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UVA Rape Story Collapses; Duke Lacrosse Redux
Topic Started: Dec 5 2014, 01:45 PM (60,495 Views)
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MikeZPU: "You don't publish such a horrendous story of gang rape unless you
do some SERIOUS fact-checking first."

Not unless you are in the mainstream media . . . .
Notice what Teresa Sullivan is saying now--that the story even if it is false makes us focus on the critical issue of rape--NOT the critical issue of false accusations and how to punish them.

Will she resign? Did Brodhead?
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/06/libel-law-and-the-rolling-stone-uva-alleged-gang-rape-story/?postshare=3701417878986879

The Volokh Conspiracy
Libel law and the Rolling Stone / UVA alleged gang rape story
By Eugene Volokh December 6 at 6:10 AM


Several readers have asked: If the Rolling Stone article describing the alleged gang rape of a UVA student at a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity party is materially false, could the Rolling Stone be successfully sued for libel? This is a good illustration of some important libel law principles, so I thought I’d write about it.

Let me stress up front, though, that my strength is in libel law, not in investigative reporting. I haven’t done any independent investigation of the facts; instead, I’ll describe how the law would likely apply to the facts as they have been reported, including in this Post article by T. Rees Shapiro. Naturally, if new facts come to light, that would affect the legal analysis, and of course if the charges in the Rolling Stone story prove to be accurate, then there would be no libel claim. Let me also stress that the most interesting and important issues raised by this controversy, whether about rape, about the proper procedures for considering allegations of rape, or about journalistic ethics, are not issues related to libel law — it’s just that libel law is the area that I am most equipped to discuss here.

1. Let us begin with who might be able to sue; I will discuss in Part 2 what sort of evidence they would have to point to (for instance, with regard to the magazine’s alleged negligence) in order to win.

A. Individually recognizable rapists: Naturally, if a story sufficiently identifies a real person, and falsely accuses him of rape (whether he participates through physical conduct or by egging on the rapists), he can sue. But “Drew,” the alleged victim’s date, and someone who allegedly lured her to the place where she was raped, isn’t identified by name — the story labels him as someone “whom we’ll call Drew.”

He is identified as a junior, a Phi Kappa Psi member, and a swimming pool lifeguard who worked with Jackie. But that seems inadequate to point to anyone in particular, especially if it is true that — as the fraternity asserts — no Phi Kappa Psi member actually worked as a lifeguard. There just doesn’t seem to be a person to whom someone could reasonably (but mistakenly) point and say, “that’s probably that ‘Drew’ scumbag from the Rolling Stone article.”
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The matter might be different as to the rapist whom Jackie says she recognized as having “attended her tiny anthropology discussion group.” If a Phi Kappa Psi member was indeed in that group, then he might be so identified by fellow group members, and by anyone whom they tell about this. (I think reasonable readers could infer from the article that all or most of the alleged rapists were claimed to be Phi Kappa Psi members.) I haven’t seen, though, any published reports confirming whether there was a Phi Kappa Psi member in that group. Likewise, if there was only one man in the discussion group, then he too could be reasonably perceived as the alleged rapist by readers who know he was in the group, but who don’t know what fraternity he was in — for instance, other discussion group members, or other classmates who had seen the discussion group together and remembered who was in it.

The story also says that the rapists “called each other nicknames like Armpit and Blanket.” If those are actual nicknames of Phi Kappa Psi members, then they could have a case, on the theory that they were defamed in the eyes of those who knew the nicknames. Identifying an alleged criminal by his nickname can be libel, so long as some people would recognize the person by that nickname. But if these names are fictionalized (the “like” is somewhat ambiguous here), then again no-one would be identifiable enough to qualify as a potential plaintiff under this theory.

B. Defamation of a Group: Can all members of the UVA Phi Kappa Psi chapter, though, sue on the theory that the statement injures their reputations? There’s actually a considerable body of law on such questions. Restatement (Second) of Torts § 564A is generally seen as a fair and influential summary of the law, and here are some key excerpts (slightly rearranged):

One who publishes defamatory matter concerning a group or class of persons is subject to liability to an individual member of it if, but only if,

(a) the group or class is so small that the matter can reasonably be understood to refer to the member, or

(b) the circumstances of publication reasonably give rise to the conclusion that there is particular reference to the member….

[Comments:] When the group or class defamed is sufficiently small, the words may reasonably be understood to have personal reference and application to any member of it, so that he is defamed as an individual. In this case he can recover for defamation. Thus the statement that “That jury was bribed” may reasonably be understood to mean that each of the twelve jurymen has accepted a bribe. It is not possible to set definite limits as to the size of the group or class, but the cases in which recovery has been allowed usually have involved numbers of 25 or fewer. [Some cases do allow recovery as to larger groups, perhaps up to 70 or so, though these are unusual. -EV] …

Even when the statement made does not purport to include all of the small group or class but only some of them, as in the case of “Some of A’s children are thieves,” it is still possible for each member of the group to be defamed by the suspicion attached to him by the accusation. In general, there can be recovery only if a high degree of suspicion is indicated by the particular statement. Thus the assertion that one man out of a group of 25 has stolen an automobile may not sufficiently defame any member of the group, while the statement that all but one of a group of 25 are thieves may cast a reflection upon each of them….

Illustration 2. A newspaper publishes the statement that the officials of a labor organization are engaged in subversive activities. There are 162 officials. Neither the entire group nor any one of them can recover for defamation….

Illustration 3. A newspaper publishes a statement that the officers of a corporation have embezzled its funds. There are only four officers. Each of them can be found to be defamed….

Illustration 4. A magazine publishes the statement that most of the sales staff of a department store are homosexuals. The store employs 25 salesmen. It can be found that each of them is defamed. [Today, a charge of homosexuality may not be seen as defamatory, the way it was when the Restatement (Second) was published, but that’s a separate issue. -EV]

I don’t know how large Phi Kappa Psi is, but as I understand it there are 16,000 undergrads at UVA, of whom about 30 percent are in fraternities or sororities, and there are about 30 fraternities. Assuming that half of the Greek system members are men, there would be about 80 members per fraternity.

If that’s about the size of Phi Kappa Psi, then it might be too large for the defamation-of-a-group theory to apply, especially since the allegation is just about nine members (again, assuming the article is read as suggesting that all or most of the rapists were fraternity members). But on the other hand, the Rolling Stone article appears to suggest that this was an initiation ritual for the fraternity’s members, which could be seen as implying that most fraternity members had likewise participated in other gang rapes. And that could indeed “cast a reflection upon each [fraternity member]” (to quote the Restatement) and “defame[ each] by the suspicion attached to him by the accusation.”

Careful readers will have noticed that this defamation-of-a-group theory could apply much more firmly to the men in Jackie’s “tiny anthropology discussion group,” if there were only two or three: A man’s being identified as being 50 percent or even 33 percent likely to be a rapist certainly “casts a reflection” and “defames by the suspicion attached to him by the accusation.” Those men, though, would probably be identifiable as such only to a small number of people (unless they had somehow been publicly identified following the publication of the story), so the damage to them would likely be considerably less than to the Phi Kappa Psi members.

C. Defamation of the fraternity: Corporations and unincorporated associations that have recognized legal identities (such as unions, partnerships and the like) can also sue for defamation that causes injury to their organizational reputation, independently of whether any member was defamed. For instance, if someone falsely accuses a corporation of defrauding customers, this might hurt the corporation’s reputation even apart from injury to any particular employee’s reputation. And this is true even for nonprofit corporations, see, e.g., Lega Siciliana Social Club, Inc. v. St. Germain (Conn. Ct. App. 2003); Gorman v. Swaggart (La. Ct. App. 1988) (yes, that’s the Swaggart you’re thinking of). As the Restatement (Second) of Torts § 561(b) puts it,

One who publishes defamatory matter concerning a corporation is subject to liability to it … if, although not for profit, it depends upon financial support from the public, and the matter tends to interfere with its activities by prejudicing it in public estimation.

The allegations of such group misconduct at the fraternity house certainly do harm the fraternity as an organization “in public estimation.” Therefore, if the chapter has independent legal existence, whether as a corporation or as an unincorporated association, and if it can show loss of income from potential members or from donors — or other loss stemming from, for instance, punishment by the university — then it could potentially prevail on this. And the central fraternity could also sue for similar losses, on the theory that its reputation has been tarnished both at UVA and elsewhere.

On the other hand, the organizations can’t recover damages for the emotional distress flowing from the injury to their reputations (since they lack emotions). Individuals can recover such emotional distress damage, even above and beyond actual lost income.

D. Defamation of identified university officials or of identifiable allegedly callous friends of Jackie’s: I won’t talk about this much, because this post is already very long, but I want to flag this for those who are interested. The general issues here would be the usual ones: Are the statements false? Was the Rolling Stone negligent in publishing the statements (or, as to sufficiently high-level government officials, whether it acted with recklessness or knowledge of falsehood)? Are the people sufficiently identifiable? Were the statements such as would defame a person?

And, you must be thinking, even if the statements aren’t defamatory, would saying such falsehoods about someone be highly offensive to a reasonable person, which might lead to recovery under the “false light” tort, right? Aha! Got you there, smarty-pants legal eagle: The false light tort isn’t recognized in Virginia. (Okay, I hadn’t known that either, until I checked just now.)

2. Say that a fraternity member, all fraternity members, or the fraternity itself can sue, and say that the statements are false and defamatory. What more do the plaintiffs need to show to prevail?

A. The fraternity members are almost certainly “private figures,” and I suspect that the local chapter and even the national fraternity likely would be, too. When an organization is a public figure is an unsettled question. Believe it or not, Computer Aid, Inc. v. Hewlett-Packard Co. (E.D. Pa. 1999) concluded that Hewlett-Packard isn’t a public figure, and while I think that’s wrong, public figure status isn’t as broadly imposed on corporations as one might think.

In particular, a precedent in the federal Fourth Circuit (which contains Virginia), Blue Ridge Bank v. Veribanc, Inc. (4th Cir. 1989) concludes that the bank wasn’t a public figure. This suggests that a fraternity chapter and even the national fraternity probably wouldn’t be one, either. And, again, the individual members wouldn’t be public figures, unless there’s something about them that I don’t know.

B. Private figures can recover for “actual harm inflicted by defamatory falsehood” — including “impairment of reputation and standing in the community, personal humiliation, and mental anguish and suffering” — if they can show that the defendant was negligent in its investigation.

Was Rolling Stone negligent? Let’s start with Rolling Stone’s recently posted note to readers, acknowledging doubt in the story, which states:

Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her. In the months Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made Erdely, or Rolling Stone’s editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie’s credibility. Her friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported Jackie’s account. She had spoken of the assault in campus forums. We reached out to both the local branch and the national leadership of the fraternity where Jackie said she was attacked. They responded that they couldn’t confirm or deny her story but had concerns about the evidence.

Assuming this is true, I think it was probably negligent for Rolling Stone to publish the accusations without checking at all with the alleged rapists. Negligence is of course a famously vague standard; but it seems to me that publishing a story such as this, without trying to talk to the alleged rapists, would indeed be negligent. To be sure, their denials might just be unverifiable self-interested lies — but they could also be independently verifiable: “Drew,” for instance, might have pointed out that he wasn’t a Phi Kappa Psi member, the anthropology study group member might have had an alibi, and so on.

That Jackie’s friends and campus activists “strongly supported Jackie’s account,” I think, isn’t enough to make it reasonable not to check with the alleged rapists. The friends and campus activists likely knew the facts only based on what Jackie said (and perhaps based on their observation of Jackie that night, which could show that she was injured but not who injured her or how).

At most, their support for Jackie’s story shows that Jackie had been making the same statements for some time. Even that’s not clear: The Shapiro story in the Post reports that the friends now say that “details of the attack” as recounted by Jackie — such as the number of attackers and the nature of the attack — “have changed over time.” Moreover, the Shapiro story reports that one of Jackie’s friends who supposedly met her later that night and tried to help her says “he never spoke to a Rolling Stone reporter” and “dispute[s various] details of [the Rolling Stone] article’s account.” All this makes me wonder how thoroughly the Rolling Stone interviewed even her friends.

But in any event, they weren’t witnesses to the alleged rape. The only witnesses were Jackie and the alleged rapists, and Rolling Stone didn’t call the alleged rapists.

For much the same reason, I don’t think the calls to the local or national fraternity were reasonable substitutes for interviewing the alleged rapists. This is especially so if Rolling Stone asked the fraternities not to talk to the alleged rapists themselves (or didn’t give the fraternities enough information with which to identify the alleged rapists), which is what I infer from the magazine’s “fear of retaliation” justification — after all, if the feared retaliation prevented the magazine from talking to the alleged rapists directly, it’s hard to see why the magazine would have encouraged the fraternity leadership to talk to the alleged rapists.

This leaves the fear of retaliation point, which might in some cases be relevant to the negligence inquiry. Negligence has to do with lack of reasonable conduct given all the circumstances — a sort of cost-benefit analysis — and if asking certain questions risks retaliation against an alleged victim, that might (in some situations) justify not asking those questions.

But I just can’t see how this argument would work here. Jackie talked to the reporter expecting the story to be published (though she at some point tried to back out). She knew that the alleged rapists would see the article when it was published.

Why would the risk of retaliation (physical or social) be substantially greater if the alleged rapists were called for their side of the story and thus learned about the article shortly before it was published? Interviewing the alleged rapists would thus have potentially had great benefit when it comes to figuring out the truth, and very little cost; failure to do so thus seems unreasonable.

C. Private figures can also recover “presumed damages” — damages aimed at compensating for likely harm to reputation even if no specific financial loss can be proved — and punitive damages if the defendant published statements knowing that they were false, or with reckless disregard of the risk of falsehood. (This is often called the “actual malice” standard, though that is a legal term of art that has little to do with “actual malice” in the plain English sense of the word; I’ll instead call this the “recklessness” standard, since in this case the allegation would be that Rolling Stone was reckless about the risk of falsehood, not that it deliberately lied.) Even public figures can recover actual damages, presumed damages, and punitive damages if they can show this recklessness as to falsehood. The difference between private and public figures here is just that private figures can recover actual damages based on just a showing of negligence.

This recklessness standard requires proof that the defendant was subjectively aware of a strong likelihood of falsehood; negligent (and even grossly negligent) failure to investigate, by itself, doesn’t prove recklessness. But when reporters and editors had reason to think that a charge is “highly improbable,” and were “aware that [someone] was a key witness and that they failed to make any effort to interview [him],” that could be evidence that “the [publication’s] inaction was a product of a deliberate decision not to acquire knowledge of facts that might confirm the probable falsity of [the accuser’s] charges.” (I quote here from Harte-Hanks Communications, Inc. v. Connaughton (1989); see also Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts (1967).)

Moreover, while different people might dispute whether the accusations here were indeed “highly improbable,” a plaintiff could subpoena the editors and ask whether they themselves consciously entertained doubts about the story. Herbert v. Lando (1979) confirms that such discovery is potentially available.

If the discovery reveals that some editors did think this story was highly improbable, or otherwise had doubts about the story, that conscious doubt coupled with the “fail[ure] to make any effort to interview” “key witness[es]” could be sufficient evidence of “a deliberate decision not to acquire knowledge of facts that might confirm the probable falsity of [the accuser’s] charges.” And that in turn would satisfy the recklessness standard.

To be sure, this recklessness standard is much harder to meet than the negligence standard. (That’s why it’s important that the plaintiffs probably could collect substantial damages even under the negligence standard, assuming the hurdles in part 1 above are passed.) And it’s impossible to tell whether the recklessness standard can be met without knowing more about the currently confidential details of the Rolling Stone investigation. But, unlike in many libel cases, I do think that it’s conceivable that this standard could be met here.

3. Finally, let me close with a pragmatic note of caution (similar to the one I noted as to the Lena Dunham controversy).

Right now, the Phi Kappa Psi members from that year have apparently not been broadly and publicly identified. They know that if someone Googles their names, most of them won’t come up in a “Controversy about the UVA Gang Rape Fraternity Allegations” story. But if they sue — one former member has reportedly already hired a lawyer — and even if they win, their names likely will come up in such a story, and some people will believe the allegations more than the vindication (or will just remember the allegations more than the vindication).

Would you rather be known to prospective employers, clients, friends, and lovers as “the frat guy in that story I read about the alleged frat gang rape, and apparently he was cleared or there was a settlement or something”? Or would you rather that the story not be part of their perception of you at all? One practical check on meritless libel lawsuits (filed, for instance, to buffalo a poor defendant into submission) is that they draw more attention to the reputation-injuring allegation, and can thus backfire against the plaintiff. But unfortunately that is also a practical check on meritorious libel lawsuits as well.

In any event, if you’re still reading, thanks! And if I’ve erred in any of this, please let me know (preferably with some specific legal or factual details).

Eugene Volokh teaches free speech law, religious freedom law, church-state relations law, a First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic, and tort law, at UCLA School of Law, where he has also often taught copyright law, criminal law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy.[/s]
Edited by abb, Dec 6 2014, 11:45 AM.
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Mason
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Parts unknown
.
Bob Beckel on Fox said seriously, the problem is these (Duke Lax too) stories are too attractive.

And Dana Perino's comment on a fake story was: well Rape on college campuses is a problem.

WoW!


.
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/12/06/rolling_stone_uva_rape_story_continues_to_unravel_jackie_s_friend_andy_speaks.html

Key Player in UVA Rape Story: Rolling Stone Never Talked to Me
By Hanna Rosin

Is that such a good idea? Her reputation will be shot for the next four years.

She's gonna be the girl who cried 'rape,' and we'll never be allowed into any frat party again.

These two quotes, from Rolling Stone’s fast unraveling story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia, were possibly the most suspicious in the story. The quotes are part of a scene that happens after the alleged gang rape, when Jackie, the woman who said she was raped, calls three friends who come to help her. One suggests they take her to the hospital, but then the other two respond with the above. It’s not that I found it hard to believe that college kids could be dismissive of a friend’s claim that she was assaulted. That probably happens all the time, and it especially happens in the nervous first few weeks of freshman year. It’s just that the quotes are a little too perfect, a little too exactly what you would write in an ABC Afterschool Special script attempting to teach teenagers how not to behave. Also, if you read the scene closely you realize that it isn’t at all clear that the reporter talked to the friends in question, that she was instead relying solely on the recollection of Jackie.

Well, apparently she didn’t talk to the friends, or at least one of them, who told the Washington Post last night that the account of what transpired after the alleged rape was not accurate. “Andy” said that he and the other two friends did not find Jackie in a bloody dress with the Phi Psi house looming in the background, as it was told in Rolling Stone. Neither, he says, did they debate the “social price” of taking her to the hospital. He said Jackie told him that she had been at a frat party and a group of men forced her to perform oral sex, although she did not specify which frat. He said she did not have any visible injuries but the friends offered to get her help, and then spent the night with her in her dorm room to comfort her at her request.

The baffling thing here is, if what Jackie told Andy is true, that would have made an explosive enough story about campus sexual violence. A group of men force a freshman to perform oral sex. She reports it to the university and they don’t investigate. That’s a disturbing story. But if Andy is to be believed, that means Jackie told an exaggerated story to Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and that Erdely was all to happy to create an even more perfect victim, one who was brutally gang raped and then left at the curb by her so called friends, thus further traumatizing her, and leaving her to fend for herself in a culture too backwards for progressive thought. (Andy is in fact good friends with the activists at One Less, the campus group dedicated to helping survivors of sexual assault. Alexandria Pinkleton, who was portrayed as a partying bimbo in a midriff baring top in the story, is also an activist who is friends with both Jackie and Andy, and who says she herself was sexually assaulted and successfully got her assailant kicked out of school, she told me).

There are many other lines in the original story that are hard to buy ("Grab its motherf*cking leg”), and should have raised red flags in the offices of Rolling Stone. Sometimes, a story is too good, or awful, to be true.

Hanna Rosin is the founder of DoubleX and a writer for the Atlantic. She is also the author of The End of Men. Follow her on Twitter.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-06/uva-anger-focused-on-rolling-stone-after-rape-story-discredited.html


UVA Anger Focused on Rolling Stone After Rape Story Is Discredited
By John Lauerman and Michael McDonald - Dec 6, 2014

University of Virginia students, faculty and leaders expressed bewilderment and anger after Rolling Stone questioned the veracity of its own story about an alleged 2012 gang rape at a fraternity.

“Rolling Stone threw a bomb at us,” said Katie Watson, 21, a third-year student majoring in media studies. “Getting the facts wrong is so detrimental to the entire issue.”

The Nov. 19 article sparked protests and a suspension of fraternities at the Charlottesville school, and became a national rallying point for sexual-assault activists. While a police investigation into the events described in the story continues, the campus is assessing the impact of the revelations.

“Over the past two weeks, our community has been more focused than ever on one of the most difficult and critical issues facing higher education today,” UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan said yesterday in a statement. “Today’s news must not alter this focus” and students’ well-being remains “our top priority,” she said.

According to the account, a freshman called Jackie was raped by seven men on Sept. 28, 2012, after she was invited to a “date function” at the Phi Kappa Psi house by an unnamed member with whom she worked as a lifeguard. In a statement today, the chapter said it didn’t hold a date function that weekend, and no members were listed as lifeguards on a UVA employee roster that year.
Fraternity Statement

“We have no knowledge of these alleged acts being committed at our house or by our members,” the chapter said. “Anyone who commits any form of sexual assault, wherever or whenever, should be identified and brought to justice.”

The now-discredited story was “deeply embarrassing” for Rolling Stone, and both the reporter and editors failed to follow basic journalistic principles, said Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

“With the charges as severe as they were, some basic fact-checking could have raised immediate red flags,” Jones said in a phone interview. “It could have been avoided if a more experienced and seasoned journalist had said, ‘I’ve got to check this out in every way I can.’”

Stories about “bad boy” incidents touch a nerve in the public imagination, said William D. Cohan, who wrote a book about former Duke University lacrosse players who were found innocent after being accused of sexually assaulting a stripper.

“We can’t seem to get enough of them, but that is why it’s so essential that we make sure we get the reporting right,” he said.
Magazine Apology

In the age of social media, when stories can severely damage reputations as they rocket across the Web, news organizations have an even greater responsibility to make sure they’re true, Cohan said.

In a letter to readers, the magazine said there were “discrepancies” in the account of the alleged rape victim, and the publication regretted failing to contact her alleged assailants. It apologized yesterday “to anyone who was affected by the story.”

Students are angry because Rolling Stone’s letter might discourage other sexual-assault survivors from telling their stories, said Ryan Gillies, 19, a UVA freshman.

“Instead of owning up to the journalism and what they chose to put out there, they seem to be scapegoating Jackie and putting all of the blame on her,” Gillies said.

Later yesterday, Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana said the magazine made a judgment that turned out to be wrong.

“That failure is on us -- not on her,” Dana said on Twitter, referring to Jackie.
‘Deeply Troubling’

State Attorney General Mark Herring criticized the magazine, saying its revelations leave many questions unanswered.

“It is deeply troubling that Rolling Stone magazine is now publicly walking away from its central storyline in its bombshell report on the University of Virginia without correcting what errors its editors believe were made,” Herring said in a statement. “Virginians are now left grasping for the truth, but we must not let that undermine our support for survivors of sexual assault or the momentum for solutions.”

One in five women in the U.S. have been raped, most before the age of 25, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

“Discrediting the Rolling Stone article does not remove the fact that there are concerns about systemic issues and how cases are handled at universities,” said Alison Booth, an English professor at UVA.

Sexual assault was an important national issue before the Rolling Stone story and will remain one after, said David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College, a liberal arts school in Claremont, California.

“Our role is to support survivors coming forward,” he said. “We have to be sensitive, thoughtful and thorough in our investigations. That’s something that hasn’t changed.”

For Related News and Information: Fraternities Back in Spotlight as Rape Report Spurs Outrage Obama Administration Toughens Rules on Campus Violence Reporting

To contact the reporters on this story: John Lauerman in Boston at jlauerman@bloomberg.net; Michael McDonald in Boston at mmcdonald10@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lisa Wolfson at lwolfson@bloomberg.net Chris Staiti
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Editorial in the WSJ today very good - most likely penned by Dorothy Rabinowitz. I look forward to a piece by her on this matter in the coming weeks (she generally has much to say on these issues).

Hope that the fraternity takes Rolling Stone to the cleaners.
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http://m.cjr.org/164388/show/5dfb4679a44bfdac37fb02401c1c3237/

What happened at Rolling Stone was not Jackie's fault - Overcome confirmation bias with responsible reporting
Posted on Saturday Dec 6th at 10:15am

By Judith Shulevitz

Last week, a slew of journalists began questioning the trustworthiness of the University of Virginia fraternity gang-rape story published in Rolling Stone on November 19. I wrote one of those pieces, but the two most notable came from Worth editor Richard Bradley, because his piece was first, and Hanna Rosin and Allison Benedikt, because theirs was rigorously reported, subtle, and cautious.

The main criticism was that the author of the Rolling Stone piece, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, never interviewed--indeed, never seemed to have tried to contact--the young men who allegedly punched a first-year student named Jackie, shoved her through a glass table, and one after the other raped her while she lay on the shards. Erdely had been given several details that could have identified "Drew," the young frat brother who allegedly led Jackie into the dark room, but Erdely didn't talk to him, either. From the way she dodged and weaved around Rosin's and other reporters' questions about her methods, it's not clear whether she knew or tried to find out the names of any of the other men in the room.

Different reasons were given for those omissions at different points. During a podcast with Rosin on Slate's DoubleX, Erdely said vaguely that she "reached out" to the alleged perpetrators "in multiple ways," including consulting an outdated online directory of the fraternity, but wound up talking only to the fraternity's local president. When I called Erdely, she wouldn't talk to me but her editor, Sean Woods, did. He confirmed something I'd heard elsewhere, which is that she'd had made a deal with Jackie not to talk to the accused, presumably because their anger would have made her life unbearable.

Some people came to Erdely's defense, particularly on Twitter and Facebook, but also in the media. They thought the criticisms came dangerously close to the knee-jerk impulse to dismiss rape victims' stories that they said cops have shown for years. And they insisted Erdely was being held to a standard rarely adhered to in crime reporting. "If a reporter were doing a story about a university accused of failing to address the mugging or robbery of a student, that reporter would not be expected to interview the alleged mugger or robber," Helen Benedict, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, told The New York Times.

Now that several details of Jackie's story appear not to check out--there was no party at the frat house that night, no frat brother fits the description she provided, and so on--and Rolling Stone has issued a non-apology apology that hints that Jackie's more at fault than the magazine is, people like me could say we were vindicated and leave it at that.

But the question remains: Why should Erdely have tried to speak with the alleged rapists? After all, as several people wrote me, it's not as if the men would have actually talked to her. The obvious reply is that one of them might have been stupid enough to try to give his side. What's more, if she'd dug up some names, she could have run a Web search and started calling around about the men. She could have tried to find out whether any of them had a history of sexual misconduct. She could have located some of their friends and asked them what they might know. She could have determined whether there indeed was a party at the fraternity that night.

But there's another argument that needs making. It comes from the philosopher Karl Popper. In a famous 1963 paper called "Science as Falsification," Popper set out to estimate the scientific value of popular theories--Freudianism, Marxism--that huge numbers of his peers held to be true, because these theories had the power to explain almost everything. Their truths "appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refuse to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions."

The problem with these thought-systems, Popper decided, is that they were too true. They explained too much. "It began to dawn on me that this apparent strength was in fact their weakness," he wrote.

What Popper had stumbled on was what psychologists would later call "confirmation bias"--our innate urge to see only evidence that confirms beliefs we hold to be self-evident, and dismiss facts that challenge those convictions. Erdely told Rosin that she'd gone all around the country looking for rape survivors and was delighted when she stumbled on Jackie. She was obviously traumatized, and her story illustrated everything Erdely knew to be true--that frat boys rape girls and universities are indifferent to rape survivors.

Erdely told Rosin that she'd based her story solely on Jackie's version because she found her "credible." Erdely's editors found her "credible" too, so much so that they let Erdely waive the usual journalistic protocols, such as getting more than one source on a story about a horrible crime. And readers found Jackie credible because everyone knows that there's an epidemic of rape on campuses around the country and women hardly ever level false rape charges, because why would they put themselves through that?

Popper would have said that Erdely and her editors were all in the grip of a myth. He'd have used that word not because rape isn't a problem in this country--obviously, it is--but because they had never subjected their beliefs to the test of falsifiability. Myths become theories only when they are tested; "Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or refute it," he wrote. He went even further: He argued that evidence only corroborates a theory if it emerges out of an attempt to falsify it. Had Erdely been open to the possibility that Jackie was wrong and gone out looking for evidence to exonerate the alleged perpetrators but found instead a mountain of sleaze, then that would have been the time to deem Jackie "credible." (It would not have been the time to stop digging for corroborating facts about the crime, however.)

Popper, of course, was talking about the scientific method, not journalism. But remember, the Rolling Stone story was taken as gospel truth for a week after it came out. UVA's president suspended the school's fraternities because of it. Editorials everywhere opined that the system for handling campus rape was broken. (I wrote one of them, I'm sorry to say.)

Journalism is how we come to know about the world. It has to proceed at a much faster pace than science, but it has as much and sometimes more impact. We readers who can't do the fact-finding for ourselves have to trust reporters to be good empiricists, to subject their hypotheses to the best test of falsifiability they reasonably can. When reporters don't do that, they should be held accountable. What happened at Rolling Stone was not Jackie's fault. It was Erdely's and Rolling Stone's. They should own up to it.
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http://www.dailyprogress.com/opinion/opinion-editorial-sexual-assault-progress-now-is-endangered/article_9b3c1cbc-7ce2-11e4-8dba-f3b2bc2547ce.html

Opinion/Editorial: Sexual assault progress now is endangered

The Daily Progress | Posted: Saturday, December 6, 2014 12:45 am

Has our painful progress on confronting sexual assault just been blown to smithereens?

We cannot — we dare not — let that happen.

Rolling Stone magazine rocked our world last month by publishing a story claiming a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity in 2012.

Now the magazine says it has lost confidence in the alleged victim’s story.

It admits it never sought to find the alleged perpetrators and get their side of events or to double check other details.

All this violates the principles of Journalism 101 — a serious enough offense in itself, but immensely more so because of the gravity of this story.

Just as there was a backlash against the fraternity and university after the initial article, we fear another backlash now that Rolling Stone has backpedaled.

That reaction could damage or derail a critical mandate: The University of Virginia still must deal with charges of a “rape culture” on campus, along with inadequate efforts to curb alcohol abuse and underage drinking.

It’s unclear just exactly what happened to “Jackie,” the alleged victim on whom the Rolling Stone story centered.

But even though her story has not been independently confirmed, and even though some details may be incorrect, we must keep the larger picture in view.

The article also cited other students, ex-students and a former administrator whose comments seem to confirm the existence of problems on Grounds.

And the article prompted additional responses from many other UVa students, ex-students and ex-employees, some of whom wrote letters to the editor at this newspaper, corroborating a culture that is far too lax on sexual assaults.

This dangerous and disgraceful state of affairs still needs to be addressed.

The university, and the community, must not be dissuaded from taking a good, hard look at these allegations. We must not be dissuaded from correcting past wrongs or from protecting women and men from victimization in the future.

This will be difficult work. But we already have invested ourselves in that effort; we have wrestled with our consciences; we have suffered pain, horror and shock. These struggles must not go to waste.

One path toward that reform comes immediately to mind.

Repeatedly in this space, we have stressed that victims can benefit from reporting sexual crimes to the police as quickly as possible. Clearly, this is an individual decision, burdened with all types of distress and uncertainty. But it is a decision that can, in the long run, achieve justice for victims and prevent additional victimizations by getting perpetrators off the street.

We’re concerned that the added trauma created by Rolling Stone’s retreat will stop victims from going public for fear of not being believed. This fear is exactly what has deterred so many victims in the past — now exacerbated by the magazine’s stated loss of “trust.”

Our hearts go out to “Jackie” — doubly so today. Whatever happened to her, she didn’t deserve this.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-06/uva-anger-focused-on-rolling-stone-after-rape-story-discredited.html


UVA Anger Focused on Rolling Stone After Rape Story Is Discredited
By John Lauerman and Michael McDonald - Dec 6, 2014

University of Virginia students, faculty and leaders expressed bewilderment and anger after Rolling Stone questioned the veracity of its own story about an alleged 2012 gang rape at a fraternity.

“Rolling Stone threw a bomb at us,” said Katie Watson, 21, a third-year student majoring in media studies. “Getting the facts wrong is so detrimental to the entire issue.”

The Nov. 19 article sparked protests and a suspension of fraternities at the Charlottesville school, and became a national rallying point for sexual-assault activists. While a police investigation into the events described in the story continues, the campus is assessing the impact of the revelations.

“Over the past two weeks, our community has been more focused than ever on one of the most difficult and critical issues facing higher education today,” UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan said yesterday in a statement. “Today’s news must not alter this focus” and students’ well-being remains “our top priority,” she said.

According to the account, a freshman called Jackie was raped by seven men on Sept. 28, 2012, after she was invited to a “date function” at the Phi Kappa Psi house by an unnamed member with whom she worked as a lifeguard. In a statement today, the chapter said it didn’t hold a date function that weekend, and no members were listed as lifeguards on a UVA employee roster that year.
Fraternity Statement

“We have no knowledge of these alleged acts being committed at our house or by our members,” the chapter said. “Anyone who commits any form of sexual assault, wherever or whenever, should be identified and brought to justice.”

The now-discredited story was “deeply embarrassing” for Rolling Stone, and both the reporter and editors failed to follow basic journalistic principles, said Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

“With the charges as severe as they were, some basic fact-checking could have raised immediate red flags,” Jones said in a phone interview. “It could have been avoided if a more experienced and seasoned journalist had said, ‘I’ve got to check this out in every way I can.’”

Stories about “bad boy” incidents touch a nerve in the public imagination, said William D. Cohan, who wrote a book about former Duke University lacrosse players who were found innocent after being accused of sexually assaulting a stripper.

“We can’t seem to get enough of them, but that is why it’s so essential that we make sure we get the reporting right,” he said.


In the age of social media, when stories can severely damage reputations as they rocket across the Web, news organizations have an even greater responsibility to make sure they’re true, Cohan said.

In a letter to readers, the magazine said there were “discrepancies” in the account of the alleged rape victim, and the publication regretted failing to contact her alleged assailants. It apologized yesterday “to anyone who was affected by the story.”

Students are angry because Rolling Stone’s letter might discourage other sexual-assault survivors from telling their stories, said Ryan Gillies, 19, a UVA freshman.

“Instead of owning up to the journalism and what they chose to put out there, they seem to be scapegoating Jackie and putting all of the blame on her,” Gillies said.

Later yesterday, Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana said the magazine made a judgment that turned out to be wrong.

“That failure is on us -- not on her,” Dana said on Twitter, referring to Jackie.
‘Deeply Troubling’

State Attorney General Mark Herring criticized the magazine, saying its revelations leave many questions unanswered.

“It is deeply troubling that Rolling Stone magazine is now publicly walking away from its central storyline in its bombshell report on the University of Virginia without correcting what errors its editors believe were made,” Herring said in a statement. “Virginians are now left grasping for the truth, but we must not let that undermine our support for survivors of sexual assault or the momentum for solutions.”

One in five women in the U.S. have been raped, most before the age of 25, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

“Discrediting the Rolling Stone article does not remove the fact that there are concerns about systemic issues and how cases are handled at universities,” said Alison Booth, an English professor at UVA.

Sexual assault was an important national issue before the Rolling Stone story and will remain one after, said David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College, a liberal arts school in Claremont, California.

“Our role is to support survivors coming forward,” he said. “We have to be sensitive, thoughtful and thorough in our investigations. That’s something that hasn’t changed.”

For Related News and Information: Fraternities Back in Spotlight as Rape Report Spurs Outrage Obama Administration Toughens Rules on Campus Violence Reporting

To contact the reporters on this story: John Lauerman in Boston at jlauerman@bloomberg.net; Michael McDonald in Boston at mmcdonald10@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lisa Wolfson at lwolfson@bloomberg.net Chris Staiti
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Just as Duke has no law school, it now appears that UVA has no "journalism" school.



http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2014/1206/What-UVA-journalists-take-away-from-Rolling-Stone-apology


What UVA journalists take away from Rolling Stone apology

When Rolling Stone apologized for its coverage of sexual assault at the University of Virginia, student journalists have had to be on the story as they grapple with tough media ethics questions.
By Lindsay Ellis, Contributor December 6, 2014

Jalen Ross, at podium, president of the University of Virginia student council, ponders a question during a news conference at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va., Nov. 24, 2014. Ross called the Rolling Stone article on a fraternity house gang rape a “wakeup call” for the university. (Steve Helber, AP Photo, File)

In the week before finals, University of Virginia campus reporters got an unexpected, front-row lesson in Journalism 101.

Friday’s news that the Washington Post reported factual inconsistencies in Rolling Stone’s reporting of a gang rape at the 195-year-old institution is further roiling a campus still reeling from the magazine’s initial article last month.

That piece brought the story of Jackie, a UVA freshman who said seven men had raped her in the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in 2012, to the national spotlight. Following its publication, the university announced an independent review of sexual misconduct policies and suspended fraternities, among other measures. The case has consumed faculty and students since the article’s Nov. 19 publication.

But UVA campus journalists have had to grapple with the issue in a distinct way from their classmates – wrestling with conveying truths about sexual assault on campus, reporting on the veracity of this particular case, responding to good and bad journalism by national news outlets, all the while absorbing the strong views coming from parents, friends, and classmates.

The Rolling Stone's Friday statement reads, “In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.” (Will Dana, the piece’s editor, later wrote that the failure was on the magazine, not Jackie, in a series of tweets later on Friday.) Professional journalists have criticized Rolling Stone’s decision not to contact the alleged attackers.

Rebecca Lim, the editor-in-chief of the UVA student news outlet, The Cavalier Daily, said they were also in the process of contacting sources and independently verifying pieces of the original Rolling Stone's story when the Washington Post's story came out Friday. Ms. Lim says that The Cavalier had tried to connect with Jackie, and they were looking into other things that might have been mischaracterized.

Was Jackie lying to The Rolling Stone or simply confused about the details of the sexual assault? On Friday, The Cavalier published a story that quoted a Michigan State University Psychology Prof. Rebecca Campbell on the impact of trauma on memory.

For survivors of sexual assault in particular, Campbell said the chronological order of events, and specific details are often unclear in their memories.

"When a victim's recounting a story of sexual assault, we would at a minimum expect some jumping back and forth," she said. "It's not a simple process to describe, but disordered presentation, fuzziness of some details, and some things — particularly very specific, what we call 'context cues,' could be inaccurate. Specific time, specific dates, specific physical scene details — those would all be very vulnerable to not getting encoded correctly in memory, particularly if alcohol and drugs were on board in the victim's system."

But in comments on the article, many Cavalier readers criticized this perspective.

Was Jackie traumatized every time she met "Drew" when they were life guards together prior to the evening in question? Would the psychological trauma have impacted here ability to accurately identify even as much as the building that she entered? That certainly doesn't seem like a minor or specific detail, and I don't think that correctly identifying the building that you entered or the individual who brought you there is too much to ask.

The Rolling Stone's apology, says Lim, serves as a reminder of why journalists must follow best practices. "It didn't teach me anything new necessarily, but it reminded me that this is why we do journalism the way that we do it," she says.

The Cavalier Daily immediately jumped on the latest news on Friday — "we found out the way everyone else did," Ms. Lim says — and it has kept a timeline of fallout from the Rolling Stone article.

An immediate challenge for the Cavalier Daily, Lim says, is that reporters are now competing against national outlets.

Besides the Washington Post, other national publications have now sent journalists to the university. This coverage has come alongside social media campaigns — including a #IStandWithJackie trend — through which thousands of users are sharing perspectives on both the apology and the case itself.

At the campus daily, reporters try to keep their key audience in mind, students, as they develop coverage, Lim says.

When Lauren Horne, a first-year student who is a columnist for the campus’s Cavalier Daily, saw Rolling Stone’s apology, she says she first focused on the quality of reporting and the way the magazine apologized, not the validity of Jackie’s allegations.

“If there’s anything wrong with Jackie’s story, fine. Sexual assault is still an issue, and it’s still an issue here,” Ms. Horne says. “But they completely took the blame off of themselves, and put it on Jackie. It says in the statement that our trust in her was misplaced, but you didn’t do your job.”

Both Horne and Lim say that students around campus have discussed various angles into the issue, and Lim says future coverage and columns will try to include different campus perspectives.

Many students, Horne says, said that Jackie fabricated the story. Others criticized the lack of fact-checking by Rolling Stone and the retraction itself.

“This has been an incredibly difficult semester to be a UVA student,” Horne says. “We’re walking on eggshells as a school and we have been since September," referring to the kidnapping and death of UVA student Hannah Graham.

Lim agrees, noting that one reason coverage is so meaningful is that the sexual assault story directly affects its reporters. "We're reporting on the community that we're very much a part of," she says. "If you take the reporter hat off, at the end of the day you're a student at the university."
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Quasimodo

Quote:
 
http://pjmedia.com/drhelen/

The Fight for Male Space
December 6th, 2014 - 7:08 am

The latest headlines involving the UVA case is just another example of how sorry and biased the media is in covering any issue having to do with male space. It just so happened that Rolling Stone got caught and is now trying to backtrack. Just like in the Duke case, there are many people who say that it doesn’t matter if the facts are true or not — some (male) is going to have to pay the price. If there are males out in society or even playing video games in the privacy of their own basement, the totalitarians are there in full force to make sure that they have nowhere to hide (Gamergate makes this clear).

Brett McKay wrote a great article about male space a while back that I discussed in Men on Strike, and it is important in understanding what is happening to men who dare to create a space for themselves anywhere in the country. Here is what Mckay says about male space:

Thankfully, we’ve made progress in the area of gender equality and women have brought their influence to bear in both the home and the workplace. However, as with many other areas of modern life, the pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other; instead of creating a world that’s friendly to both male and female space, we’ve created one that benefits female space at the expense of male space.

Here is what I had to say in the book:

Now, men are discouraged and actively made fun of or denied the ability to be in all-male groups by the law and by the disapproval of certain segments of the culture. For example, look at how colleges treat fraternity guys; they are all looked at with suspicion and treated like they are one step away from gang-raping the next girl that walks by their frat house. If you don’t believe me, mention frat guys and watch the reaction of any woman over the age of about 30. Most look at them with fear and disdain and want a stop put to any fun they might be having. And as men get older, the isolation and denigration get worse…

Many guys I talk to tell me “they don’t care about politics” or that it doesn’t affect them. Bull. Politics cares about you. It affects every man walking around who desires to be left alone or who simply wants to watch a football game in peace, or attend college without the fear of being branded a perpetrator of some type.


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chatham
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“The University of Mary Washington will not tolerate this type of behavior,” Hurley said of the rape allegations.


Will they still tolerate the media lieing about such issues?
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Mason
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Parts unknown
.
I noticed distinctly different reporting on this Rape story, than the kidnapping, Rape, and Murder of UVA student Hannah Graham.

With this rape story, it started out with, a disturbing story from one of the most prestigious Universities in the Country....

It was that emotional reporting again. You did not see that with Hannah Graham, nothing like it.

.
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Joan Foster

Cohan on "getting the story right? " After he produced a tome only worthy of being future landfill?
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cks
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Cohan is "truth impaired".
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