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Blog and Media Roundup - Thursday, January 7, 2015; News Roundup
Topic Started: Jan 7 2016, 05:09 AM (104 Views)
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http://www.cotwa.info/2016/01/my-favorite-quote-of-2015-if-we-use.html

Wednesday, January 6, 2016
My favorite quote of 2015: "If we use proof in rape cases, we fall into the patterns of rape deniers.”
Emma Sulkowicz with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.)
Last April, Emma "Mattress Girl" Sulkowicz addressed a group of Brown University students during the so-called Sexual Assault Awareness Month. The speech was live-tweeted by students in attendance, and the live-tweets included what the National Review called "alarming, Jezebel-worthy taglines" like this one: "If we use proof in rape cases, we fall into the patterns of rape deniers.”

Read it again, because it sums up the sexual grievance industry's view of how rape claims ought to be handled. It is reminiscent of a quote by Julia Horowitz, a journalist at University of Virginia’s school newspaper, who wrote that "to let fact checking define the [sexual assault] narrative would be a huge mistake.” (You remember the University of Virginia, don't you? "Jackie"? Rolling Stone? Yeah, you remember.) It's the same impulse that prompted Ohio University students to declare due process for the accused as "bullshit." And that prompted Amanda Childress, Sexual Assault Awareness Program coordinator at Dartmouth College, to ask "why could we not expel a student based on an allegation" of sexual assault?" And that prompted Stanford sexual assault activist Elisabeth Dee to declare that "essentially burden of proof is a defense of the perpetrator.” And that prompted students at Berkeley to protest due process for men accused of sexual assault. And that prompts prominent feminist writers to brand anyone who calls for due process in rape proceedings rape apologists and victim blamers. I could go on and on, as regular readers know.

If you follow Emma Sulkowicz's advice and treat every accusation as a bona fide rape, what do end up with? You end up with the alleged college rape "epidemic"--it's not difficult to find women who will claim they've been sexually assaulted after decades of being fed misinformation about what constitutes "consent," and in a culture where, as the leader of the sexual grievance industry has said, colleges see "case-after-case" of accusers getting it wrong and many of them have "mental health" issues.

But on closer examination, it's not much of an "epidemic." When the claims are actually tested against competing evidence proffered by the accused, a very significant percentage of them turn out to be false or very doubtful. Every high profile rape claim starts out the same way--with the vast majority of people believing the accuser because they've only heard the accuser's side of the story. But eventually the evidence is examined objectively, and virtually every one of those claims falls apart. There's only one way to "prove" the college rape epidemic when it comes to "he said-she said" rape claims--do what Emma Sulkowicz suggests, and what "The Hunting Ground" actually did--ignore the evidence that supports the "he said" side of the story. Or do what colleges are doing and treat even very doubtful claims as actual sexual assaults.

And that's where we are: we have a college rape "epidemic" that was manufactured out of whole cloth and that every fair-minded person knows simply doesn't exist.
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http://laxmagazine.com/college_men/DI/2015-16/news/010616_espn_30_for_30_to_feature_duke_lacrosse_scandal

ESPN's 30 for 30 Series to Feature Duke Lacrosse Scandal

by Corey McLaughlin | LaxMagazine.com | Twitter | McLaughlin Archive

ESPN's Emmy Award-winning 30 for 30 sports documentary series in March will feature a look at the Duke lacrosse scandal.

"Fantastic Lies," will debut at 9 p.m. ET on Sunday March 13 — the 10th anniversary, to the day — of the infamous team party that led to a chain of events that drew white-hot national media attention to the players, coaches and the university for a variety of reasons.

Three players were accused of rape by a dancer, who was also a student at nearby North Carolina Central University, hired for the party at an off-campus house. In response to the allegations, Duke first suspended the lacrosse team for the first two games of 2006, then a week later Duke coach Mike Pressler lost his job and the university canceled the remainder of the season.

The allegations, which led to the arrests of Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and Dave Evans, turned out to be false. The charges against them were dropped 11 months later, and Durham, N.C., district attorney Mike Nifong eventually resigned and was disbarred.

"The hard-hitting 'Fantastic Lies' goes far beyond the playing field with an examination of how multiple factors led to a miscarriage of justice," ESPN Films vice president and executive producer John Dahl said in a press release announcing the upcoming 30 for 30 slate, which also includes a look at the 1985 Chicago Bears and a documentary that examines the history of race over the last several decades through the lens of OJ Simpson's rise and fall.

Marina Zenovich is the director of Fantastic Lies. She has previously directed documentaries on filmmaker Roman Polanski and comedian Richard Pryor.

ESPN says the Duke documentary "will return to the night of March 13, 2006, when Duke University lacrosse players threw a team party that ended up changing lives, ruining careers, tarnishing a university's reputation and even jeopardizing the future of the sport at the school," and look at "what became a national firestorm and resulted in a highly-charged legal investigation. Usually confined to the sports section, lacrosse suddenly appeared on the front pages of newspapers because of the lurid details of the case and the hot buttons that it pushed: sex, race, class, violence."

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Amazing how much national advertising this is getting.

Does anyone know if the Chicago bears part will be shown as part of the same show or not?
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/espn-to-air-documentary-on-duke-lacrosse-rape-hoax/article/2579841

ESPN to air documentary on Duke lacrosse rape hoax
By Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) • 1/7/16 1:11 PM

It has been nearly 10 years since a group of Duke lacrosse players hosted a party that would end up getting them accused of gang-raping a stripper. On the 10th anniversary, ESPN will air a documentary about the case.

The accusation centered around Crystal Mangum, who in a bid to avoid being detained for intoxication, told police that members of the Duke lacrosse team had raped her at a party. Her accusations snowballed, and with his election coming up, District Attorney Mike Nifong pressured her to identify the alleged rapists. One of the men she identified wasn't even at the party at the time the rape was supposed to have occurred. Mangum's story also changed several times. (She was never punished for her false accusation, although later she was convicted of a separate murder and is currently in prison.)

But the case went forward anyway. Duke University administrators and professors maligned the lacrosse players as racists and rapists, since Mangum is African-American. The lacrosse season was cancelled, and the team's coach was forced to resign before the students even had their day in court.

The travesty of the case eventually led to Nifong's disbarment for "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation." The accused students sued, but as is often the case for falsely accused young men, they received no monetary compensation.

Two writers who helped expose the fraud were history professor K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor, who co-wrote a book on the case. Johnson was interviewed for the ESPN documentary, and told the Washington Examiner that to this day, he is still amazed by the "utter lack of accountability."

"Ten years out, we as a society have learned nothing about the importance of due process in sexual assault allegations. (Indeed, the situation now is much worse than it was in 2006)," Johnson wrote in an email. "The leadership at Duke that so botched the case remains in place; the faculty who rushed to judgment remain firmly entrenched; and the key figures in the media, especially the New York Times, that so badly failed in covering Duke continue to fail in covering this issue."

Taylor, too, brought up the lack of accountability for anyone involved in the case (with the exception of Nifong), and explained how the school and the media worked to frame these students even as the case began to fall apart.

"The stunning things about the Duke lacrosse rape fraud were not merely that a dishonest, politically motivated DA and a rogue cop almost succeeded in framing totally innocent young men as perpetrators of a fabricated gang rape, but mainly the disgraceful conduct of more than 100 Duke professors and administrators and most of the national and local news media," Taylor said. "Motivated by politically correct animus against white male college athletes, they formed themselves into a rush-to-judgment mob and did their best to ruin the lives of the falsely accused young men — even after the evidence of their innocence was clear in the public record."

The sad reality is that in the 10 years since the Duke lacrosse case, the media has not learned to fairly investigate and report accusations of rape and sexual assault — especially on college campuses. Rolling Stone is a well-known example of this continuing failure, but there are more. "The Hunting Ground," a one-sided film about the issue, follows the same shoddy journalism techniques that the New York Times used during Duke lacrosse and that Rolling Stone used during it's "expose" on the University of Virginia. Yet Rolling Stone was disgraced while "The Hunting Ground" is on the shortlist for an Oscar.

Time and time again, the media and universities ignore the lessons of Duke and Rolling Stone and take every accusation as fact in order to railroad innocent young men into expulsion. And now, in addition to the media and administrators seeking social justice, the federal government — including President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and many U.S. senators — is in on the railroading.

Because since Duke, schools have not moved toward more due process and consideration of evidence, but away – thanks to the federal government's insistence that Title IX ensures schools must adjudicate felonies. Accusations against students are not investigated fully, as the simple act of accusing is enough to ruin a person's reputation and future.

We've learned nothing since Duke, just as we've learned nothing since the Rolling Stone debacle.

"Fantastic Lies" will air March 13 at 9 p.m. on ESPN. Maybe it will remind people that accusations need to be fully investigated and that young men in this country are innocent until proven guilty.
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/republican-senator-stands-up-to-ed.-dept.-overreach/article/2579854

Republican senator stands up to Ed. Dept. overreach
By Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) • 1/7/16 2:50 PM

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., has written a letter to the secretary of the Education Department decrying the department's federal overreach when it comes to bullying, harassment and sexual violence.

Lankford, who chairs the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, has taken specific issue with the Education Department's rules regarding how schools adjudicate these issues. The department has issued multiple "Dear Colleague" letters imposing new rules, and with that, costs, on schools across the country without congressional approval or even a comment period.

The letters are subject to the Administrative Procedure Act, Lankford explains, because they amount to "substantive and binding regulatory policies that are effectively regulations." Lankford asks for a "thorough justification of the letters by providing the precise statutory and/or regulatory authority under Title IX for each policy that the letters purport to interpret."

Previously, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights has cited Title IX as justification for forcing schools to adjudicate felonies such as sexual assault. Yet that is a very stretched interpretation of Title IX, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex. OCR has determined on its own that sexual harassment and sexual assault (even between same-sex partners) is a form of discrimination and therefore is covered under Title IX.

Even with that interpretation, nothing suggests that schools must set up kangaroo court systems to adjudicate accusations — that was yet another "interpretation" from OCR.

Lankford singles out the insistence of OCR for schools to use a "preponderance of evidence" standard of proof when determining responsibility in accusations of sexual assault. This is a low standard that means administrators have to be just 50.01 percent sure an assault took place (meaning they can be 49.99 percent sure it didn't take place and still ruin someone's life) in order to find someone responsible, which could lead to an expulsion.

Lankford notes that OCR did not cite Title IX specifically in justifying this standard, but cited other Education Department grievance procedures that use it. From this, Lankford writes, it seems OCR did not include the provision based on any established law or statute, but was chosen because it "merely reflects a preferred OCR convention."

"Requiring an evidentiary standard justified only by prior agency practice cannot be said to be merely interpretive of existing legal authority," Lankford writes. "Instead, the policy more closely resembles the quintessential substantive rule, and accordingly, is precisely the type of policy that must be subjected to the APA's notice-and-comment procedures."

Lankford also accused OCR of wanting "to avoid notice-and-comment procedures" by issuing guidance in this way for fear that "education officials and other interested groups would have voiced substantive objections to the letters' policies if given an opportunity." He says such a fear would have been well placed, as groups — including law professors at Harvard Law and Penn State and the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union — have come forward to denounce OCR's constantly evolving rules.

In addition to the infringement on civil liberties, Lankford worries that OCR's rules "improperly bind regulated parties." Despite department officials claiming that the "Dear Colleague" letters aren't binding, the message to schools has been clear: Do what we say or face an investigation and potential loss of federal funding.

Lankford gives one example of the messy relationship between OCR and universities. Tufts University was investigated for violating Title IX in its handling of sexual assault complaints. Tufts agreed to sign a voluntary resolution and change how it handles complaints. After the resolution was signed, OCR said it would still find the school retroactively in violation of Title IX. Tufts revoked its signature. OCR threatened to pull the university's federal funding.

If OCR's rules were merely "guidance," then the threats would not have been made.

"Colleges and universities across the nation, in addition to prestigious legal scholars, government officials and members of the U.S. Congress view the 'Dear Colleague' letters as improperly issued guidance that require constitutionally questionable and ill-conceived policies — policies that fail to accomplish our common regulatory goals of school safety and gender equality in education as required by Title IX," Lankford wrote.

He requests specific citations from statutory and/or regulatory language to justify the letters. And for those policies that "cannot be reasonably construed from existing statutory or regulatory language," and are therefore required to go through the APA process, "please clarify, in no uncertain terms, that failure to adhere to the policies will not be grounds for inquiry, investigation, adverse finding or rescission of federal funding.

Lankford requests a response from the department by Feb. 4.

This is a welcome development, as OCR has used its authority to bully schools into spending funds on creating kangaroo court systems to appease federal activists. Schools are investigated and threatened with loss of funding if they fail to find in favor of accusers. And it's all based on department rules that weren't properly reviewed and accepted, but rather snuck in through the back door.

It's good to see a member of Congress stand up for civil liberties.
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http://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/tulsaworld.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/5/eb/5eb92d5f-8986-58c0-82c7-9d5b44a62c62/568d9fbc56239.pdf.pdf
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