[QUOTE=Jragon]
You can focus on why it did or did not happen, but a lot of this is Encyclopedia Brown levels of “clearly this man’s story is made up because nobody would reach into their right pocket with their left hand!” detective work.
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As will happen with any story whose veracity is up for grabs, I suppose. I fully believe human beings are capable of horrible things (and I don’t think a gang rape requires 7 sociopaths, I think it requires at least 1 sociopath with a lot of power and influence over group dynamics, a handful of selfish assholes, and a couple dudes who for whatever reason don’t feel they can stand up in dissent.) I just don’t think people who do evil things are necessarily evil people.
The real red flags for me were the complete lack of due diligence on the part of the investigator, not only the victim’s insistence that the accused not be contacted, but the journalist’s willingness to go along with that. This is a case where ‘sensitivity to rape victims’’ trumped ‘‘journalistic integrity,’’ and now there’s really no limit to the amount of people Rolling Stone has fucked over. Not only have they dragged a fraternity’s name through the mud, inspired undue suspicion toward all fraternities, and tarnished the names of the men allegedly involved, they’ve pretty much fucked over any future real, actual victim coming forward. They couldn’t have driven a bigger wedge between activists and skeptics if they tried.
And if this woman made the whole thing up (versus being manipulated into telling a story to fit the journalist’s preconceived notions, or had parts of her story amalgamated with others), she’s probably the real sociopath here. I hope she gets the pants sued off of her.
It is a great tragedy for everyone involved. I’m glad that the truth came to light, but I’m not looking forward to the crowing triumphalism that we’ll get from some quarters. I do agree that both Sabrina Erdely and Rolling Stone should pay heavily for this. Indeed I wouldn’t be too sorry if Rolling Stone went out of business. (It’s not like they’ve been relevant since around the time Van Halen was popular.)
As for the effect this will have on future rape allegations, we should return to sanity. We should remember that some allegations are true and others false. We should remember that we have courts, police, investigations, and trials to separate the true from the false. If anything good comes out of this, it will be that students at UVA and others learn to be skeptical of the media and sensational claims, particularly those with an agenda.
Well, there are two ways to approach this. There’s the “UVA men would NEVER treat a woman like that!” Or, there’s the “These timelines don’t add up.” I went with the one I was best able to back up.
Amidst all the soul searching a pointing of fingers I hope one lesson does come from this and that is: rape victims do need to report the rape to the authorities at the earliest opportunity. I know its easy for me to say this sitting at my desk, but it really does need repeated time and again.
Im making no judgements on what, if anything, happened to Jackie. But to prove rape took place the authorities need to be involved as soon as possible. A two year wait is not acceptable; its an unfair time lag on just about all involved.
You know what, I’m going to agree with this. I think there’s a lot of pressure within the advocacy movement to adapt a stance of ‘‘whatever the victim feels is right for him/her’’ and that’s true… to an extent. That message needs to be bundled with an additional message, ‘‘If you don’t report this immediately you will significantly reduce your odds of getting any kind of justice.’’ I wonder what a world would look like where rape victims had it drilled into their heads to report this kind of stuff right away.
And I say that knowing how righteously it may suck going through that grueling process so soon after a trauma.
[QUOTE=Frylock]
A fairly unfortunate choice of idiom…
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RAINN has found that some of the most important things college campuses can do is making the procedure to report rape extremely easy and well known, as well as making it very clear what exactly the procedure is once reported. They also find having good counselling services for rape and sexual assault victims, as well as multiple reporting channels.
Who would sue her, for what? If there is a libel case, it would be against Rolling Stone for publishing it. For the most part there’s no law against lying to journalists, if that’s what happened.
If it’s false and can be established, there is no reason she couldn’t be sued for defamation. Unless she had significant assets, no one would probably do it, though.
That’s legally not correct. She “published” her story by telling a reporter. But as a practical matter, even if her story would turn out to be provably false, no one would probably sue her because most students are judgment proof (no assets). Even Rolling Stone might not be worth a lawyer’s time.
I don’t know why certain activists don’t grasp that attaching themselves to hopeless causes does no real victims any favors.
I’m also a bit struck by your framing of the argument, because I’ve made the ‘‘big picture’’ argument on behalf of Brown et al. rather feeling like the specifics of any given case was beside the point of police brutality against racial minorities.
Couldn’t she be sued for defamation, slander, libel, or something similar by the fraternity or any of the men named?
Assuming of course that her story is either completely or almost entirely made up and at this point, while it hasn’t been definitively proven false the way Tawana Brawley or Crystal Mangum’s case was, it seems more likely than not that it was false.
“Another requirement in libel and slander cases is that the defendant must have published defamatory information about the plaintiff. “Publication” certainly includes traditional forms, such as books, newspapers, and magazines, but it also includes oral remarks. A streaming audio clip on the Internet may be considered a publication in this context. So long as the person to whom a statement has been communicated can understand the meaning of the statement, courts will generally find that the statement has been published.”
Not only did she tell the R.S. reporter the name (although they did not republish it), she told the Washington Post his name. It’s just a matter of time before everyone knows it.
There’s another new article at the Washington Post about the case. Suffice to say, it doesn’t make either “Jackie” or Rolling Stone look any better.
It would appear that back in September of 2012, Jackie started bragging to her friends about her super-hot boyfriend, supposedly a chemistry major. She showed her friends texts and photos supposedly from this boyfriend. The Post has confirmed that no person of the given name attended UVA, and that the photos of the “boyfriend” were downloaded from the internet and are not of a UVA student.
On the night in question, Jackie told her friends that this boyfriend had taken her to a fraternity and that she’d been gang raped.
Speaking to the Washington Post just a few weeks ago, Jackie provided a completely different name to the Post, and different personal details, insisting that this new name was the name of the guy who dated her and then lead the gang rape. The Post has confirmed that this individual doesn’t match any part of the description Jackie gave of him and never dated her.
There are also additional lies by Rolling Stone. The magazine initially claimed that one of Jackie’s male friends had refused to speak to her because of “loyalty to his frat”. In reality, Rolling Stone never even tried to contact this man.
This isn’t a bloodsport and it isn’t an entertainment. We don’t know what factors on Jackie’s past made her tell a lie that kept snowballing over two years. but a few things are becoming clear:
–The narrative she gave to Rolling Stone was a lie.
–It has had real-world consequences for the fraternity, the school, and for Rolling Stone.
–As all UVA students are reminded every time they turn in an assignment, lying is an honor offense that can get you expelled from the University.
–UVA could handle sexual assaults better, but it’s becoming apparent that this wasn’t one of them.
–Rolling Stone will undoubtedly clarify their position on what they should have done differently within the next month or two, and I’ll need to decide whether to keep or cancel my subscription. They’re kind of good at covering other kinds of stories; Matt Taibbi and Mikal Gilmore in particular do good work. But this was a disgrace. Their little dig at Jefferson for having sex with a 14-year-old slave who was in no real position to consent to it? Hey, so did Jimmy Page. How often has he been on the cover of the Rolling Stone?
At this point, this is starting to sound like a story about someone who tells a little white lie (“I have this hot older boyfriend”) and finds themselves having to tell incrementally bigger and bigger lies to get out of having to admit the original lie. Why she initially went with “forced to perform oral sex on five guys”, or why she eventually escalated that to “gang-raped by seven guys over three hours on top of a pile of broken glass” is beyond my ability to speculate upon, but in the long run, it’s the sort of thing that would never have circulated past a few of the young woman’s acquaintances had she not been introduced to the journalist by a friend who thought she was doing a good thing.
I don’t know whether the reporter was just inept and failed to fact-check Jackie’s story, or whether she deliberately neglected to do due diligence because she knew the story wouldn’t hold up to deeper inquiry and wanted to tell it anyway.
In the long run, what this really amounts to is an object lesson in why journalists should never put ideology or ambition ahead of facts and why due diligence is so important in the 21st century (because if you don’t check your sources, you can be damned sure the internet will), and it’ll go down in history with the McMartin preschool case, the Dale Akiki case, and the Duke lacrosse case as one of the great examples of a modern moral panic where people’s emotional response to a revulsive accusation temporarily allowed them to take leave of their senses.