UVA Rape Case = Big Lie

[Jarhead0331]

This is a direct quote from Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy J. Longo regarding the findings in their report:

"We're not able to conclude to any substantive degree that an incident occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house or any other fraternity house, for that matter. That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ... we're just not able to gather sufficient facts to determine what that is."

Again, I caution you all against the misogynistic urge to burn this woman at the stake based solely on the conclusions of the police investigation.

God, I love playing devil's advocate sometimes. 

[Airborne Rifles]

This is a direct quote from Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy J. Longo regarding the findings in their report:

"We're not able to conclude to any substantive degree that an incident occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house or any other fraternity house, for that matter. That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ... we're just not able to gather sufficient facts to determine what that is."

Again, I caution you all against the misogynistic urge to burn this woman at the stake based solely on the conclusions of the police investigation.

God, I love playing devil's advocate sometimes.

Well, we should at least throw her in the lake. If she floats, then she's a witch, andthen we can burn her at the stake.

[Staggerwing]

Does she weigh as much as a duck?

[Nefaro]

Again, I caution you all against the misogynistic urge to burn this woman at the stake based solely on the conclusions of the police investigation.

God, I love playing devil's advocate sometimes.

Devil's advocate aside, how is it "misogynistic" to warn against immediately considering any single criminal accusation, with no supporting evidence, as the truth?  The same could be said for any accusation, but this is a good example of one that has no supporting evidence, witnesses, or even further testimony from the accuser.  Yet it was deigned to be the truth, from the start, by Rolling Stone, the campus admin (they immediately suspended the fraternity), and authorities. 

The police report you cited also hints at this assumption of the accused' guilt, despite no evidence at all:

"We're not able to conclude to any substantive degree that an incident occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house or any other fraternity house, for that matter. That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ... we're just not able to gather sufficient facts to determine what that is."

The "burning at the stake" reference may instead qualify for the accused persons in this case, with some similarities to the Duke case.  Until any further evidence or supporting testimony shows us otherwise, it seems like another false accusation initially perpetuated as true.  Not some misogynistic fabrication.

[Windigo]

This is a direct quote from Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy J. Longo regarding the findings in their report:

"We're not able to conclude to any substantive degree that an incident occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house or any other fraternity house, for that matter. That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ... we're just not able to gather sufficient facts to determine what that is."

Again, I caution you all against the misogynistic urge to burn this woman at the stake based solely on the conclusions of the police investigation.

God, I love playing devil's advocate sometimes.

The line in the quote about not being able to detmine what possible terrible thing might have happened to Jackie because of a lack of facts, is... troubling. Does this mean that her allegation is without merit (i.e., lacking robustness/consistency/coherence)? Could she be suffering from a trauma that is muddling her memory? Maybe a preexisting mental health issue?

This is interesting

[LongBlade]

It means nothing she said was true.

No one seems to have a motive for what she did but it is clear that there was no substance to her claims.

[Windigo]

then why would it be couched in terms like

That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ...

just curious wording is all

[LongBlade]

then why would it be couched in terms like

That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ...

just curious wording is all

They want to be extremely sensitive to real rape victims. It can be terribly difficult for those women to come forward. The last thing they want to do is discourage reporting of real crimes.

[Nefaro]

then why would it be couched in terms like

That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ...

just curious wording is all

They want to be extremely sensitive to real rape victims. It can be terribly difficult for those women to come forward. The last thing they want to do is discourage reporting of real crimes.

Indeed.

But at the same time that statement sounded eerily like a pronouncement of guilt, even while announcing there is no evidence whatsoever to show it.  Saying one thing while implying another. 

That's the reason I likened some of the behavior in this case with the Duke case.  The police statement is a good indicator of how circumstances such as the false accusations in the Duke case can easily spiral out of hand by predispositions.  The kids falsely accused in the Duke case had their lives ruined for awhile due to such things, so these things should be used widely as cautionary examples too.

[OJsDad]

LB, your last post is correct.  I think that's why the way Rolling Stone and the rest of the press handled this whole thing. 

[Nefaro]

The UVA Case and Rape-Hoax Denial

Four months after Rolling Stone magazine published a shocking—and soon discredited—account of a fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia, the Charlottesville police department has released the results of its investigation into the alleged assault. It comes as no surprise that "no substantive basis" was found for the claim by a student known as "Jackie" that she was raped by seven men at a fraternity party as a UVA freshman in September 2012. What's striking is to what lengths both the police and many in the news media have gone to tiptoe around the obvious fact that the tale was a hoax by a serial liar. This dance of denial suggests that in the current ideological climate, it is nearly impossible to declare any allegation of rape to be definitely false.

At the press conference, Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy J. Longo stressed that the department's conclusion "doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie" and that the investigation is not closed but only suspended until new evidence emerges.

It is, of course, nearly impossible to prove a negative. Short of a surveillance tape documenting Jackie's every movement, one cannot know for certain that she was never sexually assaulted at UVA. But the evidence against her is damning. It's not simply that there was no party at Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity named by Jackie, anywhere near the time when she said she was attacked. It's not simply that her account changed from forced oral sex to vaginal rape and from five assailants to seven, or that her friends saw no sign of her injuries after the alleged assault. What clinches the case is the overwhelming proof that "Drew," Jackie's date who supposedly orchestrated her rape, was Jackie's own invention.

Back in the fall of 2012, Jackie's friends knew "Drew" as "Haven Monahan," an upperclassman who supposedly wanted to date her and with whom she encouraged them to exchange emails and text messages. However, an investigation by The Washington Post and other media last December found that "Haven's" messages were fake; the phone numbers he used were registered to online services that allow texting via the Internet and redirecting calls, while his photo matches a former high school classmate of Jackie's who lives in a different state. No "Haven Monahan" exists on the UVA campus or, apparently, anywhere in the United States (at least outside romance novels). The catfishing scheme seems to have been a ploy to get the attention of a male friend on whom Jackie had a crush—the same friend she called for help after the alleged assault.

Is it possible that someone sexually assaulted Jackie on the night when she claimed to be going out with her fictional suitor? Theoretically, yes. But it's also clear that her credibility is as non-existent as "Haven Monahan."

Moreover, the police investigation has debunked another one of Jackie's claims: that in spring 2014, when she was already an anti-rape activist, some men harassed her in the street off-campus and threw a bottle that hit her face and (improbably) broke. Jackie said that her roommate picked glass out of a cut on her face; but the roommate disputes this and describes the injury as a scrape, likely from a fall. Jackie also said she called her mother immediately after that attack, but phone records show no such call.

Despite all this, Chief Longo wouldn't call Jackie's story a false allegation and even referred to her as "this survivor" (though amending it to the more neutral "or this complaining party").

Meanwhile, in the CNN report on the March 23 press conference, anchor Brooke Baldwin, correspondent Sara Ganim and legal analyst Sunny Hostin were tripping over each other to assert that "we have to be very careful" not to brand Jackie a liar and that "she could have been sexually assaulted." Hostin argued that the idea that Jackie made it all up "flies in the face of statistics," because "only about 2 percent of rapes that are reported are false."

This is a bogus statistic, which Hostin misattributed to the FBI. (According to FBI data, 8 to 9 percent of police reports of sexual assault are dismissed as "unfounded"; the reality of false rape reports is far more complicated, and it's almost impossible to get a reliable estimate.) Even if it were true, it would say nothing about Jackie's specific case. What's more, statistics on false allegations generally refer to police reports or at least formal administrative complaints at a college—neither of which Jackie was willing to file.

CNN never mentioned the evidence that Jackie fabricated "Haven Monahan." Neither did the New York Times, which said only that "the police were unable to track Mr. Monahan down."

Jackie's defenders argue that rape victims often change their stories because their recall is affected by trauma. It is true that memory, not just of traumatic events, can be unreliable; a victim may at various points give somewhat different descriptions of the offender or the attack. It is also true that, as writer Jessica Valenti argues, someone who tells the truth about being raped may lie to cover up embarrassing details (such as going to the rapist's apartment to buy drugs).

None of that, however, requires us to suspend rational judgment and pretend that Jackie's story is anything other than a fabrication. While Jackie is probably more troubled than malevolent, she is not the victim here. If there's a victim, it's Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity branded a nest of rapists, suspended and targeted for vandalism—as well as UVA Dean Nicole Eramo, whom the Rolling Stone story painted as a callous bureaucrat indifferent to Jackie's plight.

In this case, at least, there were no specific accused men. But the extreme reluctance to close a rape investigation and call a lie a lie bodes ill for wrongly accused individuals, who may find themselves under a cloud of suspicion even after all the facts exonerate them.

Evading the facts does a disservice to Jackie, too. In a sane environment, she would face disciplinary charges and perhaps mandatory counseling. In a climate where saying that a woman is lying about rape is tantamount to "victim-blaming" and "rape culture"—and where some of Jackie's fellow students say that even if her story "wasn't completely true," it helped bring attention to important issues—she is likely to remain mired in self-destructive false victimhood.

For the rest of us, this episode shows how extreme and irrational "rape culture" dogma has become, and how urgent it is to break its hold on public discourse. The current moral panic may be an overreaction to real problems of failure to support victims of sexual violence. But when truth becomes heresy, the pendulum has swung too far, with disastrous consequences for civil rights and basic justice.

Cathy Young writes a weekly column for RealClearPolitics and is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/03/30/the_uva_case_and_rape-hoax_denial_126087.html

[LongBlade]

There appears to be yet another twist emerging from this.

A high ranking official in the Department of Education was apparently interviewed by Rolling Stone and made some disparaging remarks about some UVA officials. Those officials now claim that their reputations suffered from that interview. So far this has largely gone unnoticed but as the case has unraveled light is now being shown on areas that were previously neglected.

The following article details it further: http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/08/how-deep-is-this-education-officials-involvement-in-the-rolling-stone-hoax/

[Airborne Rifles]

This story speaks to the difficult problem in the military and on college campuses of how do you treat people Who claim to be the victims of sexual assault appropriately, while still giving the accused the benefit of being presumed innocent until proven guilty? A lot of the heat the military has taken on this issue has come from poorly navigating that minefield.

[Nefaro]

NY Post Op-piece.


Facts matter: Left sticks to 'narratives,' evidence be damned


By Naomi Schaefer RileyApril 6, 2015 | 7:44pm

The verdict's in on Rolling Stone. According to no less an authority than the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the magazine's story last year on a University of Virginia gang rape was a "journalistic failure [that] encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking."
But as with many other stories that don't fit into the right narrative, the media will continue to draw the wrong lessons.

As an AP article noted, "Despite its flaws, the article heightened scrutiny of campus sexual assaults amid a campaign by President Barack Obama."
Despite its flaws? You mean despite the fact that as far as anyone can tell, the story was made up out of whole cloth?

Even once the police investigated the claims of the alleged victim, The New York Times reported: "Some saw a more complex picture, saying that the uproar over the story and the steps that the university had taken since in an effort to change its culture had, in the end, raised awareness and probably done the school, and the nation, some good."

How has the university benefited from the fact that a fraternity has been falsely accused of a horrific crime? And how has the nation benefited from the false but now widespread belief that violent rape, even gang rape, is raging on US campuses?

Wouldn't it have done more good for people to know that young women are statistically less likely to be attacked on a campus than off one?

But who cares about the facts as long as awareness has been raised? Take the case of Ellen Pao, who filed suit against her former employer, venture capital group Kleiner Perkins, for gender ­discrimination.

She was seeking millions of dollars in damages to make up for what she claimed was a pattern of women being excluded from important meetings. They weren't invited on a ski trip with other partners. Women were forced to sit in the back of the room during a meeting.

Two weeks ago, a jury decided her claims were completely without merit. And yet from the media coverage, you'd think Ellen Pao successfully exposed a Silicon Valley rife with discrimination.

Here's Farjad Manjoo in The New York Times: "The trial has nevertheless accomplished something improbable . . . The case has also come to stand for something bigger than itself. It has blown open a conversation about the status of women in an industry that, for all its talk of transparency and progress, has always been buttoned up about its shortcomings."

In a Bloomberg article called "Ellen Pao Lost, Women Didn't," Katie Benner declared: "The case broke wide open the issue of sexism in a powerful, influential industry."

Or take the Atlantic, which declared, "Ellen Pao's claim against top venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins seems to have come up short, but it's brought heightened attention to gender discrimination in tech."

Come up short? She lost.

There was no merit to her claims. If Silicon Valley is so filled with sexist pigs acting illegally, perhaps we could find a case where they actually did that.

What Ellen Pao successfully did is what most people who file frivolous lawsuits do: They make it harder for companies to do business. They make it more expensive to cover their behinds.

They push everyone to make sure they never put anything substantive in an email, and hire large numbers of bureaucrats to ensure that another lawsuit isn't filed. Or if it is, it's settled out of court.

This is not unlike what happened after the Justice Department released its report on the shooting of Michael Brown last summer.

The only "lesson" that could really be drawn from the DOJ report and the grand jury's non-indictment was that you shouldn't knock over convenience stores, but if you do and a police officer catches you, it's probably not a good idea to ­resist arrest.

But that was not the lesson that others wanted to emphasize. Which is why the Ferguson police now have to try to change the composition of their staff and ticketing policies — though they have no bearing on the case at hand.

Even The Washington Post's Jonathan Capeheart, whose article " 'Hands Up, Don't Shoot' Was Built on a Lie" offered a kind of mea culpa for rushing to judgment in the case, concluded: "Yet this does not diminish the importance of the real issues unearthed in Ferguson by Brown's death. Nor does it discredit what has become the larger 'Black Lives Matter.' "

Actually, yes, it does diminish the importance because it calls into question whether those were real issues at all.

Maybe we've spent too much time around preschool teachers. Maybe we are so used to being infantilized by the media that we hardly notice these rejoinders at the end of every story, assuring us that even if the story was all wrong, the narrative was correct.

Not everything has to be a teachable moment. And if we do need a moral to every story, it would be useful to find one based on the facts.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a ­senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum.

http://nypost.com/2015/04/06/facts-matter-left-sticks-to-narratives-evidence-be-damned/

[airboy]

Rolling Stone is being sued for Libel.  Trial starts on Monday.

Rolling Stone had a big win in the pre-trial motions.  They got the college administrator defined as a "public figure."  This means she will have to prove that Rolling Stone had "actual malice" which is a pretty big hill to climb.  Still, more of the actual facts of the situation should come to light.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ROLLING_STONE_LAWSUIT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-10-16-09-08-28