Based on recent RollingStone and NYTimes articles, I had planned to write a diary. Perhaps drawing from other sources and including other related news stories. Part of the NYTimes article give me enough pause that I set it aside for the moment, but continued to collect additional information. The Rolling Stone article, however, was so well written and had that plausible sounding ring of truth that I didn’t question the veracity of it. Rape is always a horrific story and for the subject of the Rolling Stone, it was exceedingly so. A story that demanded more eyes because it points to a large cultural issue that requires attention.
Somehow, despite my conscious intentions, my diary didn’t get written. It’s not pleasant to admit that I had not employed fully critical thinking when reading the story. Had not even noticed a glaring problem with it. Today Rolling Stone retracted the story: A Note to Our Readers
Last month, Rolling Stone published a story titled “A Rape on Campus” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie at a University of Virginia fraternity house; the university’s failure to respond to this alleged assault – and the school’s troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual assaults. …
…
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. …
A more honest admission of error or journalistic failure than we see from other major publications.
What I overlooked was that the rape as described was too brutal for a woman not to have sought immediate medical attention. Doesn’t mean that “Jackie” wasn’t raped nor that it wasn’t a gang rape. Only that if it had happened, it wasn’t like what she described or what Erdely wrote.
It may be a lot to ask rape victims and any woman that alleges rape to be scrupulously honest and not embellish nor modify their stories in any way. Untruthfulness increases the chances that other victims won’t be believed. Won’t seek immediate medical attention. Won’t report the rape. That rapists will continue to walk among us and are highly likely to rape again.
The truth is always best. Don’t risk having your story swept away.
Update (12/11/14):
After consideration, have concluded that I would be remiss if I didn’t included WaPo’s latest addition to this story. They have interviewed the three UVA students that “Jackie” came to her aid after her alleged rape. Given “Jackie’s” report of the seeming callousness of two of those friend’s, they would have a reason not to confirm that part of her story; so, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to discount what they now say.
However, the bizarre part is what they claim happened before that night and one of them retained tweets with the man “Jackie” claimed had invited her to dinner. This “man” seems not to exist. Was it a hoax? If so, by whom? Unfortunately, at this point the veracity of “Jackie’s” story isn’t looking good.
Mother Jones: Don’t Let the Rolling Stone Controversy Distract You From the Campus Rape Epidemic
Agree. MJ article supplies detailed data on college rape.
○ Night Games author Anna Krien wins $41,000 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award
Sounds like a worth addition to books on the subject of rape. More instances than we’d like to acknowledge contain a lot of ambiguity and the alleged victim and perpetrator often are less than clear in the moment and later as to exactly what happened.
any time I see WaPo investigating someone else’s journalism I think of Gary Webb. No significant part of the RS story has been disproven, merely denied.
Good point. Also WaPo likely has as much interest in protecting UVA and fraternities as it did protecting the CIA wrt to Webb’s reporting. That’s one reason I dismissed the WaPo article a few days ago. Plus, the WaPo article was very thin.
RS retracted because others raised legitimate questions and their attempts to nail down a number of key elements failed.
It reminds me a bit of how Rather’s GWB TANG story fell apart. His story was mostly true and verified, but the bombshell was the purported memo about GWB by the CO. The source of it was a well-known GWB enemy and his story of how he came into possession of it was way too fantastic to go with. If it was a team Rove “set-up”, it worked marvelously well.
my memory of that incident is that 99% of the purported “debunking” of the memo was based on arguments about whether Selectric typewriters had that font available at that time. Seemed like every wingnut on the net was an expert on typewriters.
The wingnuts are situational “experts” in whatever the rightwing noise machine feeds them. They’re also too stupid to know that they’re parrots and not experts.
Why I suspect that the TANG document was a set-up is that team GWB had their ducks in a row and knew exactly how to attack the thing immediately. The blogger guy who posted the challenge right after the airing of the story couldn’t possibly have figured out that “tell” that quickly. Nor did the WH have enough time to do that based on their advance copy.
The problem for Rather wasn’t that the font didn’t exist as of the date of the document but that such equipment wasn’t in widespread enough use by then to be in a TANG office. Rather’s subsequent interview with the CO’s secretary confirmed that it was a forgery and nobody was interested in hearing this old woman say that the content was familiar to her.
That was an additional suggestion that the forger had access to at least a version of an original. May have been in GWB’s old TANG file that iirc Karen Hughes rifled through shortly before he began his campaign in 1999.
○ Gannon/Rove/Stone TANG Forgeries Timeline (must-read!)
○ Killian documents controversy – Wikipedia
The dKos diary is consistent with my recollection. However, all the comments about Roger Stone being involved are pure speculation. There is no shortage of rightwing flunkies that could have been tasked with the hand-off and they likely wouldn’t have known what they were passing on.
What that timeline did trip for me is that the Enquirer successfully went after Stone prior to 9/11. So, perhaps the first anthrax attack at the Enquirer offices was compensation to Stone for his post-2000 election operations. Slightly more satisfying than payback to the Enquirer for publishing pictures of the Bush twins being slightly naughty.
Discrepancies are going to come up in any crime, also, too. This is why eyewitness testimony is horribly unreliable.
I also cannot give the RS credit at all. Their statement reads like “bitch lied to us, so we are getting to the bottom of it.”
It wouldn’t surprise me if the woman just says she made it all up so everything goes away. Once again why being a public survivor is hell.
A crime investigation without discrepancies should be suspect.
wrt eyewitness testimony, they are unreliable because the brain isn’t a recorder. All memories are reconstructions based on the limited amount information that is stored from the actual event. Our brains fill in all the missing pieces to form a somewhat complete picture. Thus, people who said that Michael Brown was shot in the back weren’t lying about what their brains told them they must have seen. Most, if not all, of those reports would probably have been easy to challenge if they first hadn’t withdrawn them when the autopsy report was released.
The late Erle Stanley Gardner in his early novels always stressed how circumstantial evidence (i.e. physical evidence) was vastly preferable to eyewitnesses.
I’d add a caveat that video can be editted. We all saw a video of Rice dragging his wife out of the elevator, but didn’t see until much later the cut of him punching here out.
Just another thought that’s been bugging me. The 2012 UVA academic calendar. From orientation that began on 8/25 to the date of the alleged rape 9/28, “Jackie” had and three others, “Randall,” “Alex,” and “Cindy” had formed a fast friendship. On what basis were such close friendships established so quickly. No indication that any of them were roomies (“Jackie” and “Cindy weren’t), and no disclosure that they lived in same dorm(s), had common classes, or any other interest or activity in common.
The third friend is “Andy” not “Alex.”
Now that the RS story about “Jackie” has entered the “it’s probably mostly not true” stage, it’s fallen off as a topic of interest for those on the left.