Click on WORD or PDF for full content
The last Pickings devoted much of the issue to the probable unwinding of Rolling Stone’s UVA campus rape story. Now a dénouement of sorts has been reached since Rolling Stone has apologized for the original story.
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. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.
Thursday morning’s Richmond Times-Dispatch story of the UVA/Maryland basketball game mentions that the Maryland crowd was pretty hostile and made references to the Rolling Stone story. Saturday afternoon UVA will go to VirginiaCommonwealthUniversity to play and we could have expected more trash talk from the fans there. Perhaps now things will be toned down a bit.
… Unlike last season’s overtime thriller, the Wahoos were simply too much on defense for the newly-ranked Terps, who were without top scorer Dez Wells (wrist injury).
Even without Wells, a crowd of 15,371 provided a passion that indicated the two fanbases aren’t on cordial terms yet.
The chanting and signs ranged from the predictable “Virginia (stinks)” to a steady booing every time Anderson, who had originally committed to the Terps, touched the ball.
There was also a reference to a recent Rolling Stone article, with a student raising a sign that said “Hold UVA Accountable.” He wrote the message on the back of a piece of cardboard that was originally used to house 24 Natural Light beers. …
… The contest was part of the ACC-Big Ten Challenge, and turned into one of the evening’s most anticipated games when Maryland got off to an unexpected 7-0 start.
The Terps now have one loss in the books, but Virginia remains undefeated at 8-0, the Cavs’ best start since 2003.
Virginia now prepares for one of its most anticipated games of the season, a Saturday afternoon clash with VCU at the SiegelCenter.
WaPo had a 3,000 word piece on the problems with the story. It is too long for Pickings. But we have the beginning and you can follow the link if you want to read more.
Several key aspects of the account of a gang rape offered by a University of Virginia student in Rolling Stone magazine have been cast into doubt, including the date of the alleged attack and details about an alleged attacker, according to interviews and a statement from the magazine backing away from the article.
The U-Va. fraternity chapter where the alleged attack on a student named Jackie was said to have occurred in September 2012 released a statement Friday afternoon denying that such an assault took place in its house. Phi Kappa Psi said it has been working with police to determine whether the account of a brutal rape at a party there was true. The fraternity members say that several important elements of the allegations were false.
A group of Jackie’s close friends, who are sex assault awareness advocates at U-Va., said they believe something traumatic happened to her, but they also have come to doubt her account. They said details have changed over time, and they have not been able to verify key points of the story in recent days. A name of an alleged attacker that Jackie provided to them for the first time this week, for example, turned out to be similar to the name of a student who belongs to a different fraternity, and no one by that name has been a member of Phi Kappa Psi. …
The fundamental dishonesty and cynicism of the Rolling Stone reporter is called into question by a post in Daily Caller.
… She was rape shopping: going from campus to campus auditioning rape victims, contacting advocacy groups and asking for introductions. But the rapes she found at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn didn’t have the right narrative feel. They were just rapes, and she needed a cover-worthy rape. So she kept shopping until she found someone who would tell her a version of the story she had already decided to tell. She needed a big rape — something splashy, something with wild details and a frat house. She needed a rape that would go viral. You can’t do that with just some regular boring rape. …
… Meanwhile, real problems go unreported, because boooooring. Look again at how casual the discard pile is: “She talked to people at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. None of those schools felt quite right.”
Get better rapes, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn. Let’s face it: For magazine journalism, yours just aren’t colorful enough.
Turning our attention to another story, law professor Stephen Carter has a libertarian take on the case of Eric Garner, the man killed by police as they arrested him for selling individual cigarettes on a New York City street. Winston Churchill said, “If you have 10,000 regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.”
On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.
I wish this caution were only theoretical. It isn’t. Whatever your view on the refusal of a New York City grand jury to indict the police officer whose chokehold apparently led to the death of Eric Garner, it’s useful to remember the crime that Garner is alleged to have committed: He was selling individual cigarettes, or loosies, in violation of New York law.
The obvious racial dynamics of the case — the police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, is white; Garner was black — have sparked understandable outrage. But, at least among libertarians, so has the law that was being enforced. Wrote Nick Gillespie in the Daily Beast, “Clearly something has gone horribly wrong when a man lies dead after being confronted for selling cigarettes to willing buyers.” …
David Boaz has more.
The violent death of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisiaset off the Arab Spring. Could the killing of Eric Garner lead to a springtime of police reform – and regulatory reform — in the United States?
Bouazizi was a street vendor, selling fruits and vegetables from a cart. He aspired to buy a pickup truck to expand his business. But, as property rights reformer Hernando de Soto wrote in the Wall Street Journal, ”to get a loan to buy the truck, he needed collateral — and since the assets he held weren’t legally recorded or had murky titles, he didn’t qualify.”
Meanwhile, de Soto notes, “government inspectors made Bouazizi’s life miserable, shaking him down for bribes when he couldn’t produce licenses that were (by design) virtually unobtainable. He tired of the abuse. The day he killed himself, inspectors had come to seize his merchandise and his electronic scale for weighing goods. A tussle began. One municipal inspector, a woman, slapped Bouazizi across the face. That humiliation, along with the confiscation of just $225 worth of his wares, is said to have led the young man to take his own life.”
Bouazizi was a poor man trying to engage in commerce to make a better life. His brother Salem told de Soto the meaning of Bouazizi’s death: “He believed the poor had the right to buy and sell.” …
We have beautiful star filled photos instead of cartoons today.