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Instapundit post kicks off today’s look at developments in the Rolling Stone/UVA fiasco. Reynolds segues from statements from Senators Gillibrand and McCaskill to wonder about the people behind this story going forward. He notes that Emily Renda who worked on Pres, Sullivan’s staff at UVA was also part of a White House ”campus rape group.”
… What is clear is that Gillibrand and McCaskill leaped on this storyline when it looked good, and are now backpedaling. And Gillibrand also hung her hat on the Erdely military-rape story, which I predict won’t hold up well under investigation either.
I’d also like to know how much coordination there was among folks at UVA — Emily Renda worked in UVA President Teresa Sullivan’s office, and on the White House “It’s On Us” campus rape group, and I believe was the one who told Erdely about Jackie’s case — and Rolling Stone, and the White House, and Sens. Gillibrand and McCaskill. Perhaps someone will ask them, or submit a FOIA request to the White House and a state FOIA to President Sullivan’s office. Conveniently, McCaskill and Gillibrand aren’t subject to FOIA, but that doesn’t stop intrepid reporters from asking them.
I’d also be interested in hearing from reporters themselves: Was the White House pushing this story?
Richard Bradley, editor of Worth magazine, was one of those who broke the UVA story wide open. We featured a post from his blog in December 3, 2014 Pickings. He has another worthy post today.
Last Friday, Rolling Stone put out a statement backing off Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s story, “A Rape on Campus,” and the account of its protagonist, a young woman named Jackie.
“There now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account,” the magazine said.
That was an artfully chosen term. …
… Which brings me to a Washington Post story by T. Rees Shapiro, just posted about an hour ago, which, I think, is going to have an enormous impact.
Rees interviews Jackie’s three friends—the three friends whom, we now know, Sabrina Rubin Erdely did not even try to interview—and they tell a wildly different story of that night than Rubin Erdely recounted in her article.
In their first interviews about the events of that September 2012 night, the three friends separately told The Post that their recollections of the encounter diverge from how Rolling Stone portrayed the incident in a story about Jackie’s alleged gang rape at a U-Va. fraternity. The interviews also provide a richer account of Jackie’s interactions immediately after the alleged attack, and suggest that the friends are skeptical of her account.
It gets worse for Jackie—and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who now appears to have lied when she said that “Randall” would not speak to her “out of loyalty to his frat.” (Randall tells the Post that Rolling Stone never contacted him—and that he would have spoken to Rubin Erdely if she had. Rubin Erdely, if you had a career left—now you don’t.)
But here’s where the plot really thickens: …
Here is T. Rees Shapiro’s piece from WaPo.
It was 1 a.m. on a Saturday when the call came. A friend, a University of Virginia freshman who earlier said she had a date that evening with a handsome junior from her chemistry class, was in hysterics. Something bad had happened.
Arriving at her side, three students —“Randall,” “Andy” and “Cindy,” as they were identified in an explosive Rolling Stone account — told The Washington Post that they found their friend in tears. Jackie appeared traumatized, saying her date ended horrifically, with the older student parking his car at his fraternity, asking her to come inside and then forcing her to perform oral sex on five men.
In their first interviews about the events of that September 2012 night, the three friends separately told The Post that their recollections of the encounter diverge from how Rolling Stone portrayed the incident in a story about Jackie’s alleged gang rape at a U-Va. fraternity. The interviews also provide a richer account of Jackie’s interactions immediately after the alleged attack and suggest that the friends are skeptical of her account.
The scene with her friends was pivotal in the article, as it alleged that the friends were callously apathetic about a beaten, bloodied, injured classmate reporting a brutal gang rape at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. The account alleged that the students worried about the effect it might have on their social status and how it might reflect on Jackie during the rest of her collegiate career and that they suggested not reporting it. It set up the article’s theme: That U-Va. has a culture that is indifferent to rape.
“It didn’t happen that way at all,” Andy said.
Instead, the friends remember being shocked. Although they did not notice any blood or visible injuries, they said they immediately urged Jackie to speak to police and insisted that they find her help. Instead, they said, Jackie declined and asked to be taken back to her dorm room. They went with her — two said they spent the night — seeking to comfort Jackie in what appeared to be a moment of extreme turmoil.
“I mean, obviously, we were very concerned for her,” Andy said. “We tried to be as supportive as we could be.”
The three students agreed to be interviewed on the condition that The Post use the same aliases that appeared in Rolling Stone because of the sensitivity of the subject. …
Reason has a blog post.
… Lest anyone think that this debacle is solely the fault of someone who falsely claimed rape, keep in mind that these fraudulent charges were put forth by a national magazine that made no effort to verify them, and ignored every red flag in its haste to publish the story of the century—even when Jackie refused to name her attackers and attempted to withdraw her story. Whatever the truth is—whatever the excellent reporters at WaPost manage to uncover next—the fact remains that Rolling Stone and Erdely should have known better.
The degree to which everyone involved in this travesty of journalism failed at their jobs is almost unbelievable. But unlike the story of a gang rape at UVA, we now have incontrovertible proof of it.
We’ll close this subject with a post from Daily Caller. Jim Treacher who wrote the post is a UVA grad and a member of the frat named in the Rolling Stone article.
Rape is a very serious crime, which is all the more reason to make sure a rape claim has some basis in fact. All the more reason to make sure innocent people aren’t smeared with a false accusation. The horror of rape doesn’t excuse the abrogation of due process. Whether the charge is witchcraft, communism, or rape, the human impulse to treat an accusation as its own proof must always be resisted.
Now there’s nothing left to do but wait for the lawsuits. As a Phi Psi myself, I was ready to throw these guys under the bus for committing such an awful crime, disgracing themselves and our fraternity. That is, if it was true. But it’s not. They’ve been libeled, their house has been vandalized, and the entire Greek system at UVA has been suspended. They don’t deserve that, just because feminists hate fraternities almost as much as they hate facts.
I hope my UVA brothers have fun with Jann Wenner’s money. (Jann Wenner is Publisher of Rolling Stone)
Had to add two more items. Howie Carr draws the connection from Rolling Stone back to Dan Rather.
… Ten years ago, “60 Minutes” ran a fake story about President Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service. Turned out the memos were utterly bogus. It took bloggers about an hour to figure that out after the piece aired. For more than a week, CBS (also known as See B.S.) refused to retract the obvious hit piece on the GOP president in the heat of his re-election campaign.
See B.S.’s ultimate excuse was immortalized in a headline in The New York Times (another member of the Rolling Stone-CBS media make-it-up conglomerate). The Times quoted another Democrat as describing the memos as “Fake But Accurate.”
Fake but accurate. You can’t make this stuff up — and you don’t have to! Memo to Rolling Stone: Truth really is stranger than fiction. All those Globe columnists didn’t have to pipe it, or lift stuff from the WBUR website. There’s this amazing new invention, and I’m not talking about the Internet. I mean the telephone. It’s amazing, the stuff you can turn up with a phone, and most of the time, all it takes is one or two more calls to see if it’s true….
But now, in a decade we have gone from the “60 Minutes” fake but accurate story to Rolling Stone’s scoop, which turns out to be fake and inaccurate. …
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit wrote his weekly TODAY column on the campus rape hoax. So today, we start with Glenn and end with him.
… For months we’ve been told that there’s a burgeoning “epidemic” of rape on college campuses, that the system for dealing with campus rape is “broken” and that we need new federal legislation (of course!) to deal with this disaster. Before the Rolling Stone story imploded, Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., were citing the Virginia gang rape as evidence of the problem, but now that the story has been exposed as bogus, they’re telling us that, regardless of that isolated incident, there’s still a huge campus rape problem that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.
And that’s the real college rape hoax. Because the truth is that there’s no epidemic outbreak of college rape. In fact, rape on college campuses is — like rape everywhere else in America — plummeting in frequency. And that 1-in-5 college rape number you keep hearing in the press? It’s thoroughly bogus, too. (Even the authors of that study say that “We don’t think one in five is a nationally representative statistic,” because it sampled only two schools.)
Sen, Gillibrand also says that “women are at a greater risk of sexual assault as soon as they step onto a college campus.”
The truth — and, since she’s a politician, maybe that shouldn’t be such a surprise — is exactly the opposite. According to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of rape and sexual assault is lower for college students (at 6.1 per 1,000) than for non-students (7.6 per 1,000). (Note: not 1 in 5). What’s more, between 1997 and 2013, rape against women dropped by about 50%, in keeping with a more general drop in violent crime nationally.
Upshot: Women on campus aren’t at more risk for sexual assault, and their risk is nothing like the bogus 1-in-5 statistic bandied about by politicians and activists. So why is this non-crisis getting so much press? …