Posted on 12/03/2014 3:10:06 AM PST by servo1969
Rolling Stone has published an incredible story about a rape at the University of Virginia, sending shock waves around the country.
But when I say the story is incredible, I mean that in the literal, largely abandoned sense of the word. It is not credible -- I don't believe it.
I'm not saying that the author of the story, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, deliberately fabricated facts. Nor do I believe that all of her reporting was flawed. There may be an outrageously callous attitude toward sexual assaults at UVA. Rape, particularly date rape, may be a major problem there. I've talked to enough people with connections to the campus to think that part is credible enough.
But the central story isn't about a spontaneous alcohol-fueled case of some creep refusing to take no for an answer (an inexcusable offense in my opinion). It's an account of a well-planned gang rape by seven fraternity pledges at the direction of two members. If true, lots of people need to go to jail for decades -- if.
The basic story is this: Jackie is asked out on a date her freshman year by a junior named "Drew" (not his real name). After dinner, they go to a party at Phi Kappa Psi. Quickly, Drew asks Jackie, "Want to go upstairs, where it's quieter?"
Jackie is led to a "pitch-black" bedroom. She's knocked to the floor. A heavy person jumps on top of her. A hand covers her mouth. When she bites it, she's punched in the face. And for the next three hours she's brutally raped, with Drew and another upperclassman shouting out instructions to the pledges, referring to Jackie as "it."
Many alleged details (though Erdely never uses the word "alleged") aren't suitable for a family paper. Others are simply hard to believe. The pitch-black darkness doesn't prevent Jackie from recognizing an attacker or seeing them drink beer. The assault takes place amidst the wreckage of a broken glass table, but the rapists are undeterred by shards of glass.
The most unbelievable dialogue comes later. Sometime after 3 a.m., Jackie leaves the still-raging party, "her face beaten, dress spattered with blood," without anyone seeing her. Distraught, she calls three friends, Andy, Randall and Cindy (not their real names) for help. They arrive in "minutes." One of the male friends says they have to take her to the hospital. Cindy replies, "Is that such a good idea?" adding, "Her reputation will be shot for the next four years."
Erdely expounds: "Andy seconded the opinion, adding that since he and Randall both planned to rush fraternities, they ought to think this through. The three friends launched into a heated discussion about the social price of reporting Jackie's rape ..."
Really? Neither boy put Jackie's medical needs above their pledge prospects? What a convenient conversation for an exposé of rape culture -- it reads like a script written for a feminist avant-garde theater troupe. Similarly, when Jackie reports what happened to school authorities -- again, a brutal, premeditated gang rape by nearly half the pledge class of a prominent fraternity -- the dean is described as responding with all of the emotion you'd expect if Jackie requested to change majors. Meanwhile, it was all kept hush-hush until Erdely reported it.
Erdely admits she set out to find a sexual assault story at an elite school like UVA. She looked at lots of other colleges first, but "none of those schools felt quite right" in the words of a Washington Post profile of Erdely. But UVA, which Erdely describes in Rolling Stone as a school without a thriving "radical feminist culture seeking to upend the patriarchy," was just right. As Worth magazine editor Richard Bradley noted last week, the whole thing seems like an adventure in confirmation bias. Initially, Erdely wouldn't say whether she even knew the names of the alleged rapists. Late Monday, according to the Washington Post, Erdely's editor said Rolling Stone "verified their existence" by talking to Jackie's friends, but the magazine couldn't reach them. Uh huh.
Erdely's story was reported uncritically for days as a powerful example of the "rape epidemic" that is somehow taking place amidst a 20-year decline in reported rapes. News outlets repeated the claim that 1 in 5 college women are sexually assaulted. This bogus statistic comes from "The Campus Sexual Assault Study," a shoddy online survey of just two universities that counted attempted (forced) kissing and the like as "sexual assault" -- and never even asked female respondents about rape.
Erdely's story may be proven true after a needed investigation, but I suspect it will turn out to have been one of those stories too useful to verify.
This, like the Duke lacrosse incident, is too pat; too convenient.
I am highly skeptical that events played out as presented in the story.
If false, people need to go to jail, too.
Duke Lacrosse hoax V2, someone page Nancy Grace!
I’ve long wondered why college campuses have their own police departments and investigate their own crimes. It would appear crime victims only report the incidents to the camps police or Dean. The Dean’s first priority would be the school’s reputation. Campus police would follow orders.
Absolutely.
I thought the exact same thing about the gang rape story. I can’t say it didn’t happen. It just seemed to be “too much” too believe. The author of this article only hints at one of the unbelievable details: Jackie supposedly said she was tackled when she entered the dark room and she and her initial attacker fell THROUGH a glass coffee table shattering the glass.
The most suspicious thing is that no one seems interested in finding the culprits. The article’s author referred to attempts to find them as “a diversion”(paraphrase).
That always tell me the story is problematic.
There was a rush party mentioned but Rush is over by late September.
These things happen in fraternities but they usually just involve drunk women. Raping women with witnesses present is always a bad idea.
Plus fraternities are loaded with gay men. Mine certainly had plenty and that was in the 80’s.
The story is essentially one of a preplanned gang rape as part of an initiation into a fraternity.
Never having had any real contact with fraternities, I have some questions for you.
Is this story believable? Would any hazing or initiation go to such extremes? Do seven out of seven pledges have no sense of right/wrong or human decency? Are fraternity guys who would organize such an attack stupid enough to not realize the immense amount of physical evidence they were producing (semen, blood, glass shards in the girl’s back) that would confirm her story and take it out of the he said/she said realm? Assuming the story is true, of course.
Does anybody else see the parallels to the appalling stories used in the past to gin up support for drastic action against perpetrators in the Jewish blood libel, witch hysteria and 80s preschool sex abuse cases?
Do these phony rape accusers comprehend the damage they’re doing to their “sisters” when they fabricate these kinds of overblown stories? It is for this very reason that rape has been made so difficult to prove, to prevent wicked, immoral women from using it as a tool of blackmail against innocent men.
Where rape is proven, it should be dealt with harshly; it is truly an abominable crime. But where the charge is leveled speciously or out of malice, with no supporting evidence, and especially when it’s proven to be demonstrably false, the crime is equally reprehensible on the part of the false accuser, and should be dealt with equally harshly.
If it did happen, they would have used a roofie and she wouldn’t remember it. Roofie abuse is epidemic these days. But getting a bunch of guys to agree is pretty tough. A pledge class would be nigh on impossible. You can get your charter yanked for it and these guys are paying $1000+ to be a member.
Any pledge class is going to include both Christians and gay guys and they will not go along with it.
Bingo! All we need now is a petition assigning criminal guilt “to the fraternities” and signed by a 100 faculty members.
Laughable nonsense that wouldn't even make it in a Lifetime "woman in crisis" movie.
Exactly. Complete nonsense. You will not get seven college students (no matter how drunk) together that would throw their lives away like this. Reminds me of the satanic worship crisis of the 80s and is just as believable.
The dialog during the rape sounded to me like the usual, believable kind of implicitly homo action normal to a lot of these Fraternity stories, but this: “Cindy replies, “Is that such a good idea?” adding, “Her reputation will be shot for the next four years.” This sounds like something out of a movie made in the 70’s about the 50’s. “Her reputation will be shot’?!! Not only have I not heard that phrase since the early 70’s but I’m sure it is a lyric from a song....”Wake Up Little Susie”? Do kids talk like this anymore?
Given that there were two rape/murders of young women abducted near the UVA campus, it is indeed unsafe there. But not on-campus. Near the campus in an open-air strip mall [where Hannah Graham was last seen alive].
If you go there, you will notice congregations of beggars, winos and other street people being tolerated harassing passersby.
The town government refuses to do anything about this, for fear of offending the street people. They were even unwilling to install security cameras, so the only footage of Hannah Graham’s last moments were recorded by cameras installed by the shops in the mall.
Political Correctness with respect to street people’s rights to “free speech” — and likely race as well — puts young women in danger in that area.
Therefore, I strongly urge parents not to send their daughters to UVA.
We did have a girl take on 2-3 guys one time but it was “consensual”. But they talked about it so she later claimed “they took advantage of her”. It was a minor eruption.
I’m an adviser for a fraternity on campus here and I told them “If she wants to ‘pull a train’, it means she is crazy and you need to get rid of her. Anytime you have unprotected sex with a ‘strange’, you are handing her all the evidence needed to send you to prison”. I doubt they listen.
If so, there are some frat boys with scarred knees and elbows. If not, not.
Thanks.
The subtext behind the story is that the possibility of repercussions never entered the minds of any of the rapists.
This ties in of course with the somewhat ridiculous notion that this behavior is routine, just part of rape culture.
Personally, as a conservative male, I’d like to point out I would have no difficulty voting on a jury for conviction and, if it were allowed, execution of these guys.
With seven to nine participants, supposedly, the cops would have no problem at all flipping one or two of them to testify against the others in return for a deal. Had she reported it, it would have been a slam dunk.
My understanding is that in many college towns the local cops are, shall we say, less than totally enamoured of the entitled attitudes of the students and probably in particular the frat boys. Town/gown conflicts go back nearly a thousand years. So I don’t think there’s much reason to think the cops wouldn’t have been interested in pursuing the case.
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