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"When yet another hand clamped over her mouth, Jackie bit it, and the hand became a fist that punched her in the face. 'Grab its motherf---ing leg,' she heard a voice say. And that's when Jackie knew she was going to be raped." Thus started a 9,000-word article in Rolling Stone magazine about the supposed rash of campus rapes across America. The writer, Sabrina Erdely, began with the horrifying story of Jackie, a college girl who found herself raped by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia while two other men, including her...

Donna Riley, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech, visited the University Monday to discuss gender-based violence in science, technology, engineering and math fields. Riley discussed and analyzed the engineering, academic and broader U.S. cultures which work together to deny gender-based violence. Riley said gender-based violence not only includes rape, but also stalking, intimate partner violence, harassment, non-consensual sexual contact, verbal abuse and misogynist hate crimes. In the Survey of Academic Field Experiences published by science journal PLOS One in 2014, Riley said two-thirds of women surveyed reported being the victim of sexual harassment while researching in a scientific field, and...

<p>The University of Virginia chapter of Phi Kappa Psi announced Monday that the fraternity house will file a lawsuit against Rolling Stone, calling the magazine’s reporting that described an alleged gang-rape by some of its members “reckless.”</p> <p>The lawsuit comes a day after Rolling Stone editors retracted a Nov. 19 story “A Rape on Campus,” that portrayed the chilling account of brutal sexual assault allegedly occurring in the Phi Kappa Psi house at U-Va. in 2012. A Columbia University report issued Sunday described significant lapses by the magazine’s staff while reporting the gang-rape allegations and the story’s writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and the publication’s managing editor, Will Dana, apologized for the deeply flawed account. But the fraternity noted that Erdely did not apologize directly to the Phi Psi chapter at U-Va.</p>

Rolling Stone magazine retracted its article about a brutal gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity after the release of a report on Sunday that concluded the widely discredited article was the result of failures at every stage of the editing process. The report, published by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and commissioned by Rolling Stone, said the magazine failed to engage in “basic, even routine journalistic practice” to verify details of the ordeal that the magazine’s source, identified only as Jackie, described to the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

“The past few months, since my Rolling Stone article “A Rape on Campus” was first called into question, have been among the most painful of my life. Reading the Columbia account of the mistakes and misjudgments in my reporting was a brutal and humbling experience. I want to offer my deepest apologies: to Rolling Stone’s readers, to my Rolling Stone editors and colleagues, to the U.V.A. community, and to any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article. “Over my 20 years of working as an investigative journalist — including at Rolling Stone, a...

"Rolling Stone’s fundamental mistake, Mr. Dana said, was in suspending any skepticism about Jackie’s account because of the sensitivity of the issue." ... “We didn’t think through all the implications of the decisions that we made while reporting the story, and we never sort of allowed for the fact that maybe the story we were being told was not true,” ...

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has a history of calling people rapists without any proof. If she hears a rape accusation, she assumes it’s true. She skips niceties like “allegedly.” The way she sees it: If the accused isn’t guilty, why does he stand accused? Due process is for ladies only. She’s not about to stop now, even after the UVA gang-rape case has been revealed as an utter hoax. Joseph Spector, Journal News: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who is pushing for stronger laws against rapes on college campuses, today warned against people criticizing the woman at the center of a University of...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. — Police here say they have found no evidence to support claims in a Rolling Stone article that a University of Virginia student was gang raped at a campus fraternity in September 2012, noting that months of investigation led detectives to discredit several claims about the alleged assault. Police Chief Timothy J. Longo on Monday afternoon said the police department had multiple meetings with “Jackie” — the woman who claimed she was gang raped at a fraternity party — and that she declined to speak about the alleged incident or provide any information about it. Numerous lines of...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. — Police here say they have found no evidence to support claims in a Rolling Stone article that a University of Virginia student was gang raped at a campus fraternity in September 2012, noting that months of investigation led detectives to discredit several claims about the alleged assault. Police Chief Timothy J. Longo on Monday afternoon said the police department had multiple meetings with “Jackie” — the woman who claimed she was gang raped at a fraternity party — and that she declined to speak about the alleged incident or provide any information about it. Numerous lines of...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va – Police say they cannot confirm that the gang rape described in a Rolling Stone article last year occurred at the University of Virginia. Police Chief Timothy Longo said during a news conference Monday that police could not confirm that a rape occurred at any fraternity house. The Rolling Stone article described the gang rape of a student identified only as “Jackie” at a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in 2012. Jackie did not cooperate with investigators. Soon after the article was published in November, discrepancies were found in it. Rolling Stone has apologized and said it would...

The activist that introduced false University of Virginia rape accuser “Jackie” to the Rolling Stone reporter that wrote the disgraced “frathouse gang rape” article still serves on Democratic governor’s Terry McAuliffe’s official sexual assault task force. The Daily Caller previously reported that UVA employee Emily Renda made a number of White House visits to serve on the president’s sexual assault task force with White House staffers, where she crafted official White House documents as recently as April. After national sororities decided to prohibit UVA sorority girls from attending fraternity bid parties this weekend (for the girls’ own safety), TheDC reached...

Harvard University and its law school reached a settlement Tuesday with the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, pledging to revise its sexual harassment and sexual assault policies in order to address concerns that the university had failed to adequately provide a safe campus environment for students. The agreement represents the latest example of how the Obama administration's aggressive use of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender at schools that receive federal funding, is reverberating across the country's institutions of higher learning. The Education Department's Office of Civil Rights is investigating dozens of colleges and universities...

"This is the worst attack on an athlete that we have ever seen in the history of amateur sports," his attorney, David Cornwell, said Monday on NBC Sports Radio.... Part of that is because his own doing (see: Burger King, Publix, FSU Student Union). There's a big difference, however, between being a serial knucklehead and a rapist. It didn't help Winston that the incident occurred as "rape culture" awareness was skyrocketing on campuses. The Washington Post recently ran a column titled, "We Should Automatically Believe Rape Victims." As FSU was struggling in a game against Boston College, a San Francisco...

This isn’t one of those articles where I ask a question in the headline and provide the answer in the text. Because the truth is, I don’t know how someone accused of sexual assault is supposed to prove they obtained consent under the new “yes means yes” policies. And it looks like no one else knows either. I reached out to the lead sponsor of the California affirmative consent law, state Sen. Kevin de Leon, because when I tried asking other sponsors of the bill, they directed me to him. His office provided a lengthy description of the bill that...

Students are back in class today at the University of Virginia – a school that’s been rocked by a serious sexual assault scandal. Rev. Al Sharpton talks to UVA graduate and activist Emily Renda, and Wendy Murphy about what's being done to address the...

Before circumstances and Providence brought me to a small, Christian liberal arts college in a sleepy northern Virginia town, I spent three years studying at the University of Illinois followed by a two year stint in the Army. Needless to say, I spent much of my early twenties participating in American party culture, and I'm lucky I made it through those years relatively unscathed. Looking back, I made a lot of foolish decisions. I put myself in a lot of compromising situations that could have easily taken a dark turn. What I have to say in the following paragraphs, then,...

To see how NPR, activist scholars, and the Justice Department set the stage for the latest eruption of hysteria over alleged campus rape, watch here:

California’s “yes means yes” law turns the idea of sexual consent upside down. Suddenly, nearly all sex is rape, unless no person involved reports it as such. Consent, under the California law that is spreading to other American universities, is required to be “ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time.” The law also states that “a lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent.” Also, previous sexual activity “should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.” The law also states that incapacitation due to drugs...

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle. Consider the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. “sexual assault.” Herewith, a Philadelphia magazine report about Swarthmore College, where in 2013 a student “was...

Interestingly, they don’t specify that she’s going to re-report it *for Rolling Stone.* RS is supposedly revisiting the UVA story too but you would think at this point they’d want nothing more to do with Erdely, especially with her previous work for them and others newly under suspicion. What happens if they agree to let her “re-report” Jackie’s story for them and then her previous bombshell for the magazine begins falling apart under scrutiny?There are only two ways an Erdely mea culpa can go. She could in theory blame the whole thing on Jackie, but she won’t. “Rape culture” true...