Free Republic

Radical Marxist, E. Jean Carroll, who rose to national fame as a fevered Never Trumper seeking revenge with lawfare over very curious claims of being raped in a public dressing room at a large Department store in New York City, has suffered a setback to her plans to ‘scalp’ Donald J. Trump.A federal appeals court in Manhattan handed Trump a procedural victory Tuesday in a defamation lawsuit after famed columnist E. Jean Carroll claimed that Trump had raped her in the 1990s.“In a two-to-one decision on Sept. 27, the panel on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a...

A woman whose lies put a man behind bars for two weeks, and cost him his job and marriage, has had her sentencing delayed after penning an apology letter to her victim. Caitlyn Gray, 20, falsely accused Good Samaritan Kenan Basic of indecent assault after he spent hours helping to get her car back on the road. In Bankstown Local Court on Tuesday, Gray handed in a written apology to the magistrate among numerous other documents. Gray had pulled into a Sydney BP in November 2018 after she smashed her car. Basic, from Bankstown, offered to help with the damage....

The Obama administration was notable for its disregard of the rule of law in its avid pursuit of politically desirable outcomes. Law professor David Bernstein’s book on that subject, Lawless examined many such instances (see my review here) including the demand by Department of Education officials that colleges and universities scrap due process for accused male students in pursuit of high numbers of punishments for sexual assault. Now some of the schools that eagerly complied with the Department’s abuse of Title IX (the 1972 law that was written to keep schools that received federal funds from discriminating against women applicants)...

If “yes, to my great regret” has become the stock answer for remorseful Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely, then her protagonist in the now-discredited gang rape tale—the one who sent a college into chaos two years ago—has found a mantra of her own: “I don’t remember.” Before a hushed courtroom in downtown Charlottesville, a federal jury and a gallery of 24 spectators gathered Monday to hear over two hours of Jackie bobbing and weaving around questions in her videotaped deposition. This wasn’t the chatty Jackie of yore, the one who enthralled the visiting Erdely over dinner at the College...

A former White House college sexual assault task force member appears to have been gunning for a University of Virginia fraternity smeared in a Rolling Stone article about a now-debunked campus gang rape, newly released emails show. “I want to see these guys gone and I want to keep it as legally sound as possible,” UVA alum Emily Renda wrote to Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely in July 2014, several months before the Rolling Stone article “A Rape on Campus” was published. At the time, Renda was working in a gender-based violence prevention program at the school. That spring...

Grant Neal is suing Colorado State University-Pueblo for kicking him out over sex that the woman agrees was fully consensual. More important, he’s also suing the federal Education Department for virtually ordering the school to deprive him of his due-process rights.

The Obama administration disclosed Tuesday it first learned about Rolling Stone’s ill-fated story on campus rape in Sept. 2014, about two months before it was published, when reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely called seeking information on the government’s investigation of the University of Virginia’s handling of sexual assaults. The revelation from the Department of Education came the same day that a media watchdog group asked congressional oversight committees to start an investigation into what the administration may have known about the story before and after it was published and what it did to address the concerns raised in the article “The...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va (WVIR) - NBC29 has confirmed a secret deposition of the woman at the center of a now-retracted Rolling Stone magazine article went through Thursday. The woman known as “Jackie” spent hours getting questioned by attorneys on both sides of a federal defamation lawsuit. Rolling Stone Magazine published "A Rape on Campus" by Sabrina Rubin Erdely in its issue for November 2014. In the article, a student known as "Jackie" described being gang raped at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at UVA in September of 2012. Jackie had previously refused to answer questions about her gang rape claims...

“Double-secret probation” has been brought to an end at Georgia Tech. The Phi Delta Theta fraternity is no “Animal House.” And Tech President Bud Peterson is no Dean Wormer. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that arguments over frat-house behavior and student justice rarely spill over into the holy confines of the state Capitol. But that’s what’s happening. And the fraternity may be winning. Last August, an African-American woman lodged a complaint against Phi Delta Theta, alleging that members of the fraternity shouted racial slurs at her from the windows of their campus house. The fraternity denied that any such...

In the 14 months since her story shocked the world, Jackie has been at the heart of a national debate about sexual assaults on college campuses, has become embroiled in a media scandal, and is the central figure in a series of defamation lawsuits. Yet there’s one important fact missing about Jackie, the young woman who concocted a harrowing story about a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity: her full name. News organizations have declined to reveal Jackie’s full identity since her now-discredited story appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in November 2014. Her single-name identity — just Jackie...

Ryan Duffin was a freshman at the University of Virginia when he met a student named Jackie. Both teenagers were new to campus in September 2012, and the pair quickly became friends through a shared appreciation of alternative rock bands such as Coheed and Cambria and Silversun Pickups. Early on, Duffin sensed that Jackie was interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with him. Duffin valued her friendship but politely rebuffed Jackie’s advances for more. Just days after he met her, Duffin said, he was goaded into a text message conversation with a U-Va. junior named “Haven Monahan,” whom Jackie said...

Nineteen Harvard Law professors have written a letter condemning "The Hunting Ground," a film purporting to be a documentary about campus sexual assault. The film has been getting some Oscar buzz, and CNN is preparing to air the program next week. In a press package for the film, CNN singled out a story in the film about a sexual assault accusation at Harvard. The press packet named the accused student, even though he was not identified in the film. The 19 professors want to be sure viewers are aware that the film is highly misleading. The accusation involved former Harvard...

Universities have come a long way from the days of yore when they proclaimed that part of their mission was the search of truth. At the Heritage Foundation recently, Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson noted that “in the last decade…the two most significant…rape hoaxes in the United States happened on college campuses” at Duke University and at the University of Virginia. The men’s lacrosse team was accused of rape at Duke, while at UVa, “to their great shame, the student body and student newspaper rushed to the side of the accusers.” Neither of the accusers were raped, as they...

Artnet has confirmed that Emma Sulkowicz, the former Columbia University student known for “Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight),” is behind the website “Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol .” The site hosts an artist’s statement from Sulkowicz, who graduated from Columbia in May of this year, and a video she filmed with director Ted Lawson several months ago over the university’s winter break. The eight-minute video features Sulkowicz and a man, his face blurred, engaging in what appears to be consensual sex that turns violent. The unidentified man open-palm slaps Sulkowicz, chokes her, removes the condom, then continues to have very...

have to admit, I used to be skeptical about Emma Sulkowicz, AKA Mattress Girl. It seemed odd that the Columbia University student was protesting an alleged rape by carrying a mattress around campus. Things became even stranger when it turned out there was no proof whatsoever of any rape, and even weirder still when voluminous evidence surfaced that she remained friends with her alleged rapist. Sure, Sulkowicz became a media darling, and she even attended this year’s State of the Union address at the invitation of Kirsten Gillibrand. But despite this compelling evidence, I was unwilling to accept that an...

Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia graduate famous across the country as “Mattress Girl” after she hauled a mattress around campus for a year to protest the school’s handling of her alleged rape, has apparently released a sex tape recreating her alleged rape. Titled Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol (‘This Is Not A Rape’), the video shows two people, one of whom appears to be Sulkowicz, entering a dorm room and proceeding to have sex from four different camera angles. Timestamps in the upper corner of each camera are used to make the video appear dated to August 27, 2012, the date...

The appropriately named Vulture section of New York magazine has circled over what all proof indicates is a rape hoax and swooped down to gorge itself on speculation about the museum art future of the mattress carried around by the infamous Columbia University "Mattress Girl," Emma Sulkowicz. Amid all the really bizarre fascination by writer Andy Battaglia in the mattress as an art piece, not a bit of thought is even given as to the legitimacy of the rape charges by Sulkowicz despite very strong documentary evidence that it was a hoax. Battaglia's determination to avoid the facts of the case...

The right-wingers obsessively document and chastise her every move. Why are conservatives so threatened by a 29-year-old TV showrunner and author? In honor of Memorial Day, Lena Dunham Instagrammed herself in a lacy bra and panty set, and captioned the sultry snap, “I think I will wear it to dinner with some boots & a smile because we are all very lucky to be free.” Dunham clearly presents her exhibitionism as a celebration of personal and political freedoms, but certain fringe elements of the right-wing media have taken the peaceful photo as further evidence of Dunham’s personal war on male...

MSNBC somehow hit another new low all over again. Filling in as host on The Ed Show, Michael Eric Dyson accused George Will of being a "rapist" and "re-raping" women by writing his opinion in the Washington Post. No. Seriously. Mr. Will stated that colleges have become a haven of progressivism, where so-called "vicimizations" are "ubiquitous." Mr. Will writes that empty buzzwords like "triggers" and "micro-aggressions" are now thrown around colleges to the point of ubiquity. The passage that Mr. Dyson took offense to was one in which Mr. Will stated that, at times, "sexual assault" accusations that are put...

Last week, George Will wrote a column about how progressive politics have fomented "rape culture" on college campuses. The column was not well received by some, or even, as a great many of the histrionic responses would indicate, well understood. I received the following press release yesterday, headlined: "87,000 Call on The Washington Post to Address Sexism, Fire George Will." A group called UltraViolet was touting the success of an online petition they'd whipped up over the controversy. From the release: