Says here that Rolling Stone will entirely re-report the now-notorious “Jackie” piece (UD assumes this means a group of RS editors will re-report the piece?), a project that will involve “head[ing] to UVa both to sort through the errors of the story and to tell readers what actually happened.”
Indeed, as Joseph Heller put it, Something Happened. It’s even possible that we’ll find out much more precisely what.
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Some people believe “Rolling Stone was credulous about such an intense story because from factcheckers to editors to writers they are predisposed to believe the worst about fraternity brothers at an elite university.”
I suppose this goes to a culture clash idea: The argument would be that you’ve got brainy lefty hipsters who write stuff like this about Goldman Sachs, versus a fratful of future Mr Goldman Sachs… Sachses…
Maybe. UD thinks it may have more to do with the Huguely factor — UVa was attractive and … plausible… to the writer of the piece and to the factcheckers and editors and writers because as recently as last March Huguely’s murder of his girlfriend was still in the news.
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And why, UD has been asking herself, was she so “credulous about such an intense story”?
First of all, as I said above, something traumatically assaultive did happen. At this point, this seems to me beyond doubt, though of course we could turn out to be living in the sort of Kafkan world in which the whole damn thing is a lie… I’ll just say again that this seems to me wildly unlikely. So I was credulous because there was credible material in the story.
Second, though, and pertinent only to me: I was perhaps borne along by the prose. It didn’t occur to me, as I praised the article’s writing, that the writing was maybe too good, too perfectly lurid. I was captured, as they say, by the style, and as a result I take on the coloration of Gwendolyn: “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”
December 9th, 2014 at 6:23PM
an institution that allowed Huguely to do all he did without any complaint all the way up to finally and almost grudgingly standing up against battering his girlfriend to death deserves deficit of doubt…
December 9th, 2014 at 6:35PM
The “something happened” meme is just too convenient and deceptive to adopt, at least right now. You’ll recall that “something happened” was the fallback claim of Mike Nifong and the other credulous accusers in the Duke hoax after their initial narrative turned out to be a pack of lies. Sure, they finally admitted, the allegations of rape were false, but surely the lacrosse players must have done something illegal. Of course they didn’t. Adopting “something happened” just delayed their confrontation with reality.
“Something happened” is meaningless and therefore not worth anything. It’s deceptive because it suggests, despite the unreliability of almost every asserted fact in the RS article, that some frat members must have done something illegal to Jackie. A far better approach, which RS and its readers should have adopted at the start, would be to withhold judgment until we have real evidence.
Erdely’s story was well written, but far from convincing you, it should have prompted your skeptical instincts: if a story so perfectly confirms all of your existing suspicions, it’s probably not true.
December 9th, 2014 at 6:43PM
Dennis: Several people – including one of Jackie’s roommates- have come forward to say that although the article contains exaggerations she was attacked. We can also anticipate similar testimony from other people with whom she came in contact in the days after the event. There’s more than enough evidence at this point for me to say that something assaultive occurred.
I certainly don’t agree with you that we can conclude that almost every fact asserted in the article is unreliable. I don’t know how you can know this. I on the other hand can say with some assurance (given various forms of testimony that corroborate a traumatic event) that some of the facts are liable to be reliable.
December 9th, 2014 at 6:46PM
John: Yes. The Huguely fiasco allows us to proceed on the assumption that UVa is at the very least a troubled culture.
December 9th, 2014 at 7:26PM
[…] it seems like Rolling Stone is planing to rewrite its UVA story. What a shameless, nasty tabloid. They will squeeze every dollar out of the prurience of the […]
December 9th, 2014 at 8:25PM
Something did happen on the day in question; there seems to be pretty clear evidence for that (since I can’t think of any reason the friends who responded to her appeal for help would have to partially-confirm and partially-correct Jackie’s story as they have). I suppose there’s some chance that the event was a mental breakdown of some sort in which Jackie hallucinated an attack (one different from the one she eventually described), but an actual traumatic event, probably of the kind she described at the time (forced oral sex, seems at least equally plausible.
The article was, indeed, very well written (at least on some level). It was only several hours after I’d read it that it occurred to me how carefully Jackie’s story seemed to discredit the utility of some of the usual how-to-be-safe instructions to college women (don’t drink to the point of impairment; know the people you’re partying with). Even then, I assumed that the author had picked carefully from the available anecdotes, rather than that the story might have been crafted (perhaps unconsciously) to present a victim with just the right mix of caution and normal freshman eagerness to partake of the freedoms of college.
December 9th, 2014 at 9:42PM
“Something happened,” as I said, is meaningless until we have some idea of what that “something” was. Saying that something happened, without that knowledge, implicitly charges the frat guys with serious wrongdoing. So far one roommate said she went downhill after the date of the alleged attack, but she apparently had no idea at the time what if anything happened to cause that slide. She only tied it to the alleged rape after the RS article came out. Everyone else’s knowledge of her state was second hand.
As to the reliability of the factual assertions in the article, let’s count the ones that are now unreliable (not necessarily false, but at least unreliable in light of more recent and contradictory information).
(1) The frat says there was no party that night, so there’s a factual dispute about that. Maybe the frat is lying, or maybe there was only a nine-person gang rape, not a party, but we just don’t know. Thus that assertion is, for now, unreliable.
(2) Erdely said, relying on Jackie, that the guy who led her to the attack was a lifeguard and member of the frat, but the frat and others who checked the lists say that no frat member was a lifeguard; the guy belatedly named by Jackie a couple of days ago belongs to a different frat and denies he ever even met her, let alone went on a date with her, so there’s a factual dispute about those assertions. (By the way, how likely is it that a frat planning an initiation gang rape would ask a member of another frat to lure the victim and then direct the ceremonies?)
(3) Another attacker, she said, was in her small anthro discussion group, but she did not name that person and no one has been able to track him down, even though that should be easy.
(4) The article said she was raped by seven guys, with two more directing the action. Two of her friends say that evening she said she had been forced into oral sex by five guys, not nine. So the events and the number are in dispute.
(5) Erdely reported that Jackie called three friends from the door of the frat who came immediately there, found her in a bloody dress, and discouraged her from reporting the attack. Erdely didn’t name or interview those friends. The WaPo did interview two of them, and both denied seeing any evidence of a physical attack, even though Erdely says Jackie was hit in the face, pushed through a glass table, then raped on the glass for three hours. The two interviewed friends also said they met her a mile away from the frats and they flatly denied discouraging her from reporting. Still more factual disputes.
(5) Jackie’s father is quoted today as saying she really was attacked but got the name of the frat wrong. This, even after Jackie reaffirmed the name of the frat to the WaPo. Even if she had gotten the name wrong at the time, she surely knew where she went that evening and has had many months to learn the correct name. She was adamant about it, but now, according to her own father, wrong.
Doesn’t that list amount to almost every factual assertion in the article? Really, how many other factual assertions are there in the article that could be correct? So far there are disputes over the date, the place, the fraternity involved, the number of people she accuses of attacking her, the identity of those people, the acts she suffered, the amount of physical harm she suffered, what she looked like when she met her friend, where she met her friends, and what she told them.
Again, I’m not asserting that everything she said was wrong, just that all of her major assertions are unreliable — that is, challenged by other information or by her own inconsistencies. The only sensible response for the interested reader is to withhold judgment pending further, more conclusive information. The alternative is to end up like the Duke die-hards: clinging bitterly to the assertion that “something happened” even after all of Crystal Mangum’s allegations were proven false.
December 10th, 2014 at 10:53AM
UD, you need to look carefully at what the roommate actually said.
“Our suite bonded that first semester and talked many times about the new troubles we were facing in college. Jackie never mentioned anything about her assault to us until much later. But I, as well as others, noticed Jackie becoming more and more withdrawn and depressed.”
The roommate herself has absolutely no first-hand evidence, despite the headline. That a college freshman struggles with school becomes depressed, falls behind, feels overwhelmed, etc.–the only plausible reason is assault? These symptoms describe about 10-20% of the freshman population in typical first-year courses I teach. It’s even worse over in the natural sciences: they buy their Kleenexes in bulk quantities at Sam’s for all of the weeping students.
It is not worthwhile to perform the extraordinary mental gymnastics required to square the account she gave the reporter and what she told her friends. At this point, “Jackie” needs to file a real complaint with the real police, not a UVA deanlet. Real investigators will not have that difficult a time finding and interviewing such witnesses as there are, including the friends, reporter, questioning house residents about glass tables, bloody floors, etc. If “Jackie” has in fact named a real person as the rapist maestro to her friends, as some outlets have reported, he obviously needs to be questioned by the police, not just a WaPo reporter. Then, let’s either see the resulting indictments or why the real legal authorities are declining to prosecute.
Even if it turns out that “Jackie” is lying about everything, it tells us practically nothing about rape victims, except to falsify the proposition that “rape victims never lie.” The idea promoted by the rape culture metanarrative that we have to believe that “something happened” or else every other rape victim’s account will be disbelieved is absurd. Each case has to be considered individually. Contrast the obviously implausible RS bullshit with the recent alleged gang rape at William Paterson. The latter is almost equally outrageous, but there are no obvious reasons to doubt the woman’s account.
On the other hand, I think that Erdely’s odyssey through the Cyclopean caves of our elite institutions’ fraternity houses says a good deal about the reality of fraternity “rape culture”: here is a well-heeled reporter, who, by her own admission, spent months trawling schools for a plausible atrocity…and this is the best (or rather, worst) that she could come up with.
December 10th, 2014 at 8:04PM
UD: please read this new investigative article from the Post and then tell us whether you still think her story is reliable, bar the odd minor detail. It includes interviews with all three of the friends who met her that night, plus lots of other evidence of duplicity: a fake name, fake photos, and probably fake emails. The only consistent theme is that she acted as if she were traumatized; everything else is dubious, or worse. I’ve refrained so far from calling the whole thing a hoax, but it’s sure beginning to look like it, just as the Duke allegations soon became an obvious hoax.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/u-va-students-challenge-rolling-stone-account-of-attack/2014/12/10/ef345e42-7fcb-11e4-81fd-8c4814dfa9d7_story.html?hpid=z1
December 10th, 2014 at 10:22PM
Dennis: Many thanks. Plenty of damning details, if these accounts are accurate.