Did the UVA Story Really Happen?

~ Laura

The ongoing story of the UVa fraternity rape had a weird news cycle. In the morning, pundits were calling for arrests. There were enough clues in the original story to figure out the identities of the guilty parties.

By the afternoon, there were serious questions about the journalistic validity of the story. The author never interviewed the accused and never mentioned her efforts to track them down for comments. That’s a no-no in Journalism 101.

Rebecca Traister said that those errors shouldn’t discount Jackie’s story.

Published by Laura

26 thoughts on “Did the UVA Story Really Happen?”

  1. Daniel Davies (I’m pretty sure it was) said something very smart, to the effect that ideas which are actually good don’t require lots of lies to support them. So if campus rape is a big problem, false stories are not the way to address it, and the fact that false stories are told arouses the suspicion that the problem isn’t really so big.

    What I find really troubling is the U.Va. administration apparently shut down all fraternities based on an unsubstantiated story. I don’t understand why the presumption of guilt and collective punishment–ideas which are antithetical to civilized or humane values–are SOP on college campuses.

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    1. y81, remember the victims of sexual assault have been speaking to that very sympathetic Dean (Erano?) for years. So UVA is not operating in the dark. The number of women who seek help after an attack, but refuse to press charges, may be quite high. The numbers of reported sexual assaults strike me as unreasonably low.

      They would receive reports of the number of students brought to the hospital on weekends due to drunkenness. UVA was also the site of the murder of Yeardley Love. The university also witnessed the abduction and murder of Hannah Graham this fall. In all these stories, heavy drinking off campus and female students ending up injured or dead play prominent roles. The alleged gang rape may or may not have happened. The hard-drinking party culture at UVA is not unsubstantiated, though.

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      1. The murder of Hannah Graham justifies shutting down fraternities? That has to be the biggest non sequitur I have heard in a long time. Why not shut down Baptist churches, that would be just as logical.

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      2. No, but the Rolling Stone story arrived on the heels of Hannah Graham’s remains being discovered. I gather from news stories the campus had been having marches, candlelight vigils, etc.

        This is also the time of year college applicants are filing applications to college. The dean quoted in the story is right; no-one wants to send their daughter to a “rape college.” Out-of-state students, who pay full tuition, have many other colleges to choose from. I wouldn’t want my daughter to be a victim of rape; I wouldn’t want my son to join a fraternity with a bad reputation.

        On college tours at all campuses with a fraternity presence, parents frequently ask about fraternities, and college admissions people don’t leap to discuss them. We toured one college at which the official tour made a huge detour around “fraternity row.” If we hadn’t seen it driving in, we wouldn’t have been able to tell it existed, for all the evidence garnered from the tour and information session.

        To have two tragic stories hit the national media, from September to Thanksgiving, focusing on drinking and violence against women at UVA, has to be a nightmare. Changing the culture will (would) take a long time. High school seniors are drawing up their lists now.

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  2. As I’ve learned more details about the story (I didn’t actually read it the first time around), I’ve become more and more dubious. To me, it’s starting to sound like a creative writing project. To recap points others have:

    1. She’s brought into a dark room and sexually assaulted, and yet she gets a precise head count and is able to visually identify a guy other than the one who lured her into the room. (Granted, if there was some small amount of light, her eyes might adjust to the darkness. But it should be explained that her eyes adjusted.)

    2. She’s assaulted on top of a broken glass coffee table, and yet she doesn’t require medical assistance. Furthermore her jerk friends talk her out of seeking medical assistance.

    http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-20141119

    Also, what about the rapists? Sexually assaulting a woman in a dark room on top of a pile of broken glass is an activity fraught with peril. Back in real life, I suspect that in that scenario somebody would pretty quickly start yelling, “Ow, ow, ow!” and then have to be taken to ER to have glass fragments removed from his sensitive squishy bits. (Unless they were all high on really good drugs and didn’t notice, but I think there would still be weird injuries afterward.)

    3. After being gang raped on broken glass for three hours, she stumbles out, but still somehow has her phone. How????

    4. And back to her jerk friends–as others have pointed out, this bit sounds a little too “literary”.

    “”We have to get her to the hospital,” Randall said. Their other two friends, however, weren’t convinced. “Is that such a good idea?” she recalls Cindy asking. “Her reputation will be shot for the next four years.” 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, while Jackie stood beside them, mute in her bloody dress, wishing only to go back to her dorm room and fall into a deep, forgetful sleep. Detached, Jackie listened as Cindy prevailed over the group: “She’s gonna be the girl who cried ‘rape,’ and we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.””

    Was somebody working on the screenplay for Heathers II: The College Years?

    This story sounds like it belongs to the Stephen Glass/Scott Beauchamp tradition of colorful, well-crafted stories that tell us stuff we already want to believe and are too good to check.

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  3. Dutschke channeled Gramsci “Long March Through The Institutions”. It’s largely completed in colleges, and civilized and humane values are a distant second to obtaining ‘correct’ results. Thus, presumption of guilt and collective punishment.

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  4. 5. Jackie should at least have some scars consistent with the story. Also, unless the good brothers replaced the carpet in the interim, her DNA should be all over the rug (if it was carpeted).

    If the brothers can demonstrate that the same rug has been there for years (and that should be possible to do thanks to the fact that everybody is constantly taking photos these days) and it has none of her DNA on it, I think we have to declare them innocent. A carpet replacement soon after the alleged rape would point toward guilt.

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  5. 6. If the time and date is known, it should be possible to look up Jackie’s online and cell phone activity. If there’s an uncharacteristic blank for three hours on the day in question, that supports her case. If there is phone and internet activity from her during that window, that clears the fraternity.

    Likewise, if the fraternity brothers were identified, it might well be possible for them to establish through phone evidence that they were otherwise occupied. (Although, theoretically, I suppose they could slip out one by one to produce fake alibis, but that’s a heck of a lot of work.)

    I wonder if that’s why the original UVA case fizzled.

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  7. I’m in favor of collective punishment as a societal modification tool on college campuses, though not by the government. Students at a school are a voluntary community and community requires trust, care and concern among its individual members. If all members of the community are going to feel comfortable, we might have to take action even when we can’t establish individual guilt.

    I would like to see a full investigation — but, let’s not forget the Nicole Eramo (the UVA chair of the sexual misconduct board) interview: “when they admit to an offense, we feel that since there is no advantage to admitting guilt, and I feel they deserve some consideration, they take their licks, but not expulsion ….. ”

    There’s a problem with how universities are handling rape cases. Accusations of felonies need to be referred to the police (and this gang rape would be a felony, not an honor code violation). I think schools need to start officially clarifying that accusations of felonies will be referred to the police, that there’s no softer, gentler justice system to use within the school community for a felony. Accusations of misconduct (and, here, I include things like violations of honor codes of affirmative consent requirements, etc.) need to be handled more transparently, but can potentially be handled within the community.

    (And, I don’t find fruitful to imagine the investigation — I just think there should be one).

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  8. The problem is not with the student reporting a rape, or even telling a reporter about it. The story may be entirely true, or partly true (she may have been raped in a less “dramatic” manner, traumatized by it, and is now saying what she believes or imagines), and anyone who has been victimized or thinks they have been victimized deserves respect – from counselors, and from law enforcement officials. I would be very careful about criticizing her. But for a reporter to tell this story in a national magazine without doing (apparently) any kind of fact checking is pretty outrageous.

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    1. She did check facts so far as she could, but did not contact the alleged perps. If it was mentioned in the article that she did not do this, I don’t see the problem. Journalists often promise anonymity to subjects and in this case I don’t see how anonymity could have been maintained if she’d called the accused. Of course, the reporter did not mention anything like that in the article.

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      1. Maybe you don’t call the accused directly, but if you’re an investigative journalist, you investigate. You at least determine whether there was a party that night, whether the people accused actually belonged to the fraternity, whether they were somewhere else, etc. I was a reporter on my *high school* newspaper, and I would never have published a story of an incredibly horrible crime without better investigation and sourcing than this. Maybe she did some of this work, but it’s just not clear. It is sounding very much like the Stephen Glass cases to me. I hope not – actually I hope so, because that would mean this horrible crime didn’t happen.

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      2. af said:

        “It is sounding very much like the Stephen Glass cases to me. I hope not – actually I hope so, because that would mean this horrible crime didn’t happen.”

        The movie about Stephen Glass and his shenanigans at the New Republic was entitled “Shattered Glass.”

        I almost (but not quite) wonder if Erdely’s story is some sort of Sokal Social Text hoax, trying to see how much she can get away with in print in a reasonably reputable publication.

        bj said:

        “Journalists often promise anonymity to subjects and in this case I don’t see how anonymity could have been maintained if she’d called the accused.”

        Here’s the thing–if the frat brothers are innocent, they might have no idea who was accusing them. If they’re guilty, they know exactly what they did and who is accusing them. Anonymity only protects Jackie’s identity if she’s lying.

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      3. According to the Washington Post piece on the journalist (linked in the Reason link above) she did the fact checking except for contacting those accused.

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      4. I didn’t write what’s under my name, but, the frat brothers don’t need to know who she is, if she’s not the only one.

        The lesson I’m learning from the Cosby case (and a NY times report about Meaghan Ybos, whose rapist was only convicted after he’d raped 6 more women: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/us/victims-pressure-cities-to-test-old-rape-kits.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A9%22%7D) is that we have to support women in publicly reporting rapes.) is that women are going to have to public about rapes before we can effect any change.

        Rape victims are going to have to courageous enough to put themselves on the line, even when everyone isn’t going to believe them. In the law, that’s as it should be; the presumption of innocence and the requirement that the law prove guilt is a good one. We shouldn’t take away a person’s liberty on the evidence of one person’s story (a quick perusal shows that many of the individuals in the innocence project were convicted of rape, not infrequently on the basis of faulty eye witness testimony). But until we hear the evidence (say, in the case of Cosby) or the law can connect the dots (in the case of Ybos’s rapist), we want see justice.

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    2. Yes, it should have been mentioned in the article, and, it could have been. There are several stories here. The first is the journalist/the ethics of the journalism (and, Rolling Stone?). The second is the facts of this case. A third is UVA, and how it handles rape, . . . .

      Also liked the Traister article.

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    3. Yergh on the typos. “We won’t see justice” (and take your pick of the two endings for the other sentence).

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  9. AmyP, your tone is enough to make me want to lock my daughters in the basement until they’re 30. You are questioning the details of the person reporting the assault – not the credentials or work history of the journalist. If we have issues with the journalist’s approach then investigate the journalist. With the approach you’re taking, the message is clearly “you must have unassailable physical evidence, and your story must make sense to the audience, or you weren’t really raped”.

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    1. I think Amy P. is suggesting what an investigation would look like. Such inquiries might be inappropriate for (say) a rape crisis counselor, but a reporter who is writing an article, or a police detective conducting an investigation, is supposed to prize truth above the feelings of the people she interviews.

      The members of the Duke lacrosse team had feelings. Jo and E have feelings. A presumption of guilt is not appropriate for either reporters or university administrators or the criminal justice system.

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    2. No–I’m just pointing out possible lines of inquiry that will either confirm or undermine Jackie’s story. If you go through all of my comments, you’ll see quite a number of mentions of possible facts that would support Jackie’s story (for instance, if there’s a three hour dark window in her phone and internet activity on the day and time in question that is matched by a similar dark window on the part of the fraternity members and pledges).

      I’ll add that if the fraternity has done a substantial renovation, or done anything unusual with regard to cleaning (either cancelled a commercial cleaning or rented a steam cleaner or bought bleach, etc.), that would be a piece of evidence in the “for” column.

      What I would like you to bear in mind is that like Duke Lacrosse (but unlike a lot of conventional sexual assault cases), this is not a she-said-they-said situation–there should be both physical and digital evidence (phone and internet records) to establish where people were at the time in question and what they were doing. One of the Duke Lacrosse kids had an alibi consisting of that type of evidence (ATM slip, record of phone calls, a taxi ride, etc.).

      http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/LegalCenter/story?id=1858806

      If Jackie names the two men she recognized, it should be possible even at this late date to establish where they were and if they were doing stuff inconsistent with her chronology.

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      1. It would also be interesting (for instance, either via the testimony of a cleaning lady or photographic evidence on Facebook or wherever) to demonstrate the existence or non-existence of a glass coffee table at the fraternity house in 2012. If nobody thinks there was a glass coffee table, that’s evidence against Jackie’s story. If the coffee table demonstrably existed but mysteriously disappeared around the time of the alleged rape, that’s evidence for Jackie’s story.

        None of this is dramatic Perry Mason type evidence, but it does help to establish probabilities.

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  10. Rolling Stone just retracted the story. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/a-note-to-our-readers-20141205

    In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.

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