The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Is Ellie Clougherty a Liar?

Posted on | November 6, 2015 | 39 Comments

Joe Lonsdale and Ellie Clougherty in 2012.

It seemed like a perfect romance — a young high-tech entrepreneur and the former fashion model who met through a mentorship program at elite Stanford University. But after they broke up, the stunning beauty claimed she had been raped and abused by Joe Lonsdale. He was banned from the Stanford campus and sued by his ex-girlfriend Ellie Clougherty. What went wrong? What really happened? The truth in such matters is always difficult to know, but in the midst of the “rape culture” hysteria that feminists have incited on college campuses, this love-gone-wrong tale in California’s Silicon Valley took on a political significance:

After sightseeing in Rome [in March 2012], Lonsdale and Clougherty were together in the hotel room they were sharing when she started dressing for evening Mass. Lonsdale came up behind her and kissed her, touching her neck and hair and telling her she was beautiful. She had told him she was a virgin. Both agree they had sex. But what actually went on between them that night, and throughout their yearlong relationship, would become highly contested. After the relationship ended, Clougherty accused Lonsdale of sexual assault. Stanford investigated whether he broke the university’s rule against “consensual sexual and romantic relationships” between students and their mentors and, later, whether he raped her. The findings from the investigations have sparked a war of allegations and interpretations, culminating last month with dueling lawsuits, filled with damaging accusations. This case, which has been picked up by the media, does not fit neatly into the narratives that have fueled an ongoing national conversation about sexual assault of students on campus. But it exposes the risks of Stanford’s open door to Silicon Valley and the pressure that universities are under to do more for students who say they’ve been raped. . . .
In December 2012, Lonsdale wrote Clougherty a long email. “We are dealing with serious relationship dysfunction,” he began, and laid out a list of examples in bullet points. The first read: “Sometimes I feel it’s very clear you are eager to engage sexually, but other times you will talk about me taking advantage of you and forcing myself on you as if there is this dirty old man/young innocent student dynamic, and I should feel badly about it. We will do something and then just a bit later you’ll talk as if ‘how can I stop you from making me do that?’ and yet earlier I honestly thought you wanted to.”
Lonsdale spent Christmas with Clougherty at her family’s home. They fought about a number of things, including the fact that he didn’t bring her a Christmas present. When he got home, Lonsdale broke up with her over email. . . .

You can read the rest of that story, which Emily Bazelon wrote for the New York Times magazine in February. Permit me to remark what should be obvious: A girl who is (a) a professional fashion model, (b) smart enough to go to Stanford University, (c) devoutly Catholic and (d) still a virgin at age 21, is not Just Your Typical College Girl.

Joe Lonsdale, a millionaire who is eight years older than Miss Clougherty, certainly recognized her to be a special young lady, but the way he seduced her — and I think the word “seduced” is not unfair in this situation — created a predictable problem. Having persuaded her to forsake her religious ideals, Lonsdale should have expected the “serious relationship dysfunction” of which he later complained.

He “broke up with her over email”? Dear God!

This simply will not do, sir.

However princely your standing among your Silicon Valley peers, you can’t just seduce and abandon a girl like Ellie Clougherty and expect no reprisal. You sure as hell don’t break up with her via email. The sequel of this story — involving a Harvard “gender violence” conference and a decision to use federal Title IX law to require that Stanford punish Joe Lonsdale — is what made it part of the “rape culture” conversation. And that is why this story came to the attention of Emily Bazelon.

Because of the thoroughness of Bazelon’s reporting, especially her quotations of email correspondence between the couple, Stanford reversed its ruling against Joe Lonsdale, and Ellie Clougherty’s lawsuit against him has been settled. Bazelon makes an important point about how these stories are covered:

On Tuesday, the university reversed its finding of sexual misconduct and harassment, lifting the campus ban it had imposed on Lonsdale. Lonsdale agreed not to challenge the separate determination that he broke the rule against consensual relationships between mentors and students. That’s hardly in the same category as sexual misconduct and harassment. . . .
Last December, when Rolling Stone’s account of a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia began to unravel, some commentators argued that we should nevertheless take claims of sexual assault at face value, on the grounds that statistically, they are very likely true. “I choose to believe Jackie,” Jessica Valenti wrote in The Guardian. “I lose nothing by doing so, even if I’m later proven wrong.” In The Washington Post, Zerlina Maxwell argued: “We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”
As Margaret Talbot pointed out in The New Yorker at the time: “That’s a position that makes moral and emotional sense for advocates and friends of the victim, whose primary role is to comfort and support. But it’s not a position that makes sense for journalists, whose job is to find out what actually happened.” It’s true that women don’t make a lot of false rape accusations to the police. That’s rare. But rare is not the same as never. . . .

You can read the rest of that article, which came to my attention because of Jessica Valenti’s (ill-advised) Twitter pushback against Bazelon’s criticism. A reporter like Bazelon has an obligation to pay attention to facts that don’t fit the preconceived prejudices of anti-male crusaders like Jessica Valenti and Zerlina Maxwell. A feminist is always prepared to believe the very worst about any man (as long as the man is not an elected Democrat), and is also obligated to pretend that women never lie (unless they are Republican women). Beyond her blatant partisan motives, Jessica Valenti has a direct financial incentive to advance the “campus rape epidemic” narrative, since this helps Valenti sell books and get lucrative speaking engagements. You cannot trust her, period.

Back in the day, a fellow who did what Joe Lonsdale did might have had to reckon with the vengeance of her father or brothers, or her new boyfriend might show up with some of his buddies, looking to even the score. The possibility of being confronted by a crew of angry rednecks was something a fellow down home could not take lightly, but the old-fashioned way of dealing with these things probably doesn’t happen very often at Stanford. However, turning these love-gone-wrong tales into Title IX cases and civil lawsuits is arguably a poor substitute for the ancient and simple customs of down-home Hillbilly Justice.

Well, what of Ellie Clougherty? She was a fool, even if she was also obviously in some sense a victim. Her fateful trip to Rome with Joe Lonsdale was her own decision, and once she had compromised her standards, what consequences did she expect would follow? A hitherto faithful Catholic, she made the all-too-common mistake of trusting “love” to guide her, and this was a tragic error.

Perhaps even worse than that folly, however, Ellie Clougherty’s decision to force Stanford into a Title IX proceeding against Joe Lonsdale — and subsequently to go public with her accusations against him — exposed her personal life to an examination that no wise person would ever deliberately invite. The confessional mode of so much feminist discourse, where women reveal the most intimate details of their lives in order to dramatize how they have been victimized by the oppressive patriarchy, has always bothered me. Many times I have thought about stories I could tell — which may or may not involve redneck girls and their angry boyfriends — to illustrate a point, but then decided that the Fifth Amendment is as valuable as the First Amendment. Some stories just aren’t worth telling, when you consider all the possible costs.

Is Ellie Clougherty a liar?

This is not a question I can answer, but it is a question that many will ask, because she told a story she could not prove true.

You know and I know, woman,
I ain’t the one.
I never hurt you, sweetheart.
I never pulled my gun.
Got bells in your mind, mama,
And it’s easy to see.
I think it’s time for me to move along,
I do believe.





 

Category: Education, Sex Trouble

Comments

39 Responses to “Is Ellie Clougherty a Liar?”

  1. Bob Belvedere
    November 6th, 2015 @ 2:07 pm

    Skynyrd songs are like a guide of Wisdom for living one’s life well.

  2. Jeanette Victoria
    November 6th, 2015 @ 2:21 pm

    Calling a feminist a liar is redundant

  3. Steve
    November 6th, 2015 @ 2:42 pm

    Valenti attempts to avoid her responsibility as a journalist by inferring that the views and opinions she shares (views in which she refuses to publicly identify with) are representative of the “culture.” This is simply just another unsubstantiated opinion from Valenti, she cites no research or sources.

    Valenti: “Culture” made me do it.
    Judge: I think you just pleaded guilty.

  4. Steve
    November 6th, 2015 @ 2:54 pm

    As rightly mentioned above Valenti was ill advised to engage Bazelon on a public forum. I overestimated her. She is to dull to comprehend how truly dull she is.

  5. steve
    November 6th, 2015 @ 2:57 pm

    too*

  6. RS
    November 6th, 2015 @ 3:00 pm

    Several points:

    1. N.B. the following with emphasis supplied:

    After sightseeing in Rome [in March 2012], Lonsdale and Clougherty were together in the hotel room they were sharing when she started dressing for evening Mass.

    At the risk of being accused of “blaming the victim,” why is an ostensibly devout, virginal, Catholic girl “sharing a room” with a male on a trip to Rome? What message does she think that sends to her “roommate?” Even if nothing occurred, there was still the appearance of impropriety which is inconsistent with her professed personae.

    2. For the feminists, such allegations are zero sum. Believing the accuser (or accused for that matter) is more important than truth. Adverse effects of being the subject false allegations are dismissed as nothing. Adverse effects of disbelieving false allegations are considered crimes against humanity. The attitude that “I lose nothing by ‘standing with Jackie’ ( or Ellie)” ignores the considerable relative heartache caused by false allegations.

    3. Instapundit and others have noted in the past several days the trend of “honeytrapping” men in tech. Know, that men in STEM are well aware of this trend. It exists because of professional jealousy combined with feminist propaganda. There is an active effort among feminists to “create the narrative” especially among the tech power brokers on the West Coast. The sad thing is, the end result is that qualified women are being shunned because men in tech don’t want to risk being accused of sexual impropriety. Well done, ladies! You’re managing to destroy opportunity for those qualified women who have something to offer in tech fields. Query whether this story is another installment?

  7. RS
    November 6th, 2015 @ 3:07 pm

    Oh, I forgot my fourth point.

    4. This story reminds me something told to me by a Roman Catholic priest of my acquaintance. A young married couple came to their parish priest and inquired whether it was permissible to have sex before taking the Eucharist. He responded, “So long as it is within the confines of the Sacrament of Marriage . . . and you don’t block the aisles.”

  8. Fail Burton
    November 6th, 2015 @ 3:18 pm

    Bud, I understand what you’re saying but how old was Audie Murphy when he arrived in Rome? He was 19. Either these people are equal or they aren’t. One can’t have this both ways at will and yet that is exactly what these female supremacist bigots do.

    As for Valenti and Maxwell, they are par for the course in this cult. They have no interest in due process and that is a double-edged sword which will come back to haunt them. “Anti-rape” campaigns like #JustListen and “No Red Tape” are clearly a violation of the spirit and letter of the law. No citizen has a legal duty to “just listen” to anyone. A crime is reported. If evidence is there charges are filed. It goes to court. Both sides are “just listened” to.

    Far from being equal, we are seeing women with the civilizational awareness of children who in fact are lucky they are protected… by us and our laws. The idea of Ellie at 21 in Rome in 1944 is simply laughable. She would’ve been a useless ball of cry.

    On the day military cemeteries are full of Valenti’s and Maxwells, that’s the day I’ll listen to them, a day which will never come.

  9. Fail Burton
    November 6th, 2015 @ 3:23 pm

    Valenti is on record on youtube in a college debate with another woman who was once raped and yet stood up for due process. Valenti openly stood against due process. Valenti has tried to have that video removed from youtube. I don’t know why; her views on this are a matter of record elsewhere.

  10. JackLo
    November 6th, 2015 @ 3:24 pm

    It’s baffling how anyone as mediocre as Valenti got a national column, but then again, based on the very brain dead feminist/SJW warrior direction they’ve taken, maybe it isn’t that surprising after all? Nevertheless, Valenti is a really puddle deep, and flimsy writer, and a poster child for how trivial, whiney, and up its own ass third wave feminism is.

  11. steve
    November 6th, 2015 @ 3:28 pm

    Feminism is a point scoring exercise, they compete with each other to extort the most from a man, the female who extorts the most is the winner.

    A few things to consider:

    This man is a millionaire.
    He is well educated and well connected.
    She is nobody. For her name to be associated with his is a win for her (any publicity is good publicity).
    She knows that they will not face repercussions or downside for false reporting.
    He was already breaking policy to be with her

    If he settles, she hits the lottery
    Inamicable relationship.

    There is no downside for her even if she loses. Yet there is a high upside If he settled she may never have to work a day in her life and she would be the WINNER! all her friends would be jealous.

    She’s savvy. If I were her I would have tried for a baby. It’s the only logical and rational thing to do. If you don’t by a ticket you’ll never win the raffle. The false reporting laws are not being enforced, she may as well take advantage of it while she can.

  12. JackLo
    November 6th, 2015 @ 3:33 pm

    Of course she’s a liar! You’ve laid out all the reasons why, too: fashion model, Stanford, virgin, etc. In short, she thinks she’s above the fray, so being quickly dumped by a man, especially after she gave up her body, probably sent her into a spastic rage, not to mention intense guilt, and shame. The way to compensate was to cry ,”rape”, which leaves her blameless, and in a sense, still unsullied.

  13. steve
    November 6th, 2015 @ 3:41 pm

    Her popularity comes from being a freak show, nothing more. It’s the fad of the day. Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer…

    The problem with Valenti is that she has chosen to be a spokesperson of a fad that is fading quickly. It was a shortsighted career move, most career minded journalists choose not to go down that path. Being Feminist spokesperson is not a sought after job.

  14. steve
    November 6th, 2015 @ 3:52 pm

    Very interesting, thank you for the background. I was not aware.

    You would have thought she would have learnt to shut her mouth the first time. Why is this issue so hard for her?

    If we do some more digging maybe we will find out.

  15. Art Deco
    November 6th, 2015 @ 3:56 pm

    At the risk of being accused of “blaming the victim,” why is an
    ostensibly devout, virginal, Catholic girl “sharing a room” with a male
    on a trip to Rome? What message does she think that sends to her
    “roommate?” Even if nothing occurred, there was still the appearance of
    impropriety which is inconsistent with her professed personae.

    I’m a contemporary of the moderator. Among my fellows, it would have been assumed that two people in that age group sharing a hotel room were canoodling while they were there. If she’s a serious Catholic and goes to confession, she’s familiar with the phrase ‘occasion of sin’. Even if she were socially awkward and unfamiliar with the signals people of mainstream disposition send to each other, the Catholic understanding of occasion of sin should have substituted for an ordinary woman’s generic disinclination.

    Perhaps I’ve lived a sheltered existence, but in my family, hotel rooms are not shared by even 1st degree relatives of the opposite sex bar young brothers and sisters. The requirements of modesty simply forbid it.

  16. Art Deco
    November 6th, 2015 @ 4:04 pm

    And yet another episode of ‘women have options, men have obligations’. In these cases, it incorporates a franchise to retrospectively redefine and reframe these encounters. The actual sequence of events is irrelevant. What’s relevant is the woman’s post hoc feelings about that sequence of events.

    People do this with their (failed) marriages as well.

  17. Art Deco
    November 6th, 2015 @ 4:08 pm

    It’s not that they lack ‘civilizational awareness’. What they lack is a sense of personal agency wherein they assume responsibility for their acts and omissions. It’s not abnormal for women to have a truncated sense of personal agency. What’s abnormal is a sense so truncated that (in a way that’s both cognitive and moral) that you fancy you’ve been coerced when you almost certainly haven’t and that your feelings are true and real sequences of events are irrelevant. I felt bad about it, therefore he raped me.

  18. Fail Burton
    November 6th, 2015 @ 4:13 pm

    Honestly, I don’t know what’s going on precisely, but I can look at 5,000 years of human civilization and then at the idea of self-pity and excuses.

    You can’t just blow off 5,000 years across 5 continents and chalk it up to men holding back women. There is some natural force at work there. Let’s be honest: the ferocity, attitude and elite skills of a Ronda Rousey are an anomaly. And if she went up against a man she’d be toast. Why are there no female Jackass movies? I don’t know, but I do know there aren’t and that’s called reality.

    Why do these people keep maintaining that what I’ve never seen is reality and what I do see is fake. It’s a con game.

  19. Quartermaster
    November 6th, 2015 @ 4:21 pm

    I’m sure “don’t do it in the streets and scare the horses” is in there somewhere.

  20. Jason Lee
    November 6th, 2015 @ 4:21 pm

    At the risk of being accused of “blaming the victim,” why is an ostensibly devout, virginal, Catholic girl “sharing a room” with a male on a trip to Rome?

    https://youtu.be/5NV6Rdv1a3I?t=2m7s

  21. Quartermaster
    November 6th, 2015 @ 4:24 pm

    I wouldn’t be surprised that she was hoping for a certain result. When he dumped her instead, particularly the way he did it, she was enraged and you can the result of that.

  22. Finrod Felagund
    November 6th, 2015 @ 5:11 pm

    By comparison, my mom refused to share a hotel room with my dad when they were engaged. This was in the late 1950s, though.

  23. AwD
    November 6th, 2015 @ 5:35 pm

    Unfortunately this isn’t the first and won’t be the last time that an attractive “Christian” young woman has whored herself out to a powerful man (who should have known better than to fall into that trap himself) and then cried “Rape!” when her desired payment was not forthcoming – secure in the knowledge that most people will point fingers at the misbehaving man and conveniently forget that the trollop is the one who was on the make in the first place.

  24. RKae
    November 6th, 2015 @ 7:15 pm

    …she made the all-too-common mistake of trusting “love” to guide her, and this was a tragic error.

    Um, excuse me, but this statement flies in the face of every Disney princess song.

    Don’t you know? “Follow your heart!” “The fantasy in your head is always right!” “Grownups don’t know anything! They’re afraid of anything that’s new!”

  25. RKae
    November 6th, 2015 @ 7:17 pm

    I know! Not only did she abandon the code, but she decided to do so in the Vatican’s back yard!

    Now THAT is lapsing!

  26. Daniel Freeman
    November 7th, 2015 @ 2:09 am

    She’s made a living out of being intellectually lazy and shooting her mouth off. It’s hard to stop doing what pays the bills, especially when it’s easy and natural.

  27. Daniel Freeman
    November 7th, 2015 @ 2:24 am

    Perhaps I’ve lived a sheltered existence, but in my family, hotel rooms are not shared by even 1st degree relatives of the opposite sex bar young brothers and sisters. The requirements of modesty simply forbid it.

    It can happen under extreme circumstances, but then you don’t go around telling people. The exceptions that prove the rule, as it were.

  28. Daniel Freeman
    November 7th, 2015 @ 2:31 am

    Yeah, it isn’t just women that don’t make Jackass movies.

    https://youtu.be/FIdg4Uuuyzs

  29. Shirley Stubbs
    November 7th, 2015 @ 6:28 am

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  30. robertstacymccain
    November 7th, 2015 @ 4:01 pm

    Where’s Jiminy Cricket when we need him?

  31. robertstacymccain
    November 7th, 2015 @ 4:06 pm

    “… how old was Audie Murphy when he arrived in Rome? He was 19.”

    And my great-grandfather was scarcely older when he was captured at Gettsyburg, having previously survived Seven Pines, Antietam and Chancellorsville, among other battles. My father was wounded by Germany shrapnel when he was 20, and my oldest son was wearing paratrooper’s wings at 21. But that sort of thing counts for nothing, I suppose.

  32. robertstacymccain
    November 7th, 2015 @ 4:30 pm

    “… the trend of ‘honeytrapping’ men in tech …”

    It is obvious, furthermore, from some of the false rape accusations we have seen (e.g., Sulkowicz v. Nungesser) that any male student who has sex with a female student thereby is exposed to implicit blackmail: If at any point he doesn’t dance to her tune, she can accuse him of rape and get him expelled. Title IX grants her almost unlimited punitive power against him, and he has no protecting against that power. In the name of “equality,” the scales of justice have been tilted decisively against males in academia, and it is therefore not surprising that male students are now only 43% of U.S. undergraduate enrollment. Who would subject themselves to such deliberate and systematic mistreatment, if he could avoid it?

  33. RKae
    November 7th, 2015 @ 7:04 pm

    I guess my problem was listening to Emerson, Lake & Palmer… and I still have no idea what “Tarkus” is about. A giant armadillo fighting a pterodactyl or something?

  34. Quartermaster
    November 7th, 2015 @ 7:53 pm

    To the left, out martial ancestors were merely war mongers.

  35. Matt_SE
    November 7th, 2015 @ 8:47 pm

    She wasn’t hired by accident. When you consider how much money Gawker has been losing yearly, you wonder “who is bankrolling them and why?”

    The answer is easy: some hard-core leftist fatcat like Soros who wants to promote social upheaval.

    People like Valenti are hired because they have the ethics of a whore, and will do whatever is required of them.

  36. Matt_SE
    November 7th, 2015 @ 8:49 pm

    3. Feminists and leftists in general are fine with destroying opportunities in an industry. That creates more victims for the mill.

  37. Linda Scheerer
    November 8th, 2015 @ 3:12 am

    ?

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  38. Sarah Pawlowski
    November 9th, 2015 @ 5:37 am

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  39. Martin Davies
    November 9th, 2015 @ 6:47 am

    It would appear possible that feminist activists are targeting men in Tech for career destruction or worse:

    http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6907

    I’m definitely not saying that it’s the case here, but it is a possibility to bear in mind when a story like this comes up.