Associated Press:
News organizations following up on Rolling Stone’s horrifying tale of a gang rape at the University of Virginia exposed serious flaws in the report and the Charlottesville Police Department said its four-month investigation found no evidence that the attack happened — or that the man who allegedly orchestrated it even exists.
Now the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism is about to explain how it all went so wrong. The school’s analysis of the editorial process that led to the November 2014 publication of “A Rape on Campus” will be released online at 8 p.m. EDT Sunday.
The article focused on a student identified only as “Jackie” who said she was raped by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house more than two years earlier.
It also described a hidden culture of sexual violence fueled by binge drinking at one of the nation’s most highly regarded public universities. Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo said at a March 23 news conference that his investigators, who received no cooperation from Jackie, found no evidence to support either.
The article prompted protests on the Charlottesville campus, but the story quickly began to unravel. Other news organizations learned that the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, had agreed not to contact the accused men. Three of Jackie’s friends denied the writer’s assertion that they discouraged the alleged victim from reporting the assault, and the man described as the person who led her to an upstairs room in the fraternity house to be raped could not be located.
Let’s be clear: Jackie is a proven liar. Her elaborate “catfishing” scheme — using her make-believe boyfriend “Haven Monahan” in an unsuccessful attempt to attract the romantic interest of her friend Ryan Duffin — destroys her credibility. Period.
It is as if she said, “I was gang-raped at a frat party and I’m under surveillance by the CIA and the Bavarian Illuminati.”
There is no such thing as being semi-credible. A person who has demonstrated a habit of dishonesty cannot be accepted as a reliable authority. Sometimes liars do tell the truth, but once you know someone to be a liar — and Jackie’s “Haven Monahan” ruse was clearly a premeditated deception — you can never accept their word for anything without independent corroboration. So when the Charlottesville police investigated Jackie’s claims and found no evidence to support her story, and when she refused to cooperate with their investigation, this was tantamount to proof that the entire Rolling Stone story was a fiction.
However, this does not mean either (a) rapes don’t happen at UVA and other universities, or that (b) Jackie was never raped.
The New York Times has published former UVA student Jenny Wilkinson’s account of what happened to her in 1997:
We met while working at the same restaurant, we had mutual friends and we had gone out before. The night it happened, a Friday in late January, he attended my sorority’s date function with me. Late in the evening, he brought me a drink, my fourth of the evening; I started to feel sick shortly thereafter. Back on a daybed in the living room of my apartment, he sexually assaulted me. I have never remembered all of the details from that night, but I do remember thinking that he was raping me and that I needed to get away. Finally I did just that, dragging myself into my bedroom.
After he left, one of my roommates, who had been sleeping in her bedroom down the hall, helped me call my parents, who lived in Richmond. When they arrived 45 minutes later, my father called 911 to report my assault. The police met us at the hospital around 6 a.m. on Saturday.
A police officer was present during my entire medical examination. A gynecological exam showed some evidence of trauma; a blood test documented a blood alcohol content of 0.13, over the legal limit for driving a car; a toxicology report revealed trace amounts of three benzodiazepines in my system, including Valium and Librium. After the examination, the police took my statement. My attacker was arrested later that morning, charged, and released on bail.
The presence of those sedatives in her system certainly seems suspicious, and having a blood-alcohol level over the legal driving limit hours after she left the party indicate that she was too intoxicated to consent. The fact that she immediately reported this incident to police would seem to support the belief that she was indeed victimized — and yet the man she accused of rape was acquitted at trial. This may seem astonishing and outrageous, but Wilkinson explains why:
After the prosecution rested, the defense made a motion to strike the commonwealth’s case. The judge granted the motion, dismissing the charge. My attacker’s fraternity brothers cheered. The judge concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that the defendant knew that I was incapacitated and that he was acting against my will. The defense never had to call a single witness. The man who assaulted me walked away.
Read the whole thing, and understand what this is really about: Rape is a felony, requiring criminal intent or disregard.
While the presence of sedatives in Wilkinson’s system might raise the suspicion she had been “roofied,” (a) there was no evidence that her date was responsible for this, and (b) an 0.13 blood-alcohol level would have been sufficient to impair her judgment without any drugs whatsoever. In other words, why would a guy need to put a date-rape drug in a girl’s drink if she was drinking so heavily as to be “incapacitated” anyway?
Furthermore — please excuse me for playing the Devil’s Advocate defense attorney here — how drunk was the guy? This is highly relevant to understanding how such cases play out in court. Over and over as feminists have pushed their “rape culture” discourse in the past year, we keep hearing different versions of the same story: Two college kids, usually both teenagers and therefore too young to drink legally, go to a party, get drunk and have sex. “Rape!” says the girl. “No way!” says the guy. We are then plunged into a public “he-said/she-said” mystery involving two young people we don’t actually know, and everybody starts a sort of speculative guessing-game as to what really happened.
We are not detectives or prosecutors. Nor are we judge or jury. We’re just people reading news stories and opinion columns, bystanders to what is in fact an attempt to redefine the meaning of “rape,” and thereby strip a specific group of citizens — male college students — of their due-process rights. A student who could never be convicted of rape in a court of law can nevertheless be found “responsible” for sexual assault in a university disciplinary proceeding, effectively branded a rapist and expelled. In some cases that have come to public attention in recent months, what appears to happen is one of two scenarios:
- A girl feels shame or remorse about a drunken hookup and, to absolve herself of responsibility and expiate her sense of guilt, accuses a guy of rape;
or
- A girl feels she has been disrespected by an ex-boyfriend and, resentful of the emotional injury she feels, decides that their previous sexual activity was rape.
Understand that neither of these scenarios necessarily involves a woman deliberately and maliciously lying. Emotions like heartbreak, remorse and envy can exert a powerful influence over the way we remember past events. If those events occurred while we were drunk, and we have been brooding over them for days or weeks or months, it is entirely possible for our minds to distort reality. And we have seen multiple accounts of these “he-said/she-said” cases where several months transpired between the drunken hookup and the claim of rape. Paul Nungesser hooked up with Emma Sulkowicz in August 2012 — not their first sexual encounter — and it was not until April 2013 that Columbia University officials informed him she had claimed this hookup was rape. Cathy Young’s article about this high-profile case suggests Sulkowicz decided to accuse Nungesser of rape only after she compared notes with his ex-girlfriend, who claimed her relationship with Nungesser was abusive.
Really? Are feminists willing to die on this kind of hill?
A guy dates two girls his freshman year. One of them is a regular girlfriend and the other is what is sometimes called “friends with benefits” or, more bluntly, a “f–kbuddy.” He and the girlfriend breakup and, after he has a third hookup with the other girl, he seems to lose interest in her, too. The guy has no reason to believe that either of these girls bears him any particular grudge. He’s moving on with his life, dating other girls, and then these two ex-girlfriends get together and start talking to each other and — BOOM! — he’s a rapist?
What part of “cold-blooded spite” do you not understand?
Common sense is more useful than an advanced degree in psychology in understanding this. Nothing can enrage a woman to burning resentment more than getting dumped by a guy and being left behind while he moves on with his happy life:
It seems that the one possible explanation no feminist can accept in cases like this is the most obvious explanation: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
The source of that saying, William Congreve, was probably a sexist pig, but (a) he’s been dead nearly 400 years, and (b) it’s true.
I don’t know Paul Nungesser, and maybe he’s a total jerk. I don’t know Emma Sulkowicz and maybe she’s an innocent victim. In that case, as in any “he-said/she-said” case, it is simply impossible to know with certainty what happened. A common-sense understanding of human nature, however, tells us that teenage romance is fraught with emotion and that conflicts between ex-lovers often involve acrimonious accusations of wrongdoing. (Ask a few attorneys what kind of scorched-earth tactics they’ve seen in divorce cases.) Yet we are not being asked to evaluate these college sexual assault claims on a case-by-case basis. Rather, we are hearing about these cases because feminists are trying to convince us that there is a “rape epidemic” on college campuses, and that this crisis of sexual violence requires drastic intervention.
All the actual data, however, point in the other direction. The incidence of sexual assault has declined significantly, down 64 percent from 1995 to 2010 and remaining stable at that lower rate. Whereas feminists (and their Democrat allies) have repeatedly claimed that 1-in-5 female college students are victims of sexual assault, “the actual rate is 6.1 per 1,000 students, or 0.61 percent (instead of 1-in-5, the real number is 0.03-in-5).” And, in fact, female college students are less likely to be raped than are females of the same age who don’t attend college.
So, the rate of sexual assault is at or near the lowest level in several decades, and yet feminists have manufactured a “rape epidemic” that has made headlines for months? There is clearly a political agenda involved, and what we learn about the hoax perpetrated by Rolling Stone may help us understand what’s really happening. We have already seen enough of these hoaxes to know that feminists lie about rape.
The question we need to ask is why feminists are lying now, other than their usual motives of hate, greed, and revenge.
“Political careers, administrative jobs, government grants, book and lecture contracts are just some of vast financial benefits that rest upon continuing the ‘rape culture’ crusade on campus.”
— Wendy McElroy
People need to wake the hell up.
