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Don't we only know (1) that she wasn't attacked where she said she was attacked, and (2) she likely wasn't a bloody mess when her friends came to pick her up?
I get what you're saying, but what it comes down to is that every possible detail that could have been empirically verified has been shown to be false. Add to that the fact that she's changed her story about what happened -- somehow we went from oral sex to gang rape with a beer bottle cameo -- and it's hard to give her any benefit of the doubt at all.
There are other facts that seem curious as well.
No, but I think common sense here is that it probably didn't happen. That's why I find it sad. If the woman is troubled, depressed, traumatized, and in need of counseling, by all means, help her. But taking to the airwaves to say this is all Rolling Stone's fault and that some minor edits to their apology prove something happened ... I just wish people would be more willing to apply the same rational thinking to stories they're emotionally invested in as ones they aren't.
Fact-checking can be a very difficult, arduous process. But in this case as many have noted, there were several very basic facts the author or other staff could very easily have confirmed to be false or at minimum sketchy. Anyone reading the story with a critical eye would have been skeptical. To say it is "all Rolling Stone's fault" is obviously unfair, but its approach to this story has been bush-league at best. I don't have any agenda against RS, and do think some of their writers have done very well in the past.
Neither of these bothers me.
But isn't this the point that people were making about Title IX process and the seriousness through which we should view rape culture claims? That this stuff is actually indelible, for both accused perpetrator and victim?
I never trust anything a fraternity says about any social event, ever. I was in one. You wind up kicked off or on probation or suspended if you're forthcoming. To trust a fraternity's calendar at its word is insane.
worse for a rapist actually, all those blue light stations and Rolling Stone looking to write exposes on you. Better to stay local if you want to be all rapey.
Poor choice of words in my first post. I didn't mean "move on" in the sense that they should just drop it. The woman needs help, and I hope she gets it and I don't think those who want to help her should abandon her instead. I mean move on in the sense of working with her to find out why she lied instead of lashing out at those who are mad and those who helped uncover the flaws in the story.
Another interesting tangent about fraternities- the legal defense teams they all have in place and ready to pounce are amazing. This article from The Atlantic from several months ago details the whole thing. It gets into the rape stuff but also discusses how they throw the frat members under the bus to protect the frat from liability through an elaborate set of rules and crisis response guidelines. Crazy stuff- when I read it I came away relieved that my oldest kid is more than a decade away from college.
Rolling Stone should have known better, and this is a big embarrassment for them. I was actually excited about Matt Tiabbi rejoining the staff and this just kind of sullies the whole thing
I wanted to read that until I got to to the byline. Caitlin Flanagan. Never has a conservative anti-feminist so irritated both my feminist and masculist sensibilities. Unbelievable, this woman. But ad hominem.
It's also super long.
How or why does RS keep up an article, published on its web page and in magazines, when it does not have complete confidence in its truth?
It just seems bad all around. RS writer does a piece she hasn't vetted, and the subject tells a story that is false. They're not mutually exclusive, both things happened, but the school ought to free Phi Kappa and the other frats as well.
Yeah, this is pretty hard to believe. I was in a Big 10 fraternity with a lot of parties and dirtbag members, that being said if we were sitting around watching tv and a guy said "You know what we should do this weekend, get a girl drunk and gang bang her." That would not garner a whole lot of support.
I'm not sure anecdotal evidence is the way to go here. Most people don't want unwilling/comatose partners either, but it clearly happens quite a bit.
Horrible idea. A relative should never introduce eighteen year old girls to hard liquor in order to teach them about alcohol-induced bad decision making before college. Give me the bottle of vodka and I'll do it.
WaPo has it:
Something very sordid may have indeed happened, involving Jackie and someone, somewhere,
Did you see Tabbi's tweets over the weekend? He's going pretty far out on a limb to defend the RS fact-checking dept, saying this is not their fault, that its a grueling detailed process, etc. But then his not really backing his comments up with anything specific on this story, just making general assumptions.
I am reading it. Good stuff, and so far, accurate. I was the social chair of a frat (I was old enough to buy booze and dumb enough to accept personal liability) and her first few pages are absolutely spot-on. We had a guy fall from a roof trying to jump from one of those gabled areas she talks about to a landing below. A year later, I looked out the same window, remembered how badly he had hurt himself, his near-death, and decided to replicate the feat, only with success.
Yeah that is the point. Most people don't. So it is exponentially less likely to find 7 in one place agreeing to it.
It should not even get to the fact checkers, it's enough that the reporter herself did not cover her bases by talking to others for fear of offending the alleged victim or others. And ultimately that's on the editors as well who are essentially playing Russian Roulette with their publishing it at that point.
There may genuinely be a problem at UVA, this girl was raped once and almost raped a second time. You'd think that would be a story worth reporting.
We haven't even mentioned yet in this thread the girl's statement, as reported by WaPo, that she wanted "out" of the RS story after giving her initial interview, but (again, according to her) the RS writer told her that it was too late, that she couldn't back out, and that they were going ahead with publication of her story anyway.
I'm rooming with you at the next {insert name here} hole right?St. Louis Bob said:
Tend to trust Taibi on this one since you know the lawyers and factsy types were waaay up his ### on all those Goldman stories.CletiusMaximus said:
People are starting to pick up some older articles for fact checking. She apparently played fast and loose with the facts quite often.
Good article until the end. Really informative. I loved the part about the wine coolers and the suggestion from FIPG about the M*A*S*H party.TobiasFunke said:
This is shaping up to be a must-read.
