Why Didn’t Sabrina Rubin Erdely Write about Vanderbilt?
Posted on January 27th, 2015 in Uncategorized | 20 Comments »
Serious question. The rape for which two Vanderbilt students (they’re always referred to as football players, though I have no idea if that’s relevant or just convenient) were just convicted is plenty horrific. And it has, from a crusading journalist’s perspective, the advantage of being true. Is Vanderbilt just not as sexy a story as UVa?
In any case: These guys should be locked up for a very long time. Getting your girlfriend so drunk that she passes out, then handing her off to two other guys to rape her? What kind of a person does that? And what kind of person would rape her instead of slugging the guy in the face and calling the cops?
20 Responses
1/27/2015 8:36 pm
Becuase people at the school did everything right? Called the city cops right away after seeing suspicious activity and such. Case was investigated promptly. Conviction was secured. So, no villains, other than, you know, the heinous rapists.
1/27/2015 8:52 pm
Photos of the four accused students are here:
http://www.wptv.com/news/national/brandon-vandenburg-corey-batey-brandon-banks-and-jaborian-mckenzie-ex-vanderbilt-football-players-facing-rape-charges
1/27/2015 9:33 pm
I’ll agree with both Eddie and Anonymous (8:52 pm). The fact that the school and authorities appear to have handled this correctly is part of it, as is the fact that 1 of the 2 convicted attackers is African-American (as are the other 2 charged perpetrators). Erdely preferred to write about UVa’s “throngs of toned, tanned and overwhelmingly blond students.”
That said this story is horrific on many levels, including this fact from the ESPN article - “[The jurors] also saw cellphone images from the night of the attack that Vandenburg sent to his friends as it was happening.” So we’ve got 4 guys in the room, plus some additional number receiving cellphone pictures that I think would show that this woman doesn’t have her wits about her and is being sexually assaulted.
1/27/2015 11:28 pm
@Anonymous, Interesting contrast between your image with the image in the article linked to in the post.
1/28/2015 3:22 am
“Erdely preferred to write about UVa’s “throngs of toned, tanned and overwhelmingly blond students.””
Well, that’s okay …… as long as no one asks why. Ever.
1/28/2015 6:36 am
Bravo, Richard! Thank you! My sentiments exactly on every level!…….I am waiting for the headline: Former Editor of George Magazine starts new publication titled……..
1/28/2015 1:56 pm
[…] On a related note, the convictions of Batey and Vandenburg have prompted several writers to ask variations of this question, best summarized by Richard Bradley in a recent post—why didn’t Erdely choose Vanderbilt for her gang rape story instead of UVA? Bradley writes: […]
1/28/2015 6:51 pm
[…] On a related note, the convictions of Batey and Vandenburg have prompted several writers to ask variations of this question, best summarized by Richard Bradley in a recent post—why didn’t Erdely choose Vanderbilt for her gang rape story instead of UVA? Bradley writes: […]
1/28/2015 11:07 pm
There’s a general pattern that everybody is vaguely aware, but nobody (often especially including white conservatives, who tend to love college football) want to think about. (It was the central plot device in Tom Wolfe’s 1990’s novel “A Man In Full” but almost nobody remembers it.)
The most likely effective thing a college can do to win more football games is to lower academic and criminal record standards for football recruits. But this correlates with more rapes on campus.
Liberals don’t like to think about this because the majority of college football players accused in rape scandals are black and most of the accusers are white women. (For that matter, contemporary conservatives, as Wolfe pointed out in the 1990s, don’t really want to think about this either.)
For example, in 2012-13, the New York Times jumped all over a rape allegation against a college quarterback at the U. of Montana, running 4 stories on it even though Montana is a Division II team 2000 miles from NYC. (The accused was eventually acquitted.)
The ideal story would be white athletes raping a black woman, which is why the NYT ran two dozen stories about the lacrosse team at Duke back in 2006.
1/29/2015 3:05 pm
I think Eddie has most of the reason. If a crime is promptly reported, investigated and prosecuted it’s pretty hard to argue there is a “rape culture” that tolerates this conduct. I think Dave is also correct in that the accused (some now convicted) weren’t all upper class whites, which also doesn’t fit the “rape culture” narrative, so this very real horrific crime was ignored by RS because Jackie’s hoaxed horror story supported the narrative. .
1/29/2015 10:52 pm
A little bit of a hit piece here. It’s not clear what schools Erderly looked at. So unless Richard does the due diligence here I’m going to say this was a cheap shot.
1/30/2015 9:23 am
Richard,
You are no stranger to the media but you write your headline as if its a serious question. Can you confirm with us the impression most of us outside the media have that if the accused is black, the media will do everything they can not to physically describe that person? Most of us civilian media watchers believe this, and yet here you are, an honest liberal, who seems to be unaware of this phenomenon. Can you comment on it? Am I wrong?
1/30/2015 11:13 pm
Hit piece? Cheap shot? Sorry JMil, but where have you been lately? “Not clear what schools Erderly looked at”?
Thanks to the WaPo’s coverage, we do know:
“So, for six weeks starting in June, Erdely interviewed students from across the country. She talked to people at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. None of those schools felt quite right. But one did: the University of Virginia, a public school, Southern and genteel, brimming with what Erdely calls “super-smart kids” and steeped in the legacy of its founder, Thomas Jefferson.”
Allow me to quote this immortal line by Chris Bray, writing in the Daily Caller:
“Sabrina Rubin Erdely auditions reality until it sits up and barks for her like a trained seal.”
(I would give my eye tooth if I could come up with such a line, myself.)
SRE is the deadest of dead horses. Can’t we all move on to someone else?
1/30/2015 11:25 pm
For completeness’ sake, the dateline on the Washington Post piece (“Sabrina Rubin Erdely, woman behind Rolling Stone’s explosive U-Va. alleged rape story”) by Paul Farhi was November 28th.
Chris Bray’s opinion piece (“Your Rape: Is It Clickbait? Does It Pop?”) was December 4th.
And another request, if I may, is for the odious Steve Sailer to stop sticking his nose in here. You had your fifteen minutes of fame amongst your peers (creeps like you) for, curiously, being the first person to comment beneath Richard Bradley’s expose. Now go away, please.
1/31/2015 3:55 pm
Um, Steve Sailer doesn’t need the “fame” he got from getting RB’s post a wider audience. He’s far better known (as a blogger) than RB is. (No disrespect intended). He’s widely read for a guy everyone pretends to disapprove of.
I second Matt’s question: surely you must know, RB, why the Vanderbilt story didn’t get the coverage (as Steve points out). So why not write about that?
1/31/2015 5:37 pm
I am Anonymous 1/27/2015 8:52 pm. I pointed it out before your anti-Semitic white supremacist friend did, ER.
I only saw SS’s blog after the WSJ pointed me here, and then the SS acolytes started bog-whoring him.
One of the SS fans’ favourite memes after RB published his piece, was that the whole thing had to do with Ms Erdely being a “jewess” and a “member of the tribe”.
Really? REALLY?!
1/31/2015 9:28 pm
You’re right, you did. I should have said “several people” Apologies for not giving you the credit you so deeply crave.
I can’t tell if you are complaining about a comment made here or at Steve’s site. But blogs have lots of comments I disagree with. My own comments section includes people I disagree with, and I’m often linked by people with agendas I oppose. Welcome to the world of ideas. Some of them are unattractive.
I have no idea what “bog whoring” is. But I don’t really hold Steve responsible for what someone else said, so I’m not sure I’d care.
2/1/2024 12:46 am
Why not Vanderbilt? Maybe Erderly simply ended when she got to the University of Virginia, aka this is where she wanted to plant the story.
Being an alum I’ll admit the school does have a unique mix, but a lot of the time it feels like a fusion between Northern Virginia and Richmond - mid-atlantic and the South. It’s not Vanderbilt at all.
Anyways - it’s true, why keep drumming up this story. Fact is it’s an egregiously poor piece of reporting that (like some infamous political memos) “fixed the facts around the policy” (fixed the facts around the agenda/story/etc).
Some truth is more bizarre than fiction - some of it is absolutely awful (plenty of it is). But this was conjured up.
2/1/2024 12:49 am
Fair enough, I got the schools wrong that Erderly looked at. Apologies to Mr. Bradley, others. My bad.
3/1/2024 7:14 am
I have read that Uva was targeted for the article in part because it is a public institution. Public or gov’t institutions have a higher burden to prevail in a defamation trial. A private university would only need to prove gross negligence in proving libel. A public institution would need to prove the negligence was also reckless and intentional. In Uva’s case a dozen news organizations have highlighted the negligence in reporting. Would be much harder to win trying to prove that Erderly knew info to be false and publishing it anyway. That is the main reason that Uva was targeted. Rolling Stone’s liability would have been much greater targeting Vanderbilt or other private school.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/07/no-uva-has-no-libel-claim-against-rolling-stone/