Columbia J-School, Charlottesville Police to Report on UVa and Rolling Stone
Posted on March 23rd, 2015 in Uncategorized | 16 Comments »
CNN reports what readers of this blog already know: That we can expect Steve Coll’s report on Rolling Stone’s UVa fiasco within a week or so. You’re welcome, CNN, don’t worry about giving me credit. Just because Steve Coll already told me this on Twitter and then I posted on this blog…
Meantime, another Jann Wenner publication has published bogus material: Us Weekly printed a fake interview with Kendall Jenner. Oops. Did the fact-checking department there try to contact her first? One phone call, that’s all it would have taken…
More timely, this afternoon the Charlottesville police are going to release the results of their own investigation into the alleged gang rape at UVa.
I wonder what Sabrina Rubin Erdely is doing today.
16 Responses
3/23/2015 9:21 am
The Kendall Jenner interview had the byline Us Weekly Staff
In their retraction the author is said to be an unnamed freelancer So not only the interview but the author is a fake?
3/23/2015 1:39 pm
I wish that I wasn’t such an honest person, because it sounds like the employees of Rolling Stone and Us Weekly are prime targets for a telemarketing scam.
Me: “Hello? Mr. Wenner? This is Agent Smith from the IRS, and you owe the Federal government $65,000 in back taxes. If you’ll give me your credit card number we can settle this matter over the phone, but if not, we’ll have to send a couple of Agents to your office to arrest you for tax evasion.”
3/23/2015 1:42 pm
According to the New York Times, at 2:40 PM, “Police Find No Evidence of Rape at UVA Fraternity” with the following lede
“The police here said Monday that they had found no evidence that a woman was gang raped at a University of Virginia fraternity house in 2012, and they were suspending their investigation, after a lengthy inquiry in which the alleged victim refused to cooperate. But they said the inquiry was not closed.”
I am surprised that the alleged victim was allowed to refuse to cooperate. At any rate, I’d call that a wrap.
3/23/2015 1:42 pm
Some it up, something may have happened but police can’t confirm. Investigation will be reopened if more evidence is revealed. Police could not confirm anything happened at fraternity. Police did go to lengths to disprove multiple lies that Jackie told but did not call her a liar.
3/23/2015 1:49 pm
Richard -
How common is it for magazines to represent freelancers as being staff?
3/23/2015 1:52 pm
Indeed - where’s Sbrina
3/23/2015 2:01 pm
According to the Times, the police report makes reference to ‘this survivor.’
What a wonderful Lewis Caroll moment, where words mean nothing like we are taught they mean, and what a perfect illustration of everything that is wrong with political correctness. A more honest description would qualify ‘survivor’ appropriately.
3/23/2015 2:35 pm
“Timely” is an adjective. If you want it to modify the sentence as an adverb, it should say “timelily.”
3/23/2015 2:45 pm
SE -
Several English language references on the web list ‘timelily’ as being archaic usage… you are dating yourself. (Yes, I had to look it up.)
3/23/2015 4:23 pm
“I am surprised that the alleged victim was allowed to refuse to cooperate. At any rate, I’d call that a wrap.”
5th Amendment. No one can ever be compelled to cooperate with the police.
3/23/2015 6:23 pm
“I wonder what Sabrina Rubin Erdely is doing today.” — whatever was she doing during all that time? Was there any word from her?
3/23/2015 6:51 pm
“5th Amendment. No one can ever be compelled to cooperate with the police.”
They do it all the time by providing immunity from prosecution, don’t they?
I see from reading around that apparently the Commonwealth prosecutor is holding serve on whether to prosecute her for making false statements.
I mean, look, I am not out to see anyone destroyed. However, this is an individual who has told three different stories about a sexual assault for what appears to be three separate purposes: to gain a boyfriend, to explain her poor grades, and to become famous as a sexual assault victim. To put it mildly, that kind of conduct should not be encouraged.
The only evidence for any of these versions are her own statements, but when it came time to actually get the police involved she refused to cooperate. What that means is that there is no evidence.
Luckily, the estate of the non-existent Haven Monahan cannot act to clear his name, and the accusations against the frat and UVA were so vague, and have been exploded so easily, they they will recover.
The person who really got nailed here was Sabrina. How is she going to live this down as a serious journalist, who was gulled by this young woman? It won’t be easy.
3/24/2015 12:38 am
@SPMoore8: I emphatically disagree that the accusations were so vague and those accused will recover. Real people’s names were spread on the internet as the rapists as a consequence of the RS fraud. The frat house was vandalized.
The police have not closed their investigation - they actually said something “might have happened” to her on a different day and at another fraternity even though no one, least of all the long vanished ‘victim’, has ever even suggested that!
Greek fraternity members are still being treated as suspects by university officials on multiple campuses now and their activities are still being curtailed on the pretext of responding to the RS fraud. Every day I come across people commenting on the internet who still think “something must have happened” to Jackie at a fraternity even though none - NONE! - of her claims have stood up to scrutiny by more responsible journalists and editors than the ones at RS.
That woman (I think it’s safe to assume she has serious mental health issues in addition to her profound ethical corruption) and the bogus ‘journalists’ who gave that disturbed woman the megaphone without bothering to check even the most glaring factual discrepancies in the many versions of her story let alone the meat & potatoes of thetoo-trite-to-be-true narrative have caused a world of hurt.
And they harmed not just the innocents falsely accused, but genuine victims of rape everywhere who will have that many more skeptics looking askance at their own veracity in light of this epidemic of rape hoaxes perpetrated by twisted attention-seeking young women and social activist ‘journalists’ blindly pursuing narrow partisan social agendas instead of the truth, spurred on by a new class of professional campus rape advocates justifying their university paychecks and federal grant receipts.
The taxpayers in that community are now out a pretty penny after their PD was required to expend a massive amount of resources and man hours to fully investigate a lie perpetrated by a ‘victim’ who withheld cooperation, a lie which had been promoted by a dubious journalist (her previous work is just as factually suspect and too-clichéd -to-be-true) who casually dropped off the radar leaving the accused hanging without clearing the names of the men she recklessly smeared.
Quite a few people need to pay through the nose for the horrific injustice created by Rolling Stone, if only to ensure that other ethically-challenged publications will think twice before they cavalierly undermine the credibility of real victims of campus rape in this 21st century version of the Salem Witch Trials (or perhaps more aptly the moral panic previous to this one, the preschool sex abuse hysteria from a generation ago) which we’ve all been witnessing unfold across the country.
Real, quantifiable harm has been done to living breathing human beings and some real, quantifiable redress needs to be delivered to them.
3/24/2015 12:54 am
By the way it’s important to emphasize that the police department found that Jackie’s (and Sabrina Erdely’s) claims that other women had been raped at the fraternity as well as Jackie’s claims of injury from glass bottle attack stemming from her ‘fame’ as a campus rape victim* didn’t hold up to interviews with witnesses Erdely herself cited.
NONE of Sabrina Erdely’s overwrought story survived basic fact checking, in fact. So it’s not just Jackie that has the truth telling problem.
{*And shouldn’t that have been yet another clue that Jackie’s wildly over-the-top story did compute right there? A woman claims to be so traumatized by her rape that she can’t go to the police to press charges because it would mean reliving her ordeal, even though her refusal to do so means her rapists will be free to victimize more women. And yet she’s made herself known well enough in town through publicly retelling her ordeal of being brutally sexually assaulted that she’s recognized on sight on street corners by perfect strangers and attacked?)
4/5/2024 9:03 pm
If I may quote a previous column of yours, “I think at this point journalists need to really consider very carefully the decision to grant anonymity to people accusing others of sexual assault.”
This seems to almost precisely match a conclusion from the Columbia review of the rolling stone article. Except that you managed to reach your conclusion in quite a bit less than 4 months.
Of course, this is not a perfectly fair comparison given the breadth of their undertaking compared to the much simpler objectives of your published analyses on the subject. However given the amount of flack you have taken for some of your conclusions, I thought some recognition of this substantial endorsement of your analytical capabilities might be in order.
While I rarely agree with the conclusions you draw concerning the majority of the topics you write about on your blog, I greatly appreciate the generally respectful and well thought out manner in which you often present your arguments. The report’s corroboration of your previously stated conclusion just serves as another example of why the reading of your posts is almost always a quality use of my time.
4/6/2024 7:06 am
leilani —
Isn’t it odd how Jackie didn’t want to relive her ordeal by going to the police but she was all too happy to relive it with a journalist from a publication with a history of having a sensationalist bent?