Because it raises an important argument that we’ll be hearing a lot of in the next few days…and that I intend to challenge as soon as time permits.
Yes, I am on Twitter: RPBradley1.
Someone else—a jeweler, I think—took RichardBradley. My bad for not being an early adopter.
For those of you who are new to the blog, one small point about commenting: I’m a pretty light moderator. Steer clear of meanness and you can say pretty much whatever you want.
And if you include a link, I have to “approve” the comment before it appears. That’s to avoid spam comments, of which I used to get a ton. So don’t worry if your comment doesn’t instantly appear.
I first started writing this blog back in 2005 to help promote and discuss a book I had just written, “Harvard Rules,” which was about Lawrence Summer’s failed presidency at Harvard. (Still available—cheap!—on Amazon.)
I still write often on Harvard-related issues, but I’ve broadened the blog into a forum for discussion of culture, sports (Yankees good/Red Sox boo), politics and pop music, usually from the 1980s.
I have covered the issue of sexual assault on campus, as well as bogus journalism, fairly consistently over the past few years. I defended Woody Allen and Patrick Witt; not so much Nicholas Kristof. And, if I were to write about him, I would certainly not defend Bill Cosby.
So you may actually see some posts from time to time that have nothing to do with Sabrina Rubin Erdley, Jackie or Rolling Stone.
It has been a week since the original Washington Post story which drew key aspects of Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone article into question. In that time, “A Rape on Campus” has only become more discredited. There is reason to suspect that both Jackie and Rubin Erdely have concocted deceptions.
Also in that time, we have not heard a public word from the author of this fatally flawed and irresponsible magazine article. She appears to have taken down her Facebook page has not posted on her Facebook page and deleted her Twitter account has gone dark. She has not responded to media inquiries; she has not made any kind of statement.
Where is she—Bermuda?
Let’s suppose that there are two possible reasons why Rubin Erdely has gone underground.
1) She is depressed.
2) Her/Rolling Stone’s lawyers have told her to say nothing.
I’m sure the first is true to some degree—and let us hope that it’s nothing serious—but I expect #2 is the predominant reason.
Whatever the cause, Rubin Erdely’s mysterious silence is disappointing. As I’ve pointed out before, she was more than happy to enjoy the perks of publicity back when people believed her story.
Now, she’s avoiding responsibility.
You can’t have it both ways, reveling in praise when things are going well and then running away when it all heads south.
Because this story isn’t just about her. It has caused hurt, pain, anger, division and controversy; it has set back the cause—in her words, “upend[ing] the patriarchy”—which was her motivation for writing the story in the first place. (Well, that and professional advancement.)
No matter how depressed she may be…no matter what the lawyers are telling her…Sabrina Rubin Erdely needs to man up do the right thing. If her lawyers are telling her to lay low, she should tell them to stuff it. It’s time for her to take responsibility for the chaos for which she is primarily responsible.
(FWIW, I think the phrase “man up” has become a gender-neutral term for taking responsibility. But I can understand why others might disagree, and I don’t want to distract from the point, so I changed the language.)
Last Friday, Rolling Stone put out a statement backing off Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s story, “A Rape on Campus,” and the account of its protagonist, a young woman named Jackie.
“There now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account,” the magazine said.
That was an artfully chosen term. The magazine didn’t know if Jackie had lied to them or misremembered what happened to her; the magazine couldn’t really say for sure if anything at all had happened to Jackie.
Hence the use of the term discrepancies; it is a vague and legalistic word that can mean very little or an enormous amount. And people on both extremes of the discussion about Jackie’s story have tried to define it.
Mostly from the right, some observers believe that the term “discrepancies” suggests that nothing happened to Jackie; that she made the whole thing up. Some websites have alleged—without a hint of proof, as far as I can tell— that Jackie has a history of making up rape allegations. These are the same folks who are livid with Rolling Stone for not holding Jackie to the highest evidentiary standards. I certainly understand the criticism, but some consistency would seem to be in order.
On the other side, the victims’ advocacy wing, there are people who keep writing about “discrepancies” as if they are by definition trivial.
The context is usually something like this: “Just because there are inconsistencies in Jackie’s story does not mean that it isn’t mostly true. So what if she got the date wrong, or the name of the fraternity? Something happened to her.”
To these people I would say, let’s not forget what Jackie’s original story was: a premeditated gang rape; nine men in a pitch-black room; rape by seven of them, the last with a beer bottle; three best friends who discouraged her from reporting the rape for fear they’d never be invited to fraternity parties.
Even if there are “discrepancies” in Jackie’s story, we are still left, frankly, with a fantastical story. The argument thus becomes: So what if she got the name of the fraternity wrong? That doesn’t disprove that she was the victim of a premeditated gang rape in a blackened fraternity room by seven men!
“So what if it didn’t happen just the way she said it? She was still forced to perform oral sex on five men!”
Like this writer for the Huffington Post, who says, “Just Because Rolling Stone Got Jackie’s Story Wrong Doesn’t Mean It Is a Hoax.”
Or this writer for the International Business Times: “Why ‘Discepancies’ in Rolling Stone Rape Story Don’t Mean ‘Jackie’ Is Lying.”
Yet the forced oral sex scenario is also an incredible story that, while it could be true, must be viewed with some skepticism.
For me the challenge has always been: How do you get from something that seems plausible—a rape at a fraternity—to forced oral sex around a circle of five or gang rape by seven men? The leap from the former to the latter does not require simply getting a few details wrong; it involves the invention of dramatic and specific scenarios.
And that doesn’t suggest “discrepancies”—again, Rolling Stone’s term to explain things just not adding up—but “fabrications.” You can’t exaggerate or misremember your way to gang rape. It either happened or it didn’t.
Which brings me to a Washington Post story by T. Rees Shapiro, just posted about an hour ago, which, I think, is going to have an enormous impact.
Rees interviews Jackie’s three friends—the three friends whom, we now know, Sabrina Rubin Erdely did not even try to interview—and they tell a wildly different story of that night than Rubin Erdely recounted in her article.
In their first interviews about the events of that September 2012 night, the three friends separately told The Post that their recollections of the encounter diverge from how Rolling Stone portrayed the incident in a story about Jackie’s alleged gang rape at a U-Va. fraternity. The interviews also provide a richer account of Jackie’s interactions immediately after the alleged attack, and suggest that the friends are skeptical of her account.
It gets worse for Jackie—and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who now appears to have lied when she said that “Randall” would not speak to her “out of loyalty to his frat.” (Randall tells the Post that Rolling Stone never contacted him—and that he would have spoken to Rubin Erdely if she had. Rubin Erdely, if you had a career left—now you don’t.)
But here’s where the plot really thickens:
[The three friends] said there are mounting inconsistencies with the original narrative in the magazine. The students also expressed suspicions about Jackie’s allegations from that night. They said the name she provided as that of her date did not match anyone at the university, and U-Va. officials confirmed to The Post that no one by that name has attended the school.
The narrative they tell is a bit confusing, and I won’t recount it here, but let me be blunt:
It is getting very hard not to think that Jackie has not invented much or most of this story out of whole cloth.
It it also getting very hard not to think that Sabrina Rubin Erdely may have made up some crucial details of her article to fit her political agenda.
In short: This may be a situation where both the writer and the subject of the story have lied.
If you thought this was messy before, it’s about to get much, much worse. We are way past “discrepancies” now.
The New York Observer’s Ken Kurson finds a source who tells the paper that at least one editor at Rolling Stone, deputy managing editor Sean Woods, has offered his resignation—and that editor-in-chief and owner Jann Wenner has turned it down.
Wenner denies the report, but I suspect that Wenner would deny it regardless of its veracity. (Kurson finds a second source to confirm it.)
According to the source, Rolling Stone is right now planning to assemble a “re-reporting project” akin to the one the New York Times put together in the wake of the Jayson Blair fabulism scandal that will head to UVa both to sort through the errors of the story and to tell readers what actually happened.
Good luck with that—you can’t possibly do accurate reporting given everything that’s happened: It’s like stirring up the muck at the bottom of a crystal clear pond and then trying to see your reflection. And can you imagine going down to the U.Va. campus now and saying, “Hi—I’m a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine…” I mean-do you think Jackie’s going to talk to them? her friends? The fraternity members?
Me neither.
Here’s a section of the article that doesn’t make much sense to me:
What about the fact-checking?
The source knows Rolling Stone Senior Editor/Head Factchecker Coco McPherson well and claims that she is a “stickler who errs on the side of caution,” a claim backed up by Mr. [Matt] Taibbi, who remarked that the process is so intense “it usually takes longer to fact-check a Rolling Stone feature than it does to write it. Each review is like an IRS audit.”
But any fact-checker that good would raise a dozen red flags with this story. Which means that either McPherson isn’t as good as they say, or she raised concerns and they were overruled.
My guess: Coco McPherson was blinded by ideology; like Sabrina Rubin Erdely, she wanted to believe in this story. What makes me say this? McPherson’s tweet of November 20th:
So proud of @SabrinaRErdely and @RollingStone and the incredibly brave young women of UVA for coming forward http://rol.st/11Cs0z8
Never mind that the central woman in the story did not actually “come forward.” That tweet—”so proud”—is the tweet of an advocate and a cheerleader, not a fact checker. If you are so proud of these women merely for speaking anonymously to your magazine, are you really going to look at them with your most critical eye?
The Observer indirectly touches on this point, writing:
The Observer raised an idea that has been mentioned in some corners of the press”—i.e., this blog——”that Rolling Stone was credulous about such an intense story because from factcheckers to editors to writers they are predisposed to believe the worst about fraternity brothers at an elite university. Indeed, Ms. McPherson initially defended the story and its methods, taking to Twitter to point to an example in which other news organizations did not identify or interview alleged campus rapists.
The tweet in question refers to a New York Times story about an alleged sexual assault at Columbia; the description of the assault is vague, and you couldn’t possibly identify an alleged attacker from it. It is not even close to analogous to Rolling Stone’s story.
McPherson also retweeted this (combined) tweet from Rolling Stone writer Tim Dickinson:
…I’m appalled that people are turning a story about a public institution sitting on an explosive allegation of gang rape on campus into a conversation about ethics in gang-rape journalism.
The Observer’s Kurson adds that his source “wasn’t buying that “predisposition [to believe]….”
Nonsense. You have a deeply compromised fact-checker who’s “proud” of the “incredibly brave young women of UVA;” a fact checker who is “appalled” that anyone would ask legitimate questions about the slipshod reporting of a very sensitive story.
You have editors who have bought into the ideology that you never question a woman who says she’s been raped—an ideology that, while it may be valid for friends and counselors, has nothing to do with the conduct of journalism. And as a result, they compromised the most basic rules of the craft—things you wouldn’t do on your high school paper.
And you have a writer who went searching for just the right campus on which to “upend the patriarchy.” On the same day that CoCo McPherson sent out her pride tweet, Sabrina Rubin Erdely tweeted:
Nov 20
I’ve passed along your msgs of strength to Jackie. I know she appreciates it. Awed by her bravery & that of all the Uva women who spoke out.
It’s just one big lovefest between the women of UVA and the staff of Rolling Stone.
So don’t tell me that there wasn’t a predisposition to believe this story. That is self-delusional bunk, the kind of lazy, uncritical thinking that got Rolling Stone into this mess in the first place.
“Last month, Rolling Stone ran an article about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house, based on interviews with a student identified only as “Jackie.” It now appears that key details of the story, reported by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, may not be true. Other journalists—notably, my friend Hanna Rosin and Allison Benedikt, at Slate, and Paul Farhi, Erik Wemple, and T. Rees Shapiro, at The Washington Post—raised doubts about the reporting late last month, but Rolling Stone dismissed them.” [emphasis added]
—Margaret Talbot, writing in the New Yorker
What’s missing? I’ll give you a hint: The one journalist who “raised doubts about the reporting” before all the journalists Talbot lists.
Listen, I’m not territorial, but…are you kidding me? It was not easy being the first person to question the Rolling Stone story. Being first meant taking the brunt of the hostility from people who didn’t want to hear anything that might undermine the article. It also meant going out on a reputational limb; I didn’t think I was wrong, but imagine if I had been. These things only look easy to write in retrospect.
Paul Farhi, who was the first person after me to raise any concerns, did so four days after my blog post. And even he buried his doubts pretty far down in a profile of Erdely.
(Correction: Hanna Rosin’s Slate Gabfest came three days later, on November 27.)
Meantime, if you go back and look at that original blog post, you can see that a) it has been proved correct on every point, and b) it has fundamentally driven the media narrative about Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s article.
So, yes, I guess it does matter to me when people don’t give credit where it’s due.
The New Yorker has a storied fact-checking department. Was someone asleep? Perhaps an omission does not count as an error, but… Oh, hell. When it misrepresents what happened, an omission counts as an error.
Some of the best stuff I’ve read lately….
1) This piece in Slate by Emily Yoffe, “The Campus Rape Correction,” is an absolutely superb piece of writing and reporting. Yoffe’s is the most methodical, serious examination of “rape culture” that I’ve seen; she debunks the usual statistics that constantly get thrown around as if they were credible, and looks at the way exaggerated estimates of sexual assault on campus are leading to real injustices—against men.
Money graf:
I’ve read through the court filings and investigative reports of a number of these cases, and it’s clear to me that many of the accused are indeed being treated unfairly. Government officials and campus administrators are attempting to legislate the bedroom behavior of students with rules and requirements that would be comic if their effects weren’t frequently so tragic. The legal filings in the cases brought by young men accused of sexual violence often begin like a script for a college sex farce but end with the protagonist finding himself in a Soviet-style show trial.
I hope Slate nominates this piece for a National Magazine Award…
2) Remind me never to make Erik Wemple mad. The Washington Post’s media critic has been absolutely shredding Rolling Stone, and in this piece, titled Rolling Stone’s disastrous U-Va. story: A case of real media bias, Wemple looks at how Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s pre-existing bias led to the publication of a horrible piece of journalism. For example:
Under the scenario cited by Erdely, the Phi Kappa Psi members are not just criminal sexual-assault offenders, they’re criminal sexual-assault conspiracists, planners, long-range schemers. If this allegation alone hadn’t triggered an all-out scramble at Rolling Stone for more corroboration, nothing would have. Anyone who touched this story — save newsstand personnel — should lose their job. The “grooming” anecdote indicates not only that Erdely believed whatever diabolical things about these frat guys told to her, she wanted to believe them. And then Rolling Stone published them.
Wemple has repeatedly called for all the Rolling Stone editors who worked on the story to be fired. We’ll see.
3) A few months ago, everyone loved Chris Hughes; journalists love rich guys who seem willing to bankroll us and not worry too much about turning a profit. But now that he’s crushed The New Republic under his Gucci boots, a number of those who once professed their admiration for him have taken the long knives out—including the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, in a story called “The New Republic is dead, thanks to its owner, Chris Hughes.”
Among the evildoing Milbank attributes to Hughes:
a) Hughes ousted his intellectual partner [editor Franklin] Foer without even the courtesy of telling him; Foer found out when his replacement, a man who previously had been fired as editor of the gossip Web site Gawker, began announcing himself as the new editor and offering people jobs.
b) Hughes is no [Walter] Lippmann; he’s a callow man who accidentally became rich — to the tune of some $700 million — because he had the luck of being Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard.
c) At a lavish 100th-anniversary gala for the magazine at the Mellon Auditorium on Nov. 19, Hughes did the seating chart himself — and he put most of the magazine staff at tables in the back.
And that’s just for starters…
4) In a terrific Boston Review essay called “Feminism Can Handle It,” Judith Levine chastises feminists who accuse skeptics such as myself of “rape denialism.”
…The charge is hurled at anyone who questions the veracity of a story, statistic (one in five women students sexually assaulted), or policy (yes means yes). And if men are slapped down when they question these orthodoxies, special punishment attends female critics.
5) And a question: Where is the New York Times? A couple of weeks ago, NYT media critic David Carr wrote about how he had dropped the ball on the Bill Cosby story for years. (And years. And years.)
He—and the rest of the Times—are doing pretty much the same thing with UVA. The Times has been late, reactive, and a non-player in this media story where a number of news organizations—WashPo, Slate, Reason—are excelling.
The New York Times reports on the controversy over last night’s episode of The Newsroom, written by Aaron Soorkin, which is about a reporter handling allegations of sexual assault.
Here’s TV writer Bill Carter’s description of the episode:
In the episode, Don Keefer, a television news producer, was ordered to find a college student who had started a website designed to allow women to anonymously name the men who raped them. He was told to persuade her to go on live television to confront one of the men she had accused. He found the woman, who argued passionately that the legal system had failed her and so many other rape victims. Don told her that he found her credible and found the accused “sketchy,” but could still not square the idea of naming men accused of rape with his sense of fairness, which he tied to the American judicial system.
To simply accuse the man on television meant no jury and no presentation of evidence, the producer argued. And when Mary, the student, countered that her assailant was innocent until proven guilty only in the legal sense, the producer said he felt “morally obligated” not to name a person who has not formally been charged with a crime…
This doesn’t sound terribly objectionable to me (but then, I teach Rape Denial 101, so you’d expect that from me), but many people were offended by the plot.
Libby Hill, writing for the AV Club, said: “Aaron Sorkin doesn’t understand who the victim is. He doesn’t understand how empathy works. And he, as a rich, powerful, white man in the United States, doesn’t understand that he is among the most privileged people in the world.”
Sort of a stupid quote, reliant on rhetoric and cliche, but fair enough; it’s what Carter inserts next that would really piss me off, if I were Aaron Sorkin.
The latter criticism dovetails with long-expressed criticism that Mr. Sorkin has tended to undervalue his female characters.
I’m not a Sorkin expert, but this criticism appears to be ubiquitous.
But it’s a cheap shot for Carter to shove it in following a quote about how Sorkin “doesn’t understand that he is among the most privileged people in the world” and how he has no “empathy.” It’s effectively endorsing a harsh personal attack.
(Also: Aaron Sorkin may be one of the most privileged people in the world at this point in his life, but he’s gotten there by dint of a boatload of talent and hard work. And his paternal grandfather was one of the founders of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, according to Wikipedia, so Sorkin, who grew up in Scarsdale New York and went to Syracuse University, isn’t exactly a Dupont. So that “most privileged people” crack really is unfair.)
I haven’t seen the episode yet, but it seems to me one more example of a guy who deviated from a political orthodoxy and is being slammed for it.
Sorkin said this to the Times: “I understood going in that there would be backlash — some of it thoughtful, some of it less so — but that’s a bad reason not to write something.”
I know the feeling….
Emily Clark, one of Jackie’s first year roommates, writes a letter to the Cavalier Daily in which she supports her friend, saying that while she thinks the details of what happened to Jackie as presented in Rolling Stone are incorrect, some sort of trauma did happen to her roommate.
While I cannot say what happened that night, and I cannot prove the validity of every tiny aspect of her story to you, I can tell you that this story is not a hoax, a lie or a scheme. Something terrible happened to Jackie at the hands of several men who have yet to receive any repercussions.
Absolutely worth reading.
There is almost too much going on with this story for me to be able to read and think about it all, especially when I have a more-than-full-time day job. Again, I place the blame for this havoc on the shoulders of Rolling Stone, which held a torch to a pile of kerosene-soaked kindling.
So I’m sure that I’m dropping the ball on a few things that I should be addressing. But let me try to address a few things regardless.
1) Even before a conservative blogger named someone who may or may not be Jackie—an appalling move, we can all agree—I had come to believe that Jackie is a subject and a person best left alone for a while. We will probably never know what, if anything, happened to her; her “truth,” to borrow a word usage from Liz Seccuro, has now become a matter of public debate. She could tell her truth 100 percent accurately tomorrow, and no matter what she said, half the country wouldn’t believe her.
That’s a shame—and so I find it increasingly hard not to be angry at Sabrina Rubin Erdely. If Jackie did indeed ask the writer to remove her from the article, as has been reported, and SRE told her that Jackie was going to be in it like it or not—that is a terrible cruelty.
I want to be cautious here, as Jackie is not a reliable source—it’s getting hard to know who said what to whom, when—and I want to be fair to SRE as well; only she and Jackie really know what happened in their conversations, and they may well have differing memories, different interpretations. Memory is a tricky thing.
But Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who hasn’t tweeted or made any other public announcement in days, isn’t inspiring confidence. (More on this later.)
In any case, Jackie is a young woman in the middle of a firestorm, and at this point reasonable people have to be concerned about her mental and physical health. That seems worth bearing in mind.
Buzzfeed, for example, has reported that a 2014 UVA graduate and former Phi Psi member who now lives in Boston has hired an attorney who specializes in sexual assault. (This may be a meaningful thing, or it may be nothing; Buzzfeed implies that it is a sinister thing.)
BuzzFeed reached out to a woman believed to be Jackie multiple times on Friday but did not receive a response.
Of course, they have to ask her for comment, if only because Buzzfeed is implying that this young man may have been involved in a sexual assault. (They reached out to him for comment as well.)
Still, this thing has become a media feeding frenzy, and that worries me. We all need to step back and take it down a notch. Of course we should search for the truth, but in a deliberate and cautious manner, remembering that there are real human beings involved, most of whom are young people.
2) Where is Sabrina Rubin Erdely?
So here’s another Stephen Glass story, which I share not in order to suggest a direct analogy, but because I can’t stop thinking about it.
In the aftermath of the revelations that Stephen was a literary forger, after he was fired from The New Republic, I had to try to find him; at George, we were trying to figure out what material he’d made up and what he hadn’t, and were hoping that he would at least now be honest about that.
I found him at his parents’ home in Chicago, and he came to the phone. I explained, nicely—which wasn’t easy, considering the situation—that I could use his help setting the record straight.
Stephen said that he couldn’t talk to me. He wasn’t doing very well, he explained. His parents were very worried about him. Somebody was with him 24 hours a day.
The implication, of course, was that Stephen was suicidal. In any event, he declined my request for help.
I certainly am not suggesting that SRE—who, strangely enough, worked on her college paper with Stephen Glass—is suicidal. I am saying that her going underground—no Facebook updates, no tweets, no media interviews, no statement through Rolling Stone—gives me a bad feeling. If it were my story and, even if it turned out to be wrong, I was confident in the character of my reporting, you can bet I’d be out there in public saying so. And in her absence, some are suggesting that Rubin Erdely’s other reporting should also be called into question.
In any case, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, more than anyone else in this story, has caused an enormous controversy and a huge amount of pain. She needs to address that, and quickly. The fact that she hasn’t only makes it worse. No matter what Rolling Stone or lawyers tell you, you can’t just do this to people and then disappear without a trace.
I wrote before about her article that “something doesn’t feel right to me,” a statement which has been quoted both admiringly and derisively.
But something doesn’t feel right to me now about Rubin Erdely’s disappearance. And that makes me wonder how many of the “inconsistencies” in Jackie’s story are the fault of Jackie, and how many are literary invention? I keep coming back to that statement attributed to Jackie’s friend “Randall,” the one who allegedly said that he wouldn’t talk to Rubin Erdely out of “loyalty to his frat.” It would be such an easy thing to scribble in your notes, and it feels so convenient; it fits so perfectly with the political agenda Rubin Erdely has admitted she brought to the story.
Incidentally, do you happen to know what Stephen Glass’ middle name is? “Randall.”
3) Anna Merlan further indulges her fondness for shit metaphors with another post on Jezebel today, during which she gets yet another thing about me wrong. (Among other mistakes, her prior post about me alleged that I was “mostly retired.” Oops.)
In a post titled “The UVA Mess is Now a Full-Fledged Shitstorm” (well, we can agree on that), Merlan writes,
I’ve gotten a lot of well-deserved criticism for a salty post I wrote defending Erdely from Reason’s Robby Soave and Worth’s Richard Bradley — formerly Richard Blow, before he changed his name during his own brush with bad publicity….
That’s the second time that Merlan has mentioned that I changed my name—she actually amended her original post to add that fact—and I think I know why: She’s trying to insinuate that I have some dark secret in my past that I’m trying to run away from, and that, consequently, I can’t be trusted. (Bloomberg’s C. Thompson has implied the same thing.)
So let’s just set the record straight.
Merlan says that I changed my name “during [my] own brush with controversy.” She is wrong in both her timetable and her attribution of motive.
I was embroiled in a controversy (that’s a whole other story) back in 2000, when I decided to write a book about my former boss, John F. Kennedy Jr., and again in 2002, when the book was published.
I changed my name in 2005—not exactly “during” a brush with controversy.
The reasons why I changed my name are personal and I don’t write about them easily—it was a very hard decision for my father, which made it a very hard decision for me—but it certainly wasn’t because I was afraid of controversy. Clearly, I am not afraid of controversy.
Also, you can find the cover of my first book on, you know, the first page of this blog. So I’m not exactly hiding from my past. I’m damn proud of that book. (You can buy it for a few bucks on Amazon, which I won’t see any of, but hey, you might like it.)
If there’s some reason for Merlan or anyone else to write about that part of my life, that’s fine. But I am bothered when it’s used as some sort of dubious insinuation to reflect poorly on my character or work, so it’s important for me to spend a few minutes debunking that.
I have tried to give Anna Merlan the benefit of the doubt. She’s not making it easy.
4) I have one final thought, which I may expand upon later but I want to put out there to get it into the dialogue.
Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “overarching point,” to use her words, was the prevalence of rape culture at the University of Virginina and the university’s alleged indifference to it, as exemplified by the way it allegedly mishandled Jackie’s case.
We now have thousands of people around the country trying to figure out the truth of Jackie’s case—lawyers, reporters, friends, administrators, police. After all this scrutiny, we don’t seem any closer to the truth.
The fact of that uncertainty should make us think again about the challenges that UVA administrators, and university administrators in general, face in handling these matters, and the danger of reflexively thinking that they are hostile or uncaring because the matters are not resolved with a stark moral clarity.
The whole country is trying to figure out what happened to Jackie. Can we really blame UVA if it too tried—and failed?