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    MichaelAnna Merlan
    12/11/14 10:21am

    From Slate:

    Randall told the Post he was never contacted by Erdely and would have been happy to be interviewed. That could mean one of two things: Jackie could have given Erdely fake contact information for Randall and then posed as Randall herself, sending the reporter that email in which he supposedly declined to participate in the story. Erdely also could have lied about trying to contact Randall. Rolling Stone might have hinted at this possibility in its "Note to Our Readers" when it referred to a "friend of Jackie's (who we were told would not speak to Rolling Stone)" but later spoke to theWashington Post. That would take Erdely a big step beyond just being gullible and failing to check her facts, moving this piece in the direction of active wrongdoing.

    So many avoidable errors made throughout the process. Sad that this story is likely going to be fuel for rape apologists for some time.

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      septembergrrlMichael
      12/11/14 10:29am

      Another possibility: Randall could have been contacted in a way he didn't recognize because Erdley was somehow unclear as to what she wanted to talk about and why, and now he's either lying to the Post or has forgotten it altogether.

      Though if somebody's being portrayed as unfavorably as he is in the original piece, you'd want to make a much better attempt to talk to him than Erdley seems to have regardless.

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      IWASDARTHVADER's death star canteenseptembergrrl
      12/11/14 10:38am

      Remember though, Randall is a dude and everything he says must be true. Jackie is a woman, and she says she was raped, so she must be lying.

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    TerrordidactylAnna Merlan
    12/11/14 10:20am

    If only journalists put as much effort attempting to prove somebody was raped as they have, here, trying to prove somebody wasn't.

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      SuffersfoolsgladlyTerrordidactyl
      12/11/14 10:29am

      You make a good point.

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      sigmaoctansTerrordidactyl
      12/11/14 10:37am

      Part of proving any crime is fully investigating all possible scenarios, including scenarios where the crime didn't happen. Fully and rationally dealing with skepticism is what we should want if the goal is justice for rape victims. Its the same reason why we should want the best possible lawyers to provide an exhaustive defense for murderers and terrorists. Its not that providing such a defense is intended to exonerate criminals, its that facing strong, competent opposition in a trial forces investigators and prosecutors to fully and comprehensively prove the crime, leaving no future doubt as to innocence and revealing in the public record a full accounting of the crimes.

      The Rolling Stone story, and people who refuse to listen to any rational skeptecism of public allegations of crimes like rape, stand in the way of the justice and accountability that they genuinely intend to seek.

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    IWASDARTHVADER's death star canteenAnna Merlan
    12/11/14 10:28am

    This shows the way in which we are so vested in picking apart victims's testimony about their rapes, adamant that they have unassailable crystal clear versions of events even if they can't because the events themselves are traumatic, hazy, and might be too horrible to remember (Like Lena Dunham's Buzzfeed piece mentioned the other day). I still believe she was assaulted, even if the journalism was awful. Like someone posted on gawker's version of this story yesterday, the reason this story was originally so awful was that it struck a chord. Because it's not so hard to believe that something like this has happened, time and time again.

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      IWASDARTHVADER's death star canteenIWASDARTHVADER's death star canteen
      12/11/14 10:35am

      If you're replying to argue with me about the "facts" such as they are (apparently the only facts that are real are the ones that throw suspicion on her story, not the ones that corroborate it), you will be summarily dismissed.

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      GunshineAndPainbowsIWASDARTHVADER's death star canteen
      12/11/14 12:56pm

      You'll like this: http://sarahjeong.net/2014/12/08/som...

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    bassoonladyAnna Merlan
    12/11/14 10:23am

    Maybe it isn't that Jackie is the "wrong person to represent" and actually this article is a complete clusterfuck. .

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      signofzetabassoonlady
      12/11/14 10:27am

      This. It seems to have gone from shoddy reporting to fabricating facts to try and hit the big time with a huge expose. Which is really sad because it doesn't sound like the story needed that at all. It could have been hard hitting with real information.

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      Anna Merlanbassoonlady
      12/11/14 10:29am

      Undoubtedly it is a huge clusterfuck.

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    vauxhallmarieAnna Merlan
    12/11/14 12:10pm

    One question: Why is the Washington Post just now revealing this if they've been in contact with Jackie's friends for weeks? Did they sit on it, or did Jackie's friends give them these bombshells in bits and pieces? None of it makes any sense.

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      archiducvauxhallmarie
      12/11/14 12:37pm

      They were probably taking time to carefully vet the interviews and make sure whatever they published was accurate. You know - what journalistic publications are SUPPOSED to do.

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      vauxhallmariearchiduc
      12/11/14 1:18pm

      I don't doubt that. Ultimately, aside from confirming the picture was of someone else, they are taking the friends words for it, though, as has been the case with the Washington Post's reporting from the start. What's notable is how it differs from Jackie's account. This difference should have been presented in the original RS article, and probably should have led to the focus of the article being the inability of universities to adjudicate rape claims. This all goes back to RS's incompetence.

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    UVA GradAnna Merlan
    12/11/14 11:09am

    Three points:

    1) I think the evidence is piling up in the case of "Jackie" that UVA handled the claim 'poorly' because Jackie's story is incredibly problematic. So far the two different men she's claimed were "Drew" (her attacker) have either not met her, or gone to a different school entirely. What the heck is UVA supposed to do when the victim refuses to ID her attacker?

    2) This whole slight-of-hand argument that we should "remember the broader point about colleges being rape-factories and nobody is doing anything about it (paraphrased)" rather than focus on the fact that the entire Rolling Stone story appears to be made up is bogus. Rolling Stone and "Jackie" are entirely to blame for this apparent fraudulent story and the damage it has caused...not UVA.

    3) I completely agree with you that police should be handling allegations of this nature. Universities are not well-equiped to handled pseudo-criminal investigations and adjudications. And as we've seen, universities are equally bad at looking out for the rights of the accused as they are for victims.

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      ZuiyoMaruUVA Grad
      12/11/14 3:04pm

      Speaking to your third point, Jezebel has written before about how police departments are not really equipped to handle rape cases the way that victims often wish they would - for instance, a university can suspend or expel an accused rapist with a relatively low burden of proof, while the judicial establishment can only punish an accused rapist with a high burden of proof. So bringing accusations to the police is an imperfect solution that often doesn't bring results, while bringing accusations to the University's ethics committee or the equivalent at least a better chance of improving the victim's quality of life by removing the accused from her environment, which in many cases might be just as important as bringing the accused to justice.

      I tried to find the relevant article, but I wasn't able to locate it. But it's a point that comes up frequently, and often needs addressing.

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      burnonyoucrazydiamondZuiyoMaru
      12/12/14 2:33pm

      And what about the rights of the accused? These are criminal matters that can affect people for their entire lives, and they should be handled in a court of law. I can understand why victims would want their claims handled by the University (for lots of reasons) but ultimately if the accused is guilty, it sends a much stronger signal to prosecute rather than sanction or expel.

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    reboundstudentAnna Merlan
    12/11/14 11:39am

    What is most depressing to me, after reading the article in Slate about this, is that RS purposefully choose UVA because of Jackie's sensational story. The reporter needed a "stand out" story from all of the dozens that sounded exactly the same.
    But by choosing that sensational and (even if true) over the top story about gang rape and bloody dresses, the reporter was perpetuating the myth that non-violent, acquaintance-rape (the majority of rapes) are the outliners. It makes the run-of-the-mill rape stories harder to believe because they *aren't* the stories we associate with rape; we associate the sensational, seven-guys-and-beat-me-bloody stories with the act.
    Even if the sensational story is true and has iron-clad credibility, shining a spotlight on it in a piece surrounded with other, non-sensational stories just makes the less-sensational stories seem less believable and less worthy of attention.... which is heart-breaking when we know those are the majority of the rapes committed.

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      acornAnna Merlan
      12/11/14 11:58am

      ...she'd been forced to perform oral sex on five men (not raped by seven, as the RS story states)...

      I have no friggin' idea who's being honest and who isn't in this situation, since there are so many people who have either lied, neglected their professional responsibilities, or both, but I just want to point out that being forced to perform oral sex is rape, just one of many types of rape. And I really don't like the implication that it is somehow automatically less or less traumatizing that vaginal or anal rape. For some people maybe it is and for others it is equally if not more traumatizing.

      Second, and I'm not saying this is the case here, but a lot of people that experience this type of trauma are not immediately able to recount all of the details at first. I just "celebrated" the 9th "anniversary" of my first rape last month, and was only able to give a recount of the worst parts of what happened that night to my therapist a few months ago. She's the only person I've ever described what happened that specifically because I'd been physically unable to even get any words out. What I'm saying is, we don't know what really happened, but I wouldn't necessarily just take the fact that, after some goading, they got her to "eventually t[ell] them she'd been forced to perform oral sex" to mean she was out-right lying about anything else that happened to her.

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        abananieacorn
        12/11/14 1:25pm

        Yeah, what the fuck IS that?! Are you really saying that being forced to perform oral sex is NOT RAPE?! Because that is wrong, and not just by my definition, but by the legal definition: "The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim." - US Dept of Justice. Let's get our fucking facts straight before we stigmatize more people, k?

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      CaptOtterAnna Merlan
      12/11/14 11:51am

      (Once again: I initially defended the story, and for that I was wrong.)

      I'm curious as to whether that referenced defense was born of any in-house Gawker/Jez policy that dictates a particular stance that must be taken in the event that there's conflicting reporting on certain sorts of events. In other words, is it standard practice to side with the party bringing certain kinds of allegations? And if so, what is the threshold for withdrawing that support (i.e., how much evidence is needed to shift the presumption of accuracy and truthfulness back to the other side?)

      Additionally, in what ways (if any) will this affect future reporting? Gawker media tends to blur the line between legit journalism, tabloid reporting, news aggregation, and proselytizing—if this was an instance of primarily news aggregation that slowly migrated over to the "legit" side, did it incidentally escape some kind of editorial quality control to which it might have been subjected if it had started out as an original (i.e., legit) journalistic effort?

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        vauxhallmarieAnna Merlan
        12/11/14 12:07pm

        "This story also viscerally shows the difficulties and dangers of magazine features, where one character stands in for a broader issue."

        Nah. It shows the dangers of feature journalism written by incompetent and/or unethical journalists, that haven't been remotely fact-checked and are given the green light by glib, incompetent managing editors.

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