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courtJoanna Rothkopf
1/08/16 10:33am
Speaking as someone, like so many of us who were (are) the victims of horrific abuse, I want desperately to believe Jackie and everyone who has the enormous courage to come forward. After all, no one believed me (men can’t be sexually abused!). The abuse and the refusal for those closest to me to believe it, validate it, protect me, and take action has destroyed family relationships, saddled me with PTSD, and has led to a string of broken intimate relationships. However, and this is a big but, Jackie could very well be lying, embellishing, or simply not well. I would like desperately to hope.this is not the case. The odds of a false report of sexual assault are what, two percent or less?? But that two percent does exist right? I don’t know. It’s all so Damn sad. There, but for the grace of God, Go we.
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  WhippingPostcourt
  1/08/16 10:38am
  I want desperately to believe Jackie
  
  That’s the problem.
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  Not A Burner 4 - The Final Burnercourt
  1/08/16 10:45am
  The odds of a false report of sexual assault are what, two percent or less
  
  As a totality of assaults, reported and unreported? Yes. But if you only consider ones reported, then it’s closer to 1 in 4, IIRC. (After some deeper digging, it looks like a solid estimate of decidedly false is 10%, while there’s another number of reports that can’t be proven pror disproven)
  
  That could be for a number of reasons, from the reticence of victims to report, to people being too liberal with the term discredited, to bad police work.
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KendradicalJoanna Rothkopf
1/08/16 10:34am
Sorry not sorry, but this Nicole Eramo sounds like a real bitch. I have the feeling that should a victim go to her saying she’d been raped, her responses would include, “Well, did you lead him on?” “What were you wearing?” and “Are you sure you just didn’t have regrets the morning after?”. Whether this particular rape allegation was true or not, making the personal and vitriolic statements against Jackie as she has make me really wonder if RS’s story didn’t have the part about the administration doing nothing to help rape victims right all along.
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  foolyooKendradical
  1/08/16 10:43am
  And the Rolling Stone article cluster fuck is the distraction UVA needs to not be held accountable.
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  jakeKendradical
  1/08/16 10:57am
  You really should read up on the facts about this case. When Jackie first claimed/reported to Eramo that she was assaulted, Eramo did everything basically by the book in order to try and help her. It was Jackie who chose not to take any action. Jackie then later told (a different version) of her story to a reporter of a major media outlet, purporting Eramo to be the villain.
  
  Furthermore, these statements accusing Jackie of being a “serial liar” are coming from Eramo’s lawyers, not Eramo herself. I don’t believe Eramo has ever made any public statement about Jackie herself since the article was published.
  
  Your anger is misplaced.
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ASnowdenofYesteryearJoanna Rothkopf
1/08/16 10:24am
From the WaPo:

They also wrote that there is “no factual basis whatsoever” in evidence submitted so far in the case “to conclude that Jackie is even an ‘alleged’ victim of sexual assault, let alone an actual victim.”

Goddamn. There are no words here.
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  HiuklASnowdenofYesteryear
  1/08/16 10:29am
  What do you mean?
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  WhippingPostHiukl
  1/08/16 10:37am
  They mean that even after someone’s story is proven to be untrue and a fabrication, self-identifying as a “victim” should still net you special consideration and a completely baffling assumption of truth-telling.
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CaptOtterJoanna Rothkopf
1/08/16 11:39am
I think it’s pretty shitty to lie about sexual assault—but given the fact that Jackie didn’t falsely accuse any real person whose life might have been ruined, I don’t know that I consider her actions quite “reprehensible”.

With that in mind, the need to utterly discredit Jackie is seemingly necessary for Eramo to meet her burden in this matter. At the end of the day, Rolling Stone probably did cause injury to Eramo’s reputation by reporting a falsehood, and they should be made to answer for that.
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  ArscheLochNessCaptOtter
  1/08/16 2:26pm
  She ruined the life of Erdely Rubin and Eramo too, is that not reprehensible, or, can Jackie do no wrong in your eyes?
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  septembergrrlCaptOtter
  1/08/16 2:35pm
  Jackie said members of a specific fraternity raped her; specific friends of hers were cartoonishly unsympathetic; and specific university employees failed to help her. None of that may be life-ruining, but I’d consider it pretty detrimental to their reputations. One might even call it ... reprehensible.
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Emerson Lake and PantloadJoanna Rothkopf
1/08/16 10:38am
I have followed this story with about 8% of the required interest necessary to be well-informed and, so enlightened, am ready to render my final, definitive verdict on what did and didn’t happen.
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  NomNom83Emerson Lake and Pantload
  1/08/16 11:48am
  IIRC, every detail Jackie provided in her story has fallen apart. The guy doesn’t exist, there was no party on that date, etc. Nothing about anything she said can be verified. No one else can say, “Hey, I know the guy she’s talking about! She just gave him an alias.” It all seems very “catfishy.”
  
  Has Jackie ever been raped? It’s possible. Is she mentally unwell? That’s possible, too.
  
  My inclination is always to listen to anyone alleging rape. There’s almost never any or very little incentive to lie. The claims never should have gotten past some basic sniffing out by a reporter, let alone published. It seems very possible that Jackie manipulated peoples’ compassion and sensitivity in order to keep the story alive.
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  ASnowdenofYesteryearNomNom83
  1/08/16 1:05pm
  IIRC, didn’t Jackie change her mind and not want the story to go to print at one point?
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IskaralPustJoanna Rothkopf
1/08/16 10:42am
Eramo doesn’t even really need to show that the rape itself never happened, she just needs to show that the statements about her response to a supposed rape complaint were false and defamatory (and that the statements were made with the requisite negligence, recklessness, or knowledge of falsity, which changes depending on whether Eramo is considered a “public figure” for the purposes of this lawsuit). Thus, to some extent the focus on the assault is unnecessary, though admittedly painting Jackie as a serial liar may help establish the overall unreasonableness of the magazine’s wholesale incorporation of her narrative, and the likelihood that other parts of the story were false.

I do wish that people would stop focusing so much on Jackie; if she did lie, she is probably mentally ill and possibly traumatized for reasons separate from the fictional rape. This story is really a story about bad journalistic practices, and not a story about a a terrible liar or about a trend of false rape accusations (which is not a thing, and in any case no actual people were named as rapists, let alone charged, in this case).
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  ReburnsABurningReturnsIskaralPust
  1/08/16 10:45am
  Theoretically she doesn’t, but in practice, winning a defamation case is sort of hard, so you want even tangentially related facts to be wholly in support of the notion that the magazine intentionally participated in the lie or that they were exceedingly lazy about vetting the story.
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  IskaralPustReburnsABurningReturns
  1/08/16 10:57am
  Yeah, I understand why the lawyers are taking that position, it is just too bad that so much of the focus in the media narrative has to be on the “Jackie is a liar” aspect of the story.
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Nefret EmersonJoanna Rothkopf
1/08/16 10:37am
Good god, what a fucking mess.
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  Cocopop!Nefret Emerson
  1/08/16 12:28pm
  That pretty much covers it.
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MissAndriaJoanna Rothkopf
1/08/16 10:50am
This type of shaming the victim does absolutely no one any good. Yes this girl had some issues and the story didn’t check out. But I’m willing to believe that something did happen and she just fudged the details a little. These guys are not innocent! Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that her providing false story has irreparably hurt future victims tremendously. I feel bad for her but she’s done all future rapists a huge favor by her actions, unfortunately.
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  CaptOtterMissAndria
  1/08/16 12:55pm
  “These guys are not innocent!”
  
  Is this a generalization, or is there some other incident involving these particular fraternity members that makes them “not innocent”?
  
  Or is it an “everyone is guilty of something” sort of thing?
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septembergrrlJoanna Rothkopf
1/08/16 6:44pm
I’m reading the court documents now — I’d repost, but my access is through work and I don’t know how PACER permissions work and don’t want to get smacked down — and the “serial liar” claim relates primarily to the fact Jackie told Ryan (the guy she apparently made up the rape to impress) that she was DYING OF LUPUS.

I’ll repeat that. People are still feeling sympathetic toward some girl who, in addition to fabricating a gang rape, TOLD A GUY SHE WAS DYING FROM LUPUS SO HE WOULD WANT TO GO OUT WITH HER.

Unless she actually *has* lupus, and I suspect she would have brought it up elsewhere if she did, “serial liar” is a completely accurate and even kind assessment of this chick.

(I hope Jez will repost the full court document; it really gives a picture of why exactly Dean Eramo is pissed.)
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TheOriginalSangsterJoanna Rothkopf
1/08/16 10:26am
Nice to see that everyone is handling this delicate subject with grace and sensitivity.
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  ReburnsABurningReturnsTheOriginalSangster
  1/08/16 10:38am
  In the scenario, the lawyer sort of has to go scorched earth on the story, because the standard for winning a defamation case as a public figure/institution is pretty high.
  
  Not only does what was said have to be pretty much wholly untrue, you essentially have to prove that the outlet that said it either was intentionally complicit in the lie or was grossly negligent, essentially that they got the story and were so excited at the prospect of taking you down a notch that they didn’t even bother to engage in the most basic forms of due diligence on the story.
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