This page contains pictures of parts of Rolling Stone's apology about its article about rape at the University of Virginia.
What's the fraternity's definition of a "date function," a situation in which women don't get raped? Isn't it possible that "date functions" are the house events to which the women from the wealthier families get invited, that gang rapes aren't planned for nights when there are "formal events" because those have to be reported to the University of Virginia's administration, and that the undocumented parties are when women who are considered easy targets get raped?
Is there is a reason that Drew couldn't have lied to Jackie about being a Phi Psi member?
Did he or didn't he work as a lifeguard at the same place and at the same time as Jackie did?
If he wasn't a Phi Psi member, then Phi Psi's assertion, even if it's true, that none of its members worked at that pool in the fall of 2012 doesn't mean anything except that Drew wasn't a Phi Psi member.
Isn't it plausible that a predator looking for victims to lure to a fraternity gang rape would do what he could not to be traceable to the fraternity where the rapes take place? Look for potential victims away from the future scene of the crime. Get to know them and gain their trust. Tell the men with whom you're planning the rape that the woman you've been working on likes and trusts you. They plan the party, you invite the woman, and she, having interacted with you for weeks or months in a nonthreatening setting, walks into the trap.
Sexual assault at college has gotten some national attention over the past few decades. It's probably not as easy as it used to be to get a woman who doesn't know you to drink enough that she has no idea what's happening when you bring her to a room by herself, or to put a drug in her drink so that she passes out. People around you can be witnesses to your attempts to get a woman to keep drinking. Try that more than a few times, and you could be identified as someone who is probably a rapist, and while you might not get punished for it at a permissive school, your reputation will make women wary of you.
It's much easier, if more time-consuming, to gain a woman's trust at work or in class. Why chase your prey when you can get "it" to walk to you of "its" manipulated free will?
The "friends" of Jackie who have betrayed her to the media; aren't they the same people who told her not to report the crime to the police the night that it happened, and who treated her callously about the assault when it took its psychological toll on her? The night of the assault was when her body had the evidence that needed to be collected and documented to prove that a rape had occurred; the people who told her not to tell anyone then, who were so concerned about their own status that they could look at her while she was bruised and bleeding and tell her that nobody would believe her, were more help to the attackers than anything else could have been. She went to her dorm, she took a shower, and every chance she had of successfully prosecuting a case literally went down the drain.
The original Rolling Stone article about this story was a thorough account of the history of sexual assault at the University of Virginia. It describes the administration's systematic repression of the victims' stories and the administration's refusal to punish rapists. The article describes the misogynist, elitist college culture that brainwashes students into believing that sexual assault is a rite of passage for men to enjoy and women to endure. Jackie's story is historically corroborated by many other stories by victims, stories which nobody is refuting.
The article also describes Jackie's heartbreaking transformation from a successful, social, optimistic high-achiever to a recluse who wanted to die. Is someone offering an alternative story to the one she has told, to explain what so dramatically changed the course of her college career?
It seems to me that she had every reason to fear retaliation by the men whom she accused, and to fear that retaliation would not only stop the article from being published or result in a version of the article that minimized what had happened, but would explode into her personal and professional life, branding her a liar among all elite-school alumni even without the story getting national attention. Where do you think the parents of the men who commit these crimes and the women who support rape culture while students work? They work at the power level of American society. They easily could have stopped the article from being published at all, and now they are going to try to make national heroes of their rapist sons and to destroy their victim's life.
Every attack on the article and every withdrawal of support for her are proving that Jackie had no reason to tell her story except that it was the truth. The system of denial which she challenged is closing around her as surely as the 7 men closed around her the night she was raped, and she is as helpless to stop it today as she was then.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, March 27, 2015 @ 5:49 p.m.
