Those are pictures from today of part of the Columbia Journalism Review's article.
The way that Ms. Erdely's conversation with Shawn Collinsworth is described is interesting:
"there were allegations of 'gang rape during Phi Psi parties' and that one assault 'took place in September of 2012.'"
One of the assaults, plural? One of several assaults had taken place in September of 2012?
The mid-September, 2012 date that Stephen Scipione said, "in a recent interview," that UVA had provided to him about "a" sexual assault by the time that Ms. Erdely contacted him this past October; was that the date of another sexual assault that happened to another victim approximately two weeks before Jackie was assaulted? Was it an assault that was heard about by some of the students by the time that Jackie was assaulted, although not by Jackie before she was assaulted?
Of all the things that Jackie's three friends have said, they have never disputed the date on which they went to meet her and she told them she was raped, have they? The date of September 28, 2012, for her allegations, is not denied by them, is it?
Was a rumor about a sexual assault that happened to someone else in mid-September of 2012 the basis of what Jackie's friends later said that she told them? Did they just not want to believe that so many women could be getting assaulted within a few weeks of each other?
Is Jackie's story being deliberately confused with someone else's, by the University of Virginia and Phi Kappa Psi, as a way to discredit her, or is the mid-September date given by Mr. Scipione and/or the University of Virginia a total fabrication?
When Jackie talked to University of Virginia staff about what had happened to her, did the staff with whom she spoke decide only to hear what would not make her addition to reports of sexual assaults previously and recently told to them by other female students worse, from the perspective of damage to the university's reputation?
It is easier to pretend, isn't it, to yourself and others, that a woman might have consented to giving oral sex to several men in a row and then regretted it later, than it is to pretend that she ever wanted to be knocked into a glass table and then vaginally gang raped? Of course, if the men are willing to punch her or threaten to vaginally rape her, or kill her, if she won't do what they're telling her to do, it's no easier for her to defend herself against being orally raped than against any other kind of rape. The truth of how sexual assault happens does not seem, historically, to be something which the University of Virginia likes to contemplate.
Was the story that the University of Virginia attributed to Jackie another assault victim's story, which the school decided to consider a fraternity fad? "That's just how our boys are doing it this year; every girl has the same story, it'll die down once the hazing season is over." Does that theoretical quotation describe what the school decided to think?
What about the unchanged records that the University of Virginia won't let anyone outside of its administration read, that might not even be intact in their original form anywhere?
If I could draw a cartoon to publish with this page, I'd draw a University of Virginia rape victim being told by an administrator to tell her story directly to the shredder. "It saves time, dear," would be the caption.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, April 6, 2015 @ 9:51 p.m.
