This page has excerpts from the Columbia Journalism Review's April 5, 2015 discussion of Rolling Stone magazine's November 19, 2014 article "A Rape on Campus." I got the excerpts from Rolling Stone's website, which has retracted its original story and published the Columbia Journalism Review's article.
After every excerpt, I have written a response.
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According to the Charlottesville police, Jackie did meet with assistant dean of students Nicole Eramo on May 20, 2013. During that meeting, Jackie described her assault differently than she did later for Erdely, the police said, declining to provide details. According to members of the UVA community knowledgeable about the case, who asked not to be identified in order to speak about confidential university matters, Jackie recounted to Eramo the same story she had told her friends on the night of Sept. 28: She was forced to have oral sex with several men while at a fraternity party. Jackie did not name the fraternity where the assault occurred or provide names or details about her attackers, the sources said. No mention was made of hazing. (Citing student privacy and ongoing investigations, the UVA administration, through its communications office, declined to answer questions about the case.)
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-what-went-wrong-20150405#ixzz3WU733ysq
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April 5, 2015
The University of Virginia and the police have continued to call Jackie a liar, and the Columbia Journalism Review has genteelly accepted the school's and the police department's characterizations of Jackie. The Columbia Journalism Review had no more success getting information from the school about the incident than the reporter for Rolling Stone did when she was trying to investigate the incident. Yet, throughout their discussion, the writers from CJR repeatedly fault Ms. Erdely for not being aggressive enough about obtaining information from the school. Later in their article, they even call her biased and therefore incapable of being impartial for believing that the school did not want to help her investigation.
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When there is credible information about multiple acts of sexual violence by the same perpetrator that may put students at risk, Department of Education guidelines indicate the university should take action even when no formal complaint has been filed. The school should also consider whether to issue a public safety warning. Once more, the University of Virginia did not issue a warning. Whether the administration should have done so, given the information it then possessed, is a question under review by the University of Virginia's governing Board of Visitors, aided by fact-finding and analysis by the law firm O'Melveny & Myers. (On March 30, UVA updated its sexual assault policy to include more clearly defined procedures for assessing threats and issuing timely warnings.)
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-what-went-wrong-20150405#ixzz3WUA9j1HZ
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
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April 5, 2015
Is CJR trying to say that yet another internal investigation conducted by the University of Virginia upon itself, aided by a law firm which proudly advertises its role as a group of corporate defenders at its own website, will produce a fair and impartial judgment about the University of Virginia's actions?
That is a picture from tonight of the Yahoo search result for the law firm O'Melveny & Myers.
The page at that website that talks about Nathan Bush, the partner at the firm who is mentioned on the first page, does not say if Mr. Bush is related to the Bush family that has produced a couple of Presidents of the United States. It does say that he got his Bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia; how many other people who work for that law firm are also graduates of the University of Virginia or have family members or otherwise know people who are?
That is a picture from tonight of the first part of the page about Mr. Bush at the website for O'Melveny & Myers.
That is a picture from tonight of the page at the website for O'Melveny & Myers that discusses the speech that Mr. Bush will give at "PLI," advertised at the first page of the O'Melveny & Myers website.
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In hindsight, the most consequential decision Rolling Stone made was to accept that Erdely had not contacted the three friends who spoke with Jackie on the night she said she was raped. That was the reporting path, if taken, that would have almost certainly led the magazine's editors to change plans.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-what-went-wrong-20150405#ixzz3WUC1Qqh1
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April 5, 2015
The world heard from one of Jackie's three "friends" today. Do you believe him?
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As to "Drew," the lifeguard, Dana said he was not even aware that Rolling Stone did not know the man's full name and had not confirmed his existence. Nor was he told that "we'd made any kind of agreement with Jackie to not try to track this person down."
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-what-went-wrong-20150405#ixzz3WUCwTgpe
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
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April 5, 2015
The Charlottesville Police Department has grudgingly confirmed the existence of "Drew."
That's a picture from today of part of the statement about the police investigation, published by the Charlottesville Police Department on March 23, 2015.
If "Drew" told Jackie that he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi and he wasn't, that's not her fault.
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The problem of confirmation bias – the tendency of people to be trapped by pre-existing assumptions and to select facts that support their own views while overlooking contradictory ones – is a well-established finding of social science. It seems to have been a factor here. Erdely believed the university was obstructing justice. She felt she had been blocked. Like many other universities, UVA had a flawed record of managing sexual assault cases. Jackie's experience seemed to confirm this larger pattern. Her story seemed well established on campus, repeated and accepted.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-what-went-wrong-20150405#ixzz3WUDUxbPA
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
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April 5, 2015
The University of Virginia WAS obstructing justice. It has continued to obstruct justice, which the writers from the Columbia Journalism Review have meekly and even approvingly noted, for the protection of the perpetrators and everyone at the University of Virginia's administration who colludes in protecting the university's image.
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Yet the final version still strained to defend Rolling Stone's performance. It said that Jackie's friends and student activists at UVA "strongly supported her account." That implied that these friends had direct knowledge of the reported rape. In fact, the students supported Jackie as a survivor, friend and fellow campus reformer. They had heard her story, but they could not independently confirm it.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-what-went-wrong-20150405#ixzz3WUEV6uFe
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
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April 5, 2015
Nobody can independently confirm Jackie's story except the men who raped her and the men who watched her being raped; what are the chances that they will do that? She needed to go to the police and the Emergency Room immediately after the attack occurred for the evidence of the attack to be gathered, and she was too scared to take those steps.
It is the flimsiest of semantic analysis that the writers from CJR use to try to say that Rolling Stone was misleading when it said that Jackie's friends and student activists at UVA "strongly supported her account." What was meant was that she was believed.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, April 5, 2015 @ 10:29 p.m.
