UVA and the alleged frat rape - Rolling Stone backpedals

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

And, her quotes were followed by a weird, passive-aggressive, out-of-context and irrelevant reference to George Huguely and Yeardley Love.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

The only place this is happening is in your head.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

No, no. This is a very important journalism story, and we're journalists.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

Man, I don't know what I've done to you, but if you can't help attacking, just ignore. I'm tired of you.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

Give your persecution complex a rest.

You're seeing something that no one else sees. Because it's not there.

Shitty journalism distracts from the issue and makes it look like a blatant and manipulative political ploy. That's a tragedy for the issue of rape. As abetted by a shitty journalist.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

The RS article made UVa look bad, but they're acting now because the leadership recognizes they dropped the ball on a problem they've had for a very long time.

Whether or not this particular story winds up being debunked doesn't change the fact that they've had a culture that's very permissive of sexual violence.

The odds are good that if you know a woman who has attended UVa, either she or one of her friends has been sexually assaulted.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

Hokie is right. It's been a problem there for a long time. I have major journalistic problems if the story turns out to be false, but if it leads to real change in the way UVA deals with this, that's a good thing.

Some more background in this article. UVAvictimsofrape.com appears to have been taken down, but an archived version is below:

http://www.readthehook.com/95992/cover-how-uva-turns-its-back-rape
https://web.archive.org/web/20140903051304/http://www.uvavictimsofrape.com/

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

But I'm sure you agree that that could have been done by Erdely without the journalistic sins she committed along the way, including identifying the specific fraternity here. That's the biggest problem, along with the lack of "allgedly" or "according to Jackies" along the way.

Even if Jackie lied through her teeth, it's a story that UVA doesn't properly handle rape allegations. That's the sad part. It's like Watergate. Erdely didn't even need to do what she did.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

What about the next story? What about all the stories elsewhere that get brushed off because someone says "Well, it's probably bullshit because look what happened with Duke and Virginia."

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

PW and DD, I'm not arguing with any of that one bit. DD, what you're describing is a very real concern.

This is just extremely personal to me. I don't think more than five people on this board know me personally, and only one of them is posting on this thread, so I'll go ahead and put it out there: My wife was drugged and raped by a UVA frat guy. I can't give this an unbiased read because of that.

Even though I recognize that a false story is damaging to future victims, I want to see UVA change the way it deals with this. It's a personal blind spot.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

I was thinking about this kind of thing. I wish Erdely would have found a typical rape case - like the one your wife went through, which strikes me as how it commonly occurs - than a sensationalistic incident that, at worst, is a complete fabrication and is, at best, completely atypical.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

That's the thing -- while I'm not suggesting the initiation-style "gang rape" as chronicled in RS is typical at UVa, it's not exactly atypical either for 3 or 4 frat guys to take turns assaulting an incapacitated female.

I think that's why when I read the story, my first reaction was, "Well ... yeah."

I worked with a girl once who had been raped by 3 UVa frat boys. Her experience wasn't too unlike Jackie's, minus of course Erdely's colorful dialogue. Went to a party with one guy and wound up a party favor for him and his scumbag friends. She was drunk/drugged and couldn't make a positive ID, so nobody got prosecuted or even disciplined by the university.

She said that she learned after the fact that it was common knowledge: if you were female and went to parties at certain houses, your odds of being raped went up dramatically. And yet nobody did anything about it.

I wish the university would lose its accreditation, with the stipulation that it would only get it back once it had cleaned house and taken measures to change its disgusting culture of permissiveness toward "boys being boys."