UVA and the alleged frat rape - Rolling Stone backpedals

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

I'm interested to know what the inside of the house looks like. I mean, it looks like a damn estate from the outside, but is it just as nice on the inside? Probably not, but is it still *pretty* nice and not and Animal House-style dump?

The girl says she took a drink and slyly poured it out on the floor. If that's Animal House, no one bats an eye. But if that house is in any way *decent* on the inside, someone had to have noticed that, right? And asked her what the fuck she was doing?

Or is it completely normal for people to go walking around fraternity houses at UVa dumping drinks on the floor?

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

For parties, closer to Animal House. Nasty floors. If it's crowded enough, you can absolutely dump a drink on the floor without people noticing. I've done it. Hell, I've probably done it at Phi Psi.

I didn't spend much time in frat houses outside of parties, but I have to imagine they clean them up relatively well and remove furniture from the rooms in question. That's what pledges are for, right?

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

I'd be OK without extensive attribution because the story contains nothing but aliases. Plus, the "she says" stuff you're talking about starts at almost the exact moment she recollects anything of consequence.

Sometimes you have to go with the eyeball test, or your gut feeling. We spend years honing those to learn if we can take people at their word. That's especially important in cases like this where concrete proof never exists this long after the fact. Add in that the school is one of a dozen under compliance review by the Department of Education, that's more than enough for me to give the go-ahead for further investigating, and it adds a lot to the plausibility of the girl's claims.

That said, at the very least, I would insist on a comment or a "no comment" from the dean to whom she allegedly told the story. The rest of the article is a collection of unrelated anecdotes or data.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

Roger that. I hereby withdraw my curiosity about that particular detail. Thanks for the clarification.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

I should add that I graduated in 2003, and shit could certainly have changed in the decade since then. But I doubt it.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

See, the bottom part is entirely believable to me. I lived in Charlottesville for years. You overhear things from students, particularly female students, at sporting events or in the next booth at a Corner restaurants that make you thing that attitude is prevalent.

As for the first part, I believe she was probably raped and went through something horrible, but the problem with turning her version of it into the central narrative of the story is relying on somebody who went through something horrific to provide all the details. Don't you think it probably got worse and worse in her mind the more times she stayed in bed all day reliving it?

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

Be interesting to know if they check any of the 7's phones for videos, photos etc etc.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

I thought the purpose of pledges was to provide a fresh supply of anuses so the bros could work out their latent homosexuality.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

So the writer -- and the school -- is getting majorly trolled by this group and/or this college student?

Because, remember, this story isn't just a rape tale, but a tale of bureaucracy and a person getting caught up in the UVa system. So the person exists and the person is pursuing some kind of recourse, and has been for some time.

While it's possible that the writer embellished details, where else would she have gotten those details but the student? And if there was a discrepancy between the story the writer wrote and what the writer was told, we would have heard about it by now.

So what would have been better for RS to do? Hold the details, however clearly told, up to a "plausibility" standard? Which rape details are plausible? Which are not? Who decides?

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

UVa is not gonna let that dean talk. The president does that.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

I think that the writer was definitely told this story by the woman, yes. I also think that it is certainly newsworthy that the woman said she reported this story to UVA and that she says that UVA did not properly investigate it, and encouraged her to sit down for mediation with seven people who allegedly gang raped her.

I think that very little of this story occurred the way that the woman told the Rolling Stone writer it occurred, and I think it is possible that none of it happened the way the woman said it happened.

Steubenville is basically the worst of these kind of incidents that we know about, right? I know there are others where groups of juvenilles, usually inner-city or otherwise poor juvenilles, gang raped somebody. I think one happened in Richmond, if I remember right. Even in Steubenville, which is horrific enough, nothing close to this happened. The girl was finger penetrated while she was passed out by two boys while she was passed out.

In this alleged Virginia case, seven men set up a violent assault of a stone cold sober woman that they knew and that their friend was dating, then violently and degradingly raped her one after the other, for hours. These are educated men. During the course of this, they said things like, "We had to do it, so you do, too!"

I do not think that this happened.

 

Re: Rolling Stone on rape at UVA

Remember when people briefly took it as fact that the Duke lax team was going to rape that stripper with a broom handle?