Posted: Sat Nov 22, 2014 12:00 am
Are lesbians incapable of rape? Someone should tell the producers of Orphan Black.
By Rolling Stone | December 5, 2014
To Our Readers:
Last month, Rolling Stone published a story titled "A Rape on Campus" by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie at a University of Virginia fraternity house; the university's failure to respond to this alleged assault – and the school's troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual assaults. The story generated worldwide headlines and much soul-searching at UVA. University president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation and also to examine the way the school responds to sexual assault allegations.
Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie's story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her. In the months Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made Erdely, or Rolling Stone's editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie's credibility. Her friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported Jackie's account. She had spoken of the assault in campus forums. We reached out to both the local branch and the national leadership of the fraternity where Jackie said she was attacked. They responded that they couldn't confirm or deny her story but had concerns about the evidence.
In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.
Will Dana
Managing Editor
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture....3slFoUp
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Not sure who you are saying has the mental issues, the woman who wrote the story, or the woman who made the claims. Seems like both, to me.Vince wrote:Sorry Rolling Stone... you don't get to blame your lack of journalistic integrity on a young woman that obviously has mental issues. YOU chose to buy her story without doing any investigation because you are either monumentally lazy or you just really, really wanted it to be true. Either way, this is YOUR pooched story.
The woman that told the story. She's been telling it for a while now and it keeps changing. The one that wrote it just wanted it to be true and wanted to pretend to be a journalist, I guess. I cut the woman that told the story some slack because I really think she has real issues.GORDON wrote:Not sure who you are saying has the mental issues, the woman who wrote the story, or the woman who made the claims. Seems like both, to me.Vince wrote:Sorry Rolling Stone... you don't get to blame your lack of journalistic integrity on a young woman that obviously has mental issues. YOU chose to buy her story without doing any investigation because you are either monumentally lazy or you just really, really wanted it to be true. Either way, this is YOUR pooched story.
I'm not giving anyone at Rolling Stone the out of a mental defect. They placed activism above journalism. I think the student is trying to be part of the "in" women's issues crows and to bond with them. The way some people go to support groups for parents that have lost children even though they never had any. The student probably falls into that sort of mental illness. Not the entire staff at R/S. Remember, this had to be greenlighted by at least one editor.GORDON wrote:The chick who wrote the story was fishing for exactly that. She wanted to expose MALE RAPE CULTURE in the frats, whether it existed or not. She has issues, too. When she couldn't find real evidence, she made shit up. As far as I am concerned she should be charged with something.
The psycho bitch reporter has done this before.Vince wrote:I'm not giving anyone at Rolling Stone the out of a mental defect.
Here’s why that claim is so problematic: Calling something a hoax implies there was a specific intention to deceive, often maliciously. It implies that every piece of Jackie’s account is false, that she is a girl who set out to entrap and defame men by creating a fantastical (and brutal) story, that she had some hidden agenda and something tangible to gain from recounting this violent tale to a Rolling Stone reporter. There is no question that Rolling Stone’s editorial staff and reporter have some serious explaining to do. They did not do their due diligence on this piece, and in that failure, let down both Jackie and their readers in a major way. But discrepancies in a graphic and extremely-detailed story -- even enough discrepancies to discredit the story in a court of public opinion and journalism -- do not a “hoax” make.
Malcolm wrote:Not a hoax.Here’s why that claim is so problematic: Calling something a hoax implies there was a specific intention to deceive, often maliciously. It implies that every piece of Jackie’s account is false, that she is a girl who set out to entrap and defame men by creating a fantastical (and brutal) story, that she had some hidden agenda and something tangible to gain from recounting this violent tale to a Rolling Stone reporter. There is no question that Rolling Stone’s editorial staff and reporter have some serious explaining to do. They did not do their due diligence on this piece, and in that failure, let down both Jackie and their readers in a major way. But discrepancies in a graphic and extremely-detailed story -- even enough discrepancies to discredit the story in a court of public opinion and journalism -- do not a “hoax” make.
Many on UVA’s campus and outside of it have been understandably upset for a number of reasons -- at Rolling Stone’s lack of fact-checking, at the way the discrepancies in this one story might set back on-campus dialogue about rape or perpetuate the myth that lots of women report rape falsely...