I talk to staff who are willing to listen to me about it. They talk to him and he stops for a day, if that. Then he starts again. There are female staff and supervisors who support him, who also harass me, and who scream at me that I'm lying and "need (psychiatric) help" when I object. I'm sure that they have told the director of the women's side of the Pine Street Inn that nobody's doing anything to me and that I'm the problem, if she has asked them about it.
I have told the director about the way that I'm being treated numerous times.
Systemic denial, insensitivity and victim-blaming are typical of how organizations deal with women who are being sexually abused, whether the abuse is harassment or something worse.
That's the Web address for an article that's on the first page of Google search results for a search of the term "uva rolling stone."
"UVA law professor Anne Coughlin, a self-described feminist," is quoted in that article. The part of that sentence that's in quotations is a quote from the article.
How I'd like to describe myself is something that I try not to let infringe upon accuracy when I talk about myself. For instance, I'd like to be able to say that I am someone who has put a stop to bullying and sexual harassment at the Pine Street Inn. I'd like to be able to say that what I have written and said for years about voyeurism and involuntary pornography is respected and that those things have stopped happening to me and other people. I'd like to say that I'm no longer a target for abuse anywhere, by anyone. However, if I described myself that way, I wouldn't be telling the truth.
The Charlottesville police found Drew and they also found evidence from his financial records that corroborate Jackie's identification of him as the person who pretended to like her so that he could lure her to be gang raped at a fraternity. The statement that the Charlottesville Police Department originally published about their investigation is, from start to finish, a documented effort to deny and suppress evidence, to minimize the evidence that they couldn't deny or suppress, to portray Jackie as unreliable and uncooperative, to portray her attackers as polite, young men who fully cooperated with the investigation and who wouldn't lie if their lives depended on it (which they do), to portray the University of Virginia as irreproachable instead of a place where female students are raped and murdered, and to protect the Charlottesville police from getting fired, which they would have if they'd done a real investigation, which is why they didn't.
The three fraternity members who are suing Rolling Stone have based their lawsuit on the details of the rape described in the Rolling Stone article about it. They say that everyone knew who they were because of the details about the room where she was raped and about the men in that room. The entire fraternity has denied ever having met her, so how would she know recognizable details about the fraternity house or its members unless they're lying and she's not? That lawsuit is the most offensive of the three that have been brought against Rolling Stone; what they're saying is that they're suing her because they raped her and they didn't want her to talk about it.
Fraternities haze and they rape. Everybody knows this; fraternities get away with it because many men who were part of fraternities are also part of the power structure in the United States, everywhere, from corporations to government to media to everything else. Jackie and Sabrina Erdely had no reason to do something that was certain to bring the wrath of that power structure to their lives except that Jackie told the truth and Ms. Erdely listened.
18-year-old girls don't buy rope that they want to use to hang themselves with if they are at universities where they are safe from sexual assault and where the conditions are such that they are able to thrive. Jackie's not lying.
"Grab its motherfucking leg." You really think that a girl who got to the University of Virginia with a good high school record of scholastic and other achievement wrote that line and falsely attributed it to a rapist so that she could impress a reporter and to destroy the lives of innocent, young men? Because she felt like it? She thought "Gang rape victim" would be better on a resume or social media than "Graduated from the University of Virginia. Have lots of friends. Have an apartment with roommates; hate it when they don't do the dishes but I love them anyway! Am applying to graduate school. Have boyfriend/or am single but have lots of time to decide what kind of marriage I want. Have normal life."
People who don't know what it feels like to have their lives implode don't know that normality is all that people who have ever think about.
The conglomerate media commits journalistic failure every day; it commits crime-promoting, information-distorting, journalistic failure and is never punished for it.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, December 18, 2015 @ 5:09 p.m.
