Nobody who was part of erroneously discrediting the Rolling Stone article about rape at the University of Virginia seems to be doing anything to try to stop the lawsuits against Rolling Stone and Ms. Erdely.
As usual, the media is distorting news stories to try to promote misogyny and rape and doesn't seem to think that it has the responsibility for preventing the attack on rape victims and people who try to help them, everywhere, that those lawsuits are.
The Washington Post got it wrong. The Columbia Journalism Review got it wrong. Drew is a real person whose financial records corroborate that he had dinner with Jackie the night that she was raped. He was a student and a fraternity member at the University of Virginia in 2006, and a student again in 2012. The University of Virginia has a documented pattern of discouraging the prosecution of serial rapists, of not punishing them at all, and of suspending them and then rematriculating them a year or a few years later when it does punish them. Jackie accurately described the room at the fraternity house where she was raped, and the people in it, even though the rape happened when she was a first year student in the first semester and everyone at the fraternity later said that they had no idea who she was. Fraternities routinely don't report to anyone the parties at which they plan to drug and/or rape female students. Even the parties which they do report frequently have no record. The three friends who were portrayed in the article are liars.
Jackie's mistaken account of the time at which the attack happened could be attributed to trauma. She also has a bad memory for names, as proven by her not knowing the name of T. Rees Shapiro after he interviewed her. I'd probably want to forget the name of someone who asked me intrusive questions such as whether I was physically capable of having children after being raped and whose real purpose in interviewing me was to publicly discredit and humiliate me and the reporter who tried to help me, and to ruin my life and her career.
Copyright L. Kochman, March 11, 2016 @ 6:15 p.m.
