I don't know what would have happened if I had never started to write about the Rolling Stone article. I don't know if anything that I have said has influenced anyone to stop the unfair treatment of that magazine and the journalist who went against the grain of everything that the major media has promoted for 6 years. Without question, the article has been subjected to a level of scrutiny and standards for journalism which are never applied to the code stories promoting sexual violence that most of the rest of the media has published since 2010.
Rolling Stone and Ms. Erdely did not publish that article with malice. All they wanted to do was to help victims of sexual assault.
Yet, I can't help thinking that, if I were Rolling Stone, I would try to settle the lawsuit brought by Ms. Eramo in such a way that neither Ms. Erdely nor Rolling Stone has to agree to plead guilty to malice and that also gives Ms. Eramo the possibility of rebuilding her life. Ms. Eramo did what her employer told her to do throughout her career, and I would be surprised if she did not have many sleepless nights every year because of it. If her employer stopped her from being able to talk to Rolling Stone before the article was published, then that's another thing that her employer told her to do. What would she have said if she had gotten interviewed by Ms. Erdely, who was adamant about getting that interview and couldn't? Nobody can know. Maybe she would have felt empowered enough to tell Ms. Erdely some truth, and maybe she'd be getting demonized for that. The school to which her loyalty bound her has all but abandoned her anyway.
I think I can get a sense of what Ms. Eramo had hoped that the rest of her life would be like. How many people in the churning world are able to be happy in one place all their lives, to grow from young adulthood to old age being nurtured by and then contributing to an institution whose stated loyalty is to knowledge and the improvement of society? There's something beautiful about wanting that to be your life. So many of us fail to do and be what we wanted to do and be; when your original goal is good, that ought to be considered by people who evaluate your failures.
I hope that I don't need to win this case from afar more than I need to recognize someone else's need for mercy.
These are not my feelings about Phi Kappa Psi.
Copyright L. Kochman, October 16, 2016 @ 8:44 p.m.
