Of the thousands of words written and spoken about the Rolling Stone article, that emailed response was considered so important that it was listed as its own accusation by Ms. Eramo's attorneys, and is a permanent part of the verdict against Ms. Erdely.
Ms. Erdely's response is shown; what was the question that Mr. Shapiro (I'm assuming that it was Mr. Shapiro, but if I'm incorrect I'd like to know who it was) asked her that elicited that response, and why was he so persistent about having her clarify that the indifference of the school to the safety of students was the main theme of the article?
Whose idea was it to attempt to derail Ms. Erdely career's, if it wasn't the Washington Post's idea? The Washington Post, which has a working environment that is so malicious toward women that it took public reactions to a skit featuring something as offensive as "Mad Bitch Beer," targeting the then-Secretary of State, to get the journalists producing the skits stopped? The Post's attitude toward women continued to be so hostile that one of the journalists who was part of the "Mad Bitch Beer" joke wrote an article a few years later saying that Ms. Erdely should be fired, even though he wasn't. Gratuitous, misogynist jokes told by employees of a major newspaper in a venue endorsed by that newspaper are mistakes according to the humorless and thin-skinned and shouldn't be grounds for anyone's termination, but a reporter who has the goal of writing serious articles to help rape victims deserves to be publicly condemned in a 2-year media frenzy led by that major newspaper? Is that what everyone is supposed to think?
To my knowledge, Mr. Shapiro was not part of the skits that eventually were terminated. However, the newspaper that employed him has an obvious history of inappropriate, disrespectful, malicious behavior toward women and of expecting that outrageous behavior by misogynist men will only be checked if there's a public outcry, and even then the behavior will be excused and the people who exhibited the behavior will be characterized as talented and valuable despite their unappreciated sense of humor.
The Washington Post is also the newspaper for which another male journalist wrote a series of vicious articles about Jackie, Ms. Erdely and Rolling Stone, including an article in which he portrayed Ms. Erdely as more destructive to society than a writer who watched an unsuspecting couple having oral sex in a motel room as part of his research of the serial voyeur who owned the motel and who had criminally violated the privacy of guests of the motel for years.
Before the fateful, emailed response from Ms. Erdely, was there a previous email or phone conversation between Mr. Shapiro and Ms. Erdely of which Mr. Shapiro informed his colleagues and editors, who then told Mr. Shapiro that for Ms. Erdely to have had any preconceived ideas about sexual assault and institutional responses to sexual assault was bad reporting?
Were the misogynist attacks of the Washington Post the basis of every lawsuit brought against Ms. Erdely and Rolling Stone? The language of the lawsuits, everything that Ms. Eramo's lawyers did to try to prove that Ms. Erdely thought and said that the University of Virginia was indifferent to victims of sexual assault; was all of that designed according to the narrative about the Rolling Stone article that was crafted by the Washington Post and repeated ad nauseum by every other media source that followed the Post's lead?
As far as I'm concerned, Ms. Erdely capably proved that the University of Virginia does everything that it can to avoid expelling rapists and getting them prosecuted, and if that's not indifference to rape victims, what is? Why was Ms. Erdely ever on trial for saying it?
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, November 5, 2016 @ 8:29 p.m.
