It's not as if she sought a media source to talk to about what happened to her; she had addressed what had happened to her by trying to raise awareness at the school, joining a student group of sexual assault educators and survivors and giving of her time to other victims, before Rolling Stone talked to her.
She's also never tried to get so much as a dollar from any of it. If she's a liar who wants attention, if she had no true concern for rape victims, why didn't she just contact a tabloid and sell the story, instead of taking a year to recover and then trying to help other victims at her school and then talking to Rolling Stone for free?
The Rolling Stone article describes the Jackie of before the assault as having graduated from high school as a "straight-A achiever," and whose other high school achievements were "honor roll, swim team, first-chair violin."
Those are all facts that are independently verifiable by any investigator.
I got into Williams College when I was a 16-year-old high school senior in 1991. I had my 17th birthday a month after I graduated from high school. I had taken 4 Advanced Placement tests, in French Literature, French Language, Biology and English, and I got a 5 for each test. That is something for which the entertainment industry has mocked me, because it hates education and has no respect for people who don't; it doesn't even know what it means to be that kind of student. I got a 1370 on my SATs, without studying for them, without taking classes to teach me how to take the tests, and without scouring information about elite colleges to try to know their cut-off scores for applicants. My high school SAT scores were 750 verbal/620 math. The first time that I took the SATs, I was 11. I got a 580 on the verbal section, which was the highest in Vermont among 7th-graders who had also taken the SATs that year. I don't remember what I got for math; nowhere near 580. I was in 7th grade at the time, and therefore eligible to take the SATs, because I had skipped 3rd grade. Most people in the United States are 12 when they are in 7th grade.
I was in the National Honor Society from sophomore through senior year, which were all of the years that I was eligible starting from the first-year academic record which qualified me to apply.
I was a National Merit Finalist or Semi-Finalist; I don't remember which one. I remember that I didn't win, so I forgot about it.
I did sports for almost every season, every year. For a couple of seasons, I did drama instead of sports.
I sang in the chorus and auditioned for and was accepted for several music festivals.
Those are all facts about me which are verifiable by any investigator.
There will probably be people who will try to say that I was in the mental hospital about a year after graduating from high school because I was too much of an achiever; my poor, little, female brain and temperament couldn't deal with it. Many people tried to say that about me when I was in the hospital; it was another excuse for a lot of people to treat me like I was weak and stupid after that, but it's not what happened. I was in the hospital because my family had a lot of trauma that had nothing to do with my being a student or good at nonscholasic things. Actually, my high school and my achievements helped to offset my distress about my family. When high school was over, and my parents had more say in where and how I was going to attend college, and I knew that my future was dependent on their unpredictable feelings and behaviors; that's when my anxiety got too high for me to manage. That was when I ASKED to be in a psychiatric unit; not having ever been in a place like that before, I didn't know that it would devastate me and start my journey through the mental health care system that has ruined so many lives.
I don't know if anything has changed at elite schools since the 1990s, but people telling each other their SAT scores and the things that they're good at besides studying was an integral part of first-year college life at elite schools at that time.
Despite all of my achievements, I would have been intimidated by Jackie's high school record if I had met her as a first-year college student. I wasn't first-chair anything at any time in my life.
She didn't, and doesn't, have a reason to try to get attention for anything by lying.
Copyright L. Kochman, June 29, 2016 @ 8:20 p.m.
