These are pictures of part of the article called "Is Rolling Stone about to get throttled in court over UVA rape report," written by Mr. Wyman and published yesterday by the Columbia Journalism Review:
This is a picture of the part of the Rolling Stone article which Mr. Wyman is referencing:
This is a picture of part of the Columbia Journalism Review's April 5, 2015 report called "Rolling Stone's investigation: 'A failure that was avoidable," written by Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll and Derek Kravitz:
That the man whom the Rolling Stone article describes as having raped Jackie with a beer bottle is described by Mr. Wyman as having "hesitate(d)" to participate in gang rape is questionable. I also don't know why Mr. Wyman calls the man a "fraternity member," when it seems clear from the Rolling Stone article and from the 04/05/15 Columbia Journalism Review report that he was never previously described as a member of a fraternity but as a potential pledge. If he was never inducted into Phi Kappa Psi, that explains why he was never identified from the Phi Kappa Psi's membership roster. Since the assault happened before the official rush season, he's probably not on a list of Phi Kappa Psi pledges, either.
This is another picure of part of the 04/05/15 CJR report:
Before the 04/05/15 CJR report was published, there was already information online suggesting that fraternities that want to drug, haze and rape people frequently don't register the parties at which they plan to do those things. It is also impossible that the University of Virginia's administration or UVA's Police Department or the Charlottesville Police Department haven't known for years that fraternities that want to drug, haze and rape people frequently don't register the parties at which they plan to do those things. Probably, there are registered fraternity parties at which people are drugged, raped and hazed, because fraternities know that they won't be prosecuted for their crimes.
This is the address for the pages of results for a Google search of the term "fraternity suspended unregistered":
A discussion group that is part of a college class is usually informally organized; it's not something that would be on a transcript or a roster. Sometimes, the professor assigns the groups, and it could be that Jackie's professor for the class in which she had a discussion group in the Fall 2012 semester has a written or electronic record of which students were in each group. Even if that professor has no such record, shouldn't everyone who has attacked the Rolling Stone article try to get a roster for the class and to interview everyone who was in the class? Why don't all of the journalists who have attacked the Rolling Stone article ask the University of Virginia to disclose to them the rosters for Jackie's classes from the Fall 2012 semester, so that they can interview everybody? Why don't they interview all of Jackie's professors? They have accused Ms. Erdely of not having done enough investigation, haven't they? If they think they can do better, why don't they try?
There's no reason to believe that the University of Virginia's administration hasn't lied about whether or not it knows anything about the student whom the Rolling Stone article describes as having raped Jackie with a beer bottle.
It could be that Ms. Erdely should have given more Phi Kappa Psi fraternity members the chance to lie to her. It could also be that if she had talked to several of the fraternity members, Ms. Erdely could have gotten corroboration for Jackie's story from members who knew what happened and who thought it was bad.
There's no reason that reporters who want to know what happened can't try to interview as many Phi Kappa Psi members as they can. There's no law against that, nor is there a law against Phi Kappa Psi members telling the truth to reporters, police, lawyers who might be able to help them file reports that protect their privacy, or directly to the federal government. There's no law against those things, which doesn't mean that anyone who tries to do those things won't get attacked by the media and the rest of the conglomerate and by Phi Kappa Psi, other fraternities and the University of Virginia.
If Ms. Erdely had investigated Phi Kappa Psi's social media, she might have gotten information that could have led her to corroboration for Jackie's description of what happened. She might have discovered that even records of registered parties are frequently not maintained, which would have helped her and Rolling Stone when the media attacks against the Rolling Stone article began.
This is a picture of part of the Charlottesville Police Department's March 23, 2015 statement:
This is another picure of part of that police statement:
This is a picture of part of a January 8, 2016 article by T. Rees Shapiro of the Washington Post, called "Lawyers for U-Va. dean: Jackie lied to Rolling Stone about gang rape, 'invented' story":
Mr. Shapiro was not the only journaliat who inaccurately reported the conclusion that there "was no party at the fraternity on the night of the alleged attack." Other journalists reprinted that conclusion as if it were fact for months.
This is a picture of part of the July 1, 2016 declaration filed by Ms. Erdely in support of defendants' motion for summary judgment:
"September 17" from that document is September 17, 2014, two months before the Rolling Stone article was published on November 19, 2014.
This declaration, of which a copy is available for free online, refers to documentation that Ms. Erdely also gave to the court as part of her July 1, 2016 filing. That's what Ex. 15 at RS004410 is part of: documentation that includes Ms. Erdely's records of the investigation that she, Ms. Erdely, conducted.
It seems to me that a record of that conversation, and the specificity of what Jackie told Ms. Erdely, would be difficult for Ms. Erdely to convincingly fake. How would she fake something like that, in the midst of all of the other documentation that was filed for her on July 1, 2016? Has anyone accused Ms. Erdely of faking that documentation, of lying about the conversation that Jackie had with Dean Eramo in 2013 in which Dean Eramo verbally confirmed to Jackie that Dean Eramo had information that confirmed that Phi Kappa Psi had a party on September 28, 2012? It doesn't seem to me that anyone has.
There are only two things that could have happened to produce section 92 of Ms. Erdely's declaration. One is that Ms. Erdely faked her documentation to the court to try to prove that everyone who said, since the publication of the Rolling Stone article, that there was no party at the Phi Kappa Psi house on September 28, 2012 was lying. The other is that Dean Eramo knew that there was a party at September 28, 2012 at the Phi Kappa Psi and that it's one of the first things that Dean Eramo sought to confirm when Jackie first told Dean Eramo that Jackie was sexually assaulted.
Why would Dean Eramo have specifically tried to find out if there were a party on September 28, 2012, as one of the first things that Dean Eramo did in response to Jackie having told Dean Eramo that Jackie was sexually assaulted? Is it because Dean Eramo was familiar with the tactics of fraternities that try to deny that they have perpetrated sexual assault by not registering their parties and then by denying that that the parties happened?
It doesn't seem to me that Ms. Erdely has falsified her documentation. I have read the July 22, 2016 court filing by Dean Eramo's lawyer; there's no mention of Ms. Erdely's statement that Dean Eramo had told Jackie in 2013 that Dean Eramo had confirmed that there was a party at the Phi Kappa Psi house on September 28, 2012. Nobody has accused Ms. Erdely or Jackie, verbally or in any other way, of lying about Jackie's conversation with Dean Eramo. Maybe everybody is so sure that Rolling Stone's going to lose this lawsuit that nobody even noticed this one honest paragraph out of all the other honest paragraphs that Ms. Erdely wrote.
It's probable that Dean Eramo has, or had, records that documented her having confirmed that Phi Kappa Psi had a party on September 28, 2012. There might even be emails or other records between Dean Eramo and other UVA administrators and Phi Kappa Psi, confirming that Dean Eramo knew the party had happened. Shouldn't someone subpoena those records?
These are also pictures of part of the July 1, 2016 declaration filed for Ms. Erdely in support of defendants' motion for summary judgment:
"There are two other young women with similar stories to Jackie who have not come forward fully yet and we are trying to persuade them to in order to get punitive action against the fraternity," wrote Ms. Renda to Ms. Erdely.
How do you try to persuade people who don't exist? Doesn't it seem as if there were administrators at the University of Virginia who had email or phone conversations with those other two victims, and might even have spoken to them in person? Isn't it probable that the University of Virginia knows who they are?
Also, who told Ms. Renda that additional reports of sexual assault at Phi Kappa Psi filed after the Rolling Stone article was published indentifying Phi Kappa Psi as the fraternity where Jackie was raped would "create a credibility issue and take away our ability to kick off that frat"? The only people who would have had a credibility issue if those other two assault victims hadn't gotten too terrified to file formal reports would have been the people from Phi Kappa Psi who denied that Jackie got assaulted. If the Rolling Stone article hadn't gotten inaccurately discredited, the University would have had to investigate those other two assaults, and so would the Charlottesville Police Department.
This is what the 03/23/15 Charlottesville Police Department says about the two other alleged victims of sexual assault at Phi Kappa Psi:
At the time that the Charlottesville Police Department published that statement, that police department was not actively investigating the two other sexual assaults.
I haven't finished this page.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, July 29, 2016 @ 8:02 p.m.
July 30, 2016
Mr. Wyman writes one sentence between his own conjecture, "this allegation may have made its way to the university as well," and his description of that conjecture as fact: "when in fact it was just another unsubstantiated story from the same unverified source the magazine had built the rest of its report on."
Mr. Wyman is no "casual reader"; he, like everyone else who has attacked the Rolling Stone article, has dismissed the possibility that anyone other than Jackie, Ms. Erdely and Rolling Stone might have lied about anything. The people who have had the most reason to lie are the ones who are being believed without proof by people such as Mr. Wyman. Having no verification for the statements of the people whom you want to believe, and yet printing what they say as if it's the truth, no matter how damaging what you publish is to the people whom you don't want to believe, is exactly what people such as Mr. Wyman have spent more than a year accusing Ms. Erdely and Rolling Stone of having done.
After Mr. Wyman describes his conjecture as fact, he has the gall to quote Mr. Volokh calling that conjecture possible "evidence." EVIDENCE. From conjecture to fact to EVIDENCE in four sentences.
I haven't finished writing this page.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, July 30, 2016 @ 2:52 a.m. I published my preliminary page and similar pages several hours ago, and will publish them again later today or tomorrow.
