Mr. Shapiro knows that; it's been documented by other media sources. Ms. Erdely might not have known it until after the Rolling Stone article was attacked the way that articles that are not about sexual assault are never attacked.
That's the address of T. Rees Shapiro's Twitter. His last Tweet is a retweet from June 29th that says:
"US Dept of Interior@Interior
WOW! We can hardly believe this epic #sunset @Glacier NPS #Montana"
He didn't have to Tweet that. Even when I'm angry at people, or disgusted by something that they do, I don't encourage that their rights be violated, in code or in any other way.
That's the address of a July 2, 2016 Washington Post article by Mr. Shapiro, called "'Our worst nightmare': New legal filings detail reporting of Rolling Stone's U-Va. gang-rape story."
That's the address of a Chicago Tribune article from January 19, 2015, called "Brown University: 2 fraternities 'facilitated' sexual misconduct." It's the first result at the first page of results for a Google search of the term "two fraternities suspended at brown."
This is a picture of part of that article:
The other fraternity that was sanctioned at Brown was Phi Kappa Psi, also for having unregistered parties.
Those are pictures of Mr. Shapiro's July 2, 2016 article.
Isn't what Ms. Erdely said happened that Jackie couldn't remember how to spell Drew's last name? People get my name wrong every day of my life. I was a guest at the Pine Street Inn for about 4 years, and my last name was mispronounced and misspelled all the time. I'm sure that I'm not the only person whose name people forget how to spell, especially if the person whose name is being forgotten is someone whom you'd like to be able to forget.
That's another picture of Mr. Shapiro's 07/02/16 article. "She" in the first sentence of the picture is Ms. Erdely.
There are at least three floors to the Phi Kappa Psi house at the University of Virginia. The 1984 gang rape of Liz Seccuro happened on at least two of those floors, because she was dragged from a 2nd-floor bedroom, where she was raped, to a 3rd-floor bedroom, where she was raped again, while she was unconscious. She wrote about that in her 2011 book; there were witnesses who said that's what happened. There's nothing in Rolling Stone's description of the rape of Jackie that has to do with being dragged from one floor to another, or of being brought half-conscious to a shower by fraternity brothers who try to wash some of the blood off her, or of the victim waking up in the morning, wrapped in a bloody sheet, soon before class starts, and being spoken to by one of the rapists. There are a lot of things about those rapes that are dissimilar, except that they both happened at the Phi Kappa Psi house at the University of Virginia, and that the school failed in its responsibility to the victims.
Jackie didn't specify on which floor the bedroom was where she was raped; the Phi Kappa Psi brothers who tried to sue Rolling Stone confessed to it in their lawsuit, which has been dismissed. It was the second floor.
Mr. Shapiro also has yet to answer the question of who "Armpit" and "Blanket" are, from Rolling Stone's description of two of Jackie's rapists. Ms. Erdely might be able to clarify whether those are or aren't pseudonyms for the nicknames of fraternity brothers who were at Phi Kappa Psi in 2012. If they're not pseudonyms, then they are an indicator of how the family and friends of the three Phi Kappa Psi brothers who tried to sue Rolling Stone for defamation knew who they were as soon as the Rolling Stone article was published.
Rape is rape. It's not a creative behavior; it is a destructive behavior. It's called "rape" and not something else because certain things happen during a rape that don't happen when other crimes are committed, specifically that you're sexually abused. Things like being lied to, screaming, being told to shut up, trying to resist, being hit for trying to resist, being raped while the rapist(s) laugh and high-five each other; those are not atypical things to happen during a rape. To say that you know that someone who says that she was raped is lying because what she's saying happened to her has some things about it that are like what someone else has said about being the victim of the same type of crime is to deny what rape is.
If people don't want to talk to a reporter, the reporter can't make them talk, and if their employers don't allow them to talk to reporters then talking to reporters would risk their jobs. Dean Eramo has no claim that Ms. Erdely didn't try to get her side of the story before the Rolling Stone article was published; the Rolling Stone article states that the University of Virginia refused to allow Dean Eramo to be interviewed by Rolling Stone prior to the publication of the article.
Jackie's the one who got hurt because Ms. Erdely respected that Jackie was concerned that her former friends would be angry to be contacted by Rolling Stone. Because those former friends weren't contacted before the Rolling Stone article was published, they were able to say whatever they wanted, to ears that wanted to discredit Jackie more than they wanted to know what really happened, to deny the article's description of them.
That's the address of a December 10, 2014 article by Mr. Shapiro, called "U-Va. students challenge Rolling Stone account of alleged sexual assault." A link to that article is included at the page for the 07/02/16 article.
The 12/10/14 article starts by saying:
"It was 1 a.m. on a Saturday when the call came."
This is a picture of part of that article:
The call to which Mr. Shapiro is referring did not happen at 1 a.m. The transcripts of the texts between Jackie and her former friends show that it couldn't have. Since the Rolling Stone article says that Jackie passed out while being raped and that she didn't wake up until after 3:00 a.m., I suppose that it was easy enough for her former friends to read the article and then decide to tell anyone who asked them that the phone call happened two hours before Rolling Stone reported it as having happened. Has anyone subpoenaed the transcripts of the texts and emails among those former friends, to know whether they conspired to lie to the media and everyone else about what happened?
Jackie didn't get the time right, either, but that could be because she was traumatized and not because she was lying.
It seems clear that Haven Monahan was not a real person, that her friends knew he wasn't and that they thought it was cute for Jackie to try to get Ryan to like her through the persona of Haven Monahan, and that she had succeeded in getting Ryan to be interested; all before the rape. If the rape made her desperate, it's not surprising; few people wouldn't feel desperate. If Jackie didn't know how to tell her friends that Haven Monahan was a persona, and if she was afraid that if she told them that he was a persona they would also not believe that she was raped, and if she was traumatized and so didn't make a lot of good decisions after she was raped, I don't think that she should have to have her life ruined because of it.
Drew is a real person. He worked at the aquatic center where Jackie worked. The Charlottesville police identified him. He has financial records that ought to be subpoenaed, that will probably corroborate that he had dinner with another person on the night when Jackie said that she was being taken to dinner, the night that she was later raped. The records that the University of Virginia has about Drew and his old fraternity, which, whatever he told Jackie, was not Phi Kappa Psi, and why he was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia and a member of a fraternity in 2006 and then also an undergraduate in 2012, ought to be subpoenaed. Is he a serial rapist who left the University of Virginia after raping someone in 2006 and who was then matriculated as an undergraduate in 2012? There are several ways to read the Charlottesville Police Department's March 23, 2015 statement about the police investigation. I think that police department knows that the fraternity system is too powerful for almost every police department and school administration in the country.
That's another picture of Mr. Shapiro's 07/02/16 article. Jackie can't tell the truth no matter what she does; is that what Mr. Shapiro is trying to say? Is it possible that Jackie said "years" when she meant "months," that Ms. Erdely wrote "years" when Jackie said "months," or that there was some other mistake?
These are also pictures of Mr. Shapiro's 07/02/16 article. "She" in the first sentence of the first picture is Ms. Erdely:
Ms. Renda was working for the University of Virginia when she was interviewed by Ms. Erdely? Wouldn't that be the reason that Ms. Renda "cautioned" Ms. Erdely about naming Phi Kappa Psi as the fraternity where Jackie was raped? I have a lot of sympathy for Ms. Renda, who has suffered because of what has happened to the Rolling Stone article, but I also have sympathy for her starting from when she got hired by the University of Virginia. There is no question that Ms. Renda is sincere and wanted to contribute to the improvement of the University of Virginia's treatment of women, but it seems as if the school was using her. Why else would Ms. Renda have begun to say the things to Ms. Erdely that reflect either what a senior administrator told Ms. Renda to say, or that indicated the beginning of Ms. Renda's assimilation into the administration's culture, about not naming Phi Kappa Psi and about the university's mysterious lack of information about the two other rape victims by whom Jackie was approached?
The fear of lawsuits, bad publicity, anger from rich alumni, and loss of federal funding were the only reasons that the school could have had to try to prevent the name of the fraternity from being published in the Rolling Stone article. The idea that the school couldn't punish the fraternity because somebody said something bad about that fraternity in print is, unfortunately, the sort of thing that a naive and idealistic rape survivor, like Ms. Renda, might believe if it were told to her by a supervisor whom she trusted. Who wants to believe that a school could betray you over and over, not only lying to you but using you to mislead other people who care about the things that matter to you the most?
These sentences from Mr. Shapiro's 07/02/16 article are telling:
"In interviews with Erdely, Jackie said she met two other students who also had been gang-raped at Phi Kappa Psi. But Renda warned Erdely that no one from the university had met the two other women and that their accounts were uncorroborated."
Isn't what Ms. Renda meant was that nobody from the faculty had met the two other women? Also, if "their accounts were uncorroborated," does that mean that the university had gotten accounts from those women and not tried to talk to them and not investigated what they had said, or does it mean that Ms. Renda was lied to by other people working at the University of Virginia about those two women and what the university's response to them was? The Rolling Stone article is about the University of Virginia's dishonesty; was this another example of that dishonesty, which Ms. Renda didn't realize she was being exploited to convey to Ms. Erdely?
Whoever those two women are, do you think that they're about to call the media and ask to be interviewed? Would you?
I don't know why Mr. Shapiro thought that what seems to be a direct quote from Ms. Renda to Ms. Erdely about the 1984 rape of Ms. Seccuro and the 2012 rape of Jackie, both at Phi Kappa Psi, was condemning of Jackie and not of Phi Kappa Psi.
Also, what about these sentences from Mr. Shapiro's 07/02/16 article:
"Erdely mentioned the connection to Renda."
and
"In her notes, Erdely describes the moment when Jackie tells her of the apparent connection."
Who told whom about "the connection" between Ms. Seccuro's book and Jackie's account, according to Mr. Shapiro? In 4 sentences, he's transitioned from having Ms. Erdely tell Ms. Renda about "the connection" to Jackie telling it to Ms. Erdely, hasn't he?
Is there another "prominent book" about sexual assault that Mr. Shapiro says was a source of Jackie's alleged lies? The only one he's written about in his 07/02/16 article is Ms. Seccuro's book, and what he seems to have tried to imply is that Ms. Erdely didn't hear about Ms. Seccuro's book from Jackie, that Ms. Erdely "uncovered" it and then told Ms. Renda about it.
If Jackie's father asked her to watch an episode of a television show that was about a young woman being raped at college, wasn't that probably because he wanted her to talk to him about why she had gotten so depressed at school that she'd had to call her mother and leave? What if he didn't know how else to ask her to tell him what had happened?
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, July 3, 2016 @ 3:01 a.m./additions @ 8:45 p.m.
