I don't appreciate it when reporters are deliberately insensitive about their clothing.
That is a picture of part of the beginning of a Good Morning America broadcast about the Rolling Stone article. The broadcast featured some of a 20/20 broadcast from October 14, 2016. The Good Morning America broadcast is included in a Washington Post article by Mr. Shapiro that was published yesterday.
Good Morning America has bullied me for years.
That is a picture of the caption that the Post article added to the segment of the article that has the broadcast.
What the caption doesn't say is that the 20/20 broadcast's inclusion of video of Ms. Erdely's deposition was decided by the court to violate a protective order and that the video would therefore not be admissible as evidence for the trial. Continuing to republish parts of the 20/20 broadcast is not the most scrupulous behavior by the Post.
That is also a picture of the Post article from yesterday, discussing the Rolling Stone article.
I think that the Charlottesville Police Department has dishonestly reported about its investigation, evidence, and that police department's intimidating behavior toward Jackie. She's not from a rich family. She has no powerful connections. Those are probably things about her that Drew knew from the weeks that he spent testing her before he brought her to the Phi Kappa Psi house. He was at least 23 or 24 in 2012; a sexual predator who knew how to gauge her financial and social consequence. He knew that she would be devastated by the assault; he wanted her to be too devastated and too scared to tell anyone or talk to the police. He knew that, as a first-year student, she didn't really know anyone at school who could or would testify about her character. He knew that if she went to the police she'd be bullied. He knew that if she left school after the rape, nobody would notice, and that there would be no angry phone calls from powerful, alumni parents to the University of Virginia or anywhere else.
The problem is that investigating and prosecuting the adult children of powerful people for felonies is career suicide. Until that changes, people will be raped at colleges and universities everywhere.
Jackie's former friends are liars who are more interested in their reputations than telling the truth, even if they ruin Jackie's life.
Either the date that Ryan was supposed to have with Jackie for his birthday, for which she bought the concert tickets and the bus tickets for both of them, was the "one date" that Ryan told 20/20 he had with Jackie, or it was the SECOND date that he had with Jackie. Whether it was a first date or a second date, there's no question that texting with "Haven Monahan" did not deter Ryan from planning to have that date with Jackie, so everything that Ryan and Jackie's other former friends have said about how they felt about "Haven Monahan" is a lie.
I'd like to know if Ryan and Jackie did have that date for Ryan's birthday, after Jackie was raped. I haven't read anything that says whether or not they had the date, or if he decided that he'd be exploiting her if they had the date. If they did have the date, then it wasn't until after that date to see one of his favorite bands that Ryan decided that he didn't even want to be friends with Jackie.
What Ryan and Jackie's other former friends have told reporters about "Haven Monahan" is the version that is flattering to them, disparaging of Jackie, and not true.
Jackie should have told Ms. Erdely about "Haven Monahan" before the Rolling Stone article was published. However, there's no evidence that Jackie ever meant to hurt anyone by texting and emailing Ryan as "Haven Monahan." My theory about that is that she wanted Ryan to like her, and while she was successfully persuading Ryan in a harmless scheme that Ryan and her other friends knew was a joke in which they were all participating, Drew asked her for a date. Drew had tested her for a few weeks while they were working together, and decided that she would be a good victim for a gang rape. Jackie was surprised when Drew asked her to dinner (she told Ms. Erdely that she was surprised). She didn't want to lose the option of dating Ryan, so she told him and the other then-friends that "Haven Monahan" had asked her to dinner.
When the date with Drew turned out to be a trap, she didn't know what to say to her then-friends or anyone else.
However, I haven't read anything that suggests that she continued the "Haven Monahan" persona past the time that it took her to try to leave that persona, soon after she was raped. I also haven't read anything that suggests that she talked about "Haven Monahan" to other people once she stopped being friends with Ryan, Alex, and "Cindy."
Ryan, Alex and "Cindy," and the Charlottesville Police Department, and the University of Virginia, and the media who have attacked Rolling Stone, and Ms. Eramo's legal team, have all exploited "Haven Monahan" to attempt to prove that Jackie's a pathological liar who was never raped.
"Haven Monahan" is irrelevant to whether or not Jackie was raped. It's unfortunate that Jackie didn't tell Ms. Erdely about "Haven Monahan" before the Rolling Stone article was published; Jackie's ommission of that part of Jackie's relationship with her former friends precluded Ms. Erdely and Rolling Stone from being able to process "Haven Monahan" as part of Ms. Erdely's interviewing of Jackie and so Jackie, Ms. Erdely and Rolling Stone have all been vulnerable to whatever everyone who wants to attack the Rolling Stone article has said.
Were the texts and emails that Jackie wrote from the "Haven Monahan" persona enduring literature? I don't think so, but if "Haven Monahan" was what Jackie thought of as being everything that Ryan wasn't, that says something about the sort of person that she liked and really wanted to date.
That's the address for Mr. Shapiro's October 25, 2016 article, called "Rolling Stone fact checker acknowledges U-Va. gang-rape article flaws."
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, October 26, 2016 @ 8:32 p.m.
