UVA and the Faux Rape Case: Bad Journalism – or Deceitful Writing?

By William L. Anderson
LewRockwell.com
Dec. 22, 2014

In the month since Rolling Stone published its infamous "rape of Jackie" story about a University of Virginia student who was brutally raped at a fraternity party, a number of things have come to light. First, the story was false; Jackie was not raped, there was no party at the fraternity house in question the night the assault was supposed to have occurred, and even Jackie's "date" was a work of fiction.

Second, UVA officials acted in typical Pavlovian style when RS published the story: President Teresa Sullivan -- whose tenure at UVA already has included an unsuccessful attempt by the board to oust her -- suspended all campus Greek activities until 2015, which meant no Christmas parties and end-of-semester bacchanalias. Campus protesters (What would we ever do without them?) acted predictably and made their usual sets of demands. People said All The Right Things about the One-In-Five-or-Four standard of alleged campus rapes and sexual assaults that the Obama administration used to impose sets of rules that essentially eliminate due process for male students accused of sexually violating female students.

The day that the UVA story really began to fall apart, a graduate school friend of mine called and we were discussing the case. I told him that either one of us could write what would be Sullivan's response; and sure enough she said pretty much what we predicted, paraphrased as: The fact that this account has "discrepancies" should not get in the way of dealing with sexual assaults on campus. In other words, we must stick with the narratives no matter how false the "facts" to support them may be. Furthermore, one senses that Sullivan was disappointed that the story was a hoax, and the fact that it was based upon lies only gets in the way of Sullivan's trying to remake UVA into a cartoonish PC organization.

Since then, the "discussion" has been everything a cynic could predict: the lament that future women "will be afraid to come forward" (we hear that after every campus hoax, but women always "come forward"), and the declaration that while the story in question has been disputed, the larger narrative must remain intact. Everything has been so sickeningly predictable that it gives me occasion to write what Murray Rothbard might have said if he were alive today: Nobody learns anything on a college campus.

I would like to take this whole thing a step further and ask some questions that other journalists and commentators are not asking about the UVA case: What did the major players in this story know, and when did they know it? Is there something else to this story and, more important, its outcome that was rigged from the beginning?

Before digging into what I would call the story-in-the-story, I will address one of the "narratives" about journalism, and especially the kind of "investigative" journalism we find in stories like the faux UVA rape. The "rules" as outlines by Progressives a century ago in the 1923 Canons of Journalism called for "objectivity" and for the journalists to stand outside the story, as opposed to being the story itself. Journalists were to be truthful, accurate, impartial, and to engage in "fair play."

We have those expectations, and certainly most modern journalistic outfits, including Rolling Stone, want us to believe that their journalists would not just make up things or, worse, have direct or indirect involvement in the outcomes of the stories themselves. Regarding the UVA story, RS wants us to believe the following:

A female student at UVA had suffered through a horrible ordeal -- "something" happened -- and she claimed it was a gang rape at a fraternity house. She spoke to people about it, including a newly-hired "sexual assault specialist" named Emily Renda, a 2014 U-Va. Graduate, who says she is a "rape survivor."

Renda told the story at a June 2014 hearing at the U.S. Senate, chaired by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, who has introduced a bill to codify the "Dear Colleague" standards for investigating alleged rape and sexual assault on college campuses.

Renda also told Sabrina Erdely, a hard-left, "award-winning" freelance journalist who interviewed Jackie and her friends, and then produced the hard-hitting story that featured the "shocking" gang rape in which Jackie was raped by five, er, seven, fraternity boys who were completing an initiation. Erdely already was looking for examples of rapes and sexual assaults on college campuses that university officials supposedly had not taken seriously.

Upon release of the story last November 19, the UVA administration took quick action, suspending the Greek system activities and promising to enact new policies aimed at preventing these kinds of horrible events.

It was a very neat package, and when RS released the story, the Usual Suspects acted according to the script, and when it fell apart, the Usual Suspects all but thanked Jackie for helping "raise awareness" about campus rape. The narrative held and was vigorously defended. Of course, the Usual Suspects also once again lamented the possibility that the exposure of the falsehood would discourage other women from "coming forward," just as activists had lamented the fact that the Duke Lacrosse players actually had not raped Crystal Mangum, which meant that women who might be telling the truth would not be believed. (In the seven years since the Duke story fell apart, there has been no shortfall of women "coming forward," but that is a discussion for another article.)

In other words, Jackie was not exactly forthcoming with RS, and the magazine, in its retraction, said it had lost faith in its source, which then called into question other aspects of the story. Therefore, Jackie had "victimized" not only RS, but also the author Erdely. The publication and the author had acted in good faith, but something went wrong and perhaps Erdely and her superiors just had not done enough "fact checking."

Like Duff Wilson, who authored a number of now-discredited articles for the New York Times when it tried to prop up the rape narrative in the Duke case, Erdely supposedly has been an honest broker who just made some "mistakes" in how she sourced and investigated the alleged incident. There is a problem with that narrative, however, and the problem is Erdely herself. The discrepancies are not just about what Jackie told the author; indeed, the discrepancies also involve what Erdely claims others told her, and what the other sources say they told -- or did not tell -- her.

What do I mean? It seems that Erdely quoted people she never interviewed, or at least the people claims not to have been interviewed. Furthermore, it is clear that the discrepancies between what Jackie's friends have said and what Erdely wrote are not just a mix-up or a mistaken interpretation. Someone is lying in this exchange; the accounts differ too greatly for anything else to be the case. Writes Erik Wemple of the Washington Post about Jackie's "friends" who allegedly kept her from reporting the "rape" for fear of social reprisals:

These three students spoke up about the incident to straighten out discrepancies between what Rolling Stone reported about that night and what they say they experienced. Another motive appears to have been to clear their names, even if they were identified only pseudonymously in the original article. "Cindy," whom the Post now reveals as Kathryn Hendley, is described in the story as a "self-declared hookup queen" and is indirectly quoted as saying something terrible about Jackie's alleged gang rape at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. "'Why didn't you have fun with it?' Cindy asked. 'A bunch of hot Phi Psi guys?' " -- that's how Erdely phrased things, without ever having contacted "Cindy"/Hendley, who told Shapiro that she was "offended" by the characterization. And all this happened in a story purporting to highlight the mistreatment of women.

The RS story is not another example of well-intentioned journalism going bad because the author believed the story as being so juicy that he or she decided not to look elsewhere for information. That hardly would be the first time something like this has happened; the Duke Lacrosse Case became famous after Samiha Khanna and Anne Blythe of the Raleigh News & Observer wrote the story, "Dancer Recalls Details of Ordeal," and proceeded to write an account that later proved to be fiction.

In their "Dancer" story, Khanna and Blythe (who still is on the N&O payroll) interviewed Crystal Mangum (who now is in prison for murdering her boyfriend) and treated every word she said as gospel truth. It would not have been hard to investigate her claims, such as her supposedly having been a patient in Duke University Medical Center, being treated for rape and having been beaten up. (She was examined in the DUMC emergency room, but never was admitted as a patient -- a huge discrepancy in her story.)

The discrepancies between Mangum's story, as reported by the N&O, and the available facts at that time -- information that any journalist could have retrieved with a few simple phone calls -- were too great to ignore or to chalk up as run-of-the-mill errors that often occur when reporters are trying to push a story to press as quickly as they can. In the Duke case, the allegations were so explosive that any competent editor should have demanded that the journalists be as thorough as possible before going with the "too-good-to-be-true" story.

Within the chain of transmission of information in the Duke and UVA stories, at least some people knew it was false. Did Khanna and Blythe know they were writing falsehoods? No, but at the very best, they were reckless in depending upon only one source for the information. If they had known that Mangum had just been bragging to her friends at the strip club where she worked that she "was going to get money from the white boys," and that she was an experienced prostitute, would they have seen things differently? I don't know, but some of this information -- Mangum's prostitution and long-time employment as a stripper -- easily could have been found, and Joe Neff of the N&O later found it without much effort. As I see it, Khanna and Blythe -- and their editors -- did not do any more fact-checking because they wanted to believe Mangum's story, as it fit within the modern narratives that Progressives have fashioned about college age males and campus sexuality.

Instead of building her narrative around evil and brutish lacrosse players, Erdely decided to construct her story around the narrative of evil and brutish UVA frat boys. All of the stereotypes were present, and Erdely might have been able to get away with her work of fiction, but then she decided to paint Jackie's friends as beholden to the evil and brutish social atmosphere that she wanted to believe dominates UVA and about every other college campus.

Had she constructed the story around the theme of freshman girl is brutally raped and her friends give her comfort and help, Erdely might have enabled the fiction to be taken seriously for a while longer, but because she made some claims that Jackie's friends hotly deny (and they weren't supposed to be the "bad guys" of the story, anyway), the discrepancies inevitably came to light and it became obvious that Erdely had nowhere to hide.

This is not Erdely's first attempt at writing fiction and trying to foist it off as truth. When she was on the student newspaper staff at the University of Pennsylvania, she wrote a fake story and was upbraided by her then editor, who was none other than"¦Stephen Glass. Yes, THAT Stephen Glass was offended by Erdely's foray into journalistic fiction, but it seems that it was Erdely would learn from her former boss's storied "career" as one of the most notorious "journalists" of the 20th Century. You can't make up this stuff.

And there is more. In 2011 RS published an Erdely story that told of Catholic priests sexually abusing "Billy Doe," and it had all of the sensational material that one would expect in a story like this. The problem was that she depended entirely upon the testimony of a young man whose story would later collapse into a mass of contradictions, contradictions that Erdely chose to ignore because, after all, facts should not get in the way of a good story.

The consequences of Erdely's story included three priests and a schoolteacher being convicted and sent to prison. However, one guilty verdict recently was overturned and serious questions have been raised about the case in general. The Catholic League accused Erdely of "yellow journalism" and given Erdely's penchant for writing fiction, one has to wonder whether or not anything she writes is accurate.

As bad as Khanna and Blythe were on the original Duke Lacrosse story, they come across as bastions of honesty compared to Erdely. Khanna and Blythe at least quoted a real person, as unbelievable as her story might have been. Samantha Erdely in her UVA story could not be bothered by real people, or at least real people with whom she pretended to speak.

At this point, another one of Rothbard's Laws comes into play: Nobody resigns. The UVA president almost joyfully accepted the "bad news" that a horrific gang rape occurred at a UVA fraternity house while she was in office, and after the word comes out that the whole thing was a hoax, she essentially says that she is going to pretend as though it really did happen. Nowhere did she offer any condolences for people wrongfully accused and others who found themselves smeared by Erdely's story. Instead, she pushes forth with her agenda that is based upon the belief that the non-existent gang rape is reality.

The "sexual assault awareness officer," Emily Renda, the one who played a major role in smearing her alma mater and both male and female students there, will keep her job. She did horrific damage, yet President Sullivan seems to have conferred heroic status upon her for (of course) increasing "awareness" of sexual assault.

No one at RS has lost his or her job. The same publication that tried to make us believe the Duke case was legitimate and which gave readers a Stephen Glass fabrication has provided a new generation of readers with yet another fabricated story, one that had holes in it from the beginning. Apparently, the RS leadership does not care if a story is true or not, just as long as it says something that will interest readers.

Who knew what at RS? Please do not tell me that the editors had reason to believe what Erdely gave them was true. After all, they knew that Erdely had quoted only Jackie and she had not done much fact-checking. Just as Newsweek and the New York Times in the Duke case depended solely upon Crystal Mangum and rogue prosecutor Michael Nifong for their sources, RS decided to one-up the mainstream competition and go whole hog with fiction.

For that matter, I would like to know what Teresa Sullivan knew and when she knew it. Did she talk to anyone at RS and have a pre-planned response to impose as soon as the story was released? Why has she not demonstrated outrage that her students and her university were defamed by a national publication? She refused to reverse her policies that pretty much shut down the Greek system on campus and she did not even say she was relieved that one of her students had not been gang raped. If anything, she seemed a bit disappointed.

This does not make sense to a rational person. Even Richard Brodhead, president of Duke University, issued a formal apology to the indicted players and their families even though Brodhead himself was a major reason the indictments were handed down in the first place. And at least Brodhead issued a statement expressing relief when North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper announced that the three indicted students were "innocent."

Sullivan has given nothing of the sort. Instead, she continued to move as though every word in the RS article had been true. You see, Teresa Sullivan apparently wants the world to believe that the University of Virginia is one of the most dangerous places on earth for women -- but that they should go there, anyway -- and when they come, she will make sure that they are place in hypersexualized situations, and have UVA officials hand out lots and lots of condoms. Maybe the infamous "Sex Workers Show" will come to UVA.

Sullivan is not the only one who seems to be disappointed that the account was a lie. Jim Wallis and Sandi Villareal of the hard-left Sojourners movement are aghast that people actually believe that RS was irresponsible in promoting a story that was false on its face. They declare:

Sure -- it was shoddy journalism. Yes -- it seems as though this individual story is not totally factual. (Aside: see how trauma affects memory.) The fact that the journalistic "scandal" got more public attention than the original story should give us pause. And the narrative that is playing out in the story's wake -- the one that says the college campus rape crisis is nothing more than a hoax perpetrated by the left -- is disturbing. (emphasis mine)

The statement is breathtaking in its dishonesty and arrogance, and it shines a huge spotlight on the so-called Christian Left. As we have found out, the story was a total lie, from Jackie's attempt to fabricate a boyfriend to her account. And, no, it was not due to faulty memory due to trauma, no matter what Wallis wants to claim. But the next point -- that the original story should be front-and-center even though it was a lie -- tells the reader that Wallis and his movement prefer lies to the truth.

But that is what it seems that the Left wants on campus these days. The president of UVA, whose university was slandered and portrayed in the worst light possible, is disappointed that UVA is not full of vicious rapists waiting to attack young women, throw them through glass tables, and leave them wallowing in their own blood. Jim Wallis says that even though the story is not true, we essentially should believe it anyway, because it fits the Wallis narrative.

When we read things like this, it is not hard to understand why hoaxes occur; people want these lies to be the truth. While I doubt that Samiha Khanna, Anne Blythe, and Sabrina Erdely will have their by-lines on the next fake rape story to hit the press, I have no doubt that such stories are the wave of the future. As P.T. Barnum famously declared, "There's a sucker born every minute," and American journalists anxiously await their next opportunity to be part of a hoax and to play their readers as suckers.
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William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.