Month: December 2014

Rolling
Stone has admitted that Sabrina Rubin
Erdely’s story,
“A Rape on Campus,” contains enough inaccuracies to render the
narrative‘s central allegation
effectively false. The editor‘s note that
precedes the article is now more than 600 words long; it
concedes—over and over again—that
Jackie‘s narrative as printed in the
story is untrue, that key players and events either don’t exist or
didn’t take place, and that multiple on-record sources dispute
Erdely’s reporting.

Why on earth has the story not been fully retracted yet?

Here is what the editor’s note—which is constantly evolving to
provide an up-to-date record of the story’s thorough debunking—now
claims:

Last month, Rolling Stone published a
story entitled A Rape on Campus, which described a brutal gang rape
of a woman named Jackie during a party at a University of
Virginia fraternity house, the
University‘s failure to respond to this
alleged assault – and the school‘s
troubling history of indifference to many other instances of
alleged sexual assaults. The story generated worldwide headlines
and much soul-searching at UVA.
University president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation
and also to examine the way the school investigates sexual assault
allegations.

Because of the sensitive nature of
Jackie‘s story, we decided to honor her request not to
contact the man who she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor
any of the men who she claimed participated in the attack for fear
of retaliation against her. In the months Sabrina Rubin
Erdely reported the story, Jackie said or did nothing
that made her, or Rolling
Stone‘s editors and fact-checkers,
question her credibility. Jackie’s friends and rape activists on
campus strongly supported her account. She had spoken of the
assault in  campus forums. We reached out to both the local
branch and the national leadership of Phi Psi, the fraternity where
Jackie said she was attacked. They responded
that they couldn’t confirm or deny her story but that
they had questions about the evidence. 

In the face of new information reported by
the Washington Post and other news outlets,
there now appear to be discrepancies
in Jackie’s account. The fraternity has issued a
formal statement denying the assault and asserting that
there was no “date function or formal event” on the night in
question. Jackie herself is now unsure if the man she says
lured her into the room where the rape occurred, identified in the
story as “Drew,” was a Phi Psi brother. According to
the Washington Post, “Drew” actually belongs to a
different fraternity and when contacted by the paper, he denied
knowing Jackie. Jackie told Rolling Stone that
after she was assaulted, she ran into “Drew” at a
UVA pool where they both worked as
lifeguards. In its statement, Phi Psi says none of its members
worked at the pool in the fall of 2012. A friend of
Jackie’s (who we were told would not speak
to Rolling Stone) told
the Washington Post that he
found Jackie that night a mile from the school’s
fraternities. She did not appear to be “physically
injured at the time” but was shaken. She told him that that she had
been forced to have oral sex with a group of
men at a fraternity party, but he does not remember her identifying
a specific house. Other friends of Jackie’s told
the Washington Post that they now have doubts
about her narrative, but Jackie told the Washington
Post that she firmly stands by the account she gave to
Erdely. 

We published the article with the firm belief that it was
accurate. Given all of these reports, however, we have
come to the conclusion that we were mistaken in honoring
Jackie‘s request to not contact the
alleged assaulters to get their account.
In trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many
women feel after a sexual assault, we made a judgment – the kind of
judgment reporters and editors make every day. We should have
not made this agreement with Jackie and we should have worked
harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served
by getting the other side of the story. These mistakes are
on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie. We apologize to
anyone who was affected by the story and we will continue to
investigate the events of that evening.

Emphasis added to highlight the latest of Rolling
Stone‘s admitted sins.
Erdely originally reported that
Jackie‘s friends—the ones who urged her
not to go to the police, worried about how their social lives would
be impacted, and wondered why she didn’t enjoy being with “hot Phi
Psi guys”—declined to be interviewed. But those same friends have
now given multiple media interviews in which they claimed that they
would have gladly told their story to
Erdely if given the chance. The above
admission in the editor‘s note suggests
that Erdely did not actually try to
contact the friends at all, perhaps taking
Jackie‘s word for it that they were
unwilling to talk.

These friends have, of course, contradicted virtually all of
Jackie’s claims, from the details of the alleged crime (coerced
vaginal sex and with nine perpetrators vs. coerced oral sex with
five perpetrators) to Jackie’s state immediately after (battered
and bloodied vs. shaken but not bleeding) to the argument over
whether to call the police (Jackie said her friends talked her out
of it, the friends say they were dialing 911 when Jackie
stopped them.) The friends have also questioned Jackie’s odd
behavior prior to the alleged crimes, and have put forth a credible
narrative—backed up by the The Washington Post—suggesting
that she went to great lengths to invent a fictional suitor. As

I explained on CNN’s Michael
Smerconish show on Saturday, these
developments support a “catfishing”
explanation.

Rolling Stone is apparently re-reporting the story,
according to
WaPost‘s

Erik Wemple. Presumably,
that entails doing all the work its staff should have done before
publishing such incredible—and, as it turns out, demonstrably
false—claims. The magazine has given little reason for anyone to
believe it’s capable of such feats of competent journalism, but
should begin by penning what everyone else has already realized is
necessary: a full retraction. No more mealy-mouthed statements like
“our trust was misplaced” in Jackie (as the editors initially
claimed), or “we were mistaken” in reporting details
pursuant to Jackie’s demands (as they now
claim).

More from Reason on this subject
here.

Question: What explosive device presents zero
threat to anyone?

Answer: An empty rifle shell. And yet, a student at Chanute
Elementary School in Chanute, Kansas, was just suspended for five
days for bringing one to school. His mom told The Chanute
Tribune that Principal Gary Wheeler said her son got
off easy. He could have given the boy 168 days to cool his
heels.

(Which sounds suspiciously like a plea bargain made by a corrupt
D.A.)

But anyway: Why would a boy have a rifle shell with him at all,
if he wasn’t some kind of gun-crazed threat to all child-kind?

Carlson said her son, Camron Carlson, was out with her the night
before, Tuesday Dec. 2, where she was sighting a rifle for deer
hunting season with a friend, and he picked up one of the empty
shell casings and put it in his pocket. 

Carlson said her son had told his friends that they had been
sighting rifles the night before, and that the shell casing fell
out of his pocket.

“There was no threat,” she said. “My child’s never been in a
fight at school. He was just being a boy and bragging because it’s
cool.”

The reporter, Joshua Vail, does a good job of tracking down the
school handbook, which states that the punishment for a minor
infraction is supposed to be detention, talking to the student
and/or parent notification. Punishment for carrying a weapon or
ammo is 186-day expulsion.

Except a spent shell is not ammo any more than ashes are
fireworks. Who’s the person in this story in need of an
education? 

Anyway, if all this
sounds eerily familiar, perhaps you are recalling the 2008 case in
Winchendon, Mass., when Bradley Geslak, age 10, received a 5-day
suspension for bringing a rifle shell casing he got from a vet at
his town’s Memorial Day celebration. In that
incident, according to the local News
Telegram:

The family said they were also told that the next step
might involve assigning a probation officer to
Bradley.

Ah, the wisdom of our elders: Treating kids as criminals when
there was zero intent and zero harm. That’s zero tolerance for
you.

• Taliban
  gunmen attacked a Pakistani public school Tuesday morning,
  killing at least 126 people—mostly children and teens—at the
  military-run facility.
• John Yoo, a primary author of the Bush-era Justice Department
  memos authorizing torture, gave a ‘whoa, if true’ to
  the Senate report on CIA interrogation
  practices and suggested that CIA agents may be “at
  risk legally.”
• Google says death threats
  don’t trump copyright.
• New York magazine’s tale of a boy-wonder investor
  worth $72 million turns out
  to have been completely false.
• The Senate
  confirmed 37-year-old Vivek Murthy—founder of the pro-Obamacare
  group Doctors for America and an advocate for gun control—as
  surgeon general on Monday night, overcoming strong opposition from
  the National Rifle Association and Republican leaders.
• Do workers suffer when big chain stores overtake small, indie
  retailers? Not
  as far as wages are concerned, Stanford researchers have
  found.
• Pregnant women addicted to opioids in Tennessee say
  they’re avoiding prenatal care now that the state has
  criminalized giving birth to a baby that tests positive for
  drugs. One of the mothers that was arrested committed suicide in
  November.
• Why are China’s largest state-owned property developers
  
  investing in affordable housing in Brooklyn?

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President Obama’s recent order deferring the
deportation of up to 5 million undocumented immigrants has led to
enormous controversy. Many, especially on the political right,
argue that it undermines the rule of law. The president, they
contend, is required to enforce federal law as written, not pick
and choose which violators to go after and which to exempt based on
policy considerations.

In reality, writes George Mason University law professor Ilya
Somin, Obama’s actions were well within the scope of executive
authority under the Constitution. In a world where authorities can
prosecute only a small fraction of lawbreakers, all presidents
inevitably make policy choices about which violations of federal
law to prosecute and which to ignore. Such choices are inevitably
affected by policy preferences. Obama’s decision to defer
deportation is in line with those of past presidents. And if any
lawbreakers deserve to benefit from prosecutorial discretion,
immigrants fleeing Third World poverty and oppression have a
particularly strong case. Moreover, at least under the original
meaning of the Constitution, the constitutionality of the
immigration laws that Obama has chosen not to enforce in some
cases, is itself suspect.

View this article.