“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

On November 19, 2014, prize-winning journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely published the result of months of “investigative journalism” (quotation marks deliberate) as A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at U-VA (now retracted and deleted from their site) in Rolling Stone magazine.

Addendum #1 details latest discrepancies in Jackie’s fast-unraveling story.

Addendum #2 is the email from Jackie that “Haven/Drew” forwarded to Ryan Duffin.

Addendum #3 includes some of the US Senate testimony of Emily Renda, the U-VA employee who put Sabrina Erdely in touch with Jackie.

Addendum #4 explains the origin and baselessness of the 1 in 5 college rape statistic.

Addendum #5 follows up with the best oveview of the The Campus Rape Culture Myth.

Addendum #6 address the 2011 DOE Dear Colleague Letter, the Campus SaVE Act, & the Harvard Law Professors’ Letter Opposing Campus Sexual Assault Policies Based on Them

Conclusion: What’s To Be Done?

Postscript: The 600 Pound Gorilla Nobody Wants to Face – Binge Drinking



Case Effectively Closed: Police Find No Evidence to Support Rape Story

Epilogue: The Columbia Journalism School Review of Rolling Stone

(and my commentary on Columbia’s report, indicting them for similar malfeasance)

[Check back frequently, as this article is updated regularly.]

For a more in-depth expose of the evolution of institutions of higher learning into witch-hunt tribunals for the “rape culture” advocates, see my latest essays:

New Puritanism – New Paternalism

The Pendulum Reverses – Again : Men Strike Back against Title IX Tribunals

Her 9,000-word article was received with general acclaim and contributed to the national discussion about what has often been described as an epidemic of campus rape and the failure of school administrations to respond to it appropriately.

It also led to the suspension of all fraternity functions on the U-VA campus, several public meetings to discuss and respond to the crisis caused by the national spotlight on this genteel Southern university founded by Thomas Jefferson, student demonstrations, and a quick commitment on the part of U-VA president Teresa Sullivan to make the safety of students the highest priority.

[Seventeen attorneys involved with campus sexual assault claims throughout America wrote a letter to U-VA President Teresa Sullivan detailing specific reasons why they “are concerned that the University’s Proposed Student Sexual Misconduct Policy is both vastly over inclusive in attempting to define prohibited conduct and ill equipped to guarantee a procedure for resolving allegations that is fair and impartial”.]

And it resulted in the vandalism of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house by a group of U-VA terrorists.

In the wee morning hours after Rolling Stone’s story roiled the University of Virginia campus, a masked group of five women and three men unleashed their fury on the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the center of the controversy.

Bottles and bricks were tossed through nearly every first-floor window, sending shards of glass and crashing sounds into the house around 2:30 AM on November 20. Profane, hate messages such as “Fuck Boys” were spray-painted on the walls of the colonial facade, along with anti-sexual assault epithets such as “suspend us”, and “UVA Center for Rape Studies”. The fraternity house had to be evacuated and all residents relocated.

Yet more than a month after the attack, no arrests have been made and no charges have been filed, even though the cell phone of one of the group was found at the site of the vandalism.

The progeny of a privileged family, alleged to be the ringleader of the group (who spoke to the Washington Times under an agreement he wouldn’t be named) said his friends sent an anonymous letter to various news organizations several hours after the attack warning that it was “just the beginning” and threatening to “escalate and provoke until certain demands were met,” including “an immediate revision of university policy mandating expulsion as the only sanction for rape and sexual assault”.

The University of Virginia, which previously issued suspensions for findings of fault in school-sponsored tribunal rape cases, changed its penalty to expulsion shortly after the attackers’ threats were published.

The first cracks in Erderly’s story appeared on November 24, when former George editor and current editor-in-chief of Worth, Richard Bradley, published a piece on his blog called “Is the Rolling Stone Story True?”

Bradley had suffered the misfortune of collaborating with writer Stephen Glass at George magazine (co-founded by John F. Kennedy, Jr.). In 1998, it was revealed that as many as half of Glass’ published articles were fabrications, and Bradley developed a skeptical sixth sense from that embarrassment.

In applying that skeptical perspective to Erderly’s story, too much of it began to raise questions about her journalistic objectivity and integrity, and she seemed to suffer from the same kind of “confirmation bias” that allowed Bradley to fall victim to the journalistic inventions of Glass.

Bradley wrote about the sensational campus rape story that formed the lede and the core of the Rolling Stone article, “The only thing is…I’m not sure that I believe it. I’m not convinced that this gang rape actually happened. Something about this story doesn’t feel right.”

Bradley continued, “Let me be very clear: I don’t doubt that it’s possible that this happened. People can do terrible things, things that one doesn’t want to believe happen. And I certainly don’t want to think that this could have happened. But more than that: I don’t believe that it happened – certainly not in the way that it is recounted… Remember: One must be most critical about stories that play into existing biases. And this story nourishes a lot of them: biases against fraternities, against men, against the South; biases about the naivete of young women, especially Southern women; pre-existing beliefs about the prevalence – indeed, the existence – of rape culture; extant suspicions about the hostility of university bureaucracies to sexual assault complaints that can produce unflattering publicity.”

On November 28, Paul Farhi, The Washington Post’s media reporter, wrote:

Magazine writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely knew she wanted to write about sexual assaults at an elite university. What she didn’t know was which university.

So, for six weeks starting in June, Erdely interviewed students from across the country. She talked to people at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. None of those schools felt quite right. But one did: the University of Virginia, a public school, Southern and genteel, brimming with what Erdely calls “super-smart kids” and steeped in the legacy of its founder, Thomas Jefferson.

What Erdely eventually found in Charlottesville shocked her, and it eventually shocked the nation.

In a searing investigative piece published by Rolling Stone magazine last week, Erdely told the story of Jackie, who as a first-year student was allegedly gang-raped by seven men at a U-VA fraternity party in 2012.

Farhi also noted that “One of the many remarkable things about Erdely’s article is that no one had reported it before.”

But Farhi praised Erdely’s journalistic effort, writing how:

Ederly spent weeks corroborating details of Jackie’s account, including such minutiae as her work as a lifeguard. She concluded: “I find her completely credible. It’s impossible to know for certain what happened in that room, because I wasn’t in it. But I certainly believe that she described an experience that was incredibly traumatic to her.

Farhi, however, also offered mild criticism:

Some elements of the story, however, are apparently too delicate for Erdely to talk about now. She won’t say, for example, whether she knows the names of Jackie’s alleged attackers or whether in her reporting she approached “Drew”, the alleged ringleader, for comment. She is bound to silence about those details, she said, by an agreement with Jackie, who “is very fearful of these men, in particular Drew”.

The story does take one journalistic shortcut. The alleged assault, described in graphic detail, is presented largely without traditional qualifiers, such as “according to Jackie” or “allegedly”. The absence of such attribution or qualification leaves the impression that the events in question are undisputed facts, rather than accusations. Erdely said, however, that her writing style makes it clear that the events are being told from Jackie’s point of view.

Then, on December 1, Robby Soave (staff editor at Reason.com. focusing on college news, education policy, and criminal justice reform) published “Is the U-VA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?” at Reason.com.

Soave reported on the critical reviews of both Bradley and Farhi, and goes on to say:

I have no reason to disbelieve Erdely, and I understand why she would choose not to disclose anyone’s identity. But she should be able to confirm that she knows who the attackers are, shouldn’t she? Again, we don’t have to know who they are, but we should know that she knows – or else the story is just one long uncorroborated accusation. And regardless of whether or not the story is told “from Jackie’s point of view”, it was written by Erdely, who treats its contents as fact.

Soave explained:

So when I say that I was initially inclined to believe the story, it’s not because I wanted or needed it to be true to fit my worldview. Rather, I assumed honesty on the part of the author and her source – not because I’m naive, but because I didn’t think someone would lie about such an unbelievable story. …

However, some of the details do strike me as perplexing on subsequent re-reads. One issue now being raised by skeptics is the nature of her injuries, which sound as if they would have required immediate medical attention. (According to the story, everybody involved was basically rolling around in broken glass for hours.)

And he concluded with a constructive conclusion and a willingness to suspend judgment:

Universities should be divorced from the rape adjudication process, regardless of what actually happened at U-VA that night. That said, I’ll be following any and all developments in this case, and am eager to see this particular story either confirmed as true or exposed as a hoax.

Suddenly, the feminist backlash began. The first was Anna Merlan on Jezebel (“Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing.” owned by Gawker Media) on December 1, with “‘Is the U-VA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?’ Asks Idiot”

Merlan not only calls Bradley an “idiot” in the title of her piece, but goes on to say that “Soave at Reason – who has previously written that much of the campus sexual assault crisis is just ‘criminalizing campus sex’ – takes Bradley’s giant ball of shit and runs with it.”

She concludes:

In summary, what we have here are two dudes who have some vague suspicions and, on that basis, are implying that Ederley either fabricated her story or failed to do her due diligence and didn’t fact check what Jackie told her. …

But never mind Erdely’s months of work. Two guys who have no idea what they’re talking about don’t believe it. Case closed.

After Rolling Stone issued it’s public apology, which fell far short of a retraction (they did not change or pull the original article and appeared to shift blame to the story’s subject, the anonymous “Jackie”), Merlan was forced to issue her own:

This is really, really bad. It means, of course, that when I dismissed Richard Bradley and Robby Soave’s doubts about the story and called them “idiots” for picking apart Jackie’s account, I was dead fucking wrong, and for that I sincerely apologize. It means that my conviction that Sabrina Rubin Erdely had fact-checked her story in ways that were not visible to the public was also wrong. It’s bad, bad, bad all around. …

But then she concludes with the usual concern of the proponents of the “rape culture” meme:

Saddest of all, this is bad in ways that have far-reaching social consequences: we’ve just begun, as a society, to not immediately and harshly question a woman who says she was raped.

No concern about the reputations and lives ruined, sometimes irredeemably, by false allegations. No concern about the upheaval that the U-VA community went through nor about the defamation of the fraternity. No concern about the scientifically-documented prevalence of false rape allegations, particularly acquaintance rape and campus rape. But only concern that the dogma of “always believe the rape victim” might be sullied.

Richard Bradley was also immediately declared a “U-VA truther” by New York magazine contributing writer Marin Cogan, who compared him to 9/11 conspiracy theorists for even questioning Erdely’s story, despite the fact that Bradley included plenty of caveats that Erderly (and Jackie) might be telling the truth. Cogan has since apologized for using the term and acknowledged she was wrong about the story.

But others, like feminist writer Amanda Marcotte (who in 2007 wrote that people who defended the Duke lacrosse team were “rape-loving scum”), have merely shifted focus to how “rape apologists” will greet the news of Rolling Stone’s admission of their report’s shortcomings. (“Recommend everyone who expects victims to have perfect memory sit down and construct, word for word, the last dinner conversation they had,” she tweeted after Rolling Stone’s recantation.)

The lesson Marcotte drew from the magazine’s climbdown was that it was “interesting that rape apologists think that if they can ‘discredit’ one rape story, that means no other rape stories can be true, either.” While others were debating the failings of Rolling Stone’s process, Marcotte was railing against “rape apologists [who] are so sure rapes are hoaxes…”

In an appearance on HuffPo Live, Marcotte took aim at those demanding more reporting of Jackie’s story, which she claims is actually meant to prevent victims from coming forward: “The irony is that all these accusations that all the facts aren’t out are aimed at discouraging investigation and reporting things that gets the facts out.”

Only a true demagogue could argue that authentic investigative journalism is intended to prevent the facts from emerging.

Still others attempted to turn the focus away from Jackie onto the magazine that credulously told her story. The Guardian’s Jessica Valenti – always one to propagate the “rape culture” and “rape apologist” memes – excoriated Rolling Stone on Twitter: “Kudos on throwing this young woman under the bus for your failures. Assholes.”

In spite of the absurdist allegations of the militant feminist camp, a flurry of critical articles began to appear in a wide spectrum of media outlets.

“Rolling Stone Never Gave the Villains of Its Gang Rape Story a Chance to Defend Themselves” by Judith Shulevitz, December 1 in the New Republic

“The Missing Men: Why didn’t a Rolling Stone writer talk to the alleged perpetrators of a gang rape at the University of Virginia?” by Allison Benedikt and Hanna Rosin, December 2 in Slate.

“Rolling Stone’s omission in U-VA article proves problematic: It should serve as a warning to journalists who report on rape to be extra cautious” by Lene Bech Sillesen, December 2 in the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review.

“Why It Was Right to Question Rolling Stone’s U-VA Rape Story” by Michael Moynihan, December 5 at the Daily Beast.

In his pointed article, Moynihan intoned:

One cannot wade into issues like this, it seems, without standing accused of wanting to uncover a hoax in an order to deny the existence of sexual assault on campus. On the cruder end, those investigating Jackie’s claims are being denounced as “rape denialists” complicit in “rape victim smearing”.

That word “denialism” is particularly profane, with its unsubtle invocation of the Holocaust. And it doesn’t take long for subtlety to be ditched in favor of the blunt instrument of Reductio ad Hitlerum.

If you think something doesn’t smell right about the story, keep those doubts to yourself; if not, get ready to be accused of being complicit in creating a culture of fear that silences rape victims.

Back in the 1990s, a dean at Vassar College told Time magazine that a false accusation is not only an acceptable price to pay, but might even benefit the falsely accused: “[The wrongly accused] have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. ‘How do I see women?’ ‘If I didn’t violate her, could I have?’ ‘Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?’ Those are good questions.”

After these critical and more responsibly investigated articles appeared, particularly the Washington Post’s due diligence in seeking out those who were involved in the alleged incident in 2012, which Erderly forsook, Rolling Stone was forced to issue an apology:

To Our Readers:

Last month, Rolling Stone published a story titled “A Rape on Campus” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie 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 U-VA University president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation and also to examine the way the school responds to sexual assault allegations.

Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her. In the months Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made Erdely, or Rolling Stone’s editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie’s credibility. Her friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported Jackie’s account. She had spoken of the assault in campus forums. We reached out to both the local branch and the national leadership of the fraternity where Jackie said she was attacked. They responded that they couldn’t confirm or deny her story but had concerns about the evidence.

In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.

Will Dana

Managing Editor

After receiving scathing criticism for seemingly shifting the blame to Jackie for being unworthy of trust (which has since been established to be true), the Rolling Stone apology was changed twice. The final paragraph was replaced with this:

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.

However, as late as December 2, Rolling Stone was still defending their work, with Erdely telling the NY Times that “I am convinced that it could not have been done any other way, or any better. I am also not interested in diverting the conversation away from the point of the piece itself.”

The real scandal, she said, is that the university administration did not pursue the accusations further, ignoring that Dean Nicole Eramo, head of U-VA’s Sexual Misconduct Board to whom Jackie had gone, offered the student three options – from filing a police report to either a formal campus adjudication or an informal dialogue with the accused students and some kind of sanction – none of which Jackie accepted.

Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana had written:”Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her.”

In “How Rolling Stone failed in its story of alleged rape at the University of Virginia”, Paul Farhi of the Washington Post wrote about Dana’s statement that “like the story itself, is not entirely accurate”:

In interviews with The Washington Post and Slate, Erdely never asserted that she had agreed not to speak to the men in question – only that she wouldn’t name them in her story or talk about them afterward. Jackie “asked me not to name the individuals because she’s so fearful of them,” she told The Post. “That was something we agreed to. She was nervous to name the fraternity, too. I told her, ‘If we’re trying to shine light on this, we have to name the fraternity.’ ”

In fact, Erdely and her editor, Sean Woods, later acknowledged that the magazine had tried to find the men but failed to do so. “We did not talk to them,” Woods said. “We could not reach them.”

That should have been a red flag. In essence, neither writer nor editor could warrant that the men alleged to have committed a terrible crime actually existed.

Earlier this week, according to Lene Bech Sillesen of the Columbia Journalism Review, the editor of the Rolling Stone story, Sean Woods, told the Washington Post about the men Jackie was accusing: “I’m satisfied that these guys exist and are real. We knew who they were.” But the Washington Post reported later that Jackie never told anyone who they were until the first week of December.

Later, on December 5, Dana tweeted that Rolling Stone should have “either not made this agreement with Jackie,” or “worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story.”

As Washington Post media correspondent, Erik Wemple, wrote, “The story and Erdely’s comments about it, moreover, suggest an effort to produce impact journalism… In the case, of Erdely’s piece, however, there’s ample evidence of poisonous biases that landed Rolling Stone in what should be an existential crisis.”

In an unsigned opinion piece titled “Like a Rolling Stone: A charge of rape at U-VA unravels, and so does a political narrative” in the December 6 Wall Street Journal, the author writes:

The larger problem, however, is that Ms. Erderly was, by her own admission, looking for a story to fit a pre-existing narrative – in this case, the supposed epidemic of sexual assault at elite universities, along with the presumed indifference of those schools to the problem. As the Washington Post noted in an admiring profile of Ms. Erdely, she interviewed students at several elite universities before alighting on U-VA, “a public school, Southern and genteel”.

In other words, Ms. Erdely did not construct a story based on facts, but went looking for facts to fit her theory.

In yet another stunning example of confirmation bias, Kat Stoeffel published “The U-VA Gang-Rape Backlash Is a Trap for Feminists”, in New York Magazine’s The Cut on December 3:

From Reason to The New Republic, journalists are fretting about the sourcing hazards of a narrative story about a sexual assault that depends heavily on the victim’s account, in case this one turns out to be an elaborate hoax. Their skepticism of writer Sabrina Erdely mirrors the disproportionate scrutiny that sexual assault victims face at the hands of the police. …

And compared with how many sexual assaults go unreported, there’s an outsize paranoia about false reports of rape, which has been frustratingly hard to shut down empirically. As Megan McArdle explained, it’s a “dark number,” possibly unknowable. Also mysterious is the motive a woman would have for fabricating a gang rape, talking about it in a campus support group, then anonymously sharing it with a journalist… Jackie stands to gain neither fame nor revenge. Aside from some canceled parties, no young man’s future has been imperiled by the story. …

At this point, the benefits of believing Jackie if she is telling the truth (forcing reform at U-VA, encouraging other women to come forward) outweigh the risks of believing Jackie if she is lying (unnecessary wariness about Phi Kappa Psi)…

Meanwhile, the journalist backlash is putting feminists who believe in believing women in the uncomfortable position of hoping Jackie told the truth about her gang rape. Not because we want to confirm our biases about monstrous men, but because we’d hate to see confirmation for sexist biases about lying, attention-seeking women… If anything, we should hope that Jackie is lying. Then exactly zero lives will have been ruined in this story.

My comment to Stoeffel’s revelatory screed was:

In fact, anti-rape activists and rape-victim advocates ARE always looking to confirm their bias, just as Erderly did in her yellow journalism article.

The perception of “lying, attention seeking women” is NOT from bias, but from the best research done on false rape allegations, which have been proven to be as high as 50% on college campuses.

Unfounded and False Rape Allegations

Anti-rape activists routinely state that the rate of false rape allegations is 2%.

FBI reports consistently put the number of “unfounded” rape accusations (“unfounded” meaning that police investigation did not support the claim) at around 8%. That rate is, however, four times the average rate of unfounded reports for all FBI Index crimes.

Objective and conservative studies have shown a far higher proportion of documented false rape allegations: McDowell (Air Force, 1985) 27%, Buckley (DC, 1992) 24%, Kanin (small Midwestern town in which polygraphs were used, 1994) 41%, Kanin (two large Midwestern state universities) 50%. The allegations were determined to be false only upon credible recantation by the complainant, often just before being offered a polygraph test or after failing a polygraph test.

In the McDowell Study, a follow-up evaluation was performed on the “inconclusive” cases by three independent reviewers, based on a list of 25 criteria that were common among the women who had acknowledged they lied. In order for any of the inconclusive cases to be recategorized as false, all three independent reviewers had to agree that it was false. This increased the percentage of false allegations to 60%.

In the study of false rape allegations in the Midwestern town and state universities, more than half of the accusers fabricated the rape to serve as a “cover story” or alibi, following consensual sex with an acquaintance that led to some sort of problem for the accuser, such as contracting a sexually transmitted disease or becoming pregnant. The next most common reason was revenge, rage, or retribution (27% of the non-student and 44% of the student accusers). The Air Force study also found that spite or revenge and the need to compensate for a sense of personal failure were the primary motives for false rape reports.

Peter Neufeld and Barry C. Scheck are prominent criminal attorneys and co-founders of the Innocence Project that seeks to release those falsely imprisoned. They stated, “Every year since 1989, in about 25% of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI where results could be obtained, the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing. FBI officials report that out of roughly 10,000 sexual assault cases since 1989, about 2,000 tests have been inconclusive, about 2,000 tests have excluded the primary suspect, and about 6,000 have ‘matched’ or included the primary suspect.”

The authors continued, “these percentages have remained constant for 7 years, and the National Institute of Justice’s informal survey of private laboratories reveals a strikingly similar 26% exclusion rate.”

Wendy McElroy, the editor of ifeminists.com, a research fellow for The Independent Institute in Oakland CA, and the editor of Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the 21st Century (2002) wrote:

“Several years ago, I tried to track down the origin of the much-cited statistic that two percent of all rape reports are false. The first instance I found of the figure was in Susan Brownmiller’s book on sexual assault entitled Against Our Will (1975). Brownmiller claimed that false accusations in New York City had dropped to 2% after police departments began using policewomen to interview alleged victims. Elsewhere, the 2% figure appears without citation or with only a vague attribution to ‘FBI’ sources. Although the figure shows up in legislation such as the Violence Against Women Act, legal scholar Michelle Anderson of Villanova University Law School reported in 2004, “no study has ever been published which sets forth an evidentiary basis for the 2% false rape complaint thesis.”

Biased Crime Data

Effective January 1, 2013, the FBI changed the definition of rape that is used in the collection of national crime statistics. The old definition was “The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” The new definition of rape is: “Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

While this new definition of criminal rape for the first time eliminates the female-only blinders, it is still limited to penetration of the victim and excludes male victims “made to penetrate” a female perpetrator (which a 2011 CDC study indicates happens at least as often to men as rape happens to women).

Rape of Males



If any unwanted or not fully consensual sexual activity is defined now as rape, then more men then women are victims of rape and most of their victimizers are women.

An article about college students published in the Journal of Sex Research Vol. 31, No. 2 (1994), noted that Muehlenhard and Cook (1988) found that 46% of women and 63% of men had acquiesced to unwanted sexual intercourse, while Muehlenhard and Long (1988) also found that more men (49%) than women (40%) had engaged in unwanted sex. Muehlenhard and Rodgers (1993) found that 34% of women reported having engaged in token resistance to sex, in which they said “no” when they really desired to have sex. US women acknowledge a 55% rate of consent to unwanted sex, which is consistent with the findings of 50% false rape allegations in university studies.

[Charlene L. Muehlenhard, PhD, the author of all those studies, is a Professor of Psychology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Fellow in Three Divisions of the American Psychological Association (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Society for the Psychology of Women, Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues), and a Fellow in the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality]

According to a 2014 paper published in the American Psychological Association journal, Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 43% of high school and college-aged men say they’ve had “unwanted sexual contact”, and 95% of those say a female acquaintance was the aggressor.

Researchers found that 18% reported sexual coercion by force (including by use of weapon), 31% said they were verbally coerced into sex, 26% said they’d experienced unwanted seduction, and 7% said they were compelled after being given alcohol or drugs.

Dr. Bryana French, who teaches counseling psychology and black studies at University of Missouri and co-authored the study, says that male victims are often less willing to describe sexual coercion in detail, “but when asked if it happened, they say it happened”.

French said, “Seduction was a particularly salient and potentially unique form of coercion for teenage boys and young men when compared to their female counterparts.”



The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions is co-authored by Lara Stemple, Health and Human Rights Law Project, UCLA, and Ilan H. Meyer, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law.

The authors assessed 12-month prevalence of sexual victimization from five federal surveys conducted, independently, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2010 through 2012. The review of these surveys provides an unprecedented wealth of new data about male victimization, challenging long-held stereotypes about the sex of victims.

In one of the studies included in the analysis, the CDC found that an estimated 1.3 million women experienced nonconsensual sex, or rape, in the previous year. Notably, nearly the same number of men also reported nonconsensual sex. In comparison to the number of women who were raped, nearly 1.3 million men were “made to penetrate” someone else. The CDC data reveal that both women and men experienced nonconsensual sex in alarming and equal numbers.

The study also included the 2012 National Crime Victimization Survey, which found that 38% of all reported rape and sexual assault incidents were committed against males, an increase over past years that challenges the common belief that males are rarely victims of this crime.

“These findings are striking, yet misconceptions about male victimization persist. We identified reasons for this, which include the over-reliance on traditional gender stereotypes, outdated and inconsistent definitions used by some federal agencies, and methodological sampling biases.”

The 2011 CDC analysis referred to in the 2014 report found that 6.7% of men (7.6 million) reported that they were made to penetrate someone else, and that 82.6% of male victims of “made to penetrate” events and 80% of male victims of sexual coercion reported female perpetrators, meaning they were raped by a woman, according to the current and broadly accepted definition of rape as any unwanted sexual encounter.

The CDC report’s statistics for the preceding 12 months showed that a higher percentage of men were “made to penetrate” (1.7%) than women were raped (1.6%), such that if you properly include “made to penetrate” in the definition of rape, men were raped by women at least as often as women were raped by men.

The Problem of “Gray Rape”

A 2014 White House report on campus rape states that, when women report unwanted sexual activity, “most often (about 9 out of 10 times) it’s by someone she knows – and also most often, she does not report what happened” because in half of all cases they “don’t call what happened to them rape”. They don’t call it rape because it involves an acquaintance and ambiguous or vague consent.

In the 1994 book, The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism, author Katie Roiphe asserted, “There is a gray area in which one person’s rape may be another’s bad night.”

Laura Sessions Stepp, Washington Post journalist, wrote a 2007 article on “gray rape” describing sexual encounters where usually both parties were very drunk and really didn’t know what they had said to each other the next morning. In such cases, consent by either party is uncertain, but the standard today is that only the man is held accountable for the consequences.

A research report in the May, 1988 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that undergraduate college women saying “no” but meaning “yes” was acknowledged by 39.3% of the women, with reasons being either practical, inhibition-related, or manipulative.

A research report in the March 1995 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that 83% of token resistant women had more than one sexual intention during the episode, and the authors concluded that most token resistant behavior is a change of intention that is poorly recalled because of memory consolidation.

Gynocentrism, Misandry and The Pernicious Myth of “Rape Culture”

What this sordid episode in journalistic advocacy revealed is the depth and breadth of penetration into America’s cultural institutions – from popular culture to academia, media and government – of the memes of women as victim and men as vicious. So much is this true, that an otherwise exceptional journalist could publish such a story without fact-checking because it not only confirmed her own biases but it was assumed that her bias was so widely shared that no one would challenge it.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely is a two-time National Magazine Award nominee – the writer’s equivalent of an Academy Award and just short of Pulitzer in the journalism trade. She’s a University lecturer, teaching courses at the prestigious University of Pennsylvania and at Temple University. And she writes for the likes of The New Yorker, GQ and Mother Jones.

“She’s one of the most thorough reporters I’ve ever worked with,” said Eliot Kaplan, who hired Erdely at Philadelphia Magazine in 1994. “She’s not a shortcut-taker – very precise, diligent.” Kaplan, now vice president of talent acquisition at Hearst Magazines, recalled that Erdely wrote a number of true-crime stories for him, including one about an obstetrician who molested his patients, and another about a professor’s affair with a student.

Later, at Self magazine, Erdely was the go-to reporter for sensitive issues, according to Sara Austin, her editor there. “She’s hands-down one of the best and smartest journalists I’ve ever worked with,” said Austin, now a senior deputy editor at Cosmopolitan. “She did incredible work for us on very complicated investigations, dealing with people who had often been through illness or trauma or both.”

Lisa DePaulo, a former colleague of Erdely’s at Philadelphia Magazine and a writer at Bloomberg Politics, was incredulous about the attacks on Erdely’s reporting. “As far as I know, there’s never been a piece of hers that was sloppy,” she said. “She’s an absolute pro.”

Yet this widely-respected “pro” overlooked or failed to investigate the most obvious flaws in Jackie’s narrative.

In “Key elements of Rolling Stone’s U-VA gang rape allegations in doubt” by T. Rees Shapiro on December 5 in the Washington Post, these inconsistencies and red flags were detailed:

A group of Jackie’s close friends, who are sex assault awareness advocates at U-VA, said they believe something traumatic happened to her, but they also have come to doubt her account. They said details have changed over time, and they have not been able to verify key points of the story in recent days. A name of an alleged attacker that Jackie provided to them for the first time turned out to be similar to the name of a student who belongs to a different fraternity, and no one by that name has been a member of Phi Kappa Psi… and that other details about his background did not match up with information Jackie had disclosed earlier about her perpetrator.

Phi Kappa Psi said it did not host “a date function or social event” during the weekend of Sept. 28, 2012, the night that Jackie alleges she was invited to a date party, lured into an upstairs room and was then ambushed and gang-raped by seven men who were rushing the fraternity.

The fraternity also said that it has reviewed the roster of employees at the university’s Aquatic and Fitness Center for 2012 and found that it does not list a member of the fraternity – a detail Jackie provided in her account to Rolling Stone and in interviews with The Washington Post – and that no member of the house matches the description detailed in the Rolling Stone account. The statement also said that the house does not have pledges during the fall semester.

Reached by phone, the man named “Drew” whom Jackie described as her date and rape ringleader, a U-VA graduate, said that he did work at the Aquatic and Fitness Center and was familiar with Jackie’s name, but that he had never met Jackie in person and had never taken her on a date. He also said that he was not a member of Phi Kappa Psi.

Alex Pinkleton, a close friend of Jackie’s who survived a rape and an attempted rape during her first two years on campus, said in an interview that she has had numerous conversations with Jackie in recent days and now feels misled.

Emily Renda was a U-VA senior when she first met Jackie in the fall of 2013. In an interview, Renda said she immediately connected with Jackie as they discussed the bond they shared as rape survivors. Renda said she was raped her freshman year after attending a fraternity party. Renda said Thursday [December 4] that Jackie initially told her that she was attacked by five students at Phi Kappa Psi on Sept. 28, 2012. Renda said that she learned months later that Jackie had changed the number of attackers from five to seven.

A student identified as “Andy” in the Rolling Stone article (but who said he never spoke to a Rolling Stone reporter) said that Jackie did call him and two other friends for help a few weeks into the fall semester in 2012, that Jackie said “something bad happened”, that Jackie seemed “really upset, really shaken up”, but disputed other details of that article’s account. Rolling Stone said that the three friends found Jackie in a “bloody dress,” with the Phi Kappa Psi house looming in the background, and that they debated “the social price of reporting Jackie’s rape” before advising against seeking help. He said none of that is accurate.

“Andy” stated that Jackie said she had been at a fraternity party and had been forced to perform oral sex on a group of men, but he does not remember her identifying a specific house. He said he did not notice any injuries or blood, but said the group offered to get her help. She, instead, wanted to return to her dorm, and he and the friends spent the night with her to comfort her at her request.

In “The Missing Men: Why didn’t a Rolling Stone writer talk to the alleged perpetrators of a gang rape at the University of Virginia?”, Allison Benedikt and Hanna Rosin (December 2) wrote:

We’ve interviewed many of Jackie’s friends, including some who were quoted in the Rolling Stone story. They verified that Jackie did get very upset when Erdely wanted to find out more about the alleged assailants. Sara Surface, a good friend of Jackie’s and a member of One Less, a victim advocacy group at U-VA, had the impression that Jackie’s reaction was “extreme” when Erdely pressed her – meaning that Jackie became so terrified that she reconsidered going public with her story, even anonymously.

As Jackie had already made her story relatively public within the U-VA community, this “extreme” reaction to publicity of the specifics of her story may suggest a sudden attack of conscience or the realization that her inconsistencies and evolving narrative would be exposed.

In “What the U-VA Rape Case Tells Us About a Victim Culture Gone Mad” by Lizzie Crocker on December 5 in the Daily Beast, she reports:

Rolling Stone’s admission that its college rape story contained ‘discrepancies’ shows how victim-centric our culture has become – to the exclusion of asking vital questions.

And therein lies the problem: in valorizing Jackie’s trauma as a victim of rape (never mind that she was and remains an alleged victim), Rolling Stone ignored glaring holes in a story that was too good to check.

When journalists did scrutinize what they viewed as weak and one-sided reporting, they were met with accusations of victim-blaming. Some likened their skepticism of Erdely’s piece to police casting undeserved doubt on an alleged rape victim’s story.

We live in a culture that valorizes victims – where to question one woman’s claims of sexual abuse is to be a “rape apologist”…

Question them, and you are colluding in exacerbating the awful effects of their trauma. Question their actions or motives and you are “victim shaming” and “victim blaming”.

“Playing the victim” used to be a term of scorn, now it’s a daily modus operandi to score any number of political and cultural points.

Question those taking on the mantle of victimhood and you are immediately cast as some kind of aggressive, unfeeling oppressor. The sad consequence of a culture of victimhood is that it obscures real victims and obscures the genuinely felt experiences of those victims, whatever they have endured.

The sad and awful truth revealed in the undercurrents of the Rolling Stone tsunami is that a movement which began as a women’s liberation struggle for equal rights and recognition, sparked by Quaker abolitionists who believed that all were equal in God’s eyes – such as Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony – has devolved into an ideology of female victimization at the hands of men and patriarchy. Such an ideology, and the movement built around it, actually diminishes the status of women while vilifying the character of men, thereby militating against the kind of egalitarian and just community that the original feminists envisioned.

The fallout of such devolution or regression to the “mean” (as in nasty and malicious), is just the sort of credulous yellow journalism that Rolling Stone published, in the certain belief that its core message would not be challenged. It is a sign of some hope that such disreputable journalism has been confronted, but that it’s the journalistic ethic more than the (possibly) false rape allegation that is being addressed renders that hope slim indeed.

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ADDENDUM #1



LATEST DEVELOPMENTS – STORY CONTINUES TO UNRAVEL



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In a December 10 Washington Post article, U-Va. students challenge Rolling Stone account of alleged sexual assault By T. Rees Shapiro, further inconsistencies emerge from Jackie’s friends.

Here are the most salient points:

It was 1 AM on a Saturday when the call came from a friend, a University of Virginia freshman who earlier said she had a date that evening with a handsome junior from her chemistry class, was in hysterics. Something bad had happened.

Arriving at her side, three students – “Randall”, “Andy” and “Cindy”, as they were identified in the Rolling Stone account – told The Washington Post that they found their friend in tears. Jackie appeared traumatized, saying her date ended horrifically, with the older student parking his car at his fraternity, asking her to come inside and then forcing her to perform oral sex on five men.

In their first interviews about the events of that September 2012 night, the three friends separately told The Post that their recollections of the encounter diverge from how Rolling Stone portrayed the incident in a story about Jackie’s alleged gang rape at a U-VA fraternity. The three students agreed to be interviewed on the condition that The Post use the same aliases that appeared in Rolling Stone because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Although they did not notice any blood or visible injuries, the friends said they immediately urged Jackie to speak to police and insisted that they find her help. Instead, they said, Jackie declined and asked to be taken back to her dorm room. They went with her – two said they spent the night – seeking to comfort Jackie in what appeared to be a moment of extreme turmoil.

The friends said they were never contacted or interviewed by the Rolling Stone’s reporters or editors. Although vilified in the article as coldly indifferent to Jackie’s ordeal, the students said they cared deeply about their friend’s well-being and safety.

They said there are mounting inconsistencies with the original narrative in the magazine. The students also expressed suspicions about Jackie’s allegations from that night. They said the name she provided as that of her date did not match anyone at the university, and U-VA officials confirmed to The Post that no one by that name has attended the school.

Also, photographs that were texted to one of the friends showing her date that night were actually pictures depicting one of Jackie’s high school classmates in Northern Virginia. That man, now a junior at a university in another state, confirmed that the photographs were of him and said he barely knew Jackie and hasn’t been to Charlottesville for at least six years.

They also said information Jackie gave the three friends about one of her attackers, called “Drew” in the magazine’s article, differ significantly from details she later told The Post, Rolling Stone and friends from sexual assault awareness groups on campus. The three said Jackie did not specifically identify a fraternity that night.

The Rolling Stone article also said that Randall declined to be interviewed, “citing his loyalty to his own frat”. He told The Post that he was never contacted by Rolling Stone and would have agreed to an interview.

Randall said he met Jackie shortly after arriving at U-VA in fall 2012 and the two struck up a quick friendship. He said Jackie was interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with him; he valued her friendship but wasn’t interested in more.

The three friends said Jackie soon began talking about a handsome junior from chemistry class who had a crush on her and had been asking her out on dates. Intrigued, Jackie’s friends got his phone number from her and began exchanging text messages with the mysterious upperclassman, who raved to them about “this super smart hot” freshman. Some of the messages included photographs of a man with a sculpted jaw line and ocean-blue eyes. The student texted that he was jealous that another student had apparently won Jackie’s attention.

Randall said it is apparent to him that he is the “first year” student that the chemistry upperclassman described in text messages, since he had rebuffed Jackie’s advances.

Jackie told her three friends that she accepted the upperclassman’s invitation for a dinner date on Friday, Sept. 28, 2012. Curious about Jackie’s date, the friends said that they tried to find the student on a U-VA database and social media but failed. Andy, Cindy and Randall all said they never met the student in person. Before Jackie’s date, the friends became suspicious that perhaps they hadn’t really been in contact with the chemistry student at all, they said.

After the alleged attack, the chemistry student whom Jackie identified as her date wrote an e-mail to Randall, passing along praise that Jackie apparently had for him.

U-VA officials told The Post that no student with the name Jackie provided to her friends as her date and attacker in 2012 had ever enrolled at the university.

Randall provided The Post with pictures that Jackie’s purported date had sent of himself by text message in 2012. The Post identified the person in the pictures and learned that his name does not match the one Jackie gave friends in 2012. In an interview, the man said he was Jackie’s high school classmate but “never really spoke to her”.

The man said he was never a U-VA student and is not a member of any fraternity. Additionally, he said that he had not visited Charlottesville in at least six years and that he was in another state participating in an athletic event during the weekend of Sept. 28, 2012.

Last week, for the first time, Jackie revealed a name of her main alleged attacker to other friends who had known her more recently, those recent friends said. That name was different from the name she gave Andy, Cindy and Randall that first night.

On Friday, The Post interviewed a man whose name is similar to the second one Jackie used for her main attacker. He said that although he was a lifeguard at the same time as Jackie, he had never met her in person and never taken her out on a date. He also said that he was not a member of Phi Kappa Psi.

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ABC News scooped other news outlets with the December 11 revelation of the names and faces of the three friends, described in the Rolling Stone article, who came to her aid the night of the alleged incident.

Kathryn Hendley is “Cindy”, Alex Stock is “Andy”, Ryan (whose last name was withheld at his request) is identified as “Randall” in the Rolling Stone article.

They said at the time they believed a “traumatic” sex assault had occurred. But the two male friends said they were told on the night of September 28, 2012 that Jackie was forced to perform oral sex on five men while a sixth stood by.

The friends pointed out another inconsistency in the Rolling Stone article, saying that the three of them were not standing right next to each other when Jackie revealed what she said happened on the night of the attack, as author Sabrina Erdely writes in the magazine.

Ryan (whom Jackie had apparently been trying to woo) said he got the call from Jackie first and rushed to meet her outside a dorm building. She was “crying and shaking” when she told him what happened, and he then called Alex, but relayed Jackie’s wishes that Cindy not come.

Kathryn said she accompanied Alex when he went to see Jackie, but said that she hung back when Jackie spoke to the two men. Kathryn said that, later that night, Alex told her what Jackie said, and then Jackie later described the incident herself.

Kathryn also denied one cruel comment the Rolling Stone article alleges she made: “She’s gonna be the girl who cried ‘rape’ and we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.” Kathryn told ABC News she definitely did not say that.

The article describes Jackie sinking into depression after the alleged rape, and holing up in her dorm room. Not so, say her friends, who told ABC News she seemed fine after the alleged assault.

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12/14/2014 – Three Friends Give Full Names & Elaborate on Their Experience

“I couldn’t help but notice that everything that the article said about me was incorrect,” said Ryan Duffin, who was identified in the Rolling Stone story as “Randall”.

As described by Ryan Duffin to the AP, this is what happened: He had returned home from a party when he got a call from Jackie. He left to meet her and she was sitting on the top of a picnic table outside U-VA’s Tuttle-Dunnington dorm. She was shaking and “it looked like she had been crying,” Duffin said. “Her lip was quivering, her eyes were darting around. And right then, I put two and two together. I knew she had been on this date and people don’t usually look like that after a date.”

Jackie eventually told Duffin her version of what she said had happened that night.

“My first reaction was, ‘We need to go to police,'” he said. “I wanted to go to police immediately. I was really forceful on that, actually. And I almost took it to calling (the police) right there.” He said he had his phone out, prepared to call 9-1-1, “but she didn’t want to and,” he remembers thinking, “‘I can’t do that if she doesn’t want to do it.'”

Alex Stock corroborated this version of events.

“Jackie’s response was, ‘I don’t want to,'” Stock said. “‘I don’t want to do that right now. I just want to go to bed.'”

Feeling hamstrung by Jackie’s refusal to go to authorities, Duffin said that days later he sought advice from his dorm’s resident assistant. Careful not to mention Jackie by name, so the RA wouldn’t be obligated to contact police, he said he asked if he should call police even though Jackie didn’t want him to. The RA told Duffin that he should encourage Jackie to talk with police, but that Duffin couldn’t force her to do so.

The RA, who asked not to be named, confirmed Duffin’s story to the AP.

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Yet more explosive revelations have come from a December 15 Washington Times expose by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, “Friends of U-VA Rape Accuser Raise Fresh Doubts about Story, Citing Phone Records“:

Three friends of the alleged University of Virginia rape victim are growing more skeptical about her account, saying they have doubts about information she gave them and why she belatedly tried to get herself deleted from the Rolling Stone article.

The friends say Jackie first gave them a cellphone number in fall 2012, shortly before they came to her aid when she reported she was gang-raped at a fraternity house. All four were freshmen at the time, striking up a friendship in their first weeks on campus.

Eventually, the friends ended up with three numbers for the man. All are registered to Internet services that enable people to text without cellphone numbers but also can be used to redirect calls to different numbers or engage in spoofing, according to multiple research databases checked by The Washington Times.

The friends say Jackie also gave them the name “Haven” as the first name of the upperclassman she was seeing shortly before the purported attack, but they haven’t been able to find anyone by that name enrolled on the campus or even living in the area.

The friends said they believed that Jackie may have had a crush on Mr. Duffin but that he was interested only in friendship, and that the mystery upperclassman entered the picture shortly afterward.

Mr. Stock told The Times that Jackie was “extremely sad” that Mr. Duffin would not escalate their relationship beyond a friendship. A few days later, Jackie told her three friends that she had an admirer in her chemistry class, the upperclassman she called Haven.

Mr. Stock said Jackie “was receptive to the whole idea” of the three texting with her new admirer, but noted that he found it “suspicious” that during the text exchanges, Haven “would always steer the conversation back to Ryan”. Mr. Duffin said his experience texting with Haven was similar.

Kathryn Hendley explained that the three friends began using the phone numbers to text Haven because they were “curious” about the upperclassman. Now, they don’t know what to think about that part of her story, the friends said.

“That definitely raises some red flags,” Alex Stock, a University of Virginia junior and friend of Jackie, told The Times. “I think as more details come out I definitely feel a little more skeptical. This is all new territory for me. I’m not too technologically savvy.”

When told the cellphone numbers were traced to the Internet services, Ms. Hendley remarked: “Wow, really? That’s interesting. It’s news to me. “I think as the story has moved along it has raised some new doubts,” she said.

“As the investigation goes on, more and more aspects of the story are coming into question; the aggregate of all this evidence is increasing doubt,” Ryan Duffin said.

The cellphone number, when matched through telephone databases, is an Internet phone number that came through on two of the friends’ phones with an Internet domain attached. Several database phone searches confirmed that Internet domain matches an Internet phone and SMS text service called Pinger.

Internet phone numbers enable the user to make calls or send SMS text messages to telephones from a computer or iPad while creating the appearance that they are coming from a real phone. They also let users create multiple, untraceable phone numbers for little or no cost while concealing their true identity.

Mr. Duffin told The Times that Jackie gave him one cellphone number to text, but when he sent the first text, he received no response. Instead, he received a response from a second phone number he did not recognize. The sender announced himself as Haven explaining that his phone was not working so he was texting from a friend’s phone. Haven then said he would start texting from a third number that was his BlackBerry device, according to the friends.

The Times called all three numbers supplied by the friends. The third ‘BlackBerry’ number was forwarded to a voice mail with a female voice asking the caller to leave a message, and the other two were “not in service.”

All three phone numbers were labeled as an “Internet Phone” on a database background check; two were labeled as “Pinger Internet Phone,” and the other from “Enflick Internet Phone”.

On Pinger’s home page, the company writes, “Pinger gives you your own real phone number so you can call or SMS [text] any phone, even if they don’t have Pinger. Call or text from your phone, iPod, iPad or computer.” Another page says, “Free texting from the Web – get a free texting number, send free unlimited texts.”

Enflick Internet Phone’s home page says, “Our free app turns any WiFi enabled device into a phone. We also sell a low cost all-IP phone from TextNow.com for those who want to text and call even without WiFi.”

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As Washington Post investigative journalist Erik Wemple details in “Rolling Stone’s U-Va. story: What about the other two alleged gang rapes?” on December 15:

In addition to describing Jackie’s alleged assault, the Rolling Stone piece follows her through interactions with rape survivors and with the university administration. Thanks to her “ever expanding network,” writes Erdely, “Jackie had come across something deeply disturbing: two other young women who, she says, confided that they, too, had recently been Phi Kappa Psi gang-rape victims.” In May 2014, the story notes, Jackie apprised Associate Dean of Students Nicole P. Eramo of these gang-rape allegations.

“We haven’t been able to find any information regarding those” allegations, says Shawn Collinsworth, executive director of Phi Kappa Psi. Reports of the additional two gang rapes, Collinsworth’s group was told by the university, came exclusively from Jackie.

Erderly’s failure to substantiate those additional stories is reduced to “Neither woman was willing to talk to RS.” But we already know that such a claim almost certainly means that Erdely never made any attempt to contact them and relied exclusively on Jackie for confirmation.

From the Rolling Stone story:

“A bruise still mottling her face, Jackie sat in Eramo’s office in May 2014 and told her about the two others. One, she says, is a 2013 graduate, who’d told Jackie that she’d been gang-raped as a freshman at the Phi Psi house. The other was a first-year whose worried friends had called Jackie after the girl had come home wearing no pants. Jackie said the girl told her she’d been assaulted by four men in a Phi Psi bathroom while a fifth watched. (Neither woman was willing to talk to RS.)”

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In a December 17 article, “Friends’ accounts differ significantly from victim in UVA rape story“, CNN reported:

Was Haven Monahan a real person?

Ryan Duffin and Alex Stock told CNN they remember a starkly different account than what appeared in Rolling Stone. Their version cast doubt over whether the man who allegedly orchestrated the attack even existed.

“I mean there are definitely some major holes in the story,” said Stock. “I think that that was pretty clear in the Rolling Stone piece… It was almost too perfect of a story.”

Since summer orientation in 2012, Stock, Duffin and another freshman, Kathryn Hendley, had become friends with Jackie.

Duffin said Jackie was much more interested in him than he in her. He said he was happy when Jackie told friends that an upperclassman in her chemistry class asked her on a date.

Duffin and Stock decided to learn more about the upperclassman and check to “see if he’s OK,” Duffin said. Jackie gave them the phone number for the man, whom she identified as Haven Monahan.

Stock and Duffin said they sent him text messages and pretended to be another student from chemistry class. Monahan purportedly texted back, saying of Jackie, “I really like her,” and describing her as “super smart .. hot” and liking the same music as he. At one point, he even sent a photo of himself (the photo matched that of a man who went to high school with Jackie in Stafford, Virginia).

Duffin never suspected Monahan may not be a real person. “No,” Duffin said, “at the time, it all seemed very real.”

Jackie said she went on a date with Monahan the evening in late September 2012, when Rolling Stone reported that she was raped.

The Rolling Stone article described how she was beaten, struck about the face and left barefoot and bloodied. That’s not what her friends remember.

“I didn’t notice any sort of physical injuries,” Duffin said. “I didn’t notice a lack of shoes. I really didn’t notice anything that was consistent with the physical description that was in the article.”

Said Stock, “If there had been major injuries the way the article portrays, I think I would have remembered that.”

Five days later, Duffin said he inexplicably received an email titled “About You” from Haven, the man allegedly behind the alleged sexual assault. (When CNN tried the email address, the message came back “undeliverable.”)

“It was from Haven Monahan … and it looked like Haven had written, ‘You should read this, I’ve never read anything nicer in my life,’ with a page worth — an essay — that Jackie had written about me,” Duffin said. “Which seemed really weird to me, even at the time, because here’s somebody who allegedly just led a brutal sexual assault on a friend of mine, and now he’s going to email me this thing about me?”

Jackie told her friends that Monahan dropped out of the university after the assault, but a university record check by CNN revealed that no one by that name ever attended the university. Another check found no one by that name in the United States.

“There’s a very good chance whoever I was texting was Jackie,” Stock said. “There’s a definite possibility.”

It’s Time for a U-VA Apology – Op-Ed from a 25-year U-VA professor and his U-VA junior son

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ADDENDUM #2



EMAIL FORWARDED FROM “HAVEN” TO RYAN DUFFIN



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Nota Bene: This was reported as an exclusive in the Daily Caller, which is a far right news site that wrote a demonstrably false story in 2012 about a Democratic Senator’s involvement with Dominican prostitutes, who later claimed they had been paid to lie by a representative of the Daily Caller (the FBI found no evidence to support the story’s allegations and the Daily Caller denied the claims of bribery and falsification). At this point, the text of this email has not been corroborated by any mainstream news source, but what the Daily Caller published (below) looks identical to the slightly blurry email presented in a CNN video interview with Ryan & Alex, and the subject header of the email was reported in the CNN story.

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———- Forwarded message ———-

From: Haven Monahan <haven.monahan@yahoo.com>

Date: Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 8:33 PM

Subject: about u

To: “——@virginia.edu” <——@virginia.edu>

you should read this. iv never read anything nicer in my life.

Well yeah…Ryan is fine. Ryan’s great, actually. I mean he’s smart. He’s attractive. He’s funny. He’s a scaredy cat. If you creep up behind him, he’ll jump right out of his skin. It’s pretty amusing. He’s honest. He always calls them just like he sees them. You can constantly count on getting the truth from Ryan, even if the truth hurts. He has the most incredible taste in music. He’s like this walking, talking music library. And he understands how truly important music is. He’s stubborn. He has this regimented way about him that can be so frustrating sometimes. And sometimes the things he says hurt. But he’s a really, really good friend. And loyal to a fault. He’s realistic about everything. And I’m a dreamer so I mean, it’s good to have somebody like that in my life. He’s one of my best friends here, you know? He’s more than that …he’s everything

So, then there’s Ryan. And Ryan…Ryan’s incredible. I didn’t fall for Ryan Duffin the first day I met him. Nor did I fall for him on the second day or the third day for that matter. But once I did fall for Ryan, you see, my world flipped upside down. Kathryn doesn’t understand what I see in Ryan. I guess I don’t understand what she doesn’t see in him. He’s gorgeous, but gorgeous is an understatement. More like you’re startled every time you see him because you notice something new in a Where’s Waldo sort of way. More like you can’t stop writing third grade run on sentences because you can’t even remotely begin to describe something, someone, so inherently amazing. More like you’re afraid that if you stare at him too long, you’ll prove your grandparents right that, yes, your face will get stuck that way…but you don’t mind. You, like everyone else, may think I’m exaggerating, but then again, you probably don’t know Ryan Duffin. Ryan has no idea what he does to me…he can make me feel more emotions in one second then I would normally feel in one year. He makes my head spin. And the truth is, I’m crazy about him. I mean, if I had the choice of hanging out with anyone in the entire world or just sitting in my dorm with him talking about music and watching a crappy TV show…I’d choose him everytime…without a single false step. I know he doesn’t like me. If someone really wanted you, they’d actually put some time and effort into trying to get your attention. Ryan doesn’t even like to be around me sometimes. And that really sucks. When you like someone more than he likes you, you’ll do anything to switch the scales. The thing is, you can’t. You want to tell him how you feel but you know it will end with “It’s just not going to work out.” How can I explain to him that I fell for him because of a million tiny things he never knew he was doing? I know I should just stop trying because he and I are never going to happen. He doesn’t like me, I’m not his type, I’m not the type of person he could ever be with so I should just get over it. The problem is I can’t shake these feelings I have for him, I try so damn hard, but they won’t go away. I can’t move on because the only thing I can find wrong with him, is that he can find so much wrong with me. [Redacted] said I shouldn’t give up. She said she read this quote once that said, “There’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.” She claimed that’s how Ryan and I are. I think she’s wrong. I think he was right from the get-go. He’ll never see me as anything more than some girl and it’ll never amount to anything. He told Alex I’m not his type and I’m a waste of his time. The things he says hurt more than you know but still…there’s something about him that makes me come back for more. All I know is, the girl who gets to be with Ryan Duffin is the luckiest girl in the world. And if she doesn’t know that, then she doesn’t deserve him.

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If this love letter from Jackie is authentic, she can at least be given credit for some inventive literary talent. But it seems that Jackie not only fabricated the story about her date “Haven”, she also plagiarized most of this email from other sources.

The Daily Caller did some web searching and discovered that much of the email is pure copy and paste with some gender and name changes and very minor stylistic differences.

The email reads:

Ryan is fine. Ryan’s great, actually. I mean he’s smart. He’s attractive. He’s funny. He’s a scaredy cat. If you creep up behind him, he’ll jump right out of his skin. It’s pretty amusing. He’s honest. He always calls them just like he sees them. You can constantly count on getting the truth from Ryan, even if the truth hurts. He has the most incredible taste in music. He’s like this walking, talking music library. And he understands how truly important music is. He’s stubborn. He has this regimented way about him that can be so frustrating sometimes. And sometimes the things he says hurt. But he’s a really, really good friend. And loyal to a fault. He’s realistic about everything. And I’m a dreamer so I mean, it’s good to have somebody like that in my life. He’s one of my best friends here, you know? He’s more than that…he’s everything.

That section is almost identical to the script of a scene from Dawson’s Creek in which Dawson, played by James Van Der Beek, expressed his love for Joey, played by Katie Holmes:

She’s great. I mean, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, she’s funny, she’s a big ol’ scaredy cat. If you creep up from behind her she’ll jump out of her skin. It’s pretty amusing. She’s honest. She always calls them just like she sees them. You can always count on getting the truth from Joey even if the truth hurts. She’s stubborn. We fight a lot. She can be so frustrating sometimes. But she’s a really, really, good friend. I know her to a fault. She believes in me. And I’m a dreamer so it’s so good to have somebody like that in my life. If she goes away, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I mean, she’s my best friend, you know? She’s more than that. She’s everything.

In her email, Jackie wrote of Duffin:

He’s gorgeous, but gorgeous is an understatement. More like you’re startled every time you see him because you notice something new in a Where’s Waldo sort of way. More like you can’t stop writing third grade run on sentences because you can’t even remotely begin to describe something, someone, so inherently amazing. More like you’re afraid that if you stare at him too long, you’ll prove your grandparents right that, yes, your face will get stuck that way…but you don’t mind.

Jackie appears to have taken most of that from a University of Massachusetts student named Matt Brochu who, in an article for the school paper, which was quoted in a 2004 Washington Post article titled “Boyfriend” by Libby Copeland, wrote:

She’s gorgeous, but gorgeous is an understatement. More like you’re startled every time you see her because you notice something new in a “Where’s Waldo” sort of way. More like you can’t stop writing third grade run-on sentences because you can’t remotely begin to describe something . someone . so inherently amazing. But you’re a writer. You can describe anything. That’s what you do: pictures to words, events to words, words to even better words. But nothing seems right. More like you’re afraid that if you stare at her for too long, you’ll prove your parents right: that yes, your face will stick that way. But you wouldn’t mind.

Jackie also wrote:

The problem is I can’t shake these feelings I have for him, I try so damn hard, but they won’t go away.

A website of unattributed “Sad Love Quotes” has a similar line:

I can’t shake these feelings for you, I try so damn hard, but they won’t go away

Another phrase from Jackie’s letter appears to have been lifted from a book written by Jodi Picoult, a popular novelist. Jackie wrote:

When you like someone more than he likes you, you’ll do anything to switch the scales.

Picoult wrote, in 2005′s Vanishing Acts:

When you love someone more than he loves you, you’ll do anything to switch the scales.

Another sappy sentence Jackie’s email appears to have been taken from an episode of the TV show Scrubs. Jackie wrote:

I mean, if I had the chance of hanging out with anyone in the entire world or just sitting in my dorm with him talking about music and watching a crappy TV show…I‘d choose him everytime.

The Scrubs scene was similar. In it, one of the characters said to another:

If I had the choice of hanging out with anyone in the entire world or sitting at home with you eating pizza, watching a crappy TV show, I’d choose you every time.

Jackie wrote:

Ryan has no idea what he does to me…he can make me feel more emotions in one second then I would normally feel in one year.

That line appears to be taken from a blog post written in 2007:

You have no idea what you do to me, you can make me feel more emotions in one second than I would normally feel in one year.

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My Commentary

According to the Urban Dictionary, a “Catfish” is someone who pretends to be someone they’re not using social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances. Possible motivations: revenge, loneliness, curiosity, boredom. The term “Catfishing” was inspired by the 2010 documentary “Catfish”.

“When you like someone more than he likes you, you’ll do anything to switch the scales.” – from Jackie’s email forwarded by “Haven” to Ryan Duffin

These latest revelations make it appear that the chemistry student named “Drew” in the Rolling Stone article or “Haven” to the friends was a composite invention of Jackie’s, created in order to manipulate “Randall” (aka Ryan) into a relationship. That the fictional “Haven” emailed Ryan after the “incident” in order to continue the attempt at roping him in, suggests that the entire “gang blow job” story may also have been an invention designed to enhance Ryan’s protective feelings for Jackie.

Having failed in that, and once the fiction of serial sexual assault had already become public among her friends, it seems that Jackie may have tried to use it to garner sympathy, support and friendship from the many rape-victim advocates and support groups on campus. With each retelling, the story grew larger, more vicious – and more incredible (in the literal sense of the term).

By the time Rolling Stone came along to make Jackie’s story the core of a national expose, Jackie went along until she realized the consequences of such a large audience for a story without legs, and then tried to pull out of the article – agreeing again as long as she could “fact-check” the parts about her.

Now we see Jackie desperately trying to fill in the holes in her account with names of a real student who fits some of her description of “Drew/Haven”, but that attempt failed at the starting gate.

If Jackie was truly the victim of any kind of sexual assault, I hope the facts emerge to vindicate her. But if she is the perpetrator of an enormous hoax on her friends, on the U-VA community, and now on the whole world, I hope that she suffers the social stigma that she tried to impose on others.

In China, one who falsely accuses another of a crime is given the same sentence that would be imposed on the criminal if guilt were proved. I trust that some form of karma will even the scales, whatever the truth turns out to be.

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For the backstory on Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s entire journalism career built on fictions and half-truths, see Journalistic Fabulism and Ideological Agendas

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ADDENDUM #3

EMILY RENDA’S TESTIMONY TO THE US SENATE

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Emily Renda is described in the Rolling Stone article as a “recent grad… who says that weeks into her first year she was raped after a party” and who “channeled her despair into hard partying”. The article also claimed that “in separate incidents, both Emily Renda and Jackie were harassed outside bars on the Corner by men who recognized them from presentations and called them ‘cunt’ and ‘feminazi bitch’.” And, according to Erdely, it was Renda who introduced Jackie to “UVA’s true secret society” – One Less, a support and education group for rape survivors.

What Erdely did not mention in her article was that Renda works in the office of the vice president for student affairs at UVA and is the person who put the Rolling Stone reporter in touch with Jackie.

Renda’s Testimony to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, 6/20/2014:

One of the student survivors I worked with, “Jenna” (a pseudonym for Jackie), was gang-raped by five fraternity men early in her freshman year. Despite the severity of the assault and injuries she sustained, Jenna still experienced a feeling of personal responsibility. Looking for affirmation, she sought out peers and told her story. Sadly, each and every one of the friends she reached out to responded with varying denials of her experience; these responses worsened her feelings of self-blame – that she must be confused because that fraternity “is full of great guys”; that she must have made them think she was “down for that”; questioning how no one else at the party could have heard what was going on if she was telling the truth; or discouraging her from seeking help because “you don’t want to be one of those girls who has a reputation” for reporting “that kind of thing”. These statements haunted Jenna. She told me that they made her feel crazy, and made her question whether her own understanding of the rape was legitimate.

Survivors who receive disaffirming responses to initial disclosures are more likely to experience negative mental health consequences as well. These negative and victim-blaming responses from her peers reinforced Jenna’s sense of fault, and prevented her from coming forward to the University’s administration or the police. When she finally sought assistance from the Dean of Students’ office, after struggling and nearly failing out of her classes for two semesters, it was difficult for the university to conduct a meaningful investigation because much of the evidence had been lost, and witnesses were more difficult to locate.

Though assault “severity” (i.e., degree of physical force) is typically correlated with faster self-identification as a victim, powerful cultures of victim-blame and self-blame hinder that self-identification that would encourage help seeking and reporting. In my own case, despite explicit force (e.g. strangulation, loss of consciousness and injuries to my head and torso), I still felt responsible for the assault because I had been drinking and had willfully gone to my assailant’s dorm room. If victimized students are unable to overcome feelings of responsibility reinforced by victim-blaming statements made by peers, we will not see the kinds of reporting behaviors it will take to identify and remove the violent perpetrators on our campuses.

In my own experience, I resisted formally reporting and seeking disciplinary action after the assault because I fixated on the fact that my assailant had parents who cared about him, and that I did not want to ruin his life over what I then viewed as a mistake. Many survivors I have met and worked with echo the same concerns when thinking about bringing a complaint: that he used to be a friend; that he is generally a “good guy”; that it was a one-time mistake. Even though I now disagree with my former self’s evaluation of my assailant, and though I quietly disagree with many of these survivors, I know that fear of expelling him or suspending him was a serious barrier to reporting for me, and continues to be one for other survivors.

What is revealing about Renda’s testimony is that either Jackie (aka “Jenna”) told her the lies about being abandoned and dismissed by her friends, or it was Renda who invented this part of the tale told to Erdely and included with great emphasis in her article.

What is even more revealing is that Renda, like so many “survivors” of date or acquaintance “rape”, appropriately internalized some of the responsibility for the consensual acts and the personal decisions that led to them – but that she had that legitimate understanding exorcised by the drumbeat of the “rape culture” advocates whose mantra is “it’s never her fault”.

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ADDENDUM #4

THE ONE IN FIVE MYTH



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“It is estimated that 1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there – 1 in 5.” – President Obama, remarks at White House, Jan. 22, 2014

The January 2014 White House report, Rape And Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call To Action, began “nearly 1 in 5 women have been raped in their lifetimes”. Even if this were true, it makes a lie of the assertion that all those rapes occurred on campus.

This claim, first published in Ms. Magazine in 1987, took the universities by storm because it seemed to expose a problem that nobody knew existed in such dimensions. But the study by Mary Koss of Kent State University, in collaboration with the Ms. Foundation, had serious methodological flaws, which have been repeated in a number of subsequent studies. Chief among them is asking questions about sexual experiences which the researchers would classify as rape, even if the women respondents did not consider it anything more than a minor relationship mistake or an ambiguous alcohol-fueled hookup. (see Addendum #5 for more).

According to Christina Hoff Sommers, philosophy professor and self-described “equity feminist”, the Koss study and the oft-quoted “one in four” statistic is based upon flawed data. One of the three questions used by Koss to calculate rape prevalence was, “Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?” According to Sommers and professor Neil Gilbert, this left the door open for anyone who regretted a sexual liaison to be counted as a rape victim, even if neither partner thought of the situation as abusive.

Other studies of the time, such as those by scholars Margaret Gordon and Linda George, found much lower measured rape prevalence, with their research simply asking women if they had been raped rather than asking behaviorally specific questions.

The 1 in 5 on-campus statistic is also extrapolated from a 2007 survey, the Campus Sexual Assault Study, which asked nearly 5,500 women at two large public universities about unwanted sexual contact of any form, from touching or kissing to forcible or drugged penetrative rape. The study’s title sounds sweeping, but Christopher Krebs, the lead researcher on the study, said in an interview that the results were never meant to apply nationwide – or even to other large public universities similar to the ones he studied.

“I think sexual assault is a phenomenon that is potentially unique at each university,” he said.

The survey’s origins were personal. Krebs, a researcher with the Research Triangle Institute, was teaching at a North Carolina university in the early 2000s when he heard disturbing stories from two students. Both said they had been given drugs without their knowledge and ended up in the emergency room, although neither was sexually assaulted. Krebs applied for a grant from the National Institute of Justice to study sexual assault on college campuses, hoping in part to find out how common drug-assisted sexual assault actually was.

While his study was funded by a division of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the report began with this disclaimer: “This report has not been published by the U.S. Department of Justice. To provide better customer service, NCJRS has made this Federally-funded grant final report available electronically in addition to traditional paper copies. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the US Department of Justice.”

Krebs and his colleagues picked the two universities they studied – one in the South and one in the Midwest, but which aren’t named in the study – because administrators at those colleges were interested in participating. “It wasn’t a statistical sample or a random sample or anything else,” Krebs said. They reached almost 5,500 women, with response rates of 42.2% and 42.8%. Of those who responded (and received the payment of a $10 Amazon.com gift card), 19% said they had experienced either an attempted or completed sexual assault since starting college.

That figure includes all “unwanted sexual contact” – a broad category that includes not just rape and oral sex but also “forced touching” or sexual battery. That means being kissed, touched sexually, or groped against your will, even over clothing, while under the threat of force or because you are too drunk to consent.

The researchers broke down the results: since the beginning of college, 13.7% of women were the victim of a completed sexual assault. In all, 3.4% of women had been raped under the threat of force, and 8.5% had been raped when they were too incapacitated from drinking or drugs to consent. Of those who reported incapacitated sexual assault, 49.8% thought they were partially or fully responsible for the outcome, 31% said they did not remember or know what really happened, and 66% said they didn’t think it was serious enough to report (these categories can overlap).

“Forced touching” was, somewhat surprisingly, much less common than rape: 1.6% of women said they were sexually touched, but not raped, under the threat of force, and 2.6% said they were sexually touched but not raped when they were too incapacitated to consent.

They also found freshman were more likely to be sexually assaulted than older students, and that students in Greek organizations were more likely to be assaulted than those who weren’t. They found that sexual assault assisted by date rape drugs was relatively rare (only 0.6%, with another 1.7% believing they might have been drugged).

The Krebs report noted a 2000 study, also funded by the National Institute of Justice (but headed with the disclaimer that the results represent the points of view of the authors and not the DOJ), based on telephone interviews with 4,446 college women at both 2- and 4-year schools, that found that 2.8% of women reported an attempted (1.1%) or completed (1.7%) rape since the start of the 1996 school year. Though acknowledging the inherent dangers of doing so, the authors then extrapolated that composite 2.8% datum to a full 12-month year and multiplied it by the 5 years that the average student attends college. By engaging in such mathematical acrobatics, the authors were able to state that “the percentage of completed or attempted rape victimization among women in higher educational institutions might climb to between one-fifth and one-quarter”.

In spite of the obvious problems with such data, the 1 in 5 figure has really stuck – even though it didn’t appear in Kreb’s original report. For a later article in the Journal of American College Health, published in 2009, Kreb’s researchers used the same data to estimate the likelihood that women would experience sexual assault by graduation, which they put at about 19%, or nearly one in five.

At the same time Krebs and his colleagues were surveying students at two public universities, the Medical University of South Carolina was taking on a bigger project, also funded by the National Institute of Justice: a national survey of how common rape is during a woman’s lifetime. As in Krebs’ study, researchers were particularly interested in the role of date rape drugs.

Researchers surveyed a sample of 2,000 women from more than 200 colleges. Unlike Krebs’ study, they only asked about experiences that could be legally classified as rape – in other words, involving vaginal, anal or oral penetration. They found 13% of college women had been raped either before they entered college or while they were enrolled. They estimated nearly 5% of college women were raped annually. If it is assumed that a different 5% are raped each year, then 20% (or 1 in 5) would be raped in a four-year college tenure.

One key finding was that college women who were raped while they were too drunk or drugged to consent were less likely to describe what happened to them as rape. More than two-thirds described it either as “unpleasant but not a crime” or as “a crime, but not rape”.

The 2007 survey also found that rates of campus rape (6.1%) were lower than rates of other violent crimes, such as aggravated assault (8.3%) and simple assault (28.5%), with non-sexual violent crimes comprising 87% of those reported by college women – and that college women were significantly safer on campus than non-student women were off-campus.

NPR and the Center for Public Integrity Team up to Propagate the Myth

In 2010, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) partnered with National Public Radio (NPR) to publish “Sexual Assault on Campus”, a report which showcases the failures of colleges and government agencies to prevent sexual assaults and resolve sexual assault cases.

While correctly noting that “research funded by the U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 1 out of 5 college women will be sexually assaulted, NPR writes in a sidebar that “One of out 5 women will be sexually assaulted during her college years.” And refers to an “epidemic of sexual assault”.

Though CPI did research the number of incidents reported by Universities under the Clery Act, they compared it to the results of a survey of 152 crisis-services programs and clinics on or near college campuses. While CPI’s report acknowledged that the far higher numbers of incidents reported by the crisis centers (which are typically rape victim advocates as well) were explained by the fact that they serve a broader clientele than the schools’ student populations, some of the incidents occurred off campus, they routinely document reports from students who were sexually assaulted on spring break, raped in high school, or molested as children – none of which fall under Clery reporting requirements – the report nevertheless claimed that the discrepancy suggests “a systematic problem with Clery data collection”.

The CPI report was not a research study document, but a series of journalistic articles attempting to describe a problem they believed existed, and did not employ the usual standards for objective academic research.

NPR followed this report with a series on the campus rape issue, which employed the same kind of uncritical acceptance of the “epidemic” nature of both campus rape and university administrative failure to appropriately or adequately respond.

From a National Institute of Justice (DOJ) Fact Sheet:

Unfortunately, researchers have been unable to determine the precise incidence of sexual assault on American campuses because the incidence found depends on how the questions are worded and the context of the survey. For example, researchers did two parallel surveys of American college women during the same time and came up with very different results. The surveys, conducted between February and May 1997, asked only about sexual assaults that had taken place “since school began in fall 1996.”

One survey found a completed rape rate of 1.7%, while the other study found a 0.16% rate. Similarly, one study found an attempted rape rate of 1.1%, while the other study found a rate of 0.18%. Thus, the%age of the sample that reported experiencing a completed rape in one study was 11 times the%age in the other study. Researchers believe the disparity arises from the way the survey questions are worded.

Some researchers count as rape a wide range of actions, some of which may not be criminal. Responses to survey questions will depend on how a term is defined, and how a woman interprets the definition.

Regardless of which studies are most accurate, the often-quoted statistic that one in four American college women will be raped during her college years is not supported by the scientific evidence [emphasis added].

Surveys of college students confirm that many sexual assaults are not reported to the police. Researchers asked students why they did not report the incidents to law enforcement officers. The most commonly reported response – offered by more than half the students – was that they did not think the incident was serious enough to report. More than 35% said they did not report the incident because they were unclear as to whether a crime was committed or that harm was intended.

New Study Debunks 1-in-5

A study produced by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) of the US Department of Justice (DOJ), Rape and Sexual Assault among College-age Females, 1995-2013, by Lynn Langton, PhD BJS statistician, and published on December 11, 2014 provides more credible statistics.

The BJS conducted its survey in a similar way to previous studies like the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey and the 2007 Campus Sexual Assault Study. But unlike those surveys, BJS had a high response rate (88% for eligible persons). The NISVS and CSA studies had a response rate of 33%-42%.

The BJS survey also approached the subject from a criminal behavior perspective, while the other two were presented as public health surveys. But in all three, questions were asked of respondents and their answers were gauged to determine whether incidents of sexual assault had occurred – meaning that even if a respondent didn’t explicitly say she was raped or assaulted, the survey might still consider her a rape victim.

While the two older studies asked questions about whether the victim had been assaulted while under the influence, the BJS did not. The survey found that the rate of rape or sexual assault for women has been declining sharply since 1997.

Highlights:

The rate of rape and sexual assault was 1.2 times higher for non-students (7.6 per 1,000) than for students (6.1 per 1,000).

For both college students and non-students, the offender was known to the victim in about 80% of rape and sexual assault victimizations.

Most (51%) student rape and sexual assault victimizations occurred while the victim was pursuing leisure activities away from home, compared to non-students who were engaged in other activities at home (50%) when the victimization occurred.

The offender had a weapon in about 1 in 10 rape and sexual assault victimizations against both students and n