Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Rape is a terrible crime and deserves the harshest punishment and condemnation. Yet, in the public sphere, all rapes are not created equal. There are rapes that support the preferred narrative, and there are rapes that do not. The former tend to be much more publicized in the press than the latter, as a few recent examples illustrate.

At the top of the list of publicized rapes is Rolling Stone's reported gang rape in a University of Virginia fraternity house on Sept. 28, 2012. Sabrina Rubin Erdely's piece, "A Rape On Campus," described an hours-long gang rape in a darkened room, with the victim lying on broken glass, all as part of a pledge initiation. One could hardly imagine a worse case of patriarchal and male privilege than this sort of thing, and the reported response of the victim's "friends" afterward was almost as bad — a concern that reporting the rapes might mean that they wouldn't be invited to frat parties in the future. The scene Erdely described amid a campus populated by "toned, tanned and overwhelmingly blond students" was almost a caricature of feminist complaints about college men and the Greek system.

The story was quickly picked up nationally. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., cited it as a reason to pass federal legislation on campus sexual assault. People who questioned the story were accused of sexism. And University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan suspended the entire Greek system — not just the fraternity in question — in response. The U.Va. campus was rocked by protest, the fraternity house was vandalized, people were arrested, and U.Va. faculty members even staged their own protest.

Then, of course, the story fell apart. Whatever, if anything, happened to the Rolling Stone's subject/victim "Jackie," it seems clear that it wasn't what Erdely reported. There was no party on the night of Sept. 28, and a pledge initiation wasn't likely either since, as it turns out, pledges aren't initiated until the spring. Many other details of the story also didn't prove out, and it turned out that Rolling Stone had barely fact-checked even such simple details as dates of parties and pledge initiations. It had basically taken the word of one woman who, most tellingly, tried to withdraw from the story before publication.

The Washington Post's Erik Wemple wrote: "The next time Erdely writes a big story, she'll have to do a better job of camouflaging her proclivity to stereotype. Here, she refuses to evaluate the alleged gang rapists as individuals, instead opting to fold them into the caricature of the 'elitist fraternity culture,' and all its delicious implications." His evaluation: "Anyone who touched this story — save newsstand personnel — should lose their job." And even the newsstand folks might want to wash their hands.

Meanwhile, two other recent rape cases, despite far more factual foundation, have gotten almost no traction in the national press. In Oregon, a top Obama fund-raiser, Terry Bean, was arrested on child rape charges. Bean, a longtime gay rights activist and bundler, who raised over half a million dollars for President Obama's 2012 campaign, would seem to be a newsworthy figure. An alleged child rapist who has traveled on Air Force One isn't something that happens every day. But the story got almost no national attention.

Likewise, Donny Ray Williams pled guilty to sexually assaulting two women while serving as a staff director for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee. In one case, Williams is charged with drugging a woman and raping her while she was unconscious. In a rather generous plea bargain deal, he somehow avoided any jail time. Yet The Washington Post treated this as a local crime story, and it, too, got almost no national attention.

What's the difference? A cynic — and I've become pretty cynical lately as I observe these things — might conclude that the U.Va. rape story was hyped because it fit a preferred narrative: Evil white patriarchal privilege and the war on women. (It even fit in with a White House campaign on campus sexual assault that had U.Va. connections, extending directly to "Jackie," the Rolling Stone's victim/subject.)

The Bean and Williams rape cases, on the other hand, merely reflected badly on Democrats. The press isn't all that interested in stories that reflect badly on Democrats, it seems. And so these stories got buried in the "local crime" spot.

Are all rapes equally bad? Not in the eyes of the news media. And that's pretty bad itself.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author ofThe New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.

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