Erica Kinsman is featured in The Hunting Ground.

“All these people were praising him; they were calling me a slut, a whore. . . .I kind of just want to know, like, why me?”

— Erica Kinsman

Even while the new movie Trumbo engages in a whitewash of a notorious Communist, dishonest Stalin-era Soviet propaganda tactics have been given a new digital-age update by feminists:

A crew member from “The Hunting Ground,” a one-sided film about campus sexual assault, has been editing Wikipedia articles to make facts conform with the inaccurate representations in the film.

Edward Patrick Alva, who is listed on the film’s IMDB page as part of the camera and electrical department, has been altering Wikipedia entries for months, in violation of the website’s conflict-of-interest guidelines. Alva is the assistant editor and technical supervisor for Chain Camera Pictures, the production company associated with “The Hunting Ground” director Kirby Dick. . . .

Alva created his Wikipedia account just two weeks after Florida State University President John Thrasher first called out the filmmakers for their inaccurate and unfair portrayal of the school and its handling of the rape accusation against former star quarterback Jameis Winston. . . .

Nearly all of Alva’s Wikipedia edits have related to “The Hunting Ground,” either through edits to the film’s main Wikipedia page or through edits to the pages of some of the people featured in the film.

Alva took particular interest in editing the Wikipedia page of Jameis Winston, the only person named in the film as an alleged rapist. Winston was cleared by three separate investigations, yet activists — and the film — claim this was due to a biased process and investigators seeking to protect a star football player. The film doesn’t mention the holes in Erica Kinsman’s accusation against Winston and in fact allows her to tell a story that contradicts physical evidence. . . .

The film itself is inaccurate, as the president of FSU and 19 Harvard Law professors have noted. The film distorts the evidence and uses false statistics to paint a picture of a rape epidemic at American universities. (Despite the filmmakers insistence that it is a documentary and “completely accurate,” emails between an investigator for the film and the lawyer of one of the accusers strongly suggest otherwise.) . . .

Read the rest by Ashe Schow at the Washington Examiner.

The issue here is not whether we believe Jameis Winston is innocent, but instead whether The Hunting Ground accurately depicts the Winston case, which in turn leads to the question of whether the film accurately depicts the general situation on America’s university campuses. If we catch the producers of a documentary telling a false version of one incident, we are entitled to doubt the truth of their general portrayal of the larger phenomenon (the so-called “rape culture” on campus) that is the subject of their film. And when a member of The Hunting Ground‘s crew subsequently attempts to alter the online record and delete criticism of the film — a trick reminiscent of Soviet propagandists airbrushing Leon Trotsky out of photos of the Bolshevik leadership — we may indeed wonder if this “documentary” is fundamentally dishonest:

Amid a growing controversy involving questions of accuracy and fairness, the makers of The Hunting Ground, a documentary indictment of campus sexual assaults, are defending the film, which is set to air on CNN on Nov. 22.

Florida State University, where one of the cases depicted in the documentary occurred, has asked the news network not to air the film and has produced a detailed critique of what it alleges are instances of inaccuracy and unfairness that depart from standard journalistic practice.

In response, CNN — which also will air a roundtable discussion of campus sexual assaults after it airs the film — said it is “proud to provide a platform for a film that has undeniably played a significant role in advancing the national conversation about sexual assault on college campuses.”

CNN is dedicated to “advancing the national conversation,” even if it has to tell lies to do it. But do they really want a conversation or is this actually a one-sided propaganda lecture? Because a conversation might include questions like, why were two minors — Erica Kinsman and Jameis Winston were both 18 — being served alcohol in a Tallahassee bar on the night of Dec. 7, 2012? Why did Kinsman leave the bar in a cab with Winston and two other men and go back to Winston’s apartment? She claims somebody put a drug in one of her drinks, but the toxicology report showed no evidence of any drug. And let me repeat again: The issue is not whether Jameis Winston is innocent, but whether the case is presented accurately in The Hunting Ground.

The producers of this documentary claim that the Jameis Winston case is emblematic of a larger “rape culture” on our nation’s university campuses. If female students are indeed routinely victimized by such an “epidemic” of sexual assault, we might suppose, The Hunting Ground‘s producers would have many clear-cut cases to choose from and, by devoting a major segment of their film to the Jameis Winston case, they imply that the failure of officials to punish the FSU star athlete is self-evidently an injustice. Yet when we look at the facts of the case, reasonable doubts are immediately apparent. There is no evidence Erica Kinsman was drugged. She and Winston were both underage and drinking in a bar. There is no evidence that she was coerced to leave the bar with him, nor any evidence that he forced her to go back to his apartment.

If these reasonable doubts are apparent, we must nonetheless ask why Erica Kinsman immediately claimed she had been raped. Unlike many other cases that have come to light, there was no dubious delay in her accusation. This wasn’t like the infamous Columbia University “Mattress Girl” case where Emma Sulkowicz waited several months to claim Paul Nungesser had raped her. No, Erica Kinsman went to the hospital and reported that she was raped, an accusation the Tallahassee police were required to investigate. The alleged inadequacy of that investigation, and claims that police and university officials conspired to protect Jameis Winston, are the real issue in this case. But does anyone want to dig down into the, uh, racial subtext of this case? Is it merely a coincidence that the producers of this documentary focused so much attention on a blonde girl claiming she was raped by a black man?

We could speculate about such factors. We could wonder what an 18-year-old girl expects will happen when she goes back to the apartment of a guy she met in a bar. We can speculate what a 6-foot-4, 227-pound star athlete like Jameis Winston might have expected to happen in that situation. It is reasonable to speculate that (a) his expectations and her expectations were not exactly the same, and (b) Erica Kinsman was not prepared to deal with the consequences of her own decisions.

Are such speculations inappropriate? Perhaps. Yet if CNN wants to generate a “national conversation about sexual assault on college campuses,” they cannot silence the voices of those who see these kinds of reasonable doubts. And let the record show that there have been allegations that Jameis Winston was the target of a shakedown:

Jameis Winston’s lawyer has fired off a letter to Florida State University … claiming the woman who accused his client of rape demanded $7 MILLION to buy her silence.

David Cornwell, the lawyer for the Heisman Trophy winner, sent a letter to FSU, saying Winston will fully cooperate with the University’s ongoing investigation into the handling of the rape charges. The alleged victim claims the University engaged in sexual discrimination by sweeping her claims under the rug to protect its prized athlete.

According to the letter — obtained by TMZ Sports — the alleged victim’s lawyer, Patricia Carroll, demanded $7 MIL to settle her client’s claims against FSU and Winston, telling Cornwell, “If we settle, you will never hear from my client or me again — in the press or anywhere.”

Cornwell says he rejected her offer and 4 days later she went to the media.

Cornwell also says Carroll claimed her client’s sexual encounter had to be rape, because she would never sleep with a “black boy.” Fact is … the alleged victim’s boyfriend at the time was black. The criminal case fell apart, partly because the alleged victim had semen from 2 different men on her shorts.

Will CNN address that claim in their “national conversation”?

Probably not. Because they don’t really want a conversation.

A Smoking-Gun E-mail Exposes the Bias of The Hunting Ground https://t.co/dLzFfjhqSM pic.twitter.com/L3qtMhUhkz — National Review (@NRO) November 17, 2015

IT’S NOT THE CRIME, IT’S THE COVERUP: ‘The Hunting Ground’ crew caught editing Wikipedia to … https://t.co/2TuuTtxgj6 via @instapundit — Instapundit.com (@instapundit) November 20, 2015









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