Columbia Journalism School report on Rolling Stone and UVA rape story

Parents Forum
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I appreciate @OhioDad51’s legal input, but still hope that both Nicole Eramo and Allen Groves are able to sue Rolling Stone for libel and/or defamation.

The article portrays Dean Eramo the Chair of the Sexual Misconduct Board as complicit in UVA’s mishandling of sexual assault cases. Eramo’s letter to Columbia (sent through her lawyer and footnoted in the Columbia report) claims that she never made the statements attributed to her.

quote made numerous false statements and misleading implications about the manner in which I conducted my job as the Chair of University of Virginia’s Sexual Misconduct Board, including allegations about specific student cases. . . I can say that the account of my actions in Rolling Stone is false and misleading. . . As a general matter, I do not — and have never — allowed the possibility of a media story to influence the way I have counseled students or the decisions I have made in my position. And contrary to the quote attributed to me in Rolling Stone, I have never called the University of Virginia “the rape school,” nor have I ever suggested — either professionally or privately — that parents would not “want to send their daughter” to UVA.

[/quote]

Those fake quotes and dodgy implications are enormously damaging Eramo’s reputation as an effective sexual assault counselor and adjudicator. They were widely disseminated by the press and served as the foundation to Erdely’s premise that Virginia’s Sexual Misconduct Board was rotten to the core.

Same for Dean of Students and Title IX Coordinator Allen Groves. Groves also wrote to Columbia detailing the ways in which Erdely mischaracterised his statements at a UVA Board of Visitors meeting causing him “personal and professional damage.” (Erdely even ridiculed Groves’ TIE. Now that’s malice!)

The article accuses Groves of “downplay(ing) the significance of a Title IX performance review.” It goes on to quote head of the Office of Civil Rights, Catherine Lhamon responding to Erdlely’s description of Groves’ disregard for the seriousness of the OCR’s investigation.

Groves has filed a FOIA request to find out exactly what Erdely told Lhamon. This is significant because it’s Lhamon’s organization that is investigating UVA’s Title IX procedures.

A video of the Board of Visitors meeting shows that Erdely’s characterization and (Llamon’s subsequent reaction to Erdely’s characterization) is clearly false. I watched whole two hour video in which all of the Title IX powers that be at UVA explain the college’s policies and comment on their individual responsibilities.

There is no question that all of them, including Groves, take the issue dead seriously. Remember that this meeting took place more than two months before the Rolling Stone article broke.

The video is a fascinating watch and provides an excellent understanding of what universities’ Title IX procedures entail and how they try to protect their students while navigating the tangle of Title IX regulations. If you make it to the second hour, the sections on how UVA defines mandatory reporting and the comments of the student board are especially interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppd_pX5Zy44

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Interesting, momrath. I look forward to viewing that.

@Cardinal Fang, here are two articles I’ve read that challenge Erderly’s prior reporting on rape cases. Both stories ran in Rolling Stone. http://www.newsweek.com/another-rolling-stone-rape-article-has-major-holes-291257 and
http://www.redstate.com/2015/04/07/sabrina-rubin-erdelys-possibly-fake-rape-story/

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Considering the Today show ran a story on the “recent” troubles at Penn State and the decision by Rutgers to suspend drinking (in some cases) there is a silver lining. It might have taken a really bad storytelling and the waves made by a media scandal to garner a wider audience and attract attention to what has been largely ignored by the population at large.

The continuing litigation, if it ever happens, might keep the real underlying issues, front and center. As Bay said, be careful what you wish for. No matter how this case will end (the settlement amount and scope will be irrelevant) we can expect that the divisiveness of campus will not abate, and the voices who are heard to demand positive changes will not disappear.

Nobody wants injustice. Everyone wants is just.

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What real underlying issue? That advocacy journalism is a danger and that the press is maybe not as trustworthy as one would like? Yeah, I think that remains front and center. But to say that the over the top rhetoric about how campuses are hot beds of rape (of which this is the latest example) somehow helps people take alcohol abuse or actual, serious sexual assault seriously requires more optimism than I, at least, can muster.

@momrath, yes making up quotes can lead to a presumption of malice, which will get a public figure “over the hump” as it were in this type of litigation. But it still takes a lot of evidence to recover. Recall that several years ago Maureen Dowd effectively reconstructed quotes in one of her many articles attacking George Bush and never got sued. Obviously a very different situation but it gives you an idea of the kind of hurdle a public figure would have to overcome.

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I think xiggi was alluding to fraternity behavior being the “underlying issue” he would like to see remain front and center.

I’d like to see media reporting be the focus of this debacle. It is possible that accurate reporting could make some of the issues we spend so much time debating go away.

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Bay, to be clear, the underlying issues that are worthy of remaining in the news are not only the bad behavior of students’ groups on campus, but more importantly the cynical lack of positive responses by the college administrators in the normal business mode and the desire for the problems to go away or be controlled by the offenders. It is totally expected that a group of teenagers when given the chance will push the envelope and engage in behavior fueled by bad decisions and the mix of alcohol and illegal substances. What objective observers might expect is a more appropriate response by the people entrusted with the safety and well-being of EVERY student on campus.

Note, and perhaps to please you, that I mention groups as a proxy for MORE than frats.

Further the appropriate response is NOT reacting before facts are known and verified but reacting with vigor when the facts are beyond reasonable doubt.

Relying on the media is not an appropriate response, and it also reinforces that the main desire of the administrators is to respond to public pressure and pretend they care. What they care about is their job and how the public views that performance. Trying to PC is not what we need. Nor do we need the type of spineless politicians who lead our schools.

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http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/exclusive-interview–uva-rape-survivor-426467395555
MSNBC Interview with Liz Securro. 30 years ago when Seccuro was a first year at UVA she really was raped at Phi Psi and wrote a book about it. Originally Seccuro was supportive of Erdely and Jackie, but now that it’s clear that the whole event was fabricated, she’s miffed that Jackie appropriated elements her story.

(My own theory is that Jackie also co-opted elements from Gone Girl which was published about the time that her fake rape story took form – e.g., the shattered glass table, the bottle rape, the black eye.)

@Ohiodad51, My guess is that if Eramo or Groves were going to sue they would have already done so. It’s possible that UVA doesn’t want to risk any more bad publicity.

Of the two, I think Groves has the better case. Rolling Stone attributed quotes to Eramo that she says didn’t make; however, they were evidently just passing along information that they got second hand from Jackie.

Groves’ situation is somewhat different. Unless Erdely attended the Board of Visitors Meeting (and there’s no indication that she did) then she either got the information from a third party (again, no attribution) or she watched the video of the meeting.

Either way, what actually happened at that meeting and what Grove actually said and did are wildly different from what Erdely wrote. That Erdely might have passed this misinformation to Cathinere Lhamon, the head of OCR Title IX division, a person who’s opinion has considerable impact on the outcome of UVA’s OCR investigation, makes Erdely’s false allegations even more egregious.

Lhamon has now doubled down on her criticism of Groves which indicates that she didn’t watch the video either, compounding the chain of false accusations and ratcheting up the consequences.

208

The Gone Girl influence would not surprise me, given that someone has already discovered that the email sent from “Haven Monahan” to Ryan Duffin after the alleged attack was lifted almost entirely from an episode of Dawson’s Creek.

I really don’t get how RS can expect to keep any semblance of credibility by continuing to work with Erdely. Just so many lapses, though she certainly had help from her editors, too.

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On top of it all, there were no deadlines involved in publishing this story. It’s not like some other media outlet was going to beat RS to it. They could have waited for more corroboration or just not published it at all. The story was not breaking news. This to me adds to the malice argument. The story was published purely for monetary reasons.

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Since the essence of damages in a defamation case is harm to reputation, it seems to me that the fact-finder will be presented with evidence of what the plaintiff’s reputation was before the defamation, and what happened to that reputation after the defamation. So it’s my opinion that evidence about the fraternity’s reputation, including prior infractions, would be admissible in the case. This another reason I think there will be a settlement.

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I would agree if the prior infractions also included rape. If they don’t, why should any prior infractions be included?

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Again, what sort of “prior infractions” do you mean? I can’t think of anything that would relate to a reputation for rape, other than rape.

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…double post…

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The frat house was the location of a previous gang rape.

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Hunt, I understand the general gist of your comment, but it carries the implication that you can’t defame someone , even using a false story, if that person is generally of low repute.

It seems to me that there is something wrong with that idea, and that a trial will likely yield a different outcome than what your observation would imply. Maybe that’s not correct.

I think if I were running a fraternity, I might go for broke here against those who don’t think my organization should exist in the first place.

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@CardinalFang, are you talking about an incident that happened 30 years before? That would have no bearing, as I doubt any of these fraternity members were alive back then.

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Did previous real infractions incite angry, pitchfork-wielding mobs to vandalize their house?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/20/phi-kappa-psi-uva-vandalized_n_6194870.html
scroll down the article to view the Instagram photos of the witch hunt jury seated in the amphitheatre, and read the readers’ comments below the article.

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The “gang rape” in 1984 is still an “alleged” gang rape so may be hard to prove, as the only one convicted was William Beebe, who I believe was not an official member of the fraternity.He knew he had done something inappropriate and reached out to Seccuro to make amends years later when he was in AA. He did a plea deal and spent fairly minimal time for aggravated sexual battery. She wrote a book and became an advocate and has become a speaker on the subject . She said on the Today Show that she feels her story has been “tainted” because of the false accusations from Jackie in the Rolling Stone article that seemed to have similarities to her story.

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So a non-fraternity member raped someone 30 years ago, and angry pitchfork wielding mobs from the internet are upset about it, and that is supposed to have some bearing on this current false accusation?

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Just an FYI, the Supreme Court rejected 9-0 something called the libel proof plaintiff doctrine, which held that an individual could have such a bad reputation in a specific area that you could effectively say anything at all about them on that topic with impunity. There is something called the incremental harm doctrine, which says that a reputation for the subject of the defamation, in this case gang rape, can be used to reduce damages. It would have to be a reputation for something very similar to the subject of the defamation though. That has been clear in the law for probably thirty years