13 ms·

Jury finds Rolling Stone responsible for defamation with gang rape story

239 points by gist 10y ago

sp332 10y ago
Is a ten-member jury a normal size for this kind of case?
- Overtonwindow 10y ago
  Yes. It depends on the state and the type of case. Since this was a civil trial a 10 person jury is correct.
  - staticautomatic 10y ago
    Given that this was a Federal case, the jury size would not depend upon the state, nor would it depend upon the type of case insofar as we're talking about civil cases. Except where defined by statute, the size of a state court jury in a civil case is decided entirely by agreement between the judge and the parties.
- staticautomatic 10y ago
  Yes. Standard size of a jury in a civil case in Federal court is 8-10 jurors, depending on how long the trial is scheduled to last. They used to seat 2 people as alternate jurors but later got rid of alternates in Federal court, so now you just seat enough people that you can afford to lose a couple over the duration of a long trial and still have at least 6 remaining. Otherwise, civil juries can be as few as 6 jurors or as many as 12 + however many alternates. A rough rule of thumb would be something like minimum number of jurors required + 1 juror for each week of trial. Criminal juries are always 12 jurors. (I'm a jury consultant)
danso 10y ago
For those who can't use the "web" workaround to see the submitted wsj.com article, here's the WaPo version (and FWIW, the WaPo deserves huge credit for being the first big media outlet to scrutinize the Rolling Stone article -- they even found the 3 friends of the purported victim that the Rolling Stone didn't even bother to identify or contact): https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/jury-finds-reporter-rolling-stone-responsible-for-defaming-u-va-dean-with-gang-rape-story/2016/11/04/aaf407fa-a1e8-11e6-a44d-cc2898cfab06_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/jury-finds-re...
- sctb 10y ago
  Thank you, we've updated the link from http://www.wsj.com/articles/rolling-stone-found-liable-in-defamation-trial-over-rape-on-campus-article-1478284464 http://www.wsj.com/articles/rolling-stone-found-liable-in-de....
- Noseshine 10y ago
  By the way, the easy workaround for WaPo article restrictions is to open them in an anonymous window. Occasional visitors can just click directly since you get a small quota of free articles per time period, I don't remember the details though. By the way, a German newspaper that just introduced paid articles lead to my discovery of a new loophole: Google translate. It gives me the full article. Everybody clicking on the site itself only gets the first two paragraphs.
  - danso 10y ago
    I regularly go over the WaPo limit (it's something like 3 articles a month)...I've found it easier to direct Chrome to block cookies from the domain. This has the effect of breaking the loading of the WaPo comments section -- I think they do a sloppy check of localStorage to see if what comments have posted since you last visited -- which is actually an even nicer benefit :)
- aikah 10y ago
  The nuclear option : http://archive.is/wdn9S http://archive.is/wdn9S
danso 10y ago
This has been an interesting for professional journalists (I mean, aside from all the reasons that it is interesting to anyone) for testing the "actual malice" requirement needed for a (limited-) public figure like this Dean to prove defamation, which is that Rolling Stone acted with "actual malice", i.e. a reckless disregard for the truth: http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation.php http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation... Despite the main part of the story being based on someone's lie, RS could theoretically prove that they weren't being "reckless", given all the resources they poured into this story, including 80 hours of fact-checking work [1] -- being reckless is different than being incompetent/stupid. But reading the Columbia Journalism Review's investigation [2]: > The checker did try to improve the story’s reporting and attribution of quotations concerning the three friends. She marked on a draft that Ryan - “Randall” under pseudonym - had not been interviewed, and that his “shit show” quote had originated with Jackie. “Put this on Jackie?” the checker wrote. “Any way we can confirm with him?” She said she talked about this problem of clarity with Woods and Erdely. “I pushed. … They came to the conclusion that they were comfortable” with not making it clear to readers that they had never contacted Ryan. -- then what is? The RS reporter claims to have "exhausted all the avenues for finding the friends" and yet soon after the story was published, the Washington Post managed to find all 3 friends, who weren't at all unwilling to talk to the paper. Had RS talked to the friends, RS would have almost immediately realized that they would have to do additional reporting. The U.S. law protecting media from libel suits against public figures is very strong, but I can definitely see how a jury would decide against RS. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/rolling-stone-fact-checker-acknowledges-u-va-gang-rape-article-flaws/2016/10/25/e0e4c7e2-9aee-11e6-9980-50913d68eacb_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/rolling-stone... [2] http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation.php http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation...
- WildUtah 10y ago
  Apparently people are looking into Sabrina Ruben-Erdely's history and it resembles Stephen Glass[0] with a sex-crime angle. Poorly researched articles and lazy fact checking built her a career where RS was paying her $43,000 a story for 3-4 pieces a year that she made up herself and fed to her 'sources' to repeat back to her. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass
aikah 10y ago
Excellent. You can't just make things up for the sake of "starting a conversation". Either you report the truth or you're just a propaganda piece. I'm sure there is hundreds of real rape on campus stories out there (unfortunately). The Rolling Stone was fed with the lies they wanted to ear. They knew it was bullshit, they went ahead and publish that crap just "to start a conversation" ... hurting real rape victims at the same time.
- return0 10y ago
  > I'm sure there is hundreds of real rape on campus stories out there (unfortunately). Why do you think they did not go with a real one? What lies they wanted to hear?
  - eberkund 10y ago
    If I had to guess? Laziness mostly, and picking the most interesting story with accuracy being an afterthought.
    - ptaipale 10y ago
      I don't think "laziness" is a very good explanation here. The story was so obviously fake that the "journalist" in question actually had to do quite a bit of work to compose this story. Reporting a real, actual case, completely and honestly, wouldn't have been more work. But it wouldn't have hit so perfectly the narrative that was the selling point.
  - douche 10y ago
    Reality is rarely as lurid as the Rolling Stone short story was.
    - x0x0 10y ago
      I dunno -- look at eg Penn State football, where other coaches were aware as early as the late 80s that Sandusky was raping kids. Horrific. Sometimes people really are that craven. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/new-court-documents-suggest-others-at-penn-state-knew-of-jerry-sandusky-abuse/2016/07/12/9752f5a6-4853-11e6-90a8-fb84201e0645_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/new-court-doc...
danieltillett 10y ago
All the people involved with this story (reporter, editors and the lying "victim") should face criminal charges. The damage that making and promulgating false stories like this does to real victims of rape is immense, let alone to the people falsely accused.
- danielweber 10y ago
  For each party, what specific crime? Did Jackie ever file a police report? There is still a pending civil lawsuit from the fraternity. That one will probably settle soon now that this one has been resolved.
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    Criminal defamation. Unfortunatly, this is only on the books in 17 states, but Virginia is one of those states [1]. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law
  - phkahler 10y ago
    Jackie is more guilty that Rolling Stone. She created a false story, made false allegations, and threw an administrator under the bus. The allegations she made would have been very serious had they been true. As it stands, the fact that she made FALSE allegations is the serious matter. Yet she will be walking away with no consequences.
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    I'm not from the US and don't know how the law there works exactly, but over here, if a person fabricates a libelous story and feeds it to a journalist - however much encouraged by that journalist - and this is published, then the person, the journalist and the publisher are all guilty of libel. For other parties, at least the mob that trashed fraternity building should be prosecuted. Of course one very real victim here is people who actually have been raped or assaulted at campuses. Their stories will now be harder to believe.
codekansas 10y ago
Beyond feelings about the verdict itself, it is interesting that a single lapse in journalistic integrity has the potential to put a major news organization like Rolling Stone out of business. There are massive incentives to publish sensational articles, but as this case and the Gawker case have shown, there are also massive incentives to not publish specific details. The BuzzFeed model (which is perhaps shared by social media at large) is to simply provide a platform, and let other people stir the pot. I hope that doesn't become the only way to circulate ideas.
- tonmoy 10y ago
  But this is also the reason I am more inclined to trust major news organizations compared to Buzz Feed or other social media
- dlss 10y ago
  FWIW I come to HN for the comments, not really for the articles. I think maybe half of us use HN this way. This is to say that the platform approach has the advantage of allowing actually informed/skeptical/intelligent people to do the talking. They can discuss subjects they know, at their own pace. Contrast with traditional journalism, where even when things go right you're still dealing with someone who's reporting on things outside their profession, probably on a deadline, and beset by an industry (public relations) basically devoted to deceiving them. This is to say I'm actually fairly sure the platform approach, at least from first principals, beats the traditional approach in terms of quality. (On a side note, I just had an awful thought: are there PR people reaching out to the top HN authors?)
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    > (On a side note, I just had an awful thought: are there PR people reaching out to the top HN authors?) That definitely happens on other social new/media. I'm not sure why HN would be any different?
  - WillPostForFood 10y ago
    Worse thought for you: top HN authors are paid PR people.
ra1n85 10y ago
Good. Yet another reason we have a flood of cable cutters and record level distrust in media. Shame that the same journalists that played the same game with Iraq, and are doing so with Syria and Russia aren't facing the same. Something to be said about the bigger lie.
dredmorbius 10y ago
The story I read from this is that: 1. It's very easy to be fooled by someone who is bent on fooling you, especially where they've got strong motive to do so. 2. It's very easy to fool yourself when you decide on a narrative and start looking for facts to support it. I've long maintained, and I'm finding some good sources (skeptics-based work) that it's only in specifically seeking to uncover truth that you will do so. If you instead presume some previously-determined proposition, you're simply going to make a case for that argument. Most insidious is when you don't realise you're pursuing the second avenue. As Richard Feynman said, you're the easiest person to fool. Susan Haack, in "Science, Scientism, & Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism", Skeptical Inquirer Nov/Dec 1997 wrote: A genuine inquirer aims to find out the truth of some question, whatever the color of that truth. This is a taugology (Websters: "inquiry: search for truth..."). A pseudo-inquirer seeks to make a case for some proposition(s) determined in advance. Question your evidence, question your sources, question yourself, question your premises and propositions. Question them again. And then have someone else do the same, independently. To draw another recent online element to this -- a week or so back a video clip circulated of the South African university student "fallist" movement claiming that science was a western imposition, and that it needed to be "decolonised". First, that neglects the long history of non-western science -- from the Middle East, Africa, Persia, India, and China. Second, it is contradicted by the motto of the Royal Society, from which the modern tradition of scientific inquiry did arise: "Nullius in verba" -- "On the word of no one". That is, science -- knowledge -- doesn't arise on the authority of any one person's voice, but on the fundamental testability and verifiability of facts. A lesson Rolling Stone and Ms. Ruben-Erdely might take to heart.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mdpopescu 10y ago
  > That is, science -- knowledge -- doesn't arise on the authority of any one person's voice, but on the fundamental testability and verifiability of facts. This is what I call "real science". I call it so because it can only be found in books and movies. /sarc In reality, we are told that "the science is settled" and "the consensus is that...".
throwaway43322 10y ago
(throwaway to express unpopular view on touchy / inflammatory subject) I think it's clear that Rolling Stone engaged in poor journalism. They did not properly fact check, and the story had too many questions and holes to publish. Sabrina Erdely failed in her job as a journalist. That said, I'm not convinced that Jackie fabricated this story. From my read of the situation, Jackie was hesitant to be featured in the article. There is not much upside for a woman to be featured in a national "rape on campus" story. You risk becoming the subject of internet hate and death threats in exchange for basically no personal gain. It has come out that many aspects of her account were false. However, just because she lied about the details of the rape does not mean she was not raped, or sexually assaulted, or that something terrible did not happen to her. It's possible she lied about the location, the fraternity, etc., and I can see motivations for that: avoiding retaliation or attempting to remain anonymous. If you believe that she was raped or assaulted, squirrely behavior like that seems more reasonable. Thus, it's very likely that Jackie lied about the specifics of the situation, but that something terrible (rape or assault) did happen to her. This interpretation is more in line with a rational persons motivations than inventing a rape story for unclear motives. In a similar vein, I would recommend this This American Life podcast on the subject: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/581/anatomy-of-doubt https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/581/...
- danieltillett 10y ago
  Even if something very bad happened to "jackie" it does not give her license to go around and accuse innocent people of gang rape. Two wrongs do not make a right. More importantly it was the amplification of the accusation through the national media that made this case so much worse. Every case of false rape reported damages thousands of real rape victims by undermining their credibility. On the use of throwaway accounts to avoid downvoting I think you should be brave and stand by your opinion. At worst you will lose 4 points.
  - Pyxl101 10y ago
    Does something specific happen when you're downvoted by four points? I didn't realize there was a downside limit.
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
In my dealings with journalists for some larger magazines and TV stations, all of them had a story already in their head, I just needed to supply the sound bites. Were they interested in the real story? No.
douche 10y ago
Between this story and the loving portrayal of terrorist child-murderer Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I've lost all respect for Rolling Stone. Luckily for them, they haven't pissed off Peter Thiel yet.

239 points by gist 10y ago

sp332 10y ago

Is a ten-member jury a normal size for this kind of case?

Overtonwindow 10y ago
Yes. It depends on the state and the type of case. Since this was a civil trial a 10 person jury is correct.
- staticautomatic 10y ago
  Given that this was a Federal case, the jury size would not depend upon the state, nor would it depend upon the type of case insofar as we're talking about civil cases. Except where defined by statute, the size of a state court jury in a civil case is decided entirely by agreement between the judge and the parties.
staticautomatic 10y ago
Yes. Standard size of a jury in a civil case in Federal court is 8-10 jurors, depending on how long the trial is scheduled to last. They used to seat 2 people as alternate jurors but later got rid of alternates in Federal court, so now you just seat enough people that you can afford to lose a couple over the duration of a long trial and still have at least 6 remaining. Otherwise, civil juries can be as few as 6 jurors or as many as 12 + however many alternates. A rough rule of thumb would be something like minimum number of jurors required + 1 juror for each week of trial. Criminal juries are always 12 jurors. (I'm a jury consultant)

danso 10y ago

For those who can't use the "web" workaround to see the submitted wsj.com article, here's the WaPo version (and FWIW, the WaPo deserves huge credit for being the first big media outlet to scrutinize the Rolling Stone article -- they even found the 3 friends of the purported victim that the Rolling Stone didn't even bother to identify or contact): https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/jury-finds-reporter-rolling-stone-responsible-for-defaming-u-va-dean-with-gang-rape-story/2016/11/04/aaf407fa-a1e8-11e6-a44d-cc2898cfab06_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/jury-finds-re...

sctb 10y ago
Thank you, we've updated the link from http://www.wsj.com/articles/rolling-stone-found-liable-in-defamation-trial-over-rape-on-campus-article-1478284464 http://www.wsj.com/articles/rolling-stone-found-liable-in-de....
Noseshine 10y ago
By the way, the easy workaround for WaPo article restrictions is to open them in an anonymous window. Occasional visitors can just click directly since you get a small quota of free articles per time period, I don't remember the details though. By the way, a German newspaper that just introduced paid articles lead to my discovery of a new loophole: Google translate. It gives me the full article. Everybody clicking on the site itself only gets the first two paragraphs.
- danso 10y ago
  I regularly go over the WaPo limit (it's something like 3 articles a month)...I've found it easier to direct Chrome to block cookies from the domain. This has the effect of breaking the loading of the WaPo comments section -- I think they do a sloppy check of localStorage to see if what comments have posted since you last visited -- which is actually an even nicer benefit :)
aikah 10y ago
The nuclear option : http://archive.is/wdn9S http://archive.is/wdn9S

danso 10y ago

This has been an interesting for professional journalists (I mean, aside from all the reasons that it is interesting to anyone) for testing the "actual malice" requirement needed for a (limited-) public figure like this Dean to prove defamation, which is that Rolling Stone acted with "actual malice", i.e. a reckless disregard for the truth: http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation.php http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation... Despite the main part of the story being based on someone's lie, RS could theoretically prove that they weren't being "reckless", given all the resources they poured into this story, including 80 hours of fact-checking work [1] -- being reckless is different than being incompetent/stupid. But reading the Columbia Journalism Review's investigation [2]: > The checker did try to improve the story’s reporting and attribution of quotations concerning the three friends. She marked on a draft that Ryan - “Randall” under pseudonym - had not been interviewed, and that his “shit show” quote had originated with Jackie. “Put this on Jackie?” the checker wrote. “Any way we can confirm with him?” She said she talked about this problem of clarity with Woods and Erdely. “I pushed. … They came to the conclusion that they were comfortable” with not making it clear to readers that they had never contacted Ryan. -- then what is? The RS reporter claims to have "exhausted all the avenues for finding the friends" and yet soon after the story was published, the Washington Post managed to find all 3 friends, who weren't at all unwilling to talk to the paper. Had RS talked to the friends, RS would have almost immediately realized that they would have to do additional reporting. The U.S. law protecting media from libel suits against public figures is very strong, but I can definitely see how a jury would decide against RS. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/rolling-stone-fact-checker-acknowledges-u-va-gang-rape-article-flaws/2016/10/25/e0e4c7e2-9aee-11e6-9980-50913d68eacb_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/rolling-stone... [2] http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation.php http://www.cjr.org/investigation/rolling_stone_investigation...

WildUtah 10y ago
Apparently people are looking into Sabrina Ruben-Erdely's history and it resembles Stephen Glass[0] with a sex-crime angle. Poorly researched articles and lazy fact checking built her a career where RS was paying her $43,000 a story for 3-4 pieces a year that she made up herself and fed to her 'sources' to repeat back to her. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass

aikah 10y ago

Excellent. You can't just make things up for the sake of "starting a conversation". Either you report the truth or you're just a propaganda piece. I'm sure there is hundreds of real rape on campus stories out there (unfortunately). The Rolling Stone was fed with the lies they wanted to ear. They knew it was bullshit, they went ahead and publish that crap just "to start a conversation" ... hurting real rape victims at the same time.

return0 10y ago
> I'm sure there is hundreds of real rape on campus stories out there (unfortunately). Why do you think they did not go with a real one? What lies they wanted to hear?
- eberkund 10y ago
  If I had to guess? Laziness mostly, and picking the most interesting story with accuracy being an afterthought.
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    I don't think "laziness" is a very good explanation here. The story was so obviously fake that the "journalist" in question actually had to do quite a bit of work to compose this story. Reporting a real, actual case, completely and honestly, wouldn't have been more work. But it wouldn't have hit so perfectly the narrative that was the selling point.
- douche 10y ago
  Reality is rarely as lurid as the Rolling Stone short story was.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    I dunno -- look at eg Penn State football, where other coaches were aware as early as the late 80s that Sandusky was raping kids. Horrific. Sometimes people really are that craven. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/new-court-documents-suggest-others-at-penn-state-knew-of-jerry-sandusky-abuse/2016/07/12/9752f5a6-4853-11e6-90a8-fb84201e0645_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/new-court-doc...

danieltillett 10y ago

All the people involved with this story (reporter, editors and the lying "victim") should face criminal charges. The damage that making and promulgating false stories like this does to real victims of rape is immense, let alone to the people falsely accused.

danielweber 10y ago
For each party, what specific crime? Did Jackie ever file a police report? There is still a pending civil lawsuit from the fraternity. That one will probably settle soon now that this one has been resolved.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  Criminal defamation. Unfortunatly, this is only on the books in 17 states, but Virginia is one of those states [1]. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law
- phkahler 10y ago
  Jackie is more guilty that Rolling Stone. She created a false story, made false allegations, and threw an administrator under the bus. The allegations she made would have been very serious had they been true. As it stands, the fact that she made FALSE allegations is the serious matter. Yet she will be walking away with no consequences.
- ptaipale 10y ago
  I'm not from the US and don't know how the law there works exactly, but over here, if a person fabricates a libelous story and feeds it to a journalist - however much encouraged by that journalist - and this is published, then the person, the journalist and the publisher are all guilty of libel. For other parties, at least the mob that trashed fraternity building should be prosecuted. Of course one very real victim here is people who actually have been raped or assaulted at campuses. Their stories will now be harder to believe.

codekansas 10y ago

Beyond feelings about the verdict itself, it is interesting that a single lapse in journalistic integrity has the potential to put a major news organization like Rolling Stone out of business. There are massive incentives to publish sensational articles, but as this case and the Gawker case have shown, there are also massive incentives to not publish specific details. The BuzzFeed model (which is perhaps shared by social media at large) is to simply provide a platform, and let other people stir the pot. I hope that doesn't become the only way to circulate ideas.

tonmoy 10y ago
But this is also the reason I am more inclined to trust major news organizations compared to Buzz Feed or other social media
dlss 10y ago
FWIW I come to HN for the comments, not really for the articles. I think maybe half of us use HN this way. This is to say that the platform approach has the advantage of allowing actually informed/skeptical/intelligent people to do the talking. They can discuss subjects they know, at their own pace. Contrast with traditional journalism, where even when things go right you're still dealing with someone who's reporting on things outside their profession, probably on a deadline, and beset by an industry (public relations) basically devoted to deceiving them. This is to say I'm actually fairly sure the platform approach, at least from first principals, beats the traditional approach in terms of quality. (On a side note, I just had an awful thought: are there PR people reaching out to the top HN authors?)
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  > (On a side note, I just had an awful thought: are there PR people reaching out to the top HN authors?) That definitely happens on other social new/media. I'm not sure why HN would be any different?
- WillPostForFood 10y ago
  Worse thought for you: top HN authors are paid PR people.

ra1n85 10y ago

Good. Yet another reason we have a flood of cable cutters and record level distrust in media. Shame that the same journalists that played the same game with Iraq, and are doing so with Syria and Russia aren't facing the same. Something to be said about the bigger lie.

dredmorbius 10y ago

The story I read from this is that: 1. It's very easy to be fooled by someone who is bent on fooling you, especially where they've got strong motive to do so. 2. It's very easy to fool yourself when you decide on a narrative and start looking for facts to support it. I've long maintained, and I'm finding some good sources (skeptics-based work) that it's only in specifically seeking to uncover truth that you will do so. If you instead presume some previously-determined proposition, you're simply going to make a case for that argument. Most insidious is when you don't realise you're pursuing the second avenue. As Richard Feynman said, you're the easiest person to fool. Susan Haack, in "Science, Scientism, & Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism", Skeptical Inquirer Nov/Dec 1997 wrote: A genuine inquirer aims to find out the truth of some question, whatever the color of that truth. This is a taugology (Websters: "inquiry: search for truth..."). A pseudo-inquirer seeks to make a case for some proposition(s) determined in advance. Question your evidence, question your sources, question yourself, question your premises and propositions. Question them again. And then have someone else do the same, independently. To draw another recent online element to this -- a week or so back a video clip circulated of the South African university student "fallist" movement claiming that science was a western imposition, and that it needed to be "decolonised". First, that neglects the long history of non-western science -- from the Middle East, Africa, Persia, India, and China. Second, it is contradicted by the motto of the Royal Society, from which the modern tradition of scientific inquiry did arise: "Nullius in verba" -- "On the word of no one". That is, science -- knowledge -- doesn't arise on the authority of any one person's voice, but on the fundamental testability and verifiability of facts. A lesson Rolling Stone and Ms. Ruben-Erdely might take to heart.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mdpopescu 10y ago
> That is, science -- knowledge -- doesn't arise on the authority of any one person's voice, but on the fundamental testability and verifiability of facts. This is what I call "real science". I call it so because it can only be found in books and movies. /sarc In reality, we are told that "the science is settled" and "the consensus is that...".

throwaway43322 10y ago

(throwaway to express unpopular view on touchy / inflammatory subject) I think it's clear that Rolling Stone engaged in poor journalism. They did not properly fact check, and the story had too many questions and holes to publish. Sabrina Erdely failed in her job as a journalist. That said, I'm not convinced that Jackie fabricated this story. From my read of the situation, Jackie was hesitant to be featured in the article. There is not much upside for a woman to be featured in a national "rape on campus" story. You risk becoming the subject of internet hate and death threats in exchange for basically no personal gain. It has come out that many aspects of her account were false. However, just because she lied about the details of the rape does not mean she was not raped, or sexually assaulted, or that something terrible did not happen to her. It's possible she lied about the location, the fraternity, etc., and I can see motivations for that: avoiding retaliation or attempting to remain anonymous. If you believe that she was raped or assaulted, squirrely behavior like that seems more reasonable. Thus, it's very likely that Jackie lied about the specifics of the situation, but that something terrible (rape or assault) did happen to her. This interpretation is more in line with a rational persons motivations than inventing a rape story for unclear motives. In a similar vein, I would recommend this This American Life podcast on the subject: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/581/anatomy-of-doubt https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/581/...

danieltillett 10y ago
Even if something very bad happened to "jackie" it does not give her license to go around and accuse innocent people of gang rape. Two wrongs do not make a right. More importantly it was the amplification of the accusation through the national media that made this case so much worse. Every case of false rape reported damages thousands of real rape victims by undermining their credibility. On the use of throwaway accounts to avoid downvoting I think you should be brave and stand by your opinion. At worst you will lose 4 points.
- Pyxl101 10y ago
  Does something specific happen when you're downvoted by four points? I didn't realize there was a downside limit.

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago

In my dealings with journalists for some larger magazines and TV stations, all of them had a story already in their head, I just needed to supply the sound bites. Were they interested in the real story? No.

douche 10y ago

Between this story and the loving portrayal of terrorist child-murderer Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I've lost all respect for Rolling Stone. Luckily for them, they haven't pissed off Peter Thiel yet.