[Repost from RODOH]
I recently revisited this story for the first time since I got into H revisionism and it struck me as a useful case study for how to detect false stories.
The Original Story
Sabrina Rubin Erdely, "A Rape on Campus," Rolling Stone, 19 Nov 2014
The story is set at the University of Virginia which is said to have "an aura of preppy success, where throngs of toned, tanned and overwhelmingly blond students." There are many lines like that hinting at the authoress's resentments. We are introduced to a girl named Jackie who meets an older student Drew who asks her to be his date at a fraternity party. It turns out Drew was just luring her to the house so that the new recruits to the frat could take turns raping her as part of their initiation. It reads like Animal House fanfiction written by a feminist.
Now, climbing the frat-house stairs with Drew, Jackie felt excited. Drew ushered Jackie into a bedroom, shutting the door behind them. The room was pitch-black inside. Jackie blindly turned toward Drew, uttering his name. At that same moment, she says, she detected movement in the room – and felt someone bump into her. Jackie began to scream.
"Shut up," she heard a man's voice say as a body barreled into her, tripping her backward and sending them both crashing through a low glass table. There was a heavy person on top of her, spreading open her thighs, and another person kneeling on her hair, hands pinning down her arms, sharp shards digging into her back, and excited male voices rising all around her. When yet another hand clamped over her mouth, Jackie bit it, and the hand became a fist that punched her in the face. The men surrounding her began to laugh. For a hopeful moment Jackie wondered if this wasn't some collegiate prank. Perhaps at any second someone would flick on the lights and they'd return to the party.
"Grab its motherfucking leg," she heard a voice say. And that's when Jackie knew she was going to be raped.
She remembers every moment of the next three hours of agony, during which, she says, seven men took turns raping her, while two more – her date, Drew, and another man – gave instruction and encouragement. She remembers how the spectators swigged beers, and how they called each other nicknames like Armpit and Blanket. She remembers the men's heft and their sour reek of alcohol mixed with the pungency of marijuana. Most of all, Jackie remembers the pain and the pounding that went on and on.
The part about the shattered glass table is a good example of what Arthur Butz's called an "excess fact." The excess fact is an extra detail in a story that a good hoax would be better off without.
Erdely gives the game away by being a little too heavy-handed and on-the-nose. Did those sinister blond frat bros really refer to Jackie as "it"? She might as well have said "We only see women as literal objects," just to make sure everyone got the point. There is a common complaint about how most male writers can't write believable female characters. Here we see the reverse problem where a Jewish feminist is unable to write goy frat bro characters without resorting to ridiculous caricature. Armpit and Blanket, indeed.
Erdely is equally unsubtle when telling us how shockingly indifferent everyone is to the rape victim.(Oh, are we supposed to be learning an important lesson here than can be generalized to what is a very important systemic problem?)
The three friends launched into a heated discussion about the social price of reporting Jackie's rape, while Jackie stood beside them, mute in her bloody dress, wishing only to go back to her dorm room and fall into a deep, forgetful sleep. Detached, Jackie listened as Cindy prevailed over the group: "She's gonna be the girl who cried 'rape,' and we'll never be allowed into any frat party again."
She was having an especially difficult time figuring out how to process that awful night, because her small social circle seemed so underwhelmed. For the first month of school, Jackie had latched onto a crew of lighthearted social strivers, and her pals were now impatient for Jackie to rejoin the merriment. "You're still upset about that?" Andy asked one Friday night when Jackie was crying. Cindy, a self-declared hookup queen, said she didn't see why Jackie was so bent out of shape. "Why didn't you have fun with it?" Cindy asked. "A bunch of hot Phi Psi guys?" One of Jackie's friends told her, unconcerned, "Andy said you had a bad experience at a frat, and you've been a baby ever since."
Her friends told her to stop being upset over a brutal gang rape? Really? Erdely is so eager to make her point she overreaches. Sometimes less is more.
Early Skeptics (i.e. pro-rape misogynist mansplainers)
Online, some people were calling BS on this within 24 hours. A lot of this will be hard to find now so many years later. But here is some early commentary on the AutoAdmit forum.
https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_i ... forum_id=2
“I have a hard time believing that this could actually occur (I've only read the account of the attack though so maybe they explain it later). they make it clear that they've done it before - presumably quite a bit if all the brothers had to do it. and yet they've never been found out? and they committed this extremely serious crime and then just left her to walk out of the the house right in front of all of the people that were still there at the party? And she'd been hit in the face and was noticeably bloody? it just seems so ridiculous and incredibly dumb that it's hard for me to fathom how a group of people, not one moron acting alone mind you, could have premeditated something like this and gone through with it. Multiple times.” (Nov 20, 2014)
“It is incredibly hard to believe that this story accurately describes something that actually occurred IRL.” (Nov 20, 2014)
“I actually believed all of it until the part where her friends picked her up. I was like "oh thank goodness, she goes to the hospital to get a rape kit." But no, instead they have a discussion about its impact on their status with the frats like something out of a CW show.” (Nov 20, 2014)
“Another strange thing (that I would never mention IRL) is that Phi Psi is a fairly nerdy "nice guy" frat at UVA.” (Nov 20, 2014)
“seriously. i'm a lib. but the idea that she is covered in blood, and they're all like, but think of the frat parties!!!! is beyond belief. in other circumstances? 100% believable. but this idea that she's covered in shards of glass etc. and they're just chilling is ridiculous.” (Nov 22, 2014)
In the mainstream, however, the story was received with absolute credulity and outrage. In a way, the story was already doomed just because it was so sensational but also specific enough to demand justice. So if you are doing a hoax like this, always remember that you want to make sure it can't really be checked. Or make sure whoever checks it is on your side.
"Mainstream" Doubts (Richard Bradley)
https://web.archive.org/web/20150316211 ... tory-true/
On Nov 24, 2014, Richard Bradley, a seasoned journalist and editor, expressed his disbelief in the story on his personal blog. Bradley drew on his career experience, in particular how he edited work by Stephen Glass, the notorious journalist who made up fake stories. Being fooled by Glass was a wake up call for him. He also noted that caution is needed when we come across all-too-perfect, bias-confirming stories, and he noted prior incidents such as the Duke lacrosse scandal and the Tawana Brawley rape hoax. When he read the Rolling Stone story, his reaction was "Something about this story doesn’t feel right." He then explained his reasons which come down to 1) sourcing, 2) plausibility.
So let’s look at this story with a different set of eyes—not the eyes of a man or a woman, but those of a magazine editor who has seen fakes before.
The first thing that strikes me about it, of course, is that Jackie is never identified. I don’t love that—it makes me uncomfortable to base an entire story on an unnamed source, and I can’t think of any other situation other than rape where a publication would allow that—but certainly one can see the rationale.
Then we have three friends who talked to Jackie right after the rape, and apparently discouraged her from going to the hospital or the authorities because they might subsequently be banned from frat parties. Not one of them is named, or interviewed; so the three people who could allegedly corroborate the assault don’t.
Then there’s the fact that Jackie apparently knew two of her rapists, but they are not named, nor does Rubin Erdley contact them, which is basically a cardinal rule of journalism: If someone in your story is accused of something, you’d better do your damnedest to give them a chance to respond. There’s no sign that Rubin Erdley did so. Why not? Did she not know their names? Would Jackie not tell her? Because if Rubin Erdley knew their names and didn’t call them, that is horrible journalism and undermines confidence in her reporting. And if she didn’t know their names—well, we’re back in Patrick Witt-land again.
And then he and others made many points about the lack of plausibility and internal contradictions. Blogger Steve Sailer left several early comments below Bradley's post. He was initially the only commenter before the story caught fire.
“Wouldn’t the rapists get cut by the broken glass all over the floor, too? I guess they were such sex-crazed animals that they didn’t notice the glass cutting their hands and knees for the first three hours.” (Nov 25, 2014)
“So this is a pre-planned, traditional annual fraternity initiation gang-rape, with two older fraternity brothers coaching the seven pledges but not partaking themselves? Yet, it doesn’t seem very well organized at all, such as leaving a glass table in the middle of the room to immediately fall over and smash. And the pitch darkness — or at least it’s dark enough so nobody can see where the glass table is, but not so dark that the poor victim can’t recognize her assailant from anthropology class — seems odd, too. Don’t these animalistic rapists want to watch?
Presumably, the pitch darkness is to prevent the victim from identifying her assailants, but she can already identify the ringleader Drew.
And how many pledges are there at this fraternity anyway? Seven? Then what good does darkness do to cloud their identities? Or say there are twelve pledges. Even if the victim couldn’t identify any (besides Drew) isn’t there a lot of worry that the police would just arrest all twelve and wait for one or two of the five who weren’t rapists to get cold feet and ID the real perps in return for immunity?” (Nov 25, 2014)
“A problem with the plausibility of the story is the source’s insistence that she was sober and remembers every detail accurately. Relax that constraint and the story would seem less unlikely because inconsistent or improbable details could be chalked up to alcohol fog.” (Nov 25, 2014)
“Sorry to keep coming back to this, but I’ve done some more thinking and here’s where the story falls apart: pitch darkness _and_ broken glass on the floor. The glass table is smashed, but nobody turns on the light to see what happened or where the broken glass is? Instead, each man, having heard the glass table get smashed, still gets down on the floor covered with shards of broken glass, risking not only his hands and knees, but also pulling out an even more personal part of his anatomy, one that he only has one of.
Really?” (Nov 27, 2014)
From there questions starting creeping into the mainstream/semi-mainstream. See for example Robby Soave, “Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?” Reason, 1 Dec 2014
Doubling Down
The true believers did not react well to the skepticism. This Jezebel article reacting to Bradley and Soave will give you an idea.
Anna Merlin, "
Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax? Asks Idiot," Jezebel, 1 Dec 2014
https://www.jezebel.com/is-the-uva-rape ... asks-idiot
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. Never mind that she gave a long interview to the Washington Post this weekend about the weeks she spent fact-checking the story. Erdely explains in that interview, too, that she won’t discuss some details about Jackie’s alleged attackers because of an agreement she made with Jackie, who is, she tells the paper “very fearful of these men, in particular Drew. . . . She now considers herself an empty shell. So when it comes down to identifying them, she has a very hard time with that.”
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.
The Washington Post piece noted that “
Erdely spent weeks corroborating details of Jackie's account, including such minutiae as her work as a lifeguard.” Lol, as if that were what we were interested in. Erdley and Merlan apparently learned about "corroboration" from same place Nessie did.
Bradley: Some Thoughts on "Discrepancies"
Last Friday, Rolling Stone put out a statement backing off Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s story, “A Rape on Campus,” and the account of its protagonist, a young woman named Jackie.
“There now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account,” the magazine said.
That was an artfully chosen term.
On the other side, the victims’ advocacy wing, there are people who keep writing about “discrepancies” as if they are by definition trivial.
The context is usually something like this: “Just because there are inconsistencies in Jackie’s story does not mean that it isn’t mostly true. So what if she got the date wrong, or the name of the fraternity? Something happened to her.”
To these people I would say, let’s not forget what Jackie’s original story was: a premeditated gang rape; nine men in a pitch-black room; rape by seven of them, the last with a beer bottle; three best friends who discouraged her from reporting the rape for fear they’d never be invited to fraternity parties.
Even if there are “discrepancies” in Jackie’s story, we are still left, frankly, with a fantastical story. The argument thus becomes: So what if she got the name of the fraternity wrong? That doesn’t disprove that she was the victim of a premeditated gang rape in a blackened fraternity room by seven men!
“So what if it didn’t happen just the way she said it? She was still forced to perform oral sex on five men!”
Like this writer for the Huffington Post, who says, “Just Because Rolling Stone Got Jackie’s Story Wrong Doesn’t Mean It Is a Hoax.”
Or this writer for the International Business Times: “Why ‘Discepancies’ in Rolling Stone Rape Story Don’t Mean ‘Jackie’ Is Lying.”
Yet the forced oral sex scenario is also an incredible story that, while it could be true, must be viewed with some skepticism.
For me the challenge has always been: How do you get from something that seems plausible—a rape at a fraternity—to forced oral sex around a circle of five or gang rape by seven men? The leap from the former to the latter does not require simply getting a few details wrong; it involves the invention of dramatic and specific scenarios.
And that doesn’t suggest “discrepancies”—again, Rolling Stone’s term to explain things just not adding up—but “fabrications.” You can’t exaggerate or misremember your way to gang rape. It either happened or it didn’t.
This is a quite important point.
When a story starts falling apart, people that want to believe it don't immediately give it. They usually start changing and modifying the story out of desperation (moving the goalposts, motte and bailey), but these contortions usually fall apart immediately if you
reread the original version. Because if you do that you see how much drift there has been and how the original story contains not honest mistakes but what can only be outright fabrications. This can often get lost in a debate because the original claims get forgotten and are replaced with watered-down claims.
The Exciting Conclusion
I won't spend a lot of time on this since it isn't so relevant, but the questions swirling around the story prompted further investigation which ultimately made clear exactly what happened. It turns out that "Drew" did not exist. Jackie had a crush on a guy, "Randall"/Ryan, who had friendzoned her and so she invented a story about an older guy who was really into her in hopes of making Randall jealous. She made an email account for "Haven Monahan" (that was the name she used but this was changed to "Drew" for the article) and she started sending emails and texts to her friends from "Haven," mostly stuff about how cool Jackie is and how much she digs Randall/Ryan. Lmao. She faked a date night with "Haven" and ended up calling Randall/Ryan with the rape story afterwards. Later she joined a campus anti-rape group etc and some two years later Erdely came by looking for the "right" rape story for her article. Seriously, Erdely had already visited several campuses in this quest.
The main point about how it ended (which many people probably missed since the catfishing angle was not exactly played up) is that it leaves no doubt at all that the story is false. Not even desperate copes such as "Okay, so maybe the story isn't 100% literally true as told in the article. But she still might have been raped that night" can't survive once we find out that "Haven Monahan" doesn't exist. Case closed. It was a complete fabrication. This is a common trajectory with these things. Those who want to believe will try to cling on to some kernel that cannot be absolutely falsified. In some cases, the full information is never known.
Commentary
1) It is clear that most people when they read things like this react emotionally and do not think about any of it logically. Most people believed this at first.
2) But if you read it with your brain turned on, you notice that the story is illogical and wildly implausible. Some of this can be detected via intuition. "Something about this story doesn’t feel right," as Bradley says. There's something about it that "breaks the spell."
3) People are not always able to express their doubts rigorously, but that doesn't mean they aren't on the right track. For instance, many people noticed that it reads like fiction, that the characters are very stereotypical, and that it seemed to hit all the right political buttons. One could attempt to use literary theory and other academic concepts to analyze these things in more depth, but often this is merely a formalization of what many people pick up on intuitively.
4) In this case, the story fell apart completely when a deeper investigation started. But it is crucial to note that many people correctly determined that it was false (or almost certainly false)
from the text alone. Obviously, if you can check everything directly (like looking up "Haven Monahan" in the school directory) that much easier and more conclusive. But you can't always count on having all that information. Sometimes all you have are limited textual records. Investigations can also be botched or biased. Just think what would have happened here is Anna Merlan had headed up the investigation.
5) We see here that people can be pretty stubborn if they believe something. They usually need extremely strong evidence to change their minds. As long as there is any sliver of hope, they will hang on. It is also common for people to make a limited concession and try to maintain faith in some modified version of the story. For instance, to acknowledge that the story was not accurate as written, but to claim that it was "essentially" true. And sometimes even when something is conclusively debunked, people will say the story communicates "a larger truth" or something like that.
6) (For Nessie only, since he's the only one that doesn't understand this). Notice that virtually all of the arguments offered by the skeptics would be "arguments from incredulity," at least by Nessie's definition of that term, which is not correct. Disbelieving an implausible and illogical story is not a fallacy, and we see here that the people who used this "fallacy" were the ones who figured it out way before everyone else did.
7) (Mostly for Nessie) We see here that there is a limit to the copes about "normal witness behavior," trauma, memory, etc. Yes, people recounting events after the fact will not do so perfectly and so depending on the circumstances, allowances must be made for this. But you cannot use this to gloss over any and all errors no matter how large or serious. This "witness behavior" argument was the exact argument made by the true-believers with Rolling Stone story (e.g. "well, maybe she misremembered which fraternity it was" etc). There is a breaking point with those rationalizations.
8) "Discrepancies" - This was a very important point by Bradley. Some "discrepancies" or "errors" are such that they can only be explained as fabrications.
9) In a follow-up post, Bradley remarked that it was quite hard to pull the trigger as early as he did for fear of being wrong. He noted that is it easy to see these things in retrospect, but in the moment when everyone else believes, there is quite a bit of personal risk involved in challenging something like this, especially on this sort of topic. Hell, even Steve Sailer was wary of the story and waited until Nov 29 to post about it on his own blog, and that's a guy who is already on the SLPC's naughty list. In Bradley's posts, he hedges a bit and tried to be as diplomatic as possible, which is not surprising. But really he would have had to have been quite confident to make the first post as early as the 24th when all he had to go on was the text of the article. But note that there were anonymous online posters who faced no personal risk who were calling it out and mocking it immediately.
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