Two recent items in the Washington Post support my contention that the establishment press is currently doing more than anyone besides Lena Dunham and "Jackie," both of whom have been irrefutably exposed as rape story fabulists, to cause victims of sexual assault to be reluctant to come forward (Note: That's not to say that the two women haven't been victims of sexual assault, "only" that the stories they are currently promulgating cannot possibly be true).
As Tim Graham at NewsBusters noted this morning, the Post provided feminist character witnesses supporting Dunham (including one who still "completely believe(s) her") and made pathetic excuses for the "Girls" star, including that she has a "demanding job." Meanwhile — and to be clear, this is appropriate work which Rolling Stone should have done in the first place — the Post has been thoroughly vetting the story of alleged University of Virginia fraternity gang-rape victim "Jackie." We're now at the point where the coed's original story, like Dunham's, which "evaporated into pixie dust" after Breitbart's John Nolte's fact-check, has also become impossible to believe.
Some of the key items Post reporter T. Rees Shapiro uncovered and reported Wednesday evening include the following (links are in original; bolds are mine throughout this post):
In their first interviews about the events of that September 2012 night, the three friends (“Randall,” “Andy” and “Cindy,” who were the first to see "Jackie" after the alleged assault — Ed.) separately told The Post that their recollections of the encounter diverge from how Rolling Stone portrayed the incident in a story about Jackie’s alleged gang rape at a U-Va. fraternity.
... “It didn’t happen that way at all,” Andy said.
... They said there are mounting inconsistencies with the original narrative in the magazine. The students also expressed suspicions about Jackie’s allegations from that night. They said the name she provided as that of her date did not match anyone at the university, and U-Va. officials confirmed to The Post that no one by that name has attended the school.
Also, photographs that were texted to one of the friends showing her date that night were actually pictures depicting one of Jackie’s high school classmates in Northern Virginia. That man, now a junior at a university in another state, confirmed that the photographs were of him and said he barely knew Jackie and hasn’t been to Charlottesville for at least six years.
The friends said they were never contacted or interviewed by the pop culture magazine’s reporters or editors. Although vilified in the article as coldly indifferent to Jackie’s ordeal, the students said they cared deeply about their friend’s well-being and safety. Randall said that they made every effort to help Jackie that night.
... They also said Jackie’s description of what happened to her that night differs from what she told Rolling Stone. In addition, information Jackie gave the three friends about one of her attackers, called “Drew” in the magazine’s article, differ significantly from details she later told The Post, Rolling Stone and friends from sexual assault awareness groups on campus. The three said Jackie did not specifically identify a fraternity that night.
The Rolling Stone article also said that Randall declined to be interviewed, “citing his loyalty to his own frat.” He told The Post that he was never contacted by Rolling Stone and would have agreed to an interview.
Richard Bradley, one of the first "Jackie" skeptics, summarized the current situation thusly:
... (Rolling Stone reporter) Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who now appears to have lied when she said that “Randall” would not speak to her “out of loyalty to his frat.”... let me be blunt:
It is getting very hard not to think that Jackie has not invented much or most of this story out of whole cloth.
It it also getting very hard not to think that Sabrina Rubin Erdely may have made up some crucial details of her article to fit her political agenda.
In short: This may be a situation where both the writer and the subject of the story have lied.
Shapiro has done nice work, which serves to make the Post's disparate treatment of "Jackie" and Lena Dunham even more striking.
The Post has demonstrated that it will go to completely indefensible and absurd lengths to defend celebrity "victims," even obvious fabulists like Dunham, while marshalling its full resources to fact-check the victimhood claims of everyday people.
In their defense of Dunham, the Post is now in the same shameful class as the Associated Press, about which I wrote the following Wednesday morning after AP deceptively claimed that Dunham's mythical "Barry" didn't "fully match" the real-life Barry she effectively smeared:
The message here is that the AP and the establishment press will side with the rich, powerful and politically correct in virtually any circumstance. In many rape situations, the rich and powerful person happens to be the rapist. Tragically, rape victims now have every reason to believe that if their attacker is a powerful community member with the right political connections, they'll get no sympathy from the news media. Many of them will stay silent.That is all on you, AP.
And now, it's also on the Washington Post.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
