Don't know what to call this anymore. I had it as "University of Virginia Thing" but the focus should be on Jackie: what, if anything, happened to her on September 28, 2012 and what she did and did not tell people about "it."
There has been more reporting on Sabrina Rubin Erdely's Rolling Stone article. Associated Press and Washington Post, good journalists. These guys (which includes women) are so fucking pissed. They're pissed at Ruby and the Stones, that story took another pummeling today, because they think it reflects poorly on pencils everywhere. That is understandable of course but really, no one out there thinks Ruby is everywhere in the Post newsroom and no one thinks Rolling Stone is as reputable as the Washington Post or Associated Press.
Ruby and the Stones is not the story. This is--see title. In a previous post I wrote that I didn't know how quite to parcel the blame between Ruby and Jackie, that it was not precisely clear what, if anything Ruby MADE UP and what exactly Jackie had said. I did not think, for example, that Ruby had just MADE UP what Jackie's two or three friends, witnesses to the immediate aftermath, had seen, believed, and said. What bothered me in parceling blame was the consistent accounts that the good guys got that SOMETHING had happened to Jackie. In fact, today the good guys reported that Ruby HAD MADE UP what the friend-witnesses had said. Bad Ruby. Bad, bad, Ruby. "Execrable" journalism as one of the Post pencils wrote today.
BUT NOT WHAT THE FRIENDS BELIEVED, Ruby had not made that up, they still believe something bad had happened to Jackie that night. Here's the AP account:
As described by Duffin to the AP, this is what happened: He had returned home from a party when he got a call from Jackie. He left to meet her and she was sitting on the top of a picnic table outside U.Va.’s Tuttle-Dunnington dorm. She was shaking and “it looked like she had been crying,” Duffin said. “Her lip was quivering, her eyes were darting around. And right then, I put two and two together. I knew she had been on this date and people don’t usually look like that after a date.”
Jackie eventually told Duffin her version of what she said had happened that night: that she was gang raped at a frat house.
In another report today this witness or one of the others said that if Jackie was "acting" that night, had made the whole thing up, then they should just give her an Oscar right now. One of them said Jackie wasn't the same for the rest of the semester.
All of that is consistent with Jackie being raped, it is consistent with something bad happening to Jackie, rape being a REALLY bad thing and it is consistent with all manner of lesser bad things or consistent, though implausible, with award-winning acting AND it is consistent with Jackie having a psychological or social disorder but it is NOT consistent with a normal first date. OR, I don't know what-all but this belief remains and that still bothers me. That's the story but Jackie isn't talking now.
All of that is consistent with Jackie being raped, it is consistent with something bad happening to Jackie, rape being a REALLY bad thing and it is consistent with all manner of lesser bad things or consistent, though implausible, with award-winning acting AND it is consistent with Jackie having a psychological or social disorder but it is NOT consistent with a normal first date. OR, I don't know what-all but this belief remains and that still bothers me. That's the story but Jackie isn't talking now.
