12-7-2014
Well, this is awful.
The Web blew up Friday afternoon with the news that Rolling Stone magazine no longer stands behind last month’s horrific, explosive story of a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. A report in The Washington Post cast central elements of her story into serious doubt. Her friends and supporters now say they’re dubious, too.
It’s disastrous for everybody involved. At this writing, the victim, Jackie, insists she was telling the truth about being raped by seven students. Whatever the truth, she must be in a world of pain right now, particularly if she tried to extricate herself from the magazine story before it was published, as she now maintains.
The destructive fallout goes beyond one woman’s suffering. The Rolling Stone story, which had helped make it all but impossible to ignore the scourge of campus sexual assault, is now going to do the opposite. Because now, emboldened by this one possibly fabricated story of rape, the chorus of people who believe women routinely make these things up will grow louder.
It already has. You could see them doing their happy dances in the comments below the Post story, which, a couple of hours after it went up, looked a lot like 1950. If it turns out to be entirely false, Jackie’s story will join other fake narratives — the Tawana Brawley debacle, the accusations against the Duke lacrosse players — as weapons for those moral cave-dwellers who would have you believe that women “cry rape” all the time for attention, or revenge.
“No matter what the reality is, there is going to be the perception out there now that women lie about rape,” says Djuna Perkins, a former Suffolk assistant district attorney who investigates student sexual misconduct cases. “Every time somebody makes up a terrible crime, it does harm to the rest who tell the truth and don’t get believed.”
That sucking sound? That’s us being dragged back into the last century.
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