On Sept. 28, 2012, it was alleged that a woman named Jackie, a freshman at the University of Virginia, was gang raped at the Phi Kappa Psi frat house on campus. She described how she was raped by 7 men while two others watched in a second floor bedroom while two others watched during a fraternity party raged downstairs. She reported that the attack was part of a hazing ritual at the long time fraternity. After reporting this rape to the news and gaining her fame, she toted a mattress around campus for weeks afterwards to point out that this kind of thing was so prevalent that no woman was safe.
In 2014 Rolling Stone magazine published a story titled "A Rape on Campus", which detailed the harrowing story of a young woman set upon by predatory men in a campus that encouraged a rape culture. Assigning blame to the fraternity, its members and alumni, the school, and anyone else that happened not to comment correctly upon the account. In the wake of the article, the Phi Psi house was vandalized, windows were broken, UVA Center for Rape Studies, among other things, were written across the building. The fraternity brothers faced threats online and in the classrooms, suffered in recruiting new members, and lost affiliations with alumni. "The story was just too tempting, too sensational, to let facts get in the way."
The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity filed a $25 million lawsuit against Rolling Stone magazine. The lawsuit claims "In the most scurrilous traditions of yellow tabloid journalism, Rolling Stone published a devastating story it knowingly failed to verify, in reckless disregard for truth or falsity, or the essential safety, dignity, and welfare of the organization or of those lives it was willing to crush with its defamatory article," the fraternity contends in the lawsuit. The magazine also faces a $7.5 million federal lawsuit filed by Nicole Eramo, a UVA associate dean who assists sexual assault survivors on campus and alleges that she was vilified in the Rolling Stone account. In July, three UVA alumni members filed a federal lawsuit against Rolling Stone. One of the members wrote in the lawsuit that he lived on the second floor of the house which led members of the UVA community to assume that he possibly took part in the rape. There has been ample evidence that the frat didn't host a party that night and that a student identified as the main attacker never attended UVA
I have been following this story since its inception sort of out of curiosity but more out of anger that this culture of defamatory speech has been allowed to get completely out of hand while allowing those who start these slanderous stories get off scot free. The liberalist attitudes of our colleges, administrators, and professors upon whom these seeds of destruction sprout have blossomed to entangle and completely obscure our freedoms upon which we base our whole society. The allowance of the young to say whatever comes to mind and others to promote it as truth, without evidence, has permeated this culture to the point where it has become criminal to say things disagreeable to anyone.
We have a culture that is being encouraged to say anything about anyone and anything and never apologize if it's a lie. The backside of all this is that you aren't allowed to speak out about these same miscreants without being cast as a demon. Free speech is only defined as speech that is agreeable to those who are listening. It has become commonplace to deny the accused a voice and to denigrate them to keep them silent or cause them to be busy to fight allegations that have no truth to them. We are seeing it played out daily when the media becomes an accomplice to the lies. We will see it continue unless the public uses their power of the purse to stop it. Until next week. ags
