UVA "Rapegate" Part II: Jumping Sharks with Jackie (edited 12/17)

So I guess you could say I was mostly right. And really, it has just gotten worse the further down the rabbit hole the Washington Post has gone.

Me, the past two weeks

I've stayed relatively silent about the progressive crumbling of the narrative presented by Rolling Stone/Sabrina Rubin Erdely/Jackie (who you actually blame depends on how much you care about political correctness) in the past couple weeks because quite frankly, a lot that has been written about it recently is stuff I already said two weeks ago.
Recap of points I made that have been made by others:

• UVA doesn't have fall rush/pledging (for the most part), so the whole "rape-as-initiation" assertion is invalid (didn't include a link because it is already linked above).
• The characters and their actions are less believable than characters in car insurance commercials. In the RS story, they might as well have been cardboard cutouts holding up #rapeculture signs.
• Rubin Erdely had a clear agenda; to choose the most sensational (and conveniently least verifiable) story she could find (instead of countless others deemed "too boring") that most closely supported the narrative of rape as the weapon of white patriarchal hegemony, literally and figuratively represented as college fraternity culture.
• Sociopathy/antisocial personality disorder is rare, violent sociopathy even rarer, and violent sociopaths with even the most basic social skills are practically non-existent (we are talking probably <0.0001% of the world population). To suggest there is a "top tier" fraternity at a prestigious university whose membership is entirely composed of the type of violent sociopath to use gang-rape as an initiation ritual is statistically impossible. In other words, somebody would have cracked, and this would have come to light a lot sooner.

If you remember, I was very hesitant to place any blame on Jackie. In fact, I went so far as to suggest that "Jackie" may have been a rough, very poorly-written composite character created by the author to provide an expository narrative validating "rape culture" presented for consideration in the context of UVA's lack of appropriate action. While I don't buy into "rape culture", I do believe that many standard practices conducted by law enforcement and universities in dealing with survivors of sexual assault/rape often amount to "victim-blaming", however well-intentioned the investigator(s) may be. Let's be honest; from the perspective of someone (often a male) investigating a crime, rape/sexual assault victims aren't exactly the easiest victims to deal with. While it's arguable that the primary source of trauma is physical, the degree and severity of emotional trauma inflicted upon survivors is far greater than any emotional trauma experienced by victims of other violent crimes. Try sitting in a room with someone after they have been through the worst event of their entire life and try to get them to tell you about it in a clear, articulate manner. Humans don't operate like that. Logic/rationality and emotion occur in completely different areas of the brain. In many ways for most people, rationality and emotion are best represented as being inversely proportionate to one another; more emotion = less rationality, more rationality = less emotion. Under this framework, it's easy to see why unfortunately, oftentimes rape/sexual assault victims' own accounts of what happened don't make a lot of sense, at least the kind of concrete, unfeeling "sense" that our criminal justice system requires.

All of that being said, I was wrong. Unfortunately, "Jackie" is a real person; a real person who seems to have fabricated her entire story in an attempt to make a guy jealous. It's bad enough to lie about rape, but it is especially enraging that of all the reasons Jackie could have had, it just HAD to be the most misogynously frivolous one of them all; a tangible instance of the completely incorrect but widely accepted suggestion that "women lie about rape for attention".

Furthermore, it certainly doesn't help that Jackie appears to be a fucking nutcase. Her behavior goes far beyond the kind-of-crazy-but-still-common practice of a girl who gets rejected finding some other guy to ostentatiously parade around with to stir up jealously in the guy who originally rejected her. Jackie made up a person. This "person" was named "Haven", ostensibly a third-year at UVA that "types lyk this lol ;):P". Really??? REALLY??? At least now we can confirm that Jackie has no future in writing.

Okay, so she created a fake guy... alright. Maybe she could just casually mention it in conversation. But no. Instead, she did this:

"Jackie told her friends that the number belonged to an upperclassman who courted her, and then lured her back to a college fraternity party where the gang-rape occurred.The cellphone number, when matched through telephone databases, is an Internet phone number that came through on two of the friends’ phones with an Internet domain attached. Several database phone searches confirmed that Internet domain matches an Internet phone and SMS text service called Pinger.Internet phone numbers enable the user to make calls or send SMS text messages to telephones from a computer or iPad while creating the appearance that they are coming from a real phone. They also let users create multiple, untraceable phone numbers for little or no cost while concealing their true identity." 

Ladies and gentlemen, the shark has been jumped.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! (Billy Mayes hologram)

"Mr. Duffin said Jackie gave him one cellphone number to text, but when he sent the first text, he received no response. Instead, he received a response from a second phone number he did not recognize. The sender announced himself as Haven explaining that his phone was not working so he was texting from a friend’s phone. Haven then said he would start texting from a third number that was his BlackBerry device, according to the friends.
Mr. Duffin said he eventually asked Haven for a photograph, which the upperclassman sent from the BlackBerry number. Last week, The Washington Post confirmed that the man depicted in that photograph never attended U.Va., but did go to high school with Jackie. The Times called all three numbers supplied by the friends. The third ‘BlackBerry’ number was forwarded to a voice mail with a female voice asking the caller to leave a message, and the other two were “not in service.”
All three phone numbers were labeled as an “Internet Phone” on a database background check; two were labeled as “Pinger Internet Phone,” and the other from “Enflick Internet Phone,” services that allow users to send SMS text messages from a computer or iPad without having a phone number."

EDIT: MORE JUMPING OF THE SHARKS

"Five days later, Duffin said he inexplicably received an email titled "About You" from Haven, the man allegedly behind the alleged sexual assault. (When CNN tried the email address, the message came back "undeliverable.") 

"It was from Haven Monahan ... and it looked like Haven had written, 'You should read this, I've never read anything nicer in my life,' with a page worth -- an essay -- that Jackie had written about me," Duffin said. "Which seemed really weird to me, even at the time, because here's somebody who allegedly just led a brutal sexual assault on a friend of mine, and now he's going to email me this thing about me?" 

Jackie told her friends that Monahan dropped out of the university after the assault, but a university record check by CNN revealed that no one by that name ever attended the university. Another check found no one by that name in the United States."

WTF.

 So this brings me back to a point I wanted to make in my first piece but never got around to it; it seems like the only person Sabrina Rubin Erdley (who I will start referring to as SRE) even tried to interview was Ryan Duffin ("Randall"). The article said that "Randall", "citing loyalty to his own frat, declined to be interviewed". This raised red flags for me. I don't know if she was directly quoting him, but no one who is in a fraternity calls it a "frat". Just a simple lexical tell is one of those idiosyncrasies that made me so suspicious of the veracity of the original article.

But as it turns out, Duffin was never contacted by RS. Furthermore, Duffin isn't a member of any fraternity. This leaves us with two equally possible scenarios.
1. Rubin Erdely is lying
In the past couple weeks we've seen again and again that SRE is much more concerned with promoting her personal agenda than reporting what actually happened. However, she has been open about not contacting any of the accused rapists (due to an agreement with Jackie). Admitting to that is basically saying "I am a really shitty journalist and I don't care about facts as long as the story fits". I mean, she must have known people would tear this story apart- why would she lie about actually doing her fucking job and attempting to contact a source?
2. Rubin Erdely is telling the truth
Taken at face value, this would be the one that people would naturally want to believe. However, consider the implications; no one at RS ever contacted Ryan Duffin, so who in the world denied to be interviewed by SRE? Well considering that Jackie has already catfished/spoofed/I-don't-know-if-there's-a-word-for-it her friends, is it really that much of a stretch to suggest that Jackie gave SRE bogus contact info for Randall, and that she was the one to decline an interview in his stead?

Kansas is going bye-bye

So what does that leave us with? The generally accepted narrative is that "something happened" to Jackie that night, for the one thing everybody agrees on is that Jackie seemed extremely distressed. Distressed enough for rape to be a plausible explanation. 

Except what if nothing happened? What if Jackie abnormally reacts to situations with extremely intense emotions that aren't justified by whatever caused them? What if Jackie was having an intense emotional reaction to feelings of rejection and isolation that night? Just explaining "I'm upset because this whole manipulate Ryan into liking me thing isn't working how I thought it would" doesn't exactly justify that level of emotion... and it sounds "crazy". What if Jackie felt the only way for her (very real) emotions to be validated was to present a situation justifying that level of emotional trauma... like gang rape?

Maybe you're thinking no one would ever do that. But they do. It's called borderline personality disorder. Go ahead and read about it there, because there is absolutely NO way I could ever present an unbiased summary of BPD due to my experiences in relationships with women who have BPD. Spoiler alert: I got lied to and manipulated. A lot.

So here's the thing. Just calling Jackie "crazy" is stigmatizing and insensitive. She is obviously a very sick person, and she needs to get appropriate help. But she also needs to quit feeding everyone bullshit. She needs to come clean about what (if anything) happened. For herself and for everyone else.