THE HORRIBLE UVA STORY JUST HAD A HUGE TWIST: Catfish, anyone? vlt.tc/1qt9 “Randall said he met Jackie shortly after arriving at U-Va. in fall 2012 and the two struck up a quick friendship. He said Jackie was interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with him; he valued her friendship but wasn’t interested in more. The three friends said Jackie soon began talking about a handsome junior from chemistry class who had a crush on her and had been asking her out on dates. “Intrigued, Jackie’s friends got his phone number from her and began exchanging text messages with the mysterious upperclassman. He then raved to them about “this super smart hot” freshman who shared his love of the band Coheed and Cambria, according to the texts, which were provided to The Post. “I really like this girl,” the chemistry student wrote in one message. Some of the messages included photographs of a man with a sculpted jaw line and ocean-blue eyes. In the text messages, the student wrote that he was jealous that another student had apparently won Jackie’s attention. “Get this she said she likes some other 1st year guy who dosnt like her and turned her down but she wont date me cause she likes him,” the chemistry student wrote. “She cant turn my down fro some nerd 1st yr. she said this kid is smart and funny and worth it.” “Jackie told her three friends that she accepted the upperclassman’s invitation for a dinner date on Friday, Sept. 28, 2012. Curious about Jackie’s date, the friends said that they tried to find the student on a U-Va. database and social media but failed. Andy, Cindy and Randall all said they never met the student in person. Before Jackie’s date, the friends became suspicious that perhaps they hadn’t really been in contact with the chemistry student at all, they said. U-Va. officials told The Post that no student with the name Jackie provided to her friends as her date and attacker in 2012 had ever enrolled at the university. “Randall provided The Post with pictures that Jackie’s purported date had sent of himself by text message in 2012. The Post identified the person in the pictures and learned that his name does not match the one Jackie gave friends in 2012. In an interview, the man said he was Jackie’s high school classmate but “never really spoke to her.” “The man said he was never a U-Va. student and is not a member of any fraternity. Additionally, he said that he had not visited Charlottesville in at least six years and that he was in another state participating in an athletic event during the weekend of Sept. 28, 2012. “I have nothing to do with it,” he said. He said it appears that the circulated photos were pulled from social media Web sites. “After the alleged attack, the chemistry student who Jackie said had taken her on the date wrote an e-mail to Randall, passing along praise that Jackie apparently had for him. Randall said it is apparent to him that he is the “first year” student that the chemistry upperclassman described in text messages, since he had rebuffed Jackie’s advances.” Mollie Hemingway reacts. vlt.tc/1qtt “The latest story from the Washington Post’s T. Rees Shapiro shows that “Jackie” was engaged in a great deal of deception of her friends. She seems to have invented a suitor in order to make another boy jealous. Her stories about what she claims happened on Sept. 28, 2012, have changed a lot. Clearly this young woman has made some very bad decisions. But what the story really shows is just what bad journalism Erdely was doing. One of the tidbits in the story is that while Erdely claimed that one student had declined to speak with her out of “loyalty” to his fraternity, he said she’d never contacted him and he would have been happy to talk. “In any case, the Occam’s razor explanation at this point would not be that we’re dealing with an outright journalistic fabricator. This isn’t quite the same story as Glass or the New York Times’ Jayson Blair or the Washington Post’s Janet Cooke. It’s not at the level of the Monkeyfishing debacle, even if we know from her own claims that she wanted to write a story on “rape culture,” that she shopped around for a suitably horrifying story at an elite or Ivy League university, that she clung to the gang rape story even when the source asked to be removed from the article, and that she failed to do anything close to the minimum amount of checking on this story to make sure she wasn’t about to publish material that could make life very difficult for innocent people. “But the real problem doesn’t seem, at this point, to be about journalistic invention so much as adoption of narratives at the expense of facts. And that’s something many others struggle with as well.”
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 14:59:55 +0000
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