Tag: a rape on campus

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#MeToo effect: Movement brings local victims forward

SARA’s Rebecca Weybright says calls about sexual assault have surged since #MeToo. Photo by Eze Amos

Since 2017, when the #MeToo movement galvanized women across the country to speak out about sexual abuse and assault, local support agencies have seen a dramatic increase in requests for help.

Calls to the Sexual Assault Resource Agency to accompany victims to the emergency room increased by 42 percent from fiscal year 2017 to 2018, and the agency saw an 18 percent increase in the number of sexual violence survivors it served. But Rebecca Weybright, SARA’s executive director, sees #MeToo having the greatest impact on those victimized in the past: “We have people coming in saying, ‘This happened to me years ago, and because of what’s in the news, I realized it is still an issue for me.’”

Weybright and others in the field say media coverage of #MeToo—and more recent events, from the Kavanaugh hearings to the R. Kelly docuseries—can stir up traumatic reactions in survivors. But it can also help in healing. “Seeing people talking publicly about their experiences has made it safer and more accepted to talk about what happened,” says Elizabeth Irvin, executive director of the Women’s Initiative. And it counteracts the shaming and devaluation of victims that advocates say is part of the power dynamic of sexual violence. The Women’s Initiative, which provides mental health services for women (many of whom are survivors of sexual trauma) regardless of ability to pay, saw a 50 percent increase in clients at its free walk-in clinic in 2018.

Over at UVA, Abby Palko, director of the Maxine Platzer Lynn Women’s Center, says the center has seen “a steady, perhaps growing need for support” from students who have experienced sexual violence; staffing grew from two to four full-time counselors in 2016, and they’ve just added another two. Palko, who also teaches courses that explore women’s and gender issues, says over the last decade she’s seen “a growing internalized knowledge about issues of consent and sexual violence” in her students. Events like the debunked Rolling Stone article “A Rape on Campus,” the abduction and murder of Hannah Graham, and the killing of student Yeardley Love by her boyfriend “meant we were talking more about these issues at UVA when the #MeToo movement took off.”

So far, the rise in awareness and requests for support hasn’t translated into a significant increase in reporting these crimes to the police. Both the Charlottesville and Albemarle County police departments offer victim/witness assistance programs, but filing a police report is voluntary and always the individual’s choice. (Under Virginia law, however, teachers, law enforcement, medical personnel, and counselors or social workers are required to report sexual violence if the victim is a minor, or if there is an immediate threat to the victim or the public.) Worth noting: in Virginia, there is no statute of limitations on felony sexual assault.

Charlottesville Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Areshini Pather, who works on many sexual assault cases, says #MeToo has torn open our society’s past reluctance to talk about sexual violence. “Perpetrators would tell victims, ‘If you tell anyone about this, no one will believe you.’  But now people are talking about sexual violence, which enables survivors to see that what happened to them has happened to others, and won’t be tolerated. We’re bringing this out into the light.”

How to help victims of sexual violence

Those who counsel sexual assault victims and survivors say the most critical factor in healing is the response of the first person they turn to—often a friend or family member. If you are that person, the most important thing you can do is to believe them, and remind them they are not to blame for what happened.

From there, take your cues from them on how to help:

  • Listen non-judgmentally. Don’t try to put a label on their experience. Let them know that all of their reactions are understandable and ‘normal.’
  • Seek permission before holding or touching them.
  • Ask them what they would like you to do.
  • Encourage them to seek medical help, and offer to accompany them.
  • Be available and present, but don’t pressure them to talk. Understand that they may be distant temporarily.
  • Give them time to decide how they want to proceed, legally or otherwise. It’s important to help survivors regain a sense of control.
  • If you are a sexual partner, give them time to decide when they are ready for sexual contact.
  • Suggest getting help from a sexual assault crisis center. Encourage, but do not push them to seek support.
  • Let them know you will be available throughout the process of recovery. Give them time to heal.
  • Recognize and address your own reactions, which may include: anger (sometimes towards the victim as well as the perpetrator), sleep disturbances, guilt or shame, fearfulness, denial, frustration, depression, or a combination of these. Seek support for yourself so you can continue to help them.

—Based on information from the Sexual Assault Resource Agency.

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Day 5: A recording of ‘Jackie’ makes waves

Former Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely put in a third day on the stand Friday, a day spent answering friendly questions from the defense in an effort to show how a veteran journalist could be duped by a college girl named Jackie– the centerpiece of a story that became a libel trial.

For over two hours, the jury listened to an interview in which Jackie talks of “daddy issues” that led her to become depressed. College was supposed to provide a fresh start, but barely a month into her freshman year, she was allegedly attacked.

She tells Erdely that she got a tattoo to brand herself a survivor. As Erdely describes it, it’s a women’s symbol with a fist, a rose, and the word “unbreakable.”

Rolling Stone defense lawyer Scott Sexton stops the audio to ask Erdely, “Did it ever occur to you that someone would get a tattoo on their body to commemorate a sexual assault that didn’t happen?”

Erdely’s voice shakes in reply: “Never.”

As the anniversary of her alleged September 28 attack neared, Jackie tells Erdely on the tape, she’d have nightmares in which she pictures herself walking up stairs but telling herself, “Don’t go.”

“I’d sleep during the day and stay up all night because I just couldn’t deal with the dark,” she said.

“I reverted to thoughts of suicide and self harm,” Jackie tells Erdely. “You can run as fast as you can, but you can never get over it. I still have nightmares.”

“She tells it in such a real and emotional way,” Erdely says on the witness stand. “She’s so conscientious with her details I could feel it.”

She wasn’t conscientious about every detail.

The jury hands a note to the judge. They want to know what to make of Jackie’s varying pronunciations of the fraternity where she was allegedly raped. The background noise is distracting, but she seems to call it Chi Phi, Chi Psi, Pi Phi– rarely, if ever, the one actually named in the story: Phi Psi.

Rolling Stone’s lawyer says he’d be happy to stipulate Phi Psi. But Eramo attorney Libby Locke suddenly stands and demands that the jurors trust their own ears.

“It goes to credibility,” says Locke.

Judge Glen Conrad agrees.

The infamous rape school quotation came into the record as Jackie can be heard telling the tale of what Dean Nicole Eramo, the plaintiff, was quoted in the article saying about the UVA’s alleged penchant to bury rape statistics.

In Jackie’s words: “She looked at me very solemnly and said, like, ‘Well, who would want to send their daughter to the rape school?'”

With her chin up and her gaze fixed firmly on Erdely, Eramo lets a hint of a confident smile course across her lips, as this pillar of her lawsuit– that she never actually said it– can be heard coming from the mouth of Jackie.

Later, Jackie can be heard telling Erdely about running into two of her alleged rapists in the beverage section of Walmart while she and a boyfriend were making a night-time search for spinach. Erdely took the tale as more evidence of truth.

“Her level of specificity just reinforced her believability,” Erdely testified. “She didn’t just run into them at Walmart; she ran into them in the juice aisle.”

Jackie’s not on trial here, as the judge and lawyers remind the jurors from time to time, but she seems to relish certain aspects of victimhood. She enthuses about her 12-person UVA course on women & violence, but she reserves her greatest enthusiasm for One Less, a support group for female sexual assault survivors.

“I’m not in a sorority,” she tells Erdely. But in One Less, she says, there are sorority-like get-togethers where women share emotional “highs and lows.”

“All of us are really close,” Jackie tells Erdely. “It’s a little sorority within itself.”

There almost seemed to be a little sorority within Erdely and Jackie. The audio reveals the two talking of post-traumatic stress disorder and swapping tales of psychologists, bio-feedback therapy and migraine headaches– all while as sporting events, music, and the sound of billiard balls clink in the background.

In court, Erdely testifies that Jackie, who speaks at a rapid clip, seemed “outgoing and forthright” as well as “bubbly and enthusiastic.”

How this sister act will play with the jurors who appear to be in their 40s, 50s, and low 60s is unclear; but the college student definitely made an impression on the reporter.

“It was like drinking from a firehose when you were with Jackie,” Erdely testified. “She just talked and talked.”

Jackie seems particularly talkative on the topic of “Becky,” another woman that Jackie claims shared her story of getting raped at the same fraternity.

“She spoke like Spock from Star Trek,” says Jackie, as Becky tells of going into a room with three men.

“They summoned another boy into the room,” continues Jackie, “and I remember she used the word ‘summoned.'”

“What, was she carrying a thesaurus?” jokes Erdely, impressed with the diction and the specificity of the tale.

Jackie notes that “Becky” acts formally, dresses in business casual, and proceeds to say she was an unwilling participant in “forcible sexual intercourse.” And then leaves.

“She looks at her watch and was like, ‘I’ve got to get to class now.'”

Jackie, while admittedly more emotional than Becky– whom the defense lawyer suggests may be fictitious– is never heard in the audio protesting her role as the controversial story’s centerpiece. And, Erdely testified, Jackie never asked the reporter to remove her.

“And after it came out,” said Erdely, “she was thanking me for the article.”

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Frat brothers’ defamation case thrown out

Phi Kappa Psi. File photo

A New York federal judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit on June 29 filed by three members of Phi Kappa Psi against Rolling Stone and writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely for the now-discredited 2014 story, “A Rape on Campus.”

“Their defamation claims are directed toward a report about events that simply did not happen,” wrote U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel in his decision.

George Elias IV, Stephen Hadford and Ross Fowler were UVA students in 2012, when the alleged rape occurred, although a Charlottesville Police investigation later determined no evidence the gang rape described in Erdely’s article ever took place. None of the plaintiffs were identified by name, but they claim that the article’s references to the attackers inadvertently involved them—even though they also claim that the same attackers were invented by “Jackie.”

The three fraternity members said the story could have prompted friends, family and peers to erroneously deduce that they were participants in the gang rape.

Elias said it could be inferred from the description of the room where the purported rape occurred that it was the room he lived in for two years and the only one accessible at the top of the stairs without an electronic keypad lock.

“Now, climbing the frat-house stairs with Drew, Jackie felt excited,” said the article. “Drew ushered Jackie into a bedroom, shutting the door behind them.”

Castel disagreed, and said that while Elias had one of several bedrooms on the second floor, the article did not identify him.

Fowler’s qualms arose with the story’s insinuations that the alleged gang rape was a requirement for initiation with its statements such as, “Don’t you want to be a brother?” and “We all had to do it, so you do, too.” As the fraternity’s rush chair, he alleged the story directly implies that he was the maestro behind the heinous acts described.

Fowler further claims that as an avid swimmer who frequented UVA’s Aquatic Center, readers would automatically associate him as one of the rape’s perpetrators.

Judge Castel didn’t buy those claims either, and said Fowler relied on an interpretation at odds with the surrounding context created by the article and said a “strained or artificial construction” could not be made defamatory.

“Essentially, real people don’t have a right to sue when someone makes up fictitious people that in some way resembles them,” says legal expert David Heilberg.

Hadford, a 2013 UVA graduate, continued to live on Grounds for 15 months after graduation and frequently rode his bike between his residence and his job at UVA Medical Center’s emergency department. According to Jackie, former associate dean Nicole Eramo claimed all of Jackie’s perpetrators had graduated, yet, Jackie had seen one riding his bicycle that same day she talked to Eramo.

“Friends, family, and acquaintances of Hadford would have made the connection that Hadford must have been the person who Jackie saw riding his bike on campus,” he claimed in his suit. The judge denied this allegation because the article failed to provide additional details of the bike rider.

This is one of three cases that Rolling Stone and Erdely faces. Phi Kappa Psi also filed a defamation suit, and another hearing in Eramo’s lawsuit is scheduled August 12 in Roanoke.

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‘Jackie’ balks: Wants subpoena quashed in Rolling Stone lawsuit

Jackie says Nicole Eramo’s attorneys shouldn’t get to depose her because of her “fragile” state as a sexual assault victim.

The young woman at the center of Rolling Stone’s now-retracted 2014 article, “A Rape on Campus,” filed a motion March 15 to quash her deposition subpoena in the defamation lawsuit filed by UVA Associate Dean Nicole Eramo against the magazine and its reporter. That same day, Eramo’s attorneys filed a motion to depose Jackie for an additional three hours.

A U.S. District Court judge already had ordered that Jackie, who claimed to be the victim of a brutal gang rape at a UVA fraternity in 2012, be deposed April 5. (C-VILLE does not identify alleged victims of sexual assault.)

In the latest motion, Eramo’s attorneys asked for more time to question Jackie because the seven hours the court allotted for her deposition would have to be shared with the defendants and because of the sheer volume of notes and recordings reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely had of interviews with Jackie.

“Moreover, the voluminous evidence that Jackie has a well-documented history of making untruthful statements about the very subject matter at issue here is likely to complicate the deposition, leading to further objections by the witness and her counsel,” says an Eramo memorandum.

Jackie had already been compelled to turn over texts and e-mails for “Haven Monahan,” the pseudonym she gave her date the night of the alleged rape.  Eramo contends Jackie was “catfishing” to attract another student.

Team Jackie counters that even if she was the central figure in the Rolling Stone article, that’s “entirely irrelevant” to whether she has any factual information on Eramo’s defamation claims.

Her attorneys ask that her alleged assault be excluded from the deposition, while Eramo’s lawyers say that would be easy enough if Jackie stipulated the alleged gang rape never happened.

Every proposed stipulation is “a negative attack” on Jackie, “contains highly personal and confidential information and demonstrates a complete lack of compassion” for Jackie, her motion states.

Eramo plans to use the deposition as “a weapon to inflict harm” on Jackie with utter disregard for the “significant and undeniable psychological harm that will result,” all to further Eramo’s attempt “to extract money from Rolling Stone for reporting opinions about Plaintiff that the Office of Civil Rights has already concluded to be true,” says Jackie’s motion.

That refers to the agreement the civil rights office in the U.S. Department of Education reached in September with UVA following its investigation that found the university created a “hostile environment” for victims of sexual assault. Among other actions, UVA agreed to investigate all complaints heard for three previous years by the Sexual Misconduct Board, of which Eramo was head, to make sure they were handled appropriately.

Jackie cites her “fragile state” as a sexual assault victim as reason alone to quash the subpoena. But if she must be deposed, she wants to make sure Eramo’s suit survives a summary judgment, at which point she wants written questions, an order that prohibits counsel from disclosing the location of the deposition, no videotaping and the transcript of the deposition sealed under a protective order.

“I’ve never seen that,” says legal expert David Heilberg. He calls it “the Fourth Estate’s Frankenstein monster,” stemming from the media’s practice of protecting the identities of rape victims so as to not discourage them from coming forward to report sex crimes. “She’s asking for extraordinary relief,” he says. “Jackie, as has been reported in the press, is not your typical victim.”

Shortly after the article appeared and other media outlets began to investigate Jackie’s story, “it became apparent that Jackie’s claims were entirely false, and that she likely invented the supposed gang rape in order to gain the sympathy of a man she was romantically interested in and to cover for her failing grades,” says Eramo’s motion.

On March 23, 2015, Charlottesville Police concluded an investigation and said it found “no substantive basis of fact to conclude that an incident occurred” such as what was described in the Rolling Stone article, an investigation with which Jackie refused to cooperate.

Eramo says that when she first met with Jackie, the alleged victim “related a version of her supposed sexual assault that was very different from the tale” depicted in Rolling Stone.

Phi Kappa Psi has filed suit against Rolling Stone, as have two fraternity members.

Palma Pustilnik, one of five attorneys representing Jackie, says, “We’re still maintaining our position of ‘no comment.’” An attorney for Eramo did not return a phone call.

The limit on the length of time a third party such as Jackie can be deposed—seven hours—is to protect people who are not named in civil suits, says Heilberg. “Otherwise Fortune 500 companies would be able to depose people for days on end,” he says. “You have to convince a judge to allow more time.” Eramo wants a total of 6.5 hours.

A jury trial is scheduled for October 11.

eramo motion addl time to depose jackie 3-15-16

jackie quash memo 3-15-16

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UVA Associate Dean Nicole Eramo seeks Jackie’s text messages

UVA Associate Dean Nicole Eramo. Photo: UVA University Communications

The University of Virginia dean suing Rolling Stone for more than $7.5 million after a now-discredited story about a university gang rape at a fraternity house, which she said painted her as the “chief villain” in the case, is asking for access to the alleged rape victim’s text messages and other communications.

Associate Dean Nicole Eramo’s legal team filed documents January 6 that say Jackie, the alleged victim in the 2012 story titled “A Rape on Campus,” should not be protected from having to reveal her texts because there’s no evidence that a rape actually took place.

“What Jackie is refusing to produce is not evidence of a sexual assault, but evidence that she lied,” Eramo’s lawyers wrote in a submitted document, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.

The associate dean’s attorneys call Jackie a “serial liar” in the filings and seek documents related to Haven Monahan, the student Jackie says she was on a date with the night of the alleged rape and whom officials later learned was never a student at UVA. A person by the name of Haven Monahan has never been found or linked to the case.

A January 8 Washington Post article, “‘Catfishing’ over love interest might have spurred U-Va. gang-rape debacle,” suggests that Jackie created Monahan, a fake suitor, to spark love between herself and fellow university student Ryan Duffin. She encouraged Duffin to text Monahan, whom she said was in her chemistry class, and Duffin told the Post that Monahan seemed “infatuated” with Jackie. In a later investigation, photos of Monahan, which he purportedly sent to Duffin, were determined to be photos of a person from Jackie’s high school, who was not Monahan.

Monahan once told Duffin in a text message that he should have more sympathy for Jackie because she had a terminal illness. Duffin says he asked Jackie about the illness and she confirmed to him that she was dying.

Jackie has not been named as the defendant in any of the three lawsuits the retracted story has spawned. Along with Eramo’s suit, one has been filed by the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi, where the rape allegedly took place, and by a smaller group of men from the fraternity who say they were alluded to in the story.