Why 'Discrepancies' In Rolling Stone Rape Story Don't Mean 'Jackie' Is Lying

[undeterred]

By Barbara Herman

In the wake of Rolling Stone’s multiple clarifications to its bombshell story, "A Rape On Campus," about a University of Virginia student that the magazine called “Jackie” who recounted her gang rape at UVA, some are interpreting the “discrepancies” that Rolling Stone subsequently discovered in Jackie’s story as a sign that she lied about everything. But according to Leah Foster, who for five years has been the director of Trauma Recovery Services at the New Orleans Family Justice Center and who works with sexual assault survivors, regularly hearing their chaotic testimony, science is increasingly proving that, similar to war veterans and police officers with post-traumatic stress disorder, rape survivors' memories and stories tend to be nonlinear, fragmented and confused -- "a mishmash," as Foster put it. And it takes special training to ask them for and to make sense of their often jumbled accounts.

In a conversation with International Business Times, Foster explained that new research into the neurobiology of the brain shows that when people are in what feels like life or death situations (soldiers, police, rape survivors, etc.), chemicals get released that turn off the higher functioning of their brains, triggering a very primitive, "reptilian" part of the brain that throws them into survival mode. In trauma situations, this research shows, what a person perceives as a life or death situation is experienced differently, is processed differently and is remembered differently than ordinary experiences. Trauma memories themselves are different, and "discrepancies" are part of all trauma survivors' testimonies -- the rule rather than the exception.

It’s being reported that Jackie has hired an attorney. Mark Eiglarsh, a criminal defense attorney in Miami, Florida, told ABC News that it may be that she fears being sued herself. "If Jackie allegedly lied and that perpetrator suffered injury as a result, she could be sued for damages," said Eiglarsh. So loud has the din gotten to discredit Jackie's story completely that friends close to her situation have stepped up to support her.

On Sunday, Emily Clark wrote an open letter in UVA student paper the Daily Cavalier titled, "Letter from a friend: Jackie's story is not a hoax."

My name is Emily, and I was Jackie’s suitemate first year. I am writing to you in regards to Rolling Stone’s recent statement of "misplaced trust" in Jackie. I feel this statement is backwards, as it seems it was Jackie who misplaced her trust in Rolling Stone.... I fully support Jackie, and I believe wholeheartedly that she went through a traumatizing sexual assault. Whether the details are correct or not, and whether the reporting was faulty, or the hazy memories of a traumatizing night got skewed ... the blame should never fall on the victim’s shoulders.

Read more at: http://www.ibtimes.com/why-discrepancies-rolling-stone-rape-story-dont-mean-jackie-lying-1747528?

[enlightenment]

1. Don't blame the victim

but the reporter who submitted that story without bothering to verify basic facts of the story should have her coat and hat handed to her on the way out of the newsroom door - along with those "fact-checkers" that Rolling Stone claims to use.

"Jackie" may not be actively lying, but her hazy memory of what happened was repeated and reported as a fact - and that's piss-poor reporting.

[Igel]

3. Here's the problem.

There's a huge body of research into how memory's processed.

Chemicals and stress, mental illness can all screw around with how memories are processed and stored.

Chemicals and rehashing memories after the fact can led to dulling them, rewriting them. False memories can be implanted by others or by the person involved, memories can be rewritten and altered after the fact. Some of this has made it into clinical tries for PTSD therapies.

Had somebody pointed these facts out three weeks ago they'd have had posts removed and possibly been banned. We'd have been doubting Jackie. We would have been engaged in further violence against a victim. We'd be perpetuating something or other that is utterly wrong and hurtful. But the facts were as true then as now, just inconvenient for the narrative. Jackie was a symbol, a tool. Her story mattered because it advanced a Cause. She was the symbol that the reporter chose, and all pretense at being objective, of engaging in critical thinking, of considering evidence that might disconfirm a hypothesis was pitched out the window, gleefully. The reporter was motivatedly negligent because it suited the advocacy. This is true for all causes, and it's why we have things like the scientific method and critical thinking, to slow us down and consider alternatives, to question assumptions and facts on both sides of an argument (as well as realize that the argument at hand may have a 3rd, 4th, and 5th side).

Symbols are horrible to discuss because the details don't matter--it's a Moral Issue, and one side is Right and True and the other is evil and malicious. Everything's presented with very high contrast, all grays are rendered as solid black or solid white. The ends are justified and virtuous, bathed in a kind of sacred nimbus that casts a serene glow of righteousness and truth back on the means. Why bother with truth when you have Truth? Let self-righteous indignation creep in--much less charge in--and civilized discussion goes out the other door for its own safety.

Now that the Cause demands it, these facts about memories are not just allowed but probably required, but still they're spun. We can't throw Jackie under the bus. Moreover, we can still use the young woman, she can still be a tool. There are a lot of reasons for Jackie to have false memories--to believe something is true that isn't. Thing is, you can't just claim that because a traumatic rape is a possible cause of skewed and skewered memories that it must be the cause. It might not be. There are other causes, not just stress and trauma at the time. The first reporter was negligent. Now we're insisting on not learning anything from that reporter's ineptness. We still have motivated reasoning, we still have the same methodology in the advancement of advocacy: We pick and choose the facts, and only those that are bathed by the golden nimbus of Truth are allowed to be considered as true.

In fact, some of the claims seem to argue for some other cause. For example, spreading a false picture *before* the rape is alleged to have happened rather argues for something else entirely--what that "something" is isn't clear, by any means. Too many of the "facts"--meaning "more than none"--that presumably resulted from misprocessing the traumatic event were already alleged *before* the event. So not only do we re-imagine critical thinking, we also have to re-imagine cause and effect. Unless we up the contrast a lot so that all the unpleasant facts are washed out of the picture.

She's no longer a reliable witness for a "culture of rape" at college campuses. The lack of her testimony has no bearing on how frats and colleges deal with women and sexual abuse. Then again, her testimony also has no bearing, either.

We saw the same kind of argumentation a few decades ago when a bunch of schoolchildren at a private school started to allege sex abuse during an investigation. It was okay to destroy the adults' careers, only later saying, "Oops." The investigators, it turned out, managed to convince the kids that bad things happened, implanting false memories and letting the kids' proclivities to fill in the details do the rest. Jackie had no investigators; she did, however, have friend-advocates and a support group that could have played the same role in building some incident (real or imagined) into the story Jackie told to the reporter.

The same almost happened with a high-ranking Catholic priest in Los Angeles during the Catholic sex abuse scandal, where a woman came forward and claimed repeated incidents of abuse with detailed recollections. He denied them, and it was argued that the woman's story had to be taken at face value. Since he was a respected figure in a church wracked by accusations (many true) and it was alleged adult heterosexual abuse (not grown male priests with teenage boys or younger) the news report took off. Fortunately somebody investigated, and it was found that the woman alleged events in the man's office after he'd been transferred out of LA and had duties elsewhere, and for at least one incident before he was transferred he was photographed at a church conference in the mid-West (Ohio, perhaps?). She was defended, the very attempt to defend the priest instead of railroading him declared to be re-victimizing the woman. Any errors in memories were from the trauma involved. Then the woman with crystal clear memories of the events was also found to have a crystal clear paper trail of psychological treatment. The entire incident vanished, with a Cheshire-cat grin of "this goes to show we need more comprehensive public psychological health services safety net."

Both events go to show that false memories don't necessarily imply a real trauma happened. So the fact that Jackie's false memories are commensurate with trauma does not entail that trauma produced Jackie's false memories. This kind of thinking is called abductive reasoning. Abduction is fake logic.