Letters to the Editor
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Duke players cleared: Broadsheet Absolves Staff of Any Journalistic Responsibility
Look, a lot of people spoke way too soon on this one, your Blog included. No sane person would argue with "innocent until proven guilty" as well as "the accuser needs counselors to believe her." And you also know that wasn't the case here on Broadsheet in the weeks after the story broke. Please, just this once, take full responsibility for your posts and admit you willingly jumped on that bandwagon way too soon and could have--should have--made the post that Rockwell and Clark-Flory made today then instead of now. You could have taken the high road, you could have called for balance, you could have encouraged your readers to respect all parties until the facts were available.
You didn't. And just like that loser Imus, you continue to stall and punt in the face of the facts before you. Shame on you.
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"No Sane Person" Indeed
Seems to me that once a rape or sexual assault accusation has been shown to be unfounded (or even malicious), that the rape shiled laws that protect the accuser's identity become null and void for that accuser in that case.
Sure, once malice is proved beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
This was a failure to properly investigate, and when the facts started finally coming to light, it was shown that this woman lied about being attacked.
She has not been convicted of that beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
No sane person would argue with "innocent until proven guilty"...
While I won't vouch for their sanity, I certainly see that argument all the time.
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Give michael sullivan a star
How about a mea culpa instad of this self-serving nonsense?
I'm going to hold my breath for ONE, one single person who jumped on the lacrosse players from the start to come out and simply say "I was wrong."
This post is equivocating rationalization. Mistakes were made, blah blah blah, everyone is to blame, etc etc. Diffusion of responsibility. We were wrong but hey, other people were wrong too!
You were flat out wrong, so come clean.
What you are doing is plain dishonest and reduces your credibility to near zero.
Not only should you flatly state that you were wrong, without your wishy-washy qualifications, but you should perform some introspection and then explain why you were so quick to grab your pitchforks. Instead you bend over backwards to diffuse the blame to everyone and excuse yourselves.
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uhhh..sorry?
How convenient that the Duke case wraps up on the heels of the Imus flap so that all the media (Broadsheet included) don't really have to bend at the waist doing their collective mea culpas. They can sniff the air, shake their heads and like Belushi in Animal House after destroying the guitar, hand it back and mutter 'sorry'. Move on to Imus, fresh meat, we got HIM on TAPE.
Even your headline, 'botched case', gives off the air of "well it could have been true, if not for Nifong's bumbling and malfeasance". Listen to the NC AG's words. No credible evidence. Complete exoneration. Stop saying or intimating (talking to you Serena Roberts) we will never know for sure what happened in that house.
We know there was underage drinking, not a felony and I daresay an activity every single contributor to Salon under 40 has engaged in.
We know they hired a stripper (again not a crime, even if you and I don't like it), but did NOT specify race.
We know the two strippers showed up, danced, got paid, and left.
There is no credible evidence (again the AG's words, not mine) that ANYTHING else occurred, other than party cleanup and everyone leaving soon after the strippers left.
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AV name
From Raleigh NewsObserver.
http://blogs.newsobserver.com/editor/index.php?title=why_we_re_naming_the_accuser&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
Crystal Gail Magnum for those too lazy to go to url.
apologies for serial post...
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Cavalier attitudes all around
Better that 10 men be sent to prison on false accusations of rape, than one true victim of rape decide to drop the charges.
Right?
I'm reminded of Catherine Comins, the official at Vassar College, who once said in Time magazine: "Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience."
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Sure, once malice is proved beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law
Why? She can't be PUNISHED unless she is PROVEN to have done something wrong, but why does her identity need to be protected in the absence of any AFFIRMATIVE evidence that she is actually a victim of a crime?
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Discouragement
How will future rape "survivors" (love that term -- if she didn't survive, she'd be a murder victim) be further injured by this circus of a case? We're not a Muslim country, where under Islamic law rape victims are whipped, stoned and hanged if they fail to produce four male Muslim spectators who are willing to testify. That's being further victimized. Not some vague handwringing fear that women won't be instantly believed without question.
The police and health workers I know and have heard of are all keenly aware of the reality of rape and the need to support the victim, as well as of the responsibility to conduct a thorough investigation. In fact, the woman at the core of the Duke case almost certainly benefitted from that training and those procedures, though in the end they unraveled her lies.
Though these young men were well-Tawana'd, the furious blogging on the case did bring to light the disturbing attitudes of many of the "feminist" bloggers. If feminism is, as I believe Katha Pollitt put it, merely "the belief that women are people," how can one excuse the instantaneous demand that the accuser be believed without question, despite all evidence to the contrary? If women are people, then some of them are going to lie -- yes, even about rape. The system we have, improvable as it might be, is designed to determine the truth. It worked in this case.
Reflexively believing someone's story simply because they are one of a class of "victims" du jour is not a sign of moral elevation. It does not prove your righteousness or "tolerance." It is a sign of moral dishonesty (there is only one kind of "victimization"), intellectual laziness (who cares about the facts), and a keen interest in self-congratulation.