Rolling Stone's Journalistic Missteps Cause Fallout For Victims Of Sexual Assault

MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: This is KPBS Midday Edition, I am Maureen Cavanaugh. A "debacle" that's how news outlets are characterizing the meltdown of Rolling Stone's expose on a sexual assault at the University of Virginia. The article told the story of a freshman, referred to as "Jackie," who said she was the victim of a brutal gang rape at a UVA fraternity. In response to the bombshell story, the school called for a police investigation into the incident and suspended all fraternities until next semester. Reporting by other news outlets found major discrepancies in the story of the alleged rape. Now, Rolling Stone has backed away from its own report, first in a clumsy apology citing misplaced trust in Jackie, and more recently blaming their own faulty reporting. This debacle has left many questions in its wake: How should news organizations verify allegations made by sexual assault victims? And more importantly, what do inaccurate reports due to the credibility of the victims? I would like to welcome my guests Jeffrey Bucholtz is President of we send violence and President of the San Diego Domestic Violence Council. Jeffrey, welcome to the show. JEFFREY S. BUCHOLTZ: Thank you. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: And Laura Wingard is news and digital editor here at KPBS. Hi, Laura. LAURA WINGARD: Hi, Maureen. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Now, Jeff is this the kind of the situation where survivors and advocates just cringe and worry about the fallout? JEFFREY S. BUCHOLTZ: I don't know that I would say where people cringe. I think it's actually a common part of dealing with sexual assault case. I think for those that do advocacy and support for survivors of sexual assault I would say that a story not being linear or changing over time as the person recalls this traumatic event, I don't think people would be surprised by that at all in our field. I think for anybody in our field it is a large concern any time a story gains this much traction and then has people are labelling as inaccuracies in it. I am not sure I would agree with all of that, but there are some inaccuracies in the story from how people see it, and I think that is damaging to the movement as a whole to some extent. Those people in the field are not unfamiliar with the fact that the stories of survivors are not tracked in the same linear way that a movie plot does or the way this expose narrated it. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: I'm going to ask you more about that as we go on, but to focus on as what you say is a high profile story, when something like this happens, when certain things are revealed to be inconsistent the story may not be exact little the way it was revealed originally, can it stop victims of sexual assault from coming forward do you think? JEFFREY S. BUCHOLTZ: I think what stops victims from coming forward from sexual assault is the kind of backlash that a news outlet today a blog outted the name of the victim or the image of her of Jackie, that's the stuff that terrifies survivors. Most of the time they don't come forward is because they are not afraid of a media outlet picking up the story, they are afraid of their friends not believing them and their families not believing them and shaming them. That fear of the people they love and trust being unsafe is just as much if not more of a motivator than a distrust of media or law enforcement. In a large scale case like this where the amount of media attention that is driven to it has put a lot of exposure out there. Yeah, there is a little damage done for folks in terms of being safe to report their stories. They say something and then if it doesn't stay the same exactly because I don't remember it precisely in that way, what happens if I change? Will everyone stop believing me? Will my friends not believe me? MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Right, now let's talk about some of the discrepancies in the Rolling Stones story uncovered by other reporters, most notably the Washington Post. Laura the alleged attacker was described in the story as a lifeguard at the University pool, a member of a certain fraternity, what does other news sources discover when they tried to confirm that? LAURA WINGARD: Well, they found out that no member of this particular fraternity, according to the fraternity, had been a lifeguard at the pool. So that was one of the discrepancies and there was other things that came out about it goes to the heart of what Jeffrey said, as Jackie told her friends there was more, you know, was it seven men who attacked her or was it five men? And I think Jeffrey would say that's not uncommon, but now all of that is being brought out as you know can she be believed? MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Now, what we have heard from Rolling Stone is that they were asked by Jackie not to contact the alleged attackers, but are there other things they might have done. For instance, called up and found out if a certain person had worked at a lifeguard at a pool? LAURA WINGARD: Oh, sure. There are just so many things they could have been doing to verify this story. Um, and I think really a lot of people are blaming the reporter. I think editors at Rolling Stone have to take responsibility. Reporters don't act alone. It is a team effort. So there should have been discussions about this. Who makes an agreement that we are not going to contact the accuser or really just do due diligence in trying to verify this woman's story. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Now, Jeff the Washington Post reports in a second interview Jackie could no longer remember whether her attacker was a member, actually a member of the fraternity. Explain how to us how that is possible? You started out by telling us that trauma like this sort of makes linear recall not as common as you would think from just in normal life. How does that happen? How does it impact the way you remember details? JEFFREY S. BUCHOLTZ: The first thing I would say is that if all of us look back at something that happened two years ago while we were in a you know, how good is our recall of an event like that, especially when somebody when someone would start to dig into everyone else's opinion that happened that night. Very seldom do our friends do does a reporter ask 15 other people in the room if they recall it the same way we did. So memory is not as precise as we would like it to be especially in trauma MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Some people however would say that if something traumatic and terrible happens to you the memory is imprinted indelibly in your mind. JEFFREY S. BUCHOLTZ: Yes, the memory again memory and narrating the memory are two different things. To be able to access what you experience. When you are experiencing trauma the parts of your brain that are working, you are in a fight or flight response mode. So the parts of the brain that are responsible for organizing the high level logic thinking are not where people are at in those situations. So when you try and use that part of the brain to recall what happened, you are having to figure out how to connect two types of things the primordial response and experience that you have and then to narrate that as a linear memory that would make sense to a reporter or your friends can be difficult and or flat out sometimes impossible to be able to come up with that precise linear thing. It is not to say that people don't remember it, I would like point out, no one Washington Post or anybody who has criticized this has said that this woman was not sexually assaulted. So when we boil it down, whether the reporting was accurate or not, nobody argued with whether she was actually sexually assaulted. Instead, it is whether she recalls the story in a way that how she recalls that story and how it was reported which is an important part of the story. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: In their first apology Jeff about these discrepancies in the story, Rolling Stones said they had come to the conclusion that their trust in Jackie was misplaced. Let me get your reaction to that statement? JEFFREY S. BUCHOLTZ: I don't like that statement. That's my basic reaction. I think to say their trust in Jackie was misplaced is really a deep insult to every survivor out there and if there was trust misplaced it was in the editorial staff. If you are going to run a story that you run on purpose, right? Probably because it is a sensational story and it got a lot of attention because it is so graphic. If you are going to run a story like that, it should not be based on trust in one person um, but trust in the process which I think you would use as a journalist to determine what kind of stuff we share with the public and how we share it in a way that is ethical or not. When we say this is what one person told us, we have not verified it yet, but this is what the story said. I think saying their trust in her is misplaced is also an indicator of the fact that they are not familiar with working with survivors, and I would be curious as to whether they had or she had access to an advocate for example to be supportive during that process as she was going through the interviews. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: And Laura? LAURA WINGARD: I was thinking that the reporter had to have spent an awful amount of time with this woman. And along the way I think I would have said maybe we should going to sources like Jeffrey at the University of Virginia and find out is she the best case study to illustrate this issue? That doesn't mean she is not a victim, but is she the story you want to go with to illustrate the story of sexual violence on college campuses. There was no paper trail. She never went to the police. It didn't go through the campus judicial process. Those are all red flags to me as an editor and they should have been to the editors at Rolling Stones as well as the reporter. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Now, recently KPBS Angela Carone did investigative reports on an alleged rape that happened on the campus of San Diego State University that allegedly happened years ago there was no fact checking in that particular instance. And was there the kind of documentation that you said that maybe reporters should look for in a particular story in order to feel more confident about the kind of news they are putting out? LAURA WINGARD: Yes, Angela had a number of conversations with editors. We talked a lot about what did she have beyond she had just like Rolling Stones she had a very good interview with a willing accuser. And the woman gave us a lot of details, but she had also immediately filed a police report, that police report we obtained through the victim because you have to get that from somebody that is involved. We got the police report so we had that. We went this case was not prosecuted criminally, Angela went back to the Deputy District Attorney that handled the case and reviewed it and decided not there was not enough evidence to go forward. Our victim was attacked by her boyfriend those often are difficult. Law enforcement or prosecutors will say this is going to be a he said or she said, but we talked to that person. This woman filed a temporary restraining order in the courts against this man. So there was a court record that you know where the allegations are listed and stuff like that. Angela went to great lengths to track the man down. She found a phone number for him, it didn't work. So she reached out to him through Facebook. She found him through Facebook and immediately got back to Angela. She told him what the story was about and he declined to be interviewed for it. That was included in the story. So there was a lot of discussions and we felt comfortable with the story because it went through that, and it also went through the judicial process. We should say that he was expelled from San Diego State, and they found that what the woman said to have happened, they believed her story and felt it was serious. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: So as you have been pointing out there are rather huge differences in documentation and outreach if you want to call it that in the story that KPBS did as opposed to the story that Rolling Stone did about the UVA campus. Well, one thing that is similar is that Rolling Stone didn't use the real name of the accuser and neither did KPBS in its report. How is that decision made to withhold the name of the person making the allegations? LAURA WINGARD: There was a discussion, not all of the editors agreed. The final feeling was that this woman did not want her name used or even her first name used. Typically when somebody is making allegations of sexual assault, news organizations do not name them unless the person wants their name used. We changed her name and we were transparent about that because it helped to tell the story as opposed to saying the woman, the accuser, using those types of things. It made it easier to tell the story. We also had her on camera but she was blurred out. So there was a discussion about that. We knew who she was and we had checked her out and decided not to use her name. JEFFREY S. BUCHOLTZ: And let me tag on to that for one second here. The reason that so many news organizations used that strategy of not using the victim’s name and identifying them, this is where every listener right now has a choice to make as to whether we as a culture are going to be a culture supportive to people who go through this or not. The reason that these news organizations make that decision is because if they don't, you are talking about every friend and every family member who doesn't know anything about what has happened to this person now being a part of that conversation. That is not always going to be helpful to that person who went through the sexual assault or through the domestic violence to be able to recover. Again, this is where those listeners have to make a choice, you don't have to know what happened in the room to be able to be supportive of someone who said that something happened to them. LAURA WINGARD: And this woman is trying to move on with her life, and she has to live with this her whole life. She doesn't want every time you Google her name when she applies for a job, when somebody wants to date her and they Google you and the first thing that pops up is a KPBS story that has her name saying that she was the victim of an attack by a boyfriend when she was in college. JEFFREY S. BUCHOLTZ: There are very few people who would want to be defined that way. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Now, what are your concerns Jeff for the woman Jackie at the center of this story now? You mentioned over the weekend her name and picture was basically published by a blogger, she is getting an awful lot of flak for the fact that everything in this story has not turned out to be consistent with any viable fact that a reporter can find out. So, is this the kind of thing that is a nightmare a second nightmare for somebody who has been through a sexual assault? JEFFREY S. BUCHOLTZ: I certainly think it would meet that criteria. Um, I think that for anyone going through a sexual assault what we can do is to believe them and be supportive of them and ask how we can help. What is happening right now for her is a re adjudication in the public domain of what happened in a case where I mean that is just what a horrific to have to watch that happen. I can't speak to it from her perspective, I don't know her, but if that were me I would not be well right now. I would be terrified of the very critiques that silenced me in the first place. Right? Why she didn't want to go to the police. This is exactly why. She is now living it, and it is amplified by Rolling Stone and every other media outlet that has picked up her story. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: There is some advocates who make the argument that the more transparency, the more people that come out in the open, the more faces, the more names of victims of sexual violence that are known, the more people who stand up and don't necessarily feel that they need that cloak of secrecy the more this will become a real subject that will be really dealt with by society. JEFFREY S. BUCHOLTZ: Yeah, I think any time we can have a more open and public dialogue about something where we have a lot more information to understand what went on there is value to that. This is where ore culture keeps failing though. It is like we are turning to people who have just been raped and saying, "You know what we would really like you to do now is make sure you make your case public so we can talk about it in a way that would be helpful." I am not saying it wouldn't be, but really that's how about we talk about it like we know it happens. This is part of the reporting problem too, the story covered one piece of one story at one University and the whole big story here is that this is happening all of the time at all of the Universities and that's the big story. It is not a question of whether sexual assault happens, we are now arguing about whether she was forced to have oral sex with five guys or seven guys, who cares about that specific detail. Let's talk about the fact that we are failing as a culture to support survivors and it is very visible in this process, and we are failing as a culture to prevent the problem in the first place. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: I am out of time. I want to thank you both very much. Jeff Bucholtz is President of San Diego Domestic Violence Council and Laura Wingard is news and digital editor here at KPBS. Thank you both very much. JEFFREY S. BUCHOLTZ: Thanks. LAURA WINGARD: Thanks. MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: Coming up, how the man named California professor of the year tries to give students the tools to teach themselves that as KPBS Midday Edition continues.