Over the past week, 1,300 fraternity executives and student-affairs officials from across the U.S. met at the Omni hotel in Nashville. The most popular topics at the conference: media scrutiny and how to prevent sexual assault.
As the meeting wrapped up Friday, Rolling Stone magazine backed away from a story about the alleged gang rape of a woman named Jackie at the University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. At the same time, the hashtag #IStandWithJackie drew attention on Twitter, with advocates saying they don’t want the episode to deter women from speaking up.
The gathering and social-media frenzy show how the journalistic fiasco has tarnished the growing movement to combat college sexual assault, as well as fraternities. Rolling Stone’s note to readers -- which fails to mention exactly what it now believes may be untrue -- could discourage women from talking about violence, according to activist Susy Struble.
“This is coming at a time when we’ve been hopeful about making significant progress in improving the climate for women everywhere,” said Struble, one of the founders of Dartmouth Change, an alumni group fighting sexual assault at the Ivy League school in Hanover, New Hampshire. “People are so upset and distraught. It’s been incredibly damaging.”
‘Incredibly Damaging’
Sexual assault has become one of the leading issues on college campuses. About 90 colleges are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights over policies -- on sexual-assault prevention, investigation and adjudication -- that may violate Title IX, the law that prohibits gender discrimination in education.
State and federal lawmakers are pushing for more prosecutions of sexual assaults and stiffer penalties for schools that fail to prevent and pursue occurrences. President Barack Obama unveiled a national campaign in September called “It’s on Us,” enlisting celebrities to raise awareness about the importance of obtaining consent before sex and protecting friends from being assaulted.
At first, the magazine story seemed to be a valuable part of those efforts, advocates said.
“The Rolling Stone story helped our country wake up to the true scope of the challenge of campus sexual violence,” said Daniel Carter, director of the VTV Family Outreach Foundation’s 32 National Campus Safety Initiative. “It would be a tragedy if this awakening is derailed by inconsistencies in how any single case is reported.”
‘A Nightmare’
Advocates expressed support and sympathy for Jackie. Rachel Soltis, her former suitemate at UVA, said Jackie should be considered a hero for telling her story to help other victims.
“The media backlash has been very hard for Jackie,” Soltis, who lives near Leesburg, Virginia, said in a phone interview. “It’s like a nightmare.”
Emily Renda, who has said she was raped as an 18-year-old UVA freshman, expressed sympathy for both Jackie and unnamed men accused in the article.
“Rolling Stone played adjudicator, investigator and advocate -- and did a slipshod job,” Renda, who works on sexual-assault issues for UVA’s student affairs office, wrote after the magazine backtracked. “As a result Jackie suffers, the young men in Phi Kappa Psi suffered, and survivors everywhere can be called into question.”
Frats Targeted
For their part, fraternities have been one of the most frequent targets of sexual-assault activists. They have been called bastions of male campus power and exclusivity, leading to frequently critical media coverage.
The fraternity and sorority workshops in Nashville included a talk by Caitlin Flanagan, author of a withering article on fraternities in the Atlantic magazine earlier this year. Rolling Stone’s story came under occasional attack, according to Mark Koepsell, executive director of the Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisors, a Fort Collins, Colorado-based group that organized the conference.
“People were extremely frustrated that something was allowed to be published where the fact-checking had not occurred,” Koepsell said. Still, “the reality is that throughout the university there are issues of sexual assault. The positive outcome is that it’s shined a light on a problem that has to be addressed.”
Even after Rolling Stone’s apology, its article may deter some students from joining Greek houses, according to Bradley Cohen, the national president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the largest national fraternities, with about 15,000 members.
Reputation Risk
“An article like this breaks and they’re interviewing for a job and someone says, ‘Hmmm, is this guy a rapist?’” said Cohen, who eliminated pledging activities at the fraternity this year to combat deaths and injuries related to hazing and alcohol.
Cohen took action after a Bloomberg News series last year reported on those deaths -- often associated with pledging, the sometimes months-long initiation period for new members. More than 75 people have died since 2005 in fraternity-related incidents, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
SAE is also one of eight fraternities that formed a group in September to fight sexual misconduct, alcohol abuse and hazing.
The collapse of the UVA article casts doubt on a 2012 Rolling Stone piece about the SAE chapter at Dartmouth, Cohen said. It focused on a Dartmouth student, Andrew Lohse, who said he was forced to swim through urine and vomit as part of his initiation into a chapter awash in alcohol and drugs. Lohse also said that Dartmouth’s fraternities help perpetuate a culture of sexual assault, according to the article.
Dartmouth Story
“We couldn’t find anything to substantiate it,” Cohen said.
Melissa Bruno, a spokeswoman for Rolling Stone, said the magazine stands by the Dartmouth article, as does Lohse.
“This is the SAE fraternity organization trying to jump on this issue and calling into question everything Rolling Stone does,” Lohse said.
Dartmouth spokesman Justin Anderson declined to comment.
Members of UVA’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity have been in the delicate position of seeking to defend themselves while avoiding any attack on a woman who may have been a sexual-assault victim, according to a person familiar with its internal investigation of the events described in the article.
Gathering Evidence
Fraternity members learned that Rolling Stone was planning its story in mid-September, after a university official who was contacted by the magazine told the fraternity’s national office, according to the person familiar with the matter. Briefed on the facts of the story, the brotherhood began examining them, the person said.
Chapter members spent the next six weeks gathering evidence to disprove the story. They reviewed e-mails about chapter events in fall 2012 and researched whether a brother had worked in the school’s aquatic center, the person said. The information was provided to Phi Kappa Psi’s national fraternity, the person said.
It’s unclear whether the national organization made this information available to Rolling Stone before publication. Rolling Stone’s Bruno declined to comment.
After the story was published, the chapter waited to release the information until local police authorized it to do so. When contacted by the Washington Post, one of the news organizations investigating the story, the chapter issued its statement, with police approval.
Shawn Collinsworth, the fraternity’s executive director, didn’t respond to an e-mail request for comment.
Frat Ban
In a statement, the North-American Interfraternity Conference, the industry’s largest trade group, urged UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan to rescind the suspension of fraternities and related activities that she had imposed through Jan. 9.
“It is not right to punish an entire community of students based on allegations against a very small subset of those students -– especially when those allegations have not been investigated or proven,” the group said in a statement.
Still, fraternities must address the problem of sexual assault, according to Brian Warren, executive director of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, which recently instituted new reporting and disciplinary policies for sexual assault.
“Fraternity houses need to be safer and healthier and model residential communities on college campuses,” Warren said.
To contact the reporters on this story: John Lauerman in Boston at jlauerman@bloomberg.net; David Glovin in New York at dglovin@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: John Hechinger at jhechinger@bloomberg.net Lisa Wolfson
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