A Rape on Campus

"A Rape on Campus" is a controversial (and ultimately retracted) article in Rolling Stone magazine written by Sabrina Rudin Erdely, which purported to tell the story of a young woman named "Jackie" being brutally raped on the campus of the University of VirginiaFile:Wikipedia's W.svg, and then being thwarted in her attempts bring the perpetrators to justice.

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The sensationalistic nature of the story made many doubt it from the start, and then alarm bells rang when virtually nothing seemed to corroborate "Jackie's" account. Rolling Stone hired an independent investigation, which confirmed that a shocking lapse in journalistic standards had occurred, and the magazine later apologized and retracted the story, though neither Erdely, nor the magazine's managing editor Will Dana, were penalized in any way. Incidentally, Will Dana is the same editor who fired Jim DeRogatis, the reporter who scooped R&B star R. Kelly's (still unpunished) serial sexual abuse of young girls.

Resulting feminist moonbattery

A small handful of fanatical feminist pundits, like Amanda Marcotte at Salon, uncritically swallowed the hoax like a fat kid swallows cake, demonizing individuals who questioned the story and then refusing to apologize and own up when proven wrong.

Resulting antifeminist wingnuttery

To the surprise of no one the ever-eager conservative media, frothing antifems (particularly Thunderf00t and TheAmazingAtheist), and general Internet trolls blew the aforementioned moonbattery out of proportion, turning a fringe minority of the feminist movement's hysterics over it into a manufactroversy and opportunistically seizing upon every isolated case of the moonbattery they could find and trumpeting it to the skies as "proof" that modern feminism is stupid and out to get men.

Aftermath of the shitstorm

Long story short, a good university had a couple weeks of unwarranted bad publicity, a lot of insults were exchanged, college sexual assault education was set back a decade and nobody won, except the just-mentioned manchildren who made hay of it.

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