We should always believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist. Even if Jackie fabricated her account, UVA should have taken her word for it until they could have proved otherwise.

The accused would have a rough period. He might be suspended from his job; friends might de-friend him on Facebook. In the case of Bill Cosby, we might have to stop watching, consuming his books, or buying tickets to his traveling stand-up routine. These errors can be undone by an investigation that clears the accused, especially if it is done quickly.

The cost of disbelieving women, on the other hand, is far steeper. It signals that that women don’t matter and that they are disposable — not only to frat boys and Bill Cosby, but to us. And they face a special set of problems in having their say…

The time we spend picking apart a traumatized survivor’s narration on the hunt for discrepancies is time that should be spent punishing serial rapists.

Advocates for sexual-assault victims say Rolling Stone’s backpedaling from an explosive account of a gang rape at the University of Virginia doesn’t change the fact that rape is a problem on college campuses and must be confronted — even as some expressed concern that the magazine’s apology could discourage victims from coming forward…

“Rolling Stone played adjudicator, investigator and advocate — and did a slipshod job at that,” added [Emily] Renda, a May graduate who said she was raped her freshman year at the school. “As a result Jackie suffers, the young men in Phi Kappa Psi suffered, and survivors everywhere can unfairly be called into question.”…

Karen Chase, an English professor at U.Va. and Jackie’s faculty adviser, said that she doesn’t believe Jackie would knowingly say something that wasn’t true…

She added that regardless of whether there were incorrect details in the student’s account, “We don’t need Jackie’s story to substantiate the problem of rape on this, or any other campus.”

As the doubts and discrepancies are sorted out, here are some truths that must not get lost: Sexual assault, often associated with excessive alcohol consumption, is a scourge that, for far too long, has not been taken seriously enough by colleges and universities. The critical work of putting in place a system that effectively and fairly investigates allegations of sexual assaults, supports victims and provides for due process must continue with even more urgency.

The University of Virginia is certainly no exception to those truths, as its officials have acknowledged in recent days. The fact that it apparently never expels students for sexual assault, the outpouring of complaints from other students and the federal investigation of the school for possible noncompliance with Title IX equal rights protections all point to a serious problem.

One cannot wade into issues like this, it seems, without standing accused of wanting to uncover a hoax in an order to deny the existence of sexual assault on campus. On the cruder end, those investigating Jackie’s claims are being denounced as “rape denialists” complicit in “rape victim smearing.”

That word “denialism” is particularly profane, with its unsubtle invocation of the Holocaust. And it doesn’t take long for subtlety to be ditched in favor of the blunt instrument of Reductio ad Hitlerum…

If these writers are urging something other than holding one’s tongue, I’m not sure exactly what they are suggest[ing] writers do when certain bits of evidence don’t add up. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t approach these issues with extreme sensitivity—quite the contrary—but the idea that journalists should abandon skepticism in the face of hugely important and consequential claims made in Rolling Stone is an abrogation of one’s duty as a journalist…

Back in the 1990s, a dean at Vassar College told Time magazine that a false accusation is not only an acceptable price to pay, but might even benefit the falsely accused: “[The wrongly accused] have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. ‘How do I see women?’ ‘If I didn’t violate her, could I have?’ ‘Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?’ Those are good questions.”

Observe how Erdely responded to a question about the accused parties in Jackie’s alleged gang rape. In that Slate podcast, when asked who these people were, she responded, “I don’t want to say much about them as individuals but I’ll just say that this particular fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi — it’s really emblematic in a lot of ways of sort of like elitist fraternity culture. It’s considered to be a kind of top-tier fraternity at University of Virginia…It’s considered to be a really high-ranking fraternity, in part because they’re just so incredibly wealthy. Their alumni are very influential, you know, they’re on Wall Street, they’re in politics.”

The next time Erdely writes a big story, she’ll have to do a better job of camouflaging her proclivity to stereotype. Here, she refuses to evaluate the alleged gang rapists as individuals, instead opting to fold them into the caricature of the “elitist fraternity culture,” and all its delicious implications. Of course, one of the reasons she didn’t describe the accused is that she never reached out to them…

Under the scenario cited by Erdely, the Phi Kappa Psi members are not just criminal sexual-assault offenders, they’re criminal sexual-assault conspiracists, planners, long-range schemers. If this allegation alone hadn’t triggered an all-out scramble at Rolling Stone for more corroboration, nothing would have. Anyone who touched this story — save newsstand personnel — should lose their job.

Why wouldn’t I believe her? The antagonists were a bunch of over-privileged white fraternity jerks from UVA, it seemed. The victim was yet another young woman who had had justice withheld. The story confirmed what I wanted to believe: that the elite run roughshod over the rest of us. It proved so much, and I “knew” which side was right. And it confirmed the bias of left-wing academics who have collectively decided that the “war on boys” must have more victims, because everything with a penis is a rapist…

This is the kind of “believe the victim” mentality that is so darkly infecting academia. “Presumed guilty” is the new standard. Patrick Whitt is the new Tom Robinson, the black man accused of the rape in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Due process loses, ethics are out the window, because there is an agenda, and it needs the fuel of a rape story.

And who loses?

The casualty list is still being compiled. Terrible journalism or not, maybe Jackie was telling the truth. Maybe she was lying. If she was lying, the UVA Greek system already paid a terrible price. If she was telling the truth, she won’t ever be believed now. Why? Because Sabrina Erdely was so utterly void of journalistic ethics that she committed “journalistic malpractice.” Because now, nobody will believe Jackie.

When Jackie tried to pull out [of the story], the red lights should have been flashing in Erdely’s mind, with klaxons sounding warnings that she might be dealing with a student who fabricated or exaggerated a story, for attention or for some other reason, and hadn’t realized that when she told this story to a major magazine reporter, she was inviting a level of scrutiny that her story could not withstand. Instead, Erdely seems to have adopted the “ask no questions” approach of community activists…

Nor am I very convinced by the people — including Erdely — who have argued that focusing on Jackie’s story is getting us “sidetracked” from “the real story,” which is about the rape culture at UVA and the slothful institutional reaction to Jackie’s story. The story was headlined “A Rape on Campus.” The first thousand words are devoted to Jackie’s horrifying story, and much of the rest of the story is devoted to Jackie’s descent into depression and her interactions with the deans. If the story is so irrelevant to the real point of the article, then it should have been pulled out when the victim refused to provide details that would have permitted the author to contact the accused for comment.

But of course, if Jackie’s story had been pulled out, the article wouldn’t have received anything like the attention it got. The story was so electric precisely because it was about the premeditated gang rape of an innocent girl, in a way that suggested that such callous and criminal treatment of women was commonly viewed by the university community as not really worthy of comment, much less punishment — and that this view afflicted even the administrators charged with protecting students from rape. Without that element, this would have been a dull-but-worthy chin-stroker about institutional bureaucratic processes that probably wouldn’t have been shared 170,000 times on Facebook.

The problem with valorizing the victim, as a “victim culture” does, is that anything that runs contrary to the victim’s narrative is cast as an attack on that person.

Question them, and you are colluding in exacerbating the awful effects of their trauma. Question their actions or motives and you are “victim shaming” and “victim blaming.” Of course, the flip-side of a victim is a bully, and it is notable that today, everyone rushes to be a victim—the right wing under attack from the left, the left under attack from the right, bigots still seeking to attack gay people, and claiming they cannot voice their bigotry.

“Playing the victim” used to be a term of scorn, now it’s a daily modus operandi to score any number of political and cultural points.

Question those taking on the mantle of victimhood and you are immediately cast as some kind of aggressive, unfeeling oppressor. The sad consequence of a culture of victimhood is that it obscures real victims and obscures the genuinely felt experiences of those victims, whatever they have endured.

[N]o lessons will be learned from this, except, I think, this one:

The Hysterical Accusers now know they have to make even more hysterically defamatory accusations to shut down any kind of skeptical inquiry at an even earlier stage.

If you permit people to ask questions, then they will eventually come across the truth.

Hence, you must cow them from ever even considering asking a question in the first place.

The only problem here, from the perspective of the Hysterical Shrieking Accusers brigade, is that they were too moderate and too soft in their nonstop hysterical accusations.

Rape hoaxes, like the sometimes related hate-crime hoaxes that have become so common on college campuses, do not condense spontaneously out of the ether. The Left is committed to the notion that American colleges are hotbeds of sexual violence, racial bigotry, hatred of homosexuals, etc., because they are committed to the notion that the largely white and male upper echelons of American society — mostly products of those colleges — are secretly but unalterably committed to white supremacy, homophobia, and to using the threat of sexual violence to keep women in their place…

The political aspect of this is not too hard to see. Campus hate-crime hoaxes, including rape-threat hoaxes, are generally targeted at Republicans and conservatives, and they very often feature comical, cartoonish conservative villains: “That chick that runs her liberal mouth all the time and doesn’t care who knows it,” read the fake rape threat in the University of Wyoming case; those are not words that an angry, knuckle-dragging conservative says about an outspoken feminist — those are words a self-admiring feminist says about herself. In Colorado, the target was a National Guardsman. At Duke, the target was the lacrosse team, while at UVA the target was a fraternity. All of those are engraved, gilt-edged invitations to another one of those tedious conversations about “male privilege” we’re always supposed to be having. Colleges become the locus of these fantasies because, as anybody who has watched one of our missing-blondes-of-the-week sagas knows, there is more juice to be had from the victimization of bright young college women than there is from the victimization of poor single mothers in obscure backwaters…

The people and institutions who ran with Rolling Stone’s fake story — Jamelle Bouie, Sally Kohn, CNN, Amanda Marcotte, Jezebel, etc. — did not err in an ideological vacuum. They are not dupes; they are opportunists.

What has happened will temporarily set back Sabrina Erdley’s and Rolling Stone’s reputations, but only temporarily. They will not be driving from credibility the way a conservative would because they recognize the cause is more important that truth and facts.

These stories are going to keep happening. They will have fall out. Other victims of rape may now be more hesitant to come forward. It may now be harder to get people to believe real stories.

But the cause remains greater than the truth for these “journalists”. Journalists used to believe truth was power, but now stories are. As the left becomes more and more levitical in their world view, showing no mercy and no grace, they have to develop a canon of scripture and stories to tell their tales and lay out the parameters of their faith.

That mythology comes with their own version of Aesop’s fables — stories to relate their morals. It does not matter that the rape at the University of Virginia was not real. Because “rape culture” is real and fraternity boys are silver spooned satans, the story has power. The left must continue building the canon of their religion, of which Rolling Stone’s bunk articles play a necessary role.