UVA Rape Story Trial Highlights Struggle to Report on Sexual Assault in Trump Era

By Molly Redden, Guardian UK

24 October 16

 

As Rolling Stone faces a defamation trial for the retracted report, journalists discuss the depth of their investigations into claims from Trump’s past

ver the last week, as the news was blanketed by new accusations of sexual misconduct against Donald Trump, a quiet reckoning began to take place in a small federal courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia: the first of two defamation trials against Rolling Stone for its story of a gang rape at the University of Virginia.

The trial, which started Monday and is expected to unfold over the course of 12 days, swirls around a blockbuster feature that Rolling Stone retracted in April of 2015. Titled A Rape on Campus, it told a harrowing story of a student, “Jackie”, who claimed to have been gang-raped by seven fraternity brothers in an initiation ritual. The story appeared in the November 2014 issue of Rolling Stone, only to slowly unravel as other publications questioned its major claims.

Officially, the $7.8m lawsuit asks only whether Rolling Stone knew or should have known that its portrayal of Nicole Eramo, a former UVA dean who complains that she was unfairly painted as the story’s “chief villain”, was false.

But in practice, the trial has involved relitigating the numerous ways Sabrina Erdely, the article’s author, failed to corroborate Jackie’s central story. On Thursday and Friday, when Erdely testified, attorneys for Eramo pressed the reporter on why discrepancies in Jackie’s story didn’t give her pause. The lawyer also asked Erdely why she had not contacted friends of Jackie’s to see if they could corroborate her story. Erdely’s notes contained enough information – a full name – to track down at least one of them. “It’s embarrassing to say it,” Erdely answered. “I had this in my notes and I didn’t even see it.”

It is against this backdrop that the country’s political reporters are seeking out and vetting stories of sexual misconduct by Donald Trump. So the Guardian looked at how the press is reporting on these allegations in the wake of the debacle at Rolling Stone.

Since a 2005 tape revealed the presidential candidate bragging that his fame allowed him to grope and kiss women without their permission, seven women have publicly accused him of doing just that. Three women had made similar accusations even before the tape surfaced, bringing the total to 11.

Trump has responded with fury. In reply to a New York Times reporter who asked him about the allegations, Trump shouted: “You are a disgusting human being.”

A flurry of recriminations from Trump, his supporters, and his surrogates have painted the press as uncritically accepting of the accusations as true and questioned the various women’s motives. In the final presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump suggested that the rush of accusations was either orchestrated by the Clinton campaign or the product of women seeking “10 minutes of fame”.

Regardless of the bruising fashion in which Trump has raised his doubts, there is no question that reporting these kinds of accusations poses inherent challenges.

Of the eleven women who have accused Trump of unwanted contact, three aired their accusations directly to the public in press conferences organized by the women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred. Natasha Stoynoff, a reporter for People, relayed her account in a first-person essay for the magazine. The rest have initially relayed their stories through the press – making reporters and their institutions the primary arbiters of their credibility.

Trump has responded with fury. In reply to a New York Times reporter who asked him about the allegations, Trump shouted: “You are a disgusting human being.”

A flurry of recriminations from Trump, his supporters, and his surrogates have painted the press as uncritically accepting of the accusations as true and questioned the various women’s motives. In the final presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump suggested that the rush of accusations was either orchestrated by the Clinton campaign or the product of women seeking “10 minutes of fame”.

Regardless of the bruising fashion in which Trump has raised his doubts, there is no question that reporting these kinds of accusations poses inherent challenges.

Of the eleven women who have accused Trump of unwanted contact, three aired their accusations directly to the public in press conferences organized by the women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred. Natasha Stoynoff, a reporter for People, relayed her account in a first-person essay for the magazine. The rest have initially relayed their stories through the press – making reporters and their institutions the primary arbiters of their credibility.

“You really do have to show your work in all this,” said Karen Tumulty. Tumulty, a Washington Post reporter, wrote about a woman, Kristin Anderson, who claimed Donald Trump touched her inappropriately at a Manhattan night club many years ago.

With so much time having passed, “you’re never going to get a story like this beyond the point of being a ‘he said, she said’”, Tumulty said. “What we needed to make sure was that the ‘she said’ side of this story was credible. And we were convincing ourselves, through our reporting process, that she was.”

Tumulty learned about Anderson’s story from a tip. She interviewed Anderson days after the video was published, and Anderson gave her the names of three friends she had told her story to over the years.

“That was sort of just the beginning of what we had to do,” Tumulty said. Anderson couldn’t exactly remember the place where the alleged incident happened or the date. She remembered vividly the club’s red sofas and she was pretty sure the encounter took place at the China Club. While Anderson Googled China Club to see if she recognized the interior, Tumulty worked to establish whether Trump was known to frequent the China Club – he was.

Tumulty then asked Anderson if there were events in her life which might undermine her credibility. She volunteered that during an acrimonious breakup, she and her partner had restraining orders against one another. “Everything we asked, she was willing to provide,” Tumulty said. Smaller details, like the fact that Anderson claimed to be a registered independent, checked out, too.

“The thing is, if the little checkable details don’t add up, people are going to have reasons, legitimately, to doubt the big one. That’s how you can nail it down after this many years,” Tumulty said.

The process unfolded in almost the opposite manner to how Rolling Stone appears to have vetted Jackie’s story. Reporters scrutinizing the feature noticed that Erdely’s piece failed to indicate whether she had contacted Jackie’s alleged attackers for their end of the story. (She had not.) The article even left readers to wonder whether Erdely had contacted friends of Jackie’s who appear in the narrative and could have corroborated – or raised questions about – key parts of Jackie’s allegations. She had not – and later reporting revealed that if she had, Jackie’s friends might have provided reasons to doubt her recollections.

Reporters unveiling new accusations against Trump appear not to be taking the same risks. The New York Times, in vetting separate allegations against Trump of inappropriate touching or unwanted kissing, contacted six people in whom the women had confided over the years. One was the sister of Rachel Crooks, who recalled that Crooks had phoned her in tears right after an encounter with Trump. Crooks claims that Trump shook her hand in introduction, but would not let go and began kissing her.

After the Trump campaign lashed out at Stoynoff, People magazine produced the accounts of six colleagues and close friends who recall Stoynoff recounting a similar story. The Guardian reached out to a friend, a family member, and an acquaintance of Cathy Heller while reporting on her claim that Trump forcibly kissed her. The Palm Beach Post corroborated Mindy McGillivray’s accusation that Trump groped her at Mar-a-Lago by speaking with a photographer who was on location at the time. The photographer remembers McGillivray pulling him aside to say, “Donald just grabbed my ass!’’

Michael Barbaro, the reporter who wrote the Times story, declined to speak for this story, in reply to an email sent to both him and his coauthor, Megan Twohey. “Our reporting here speaks for itself,” he wrote. But in May, after the two reporters published an investigation into Trump’s treatment of women, the two spoke briefly about their vetting process on CBS This Morning.

“Did you find things that were worse than anything you reported, but because of the New York [Times]’ standards, you could not put it in the paper?” Charlie Rose asked.

Barbaro replied, “I don’t think we want to go too deep into our process, but we felt very strongly that unless something could be verified in a lot of different ways, we weren’t going to put it in the New York Times. So you can kind of leave that to your imagination that, yeah, certainly some things hit the cutting room floor, which happens in your journalism, and happens in ours.”

Tumulty says she is in touch with other women making accusations against Trump whose stories she has declined to publish. She believes that the women are credible, but it poses an obstacle that they are not willing to publicly disclose their names. The benefit of naming an accuser is twofold: not only does it give the accused a greater ability to respond, but it can also help convey the credibility of the accuser, who has staked her reputation on her word.

Making a similar calculation, the Guardian first heard Heller’s account in February, but declined to publish her claims because she was not willing to use her name at the time. In other instances, it has refrained from publishing accusations it could not corroborate.

But from a vantage point of judging the press, perhaps the most interesting Trump allegation is one that reporters have been unable to corroborate. To the contrary, those who have tried have raised serious questions about the credibility, and even the existence, of the accuser.

The accusation comes from a mysterious lawsuit filed against Trump and the celebrity and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, accusing both men of violently raping the plaintiff when she was 13 years old. The plaintiff listed on the lawsuit is a woman named Katie Johnson.

Several media outlets, including the New York Daily News, uncritically reported on the lawsuit.

But Anna Merlan, a reporter for Jezebel, documented at length her difficulties obtaining an interview with Johnson or indeed any evidence that she exists. An apparent corroborator, identified in the suit as Tiffany Doe, proved equally difficult to track down. Eventually, Merlan published a detailed account of how a handful of Trump opponents had aggressively shopped the story and all its flaws to the press.

The Guardian followed up with a report that a former producer for the Jerry Springer show had apparently coordinated the whole thing.

Following some of the most recent accusations, it has not escaped skeptics that the press has made mistakes in reporting on accusations of sexual assault before. On Twitter, some supporters of Trump have sarcastically dredged up a hashtag, #IBelieveJackie, which many used to support Jackie when questions about her story first bubbled up.

At the time, one of the most high-profile rebuttals to the premise of the hashtag came from Amanda Hess of Slate.

“I do question whether belief [in Jackie’s version of events] is a productive framework for this story, because it suggests faith in something that lies outside the bounds of human knowledge,” Hess wrote. “To put claims of rape in this category is to buy the idea that rape reports are by nature ambiguous, and that feelings override facts. The Rolling Stone incident shows that is not the case – many aspects of many rape allegations are capable of being thoroughly investigated.”