In October, College Insurrection reported on an unfolding sex scandal at Ohio University which began with photos promoted in social media and ended with allegations of rape.

Since then, all hell has broken loose at the school.

Cathy Young has written a detailed follow up piece at Minding The Campus.

The Hyped Campus Rape That Wasn’t

If a satirist had set out to write a scathing parody of the campus crusade against rape, he could not have come up with anything more bizarre, or more ridiculous, than the real-life comedy-drama that unfolded last month at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

The scandal started, like many scandals do these days, in the social media. On Saturday, October 12, amidst the school’s Homecoming Weekend festivities, photos and a video of two young people engaged in a public sex act near the campus–the man on his knees performing oral sex on the woman while she leaned against a plate-glass window, half-sitting on its ledge–showed up online and promptly spread on Twitter.

On Sunday night, the woman in the photos, a 20-year-old Ohio University student, contacted Athens police to say that she had been sexually assaulted.  The news media picked up the story; an October 16 report on the local television channel, WBNS-10TV, opened with the alarming announcement, “An Ohio university student says she was the victim of a rape.  Making it even worse, someone photographed the alleged assault and shared it on social media.”  Within the OU community, there was widespread outrage, particularly at reports that at least a dozen people had witnessed the act. OU senior Allie Erwin lamented to 10-TV, “Our first instinct as a community was not to intervene and help this woman, but to post it on social media, and make a mockery of probably the most traumatic experience of her life.”

While Athens police chief Tom Pyle warned against a rush to judgment, noting that the witnesses “may not have realized” they were seeing an assault and, in fact, that no assault may have taken place, the outraged student were not mollified.  Said Erwin, “She obviously wasn’t okay with what happened. It was rape. She reported it to the police as rape.”

Meanwhile, the photos and videos–initially taken down after the rape complaint–resurfaced.  They appeared to show a fully consensual encounter; the woman was seen smiling, flipping back her hair, at one point putting her hand on the back of the man’s head, and even posing for the camera with a grin on her face.  Witnesses confirmed that, while both participants were clearly drunk, the “victim” was not incapacitated and “seemed like she was enjoying it”; she also left with the man afterwards, walking unassisted.  (While none of the onlookers thought the sex was non-consensual, at least one or two of them berated the man as a “slut” and physically assaulted him after he stood up, bloodying his face–an ironic detail considering feminist complaints that women are stigmatized for sexually “loose” behavior while men are not.)

Read the rest at the link below.