Rape Culture hardest hit…

From our parent site, Legal Insurrection:

No evidence of rape at UVA fraternity say Charlottesville police

The seminal case in the fight against ‘rape culture’ ended today, leaving a giant, gaping hole in the Rape Culture agenda.

An investigation conducted by the Charlottesville Police Department found no evidence of rape at the accused University of Virginia fraternity.

Months ago, Rolling Stone broke Jackie’s story. Jackie claimed she’d been gang raped by members of Phi Kappa Psi in 2012. When the Rolling Stone article sparked national outrage, UVA’s administration acted swiftly and without facts, punishing Greek life on campus.

Then the Washington Post began to dig deeper into the Rolling Stone shocker. And that’s when the story began to quickly unravel and was eventually debunked in entirety.

Today, the New York Times reports:

“I can’t prove that something didn’t happen, and there may come a point in time in which this survivor, or this complaining party or someone else, may come forward with some information that might help us move this investigation further,” Police Chief Timothy Longo told a roomful of reporters here.

“That doesn’t mean that something terrible did not happen to Jackie on the evening of Sept. 28, 2012,” Chief Longo said, referring to the accuser and adding that his department was simply unable to corroborate her account. He added, “This case is not closed by any stretch of the imagination.”

But Monday’s news conference did little to clear up the sense of confusion that has surrounded the Rolling Stone article, “A Rape on Campus,” which detailed what appeared to be a brutal gang rape of a student, identified only as Jackie, in an upstairs room of the Phi Kappa Psi house in 2012, followed by a botched response by the school’s administration.

Asked why he did not officially clear the fraternity and its members of wrongdoing, Chief Longo replied, “I think I just did.”

The Rolling Stone UVA fable isn’t the only ‘rape culture’ banner story to be debunked. Last month, a student accused of rape by mattress wielding Emma Sulkowicz shared his side of the story wherein allegations brought against him were found to be falsified.