ABC News Interviews Jackie's Three Friends

Couple of interesting new claims.

Erdely's report claimed that Jackie's behavior had changed significantly after the September 28, 2012 incident. I believe some other friends claimed this.

But the three friends who were present after the alleged events say she was fine. Note they mean fine later that semester, not fine that very night. On the night in question they say she was "crying and shaking."

But they didn't see any post-trauma sort of change in behavior later.

The article describes Jackie sinking into depression after the alleged rape, and holing up in her dorm room. Not so, say her friends, who told ABC News she seemed fine after the alleged assault.

Now I don't know what this next quote means, because ABCNews drops it into the article amateurishly, without set-up or pay off. It's disconnected from any narrative. It reads like it had been edited out of the article, but then was accidentally edited back in.

But Ryan -- who Erdley had called "Randall," the boy Jackie had a crush on, said:

"I didn't know any Greek letters outside of what I'd learned in physics class," Ryan said.

What does this mean? What is the context? The ABCNews article, as I said, is glitched as far as this quote.

But it is possibly interesting, given that Sabrina Erdely claimed that "Randall" -- actually Ryan -- refused to be interviewed "out of loyalty to my frat."

It's possible that this quote is Ryan denying he belongs to any frat.

But I don't know.

Bizarrely, incredibly, it is now revealed that when Sabrina Erdely was a student newspaper editor at U Penn, she was disciplined for fabulism, for making a story up out of whole cloth.

She was disciplined by the paper's editor in chief, Steven Glass.

This is from a book about the very boring sounding subject of the U Penn college newspaper:

Sabrina Rubin, who says she and the rest of the editorial board "adored" [Stephen Glass], puts it another way: "There are reporters who get ahead because they’re great schmoozers, and I think Steve was definitely one of them." When he became the paper’s executive editor, the editorial board hailed him as a "man of principle," and in her Philadelphia Magazine piece, Rubin describes how Glass threw a righteous fit when she and a colleague concocted a funny and obviously made-up travel story for 34th Street–going so far as to call an emergency session of the [Daily Pennsylvanian's] Alumni Association board to apprise them of the transgression.

Now, the author claims the story was "obviously funny and made-up," but note that Erdely (then, Sabria Rubin) is one of his sources, and thus he may be captured by her claims of the events. Also note that while Erdely, it seems, is claiming the story was "obviously... made-up" and thus not really a case of fabulism, Steven Glass sure disagrees pretty strongly, and even gathers the Alumni Association Board to inform them of the breech.

I'm not so certain I'd take this author's, or Sabrina Rubin Erdely's, word for it that the story was "obviously... made-up." I'd like to see this supposedly "obviously... made-up" story.

So there you have it. Twenty-some years ago Steven Glass took serious action against Sabrian Rubin Erdely for fabulism.

posted by Ace at 01:28 PM

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