"Woman tells police she was RAPED by a Pokemon Go character..."

"...after she felt an ‘assault’... and the virtual reality game detected the creature in her bedroom"

Police say a young woman has lodged a formal complaint that she has been raped - by a Pokemon.

She told officers that she had been sexually assaulted by a giant Pokemon in her apartment in the Russian capital city of Moscow.

The married woman, whose name has not been released, had reportedly been playing Pokemon GO before she fell asleep.

She claimed that she woke up to find a huge Pokemon lying on top of her body and says it was raping her. (more)

Mattress girl hardest hit.

"Treat Rape Like Every Other Crime"

Megan McArdle:  The most surprising thing about the UVA case was not that a single reporter got rooked, but that her editors let the story go ahead, and a Columbia Journalism School professor defended them for publishing the story without making a serious effort to get a response from the accused.

I understand completely the humanitarian impulse behind this. Being raped is incredibly traumatic; being treated with suspicion afterward adds insult to terrible injury. But this is not, as is often implied, a problem that is unique to rape cases. If your spouse is murdered, or simply dies under suspicious circumstances, it is quite likely that soon afterward you will find yourself subjected to interviews with police who think you were involved. You have just lost the person most important to you in the world, and now you are also being tacitly accused of having committed a crime. You are possibly facing jail or execution. It is horrible. Police don’t like having to take someone who’s grieving and make them sit through hours of interviews. But investigations are the only tool they have; they don’t know any other way to keep bad people from murdering their spouses.

And in the long run, the “I believe women” standard is not only bad for people who are accused (most of whom are men), but also bad for rape victims (most of whom are women). The Jackie debacle was an enormous setback for campus rape activists. I don’t blame the activists for having listened to Jackie without interrogating her claims too closely; a support group is not the place for rigorous investigations. But that’s why the journalists who tell their stories to a wider public are supposed to vet them carefully. (please read the whole thing)

Popehat mansplains Ke$ha court decision

CNN: A Court Denies Ke$ha Claims:  New York judge threw out Kesha's appeal Wednesday in her case against Sony Music.

Kesha, the singer known for hits such as "Tik Tok" and "Die Young," had appealed a decision in February that said she could not be released from her contract with producer Dr. Luke.

Kesha has alleged that Dr. Luke, whose real name is Lukasz Gottwald, had sexually, emotionally and physically abused her. Dr. Luke's record label is affiliated with Sony.

Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Shirley Werner Kornreich noted that Kesha had "failed to plead that any of the alleged discrimination occurred in New York State or City," and that the court had no jurisdiction over the claims.

The court also denied Kesha's claims that Dr. Luke's abuse constituted a hate crime.

Bill Cosby Sues Accusers

"You Assassinated My Character"

Bill Cosby has aggressively lashed out at 7 of his sexual assault accusers, claiming they went on a malicious campaign to ruin him with lies and thwart his TV comeback.

Cosby just countersued the women, claiming they have made "malicious, opportunistic, false and defamatory accusations of sexual misconduct against him."

The comedian is claiming emotional distress against Tamara Green, Therese Serignese, Linda Traitz, Louisa Moritz, Barbara Bowman, Joan Tarshis and Angela Leslie ... claiming the allegations of drugging and then sexually assaulting them is flatly untrue.

Cosby claims the motivation of the women was to torpedo his television return.

"I fell and penetrated her by accident"

"... rape suspect claims in court"

Abdulaziz claimed the teenager pulled him onto her and placed his hand between her legs. But he said she become angry when he had offered to call her a taxi and stormed into the bedroom to wake her friend.

He is then said to have changed his story after DNA tests found traces of his semen.

Mr Davies said: "That caused him to be re-interviewed in May this year and he was confronted with that finding. 

"On this occasion he said after he had sex with the complainant's friend his penis was still erect and he had semen on his hands when he went into the living room.

"He said in the second interview she pushed his hands down on to her vagina. He said that he did fall onto her and his penis may have penetrated her vagina. You may consider, members of the jury, him changing the account he was giving."

Abdulaziz, of Maida Vale, denies rape and the trial continues.

Hillary Tweet backfires

Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported. https://t.co/mkD69RHeBL

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 23, 2015

Cosby's "special barbecue sauce"

"There is an episode of The Cosby Show, where after consuming Cosby's "special barbecue sauce", women stop fighting, become passive, and become more affectionate towards their lovers."

Reddit top voted comments...

"Write what you know, write what you know."

BBQuaaludes

I think if you traveled back in time 20 years to lay down just one piece of trans-temporal knowledge, the fact that "Bill Cosby turns out to be a serial rapist" would blow the most minds.

"Damn these women today with their hippity hoppity, and their bippin' and the boppin' and the lawsuits and the court orders...."

That last comment I believe is a quote from the "special barbecue sauce" episode.

“Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim”

"Rolling Stone Retracts Article on Rape at University of Virginia"

In an interview discussing Columbia’s findings, Jann S. Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, acknowledged the story’s flaws but said it represented an isolated and unusual episode. The problems with the article started with its source, Mr. Wenner said. He described her as “a really expert fabulist storyteller” who managed to manipulate the magazine’s editorial process. When asked to clarify, he said that he was not trying to blame Jackie, “but obviously there is something here that is untruthful, and something sits at her doorstep.”

The reporting errors by Ms. Erdely were compounded by insufficient scrutiny and skepticism from editors, the report said. And the fact-checking process relied heavily on four hours of conversations with Jackie.

Ms. Erdely, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone who has also written for GQ and The New Yorker, declined to be interviewed for this article. She said in her apology that reading the report was “a brutal and humbling experience.” She also acknowledged that she did not do enough to verify Jackie’s account.

Rolling Stone’s fundamental mistake, Mr. Dana said, was in suspending any skepticism about Jackie’s account because of the sensitivity of the issue. “We didn’t think through all the implications of the decisions that we made while reporting the story, and we never sort of allowed for the fact that maybe the story we were being told was not true,”

"Police Find No Evidence of Rape at University of Virginia Fraternity"

"The police here said Monday that they had found no evidence that a woman was gang raped at a University of Virginia fraternity house in 2012, and they were suspending their investigation, after a lengthy inquiry in which the alleged victim refused to cooperate. But they said the inquiry was not closed."

“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.

The announcement came four months after a now-discredited report of the sexual assault was published in Rolling Stone, roiling the historic university — and the world of journalism. But it was not entirely unexpected; university officials said in January that the police had informed them there was no “substantive basis to confirm the allegations.” (read more)

Should false allegations of rape be punished?

Link to original Rolling Stone magazine article. "A Rape on Campus"

Added: UVA Fraternity Exploring Legal Options to Address 'Extensive Damage Caused by Rolling Stone'

"Cops Say Nothing Happened at UVA Frat Accused of Gang Rape"

"The University of Virginia reinstated its chapter of Phi Kappa Psi—the fraternity where Jackie claimed to have been gang raped, according to Rolling Stone—after the cops failed to find evidence that the horrible crime actually occurred. The fraternity's national organization has reinstated it as well, effective immediately.

According to the press release:

The reinstatement resulted after consultation with Charlottesville Police Department officials, who told the University that their investigation has not revealed any substantive basis to confirm that the allegations raised in the Rolling Stone article occurred at Phi Kappa Psi... (read the whole thing)

 That's it? No apology? No sorry about our huge mistake and rush to judgment? Keep in mind that the false accusation had consequences for the Phi Psi house, which was vandalized by angry students after Rolling Stone's story broke.

Should the media start naming rape accusers?

"Suppressing the names of rape victims — to say nothing of protecting the identities of those who make false accusations of this horrible crime — is intended to liberate victims from the stigma associated with such victimization, but it also contributes to it. By insisting on anonymity, we cultivate the false belief that rape victims have something of which to be ashamed in a way that victims of other crimes do not. This goes beyond mere embarrassment: Men who have been mugged may very well feel ashamed of their inability to protect themselves and their property, and may feel that their victimization reveals them as being somehow unmanly, inadequately virile. (That this is a less intense and less intimate violation than rape should go without saying.) The victims of Bernard Madoff, many of whom considered themselves financial sophisticates, may very well have felt ashamed of having been victimized. But we do not suppress the names of people who make accusations of fraud or file armed-robbery complaints. Nor is there a political faction in the United States insisting that we “always believe the victim” in securities-fraud cases."

"And, for good reason, we do not offer anonymity to those accused of rape and other crimes. In the case of rape, this and other deviations from normal legal process creates a poisonous asymmetry and a powerful temptation: One can ruin a life while remaining comfortably cocooned in anonymity. Consider the case of Oliver Jovanovic, who was wrongly convicted of rape, and whose prosecution was enabled in part by so-called shield laws that excluded from evidence e-mails between the accused and his accuser in which she expressed her consent to, and her enjoyment of, the sexual acts that transpired between the two. In that case the accuser, a 20-year-old college student, was described by her grandmother as having a long history of having made similar false accusations. Jovanovic served two years of a 15-year prison term before his conviction was overturned."

“If she was acting on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, then she deserves an Oscar”

"The three students agreed to be interviewed on the condition that The Post use the same aliases as appeared in Rolling Stone because of the sensitivity of the subject."

They said there are mounting inconsistencies with the original narrative in the magazine. The students also expressed suspicions about Jackie’s allegations from that night. They said the name she provided as that of her date did not match anyone at the university, and U-Va. officials confirmed to The Post that no one by that name has attended the school.

Key details of The Rolling Stone story of gang rape at the University of Virginia continue to unravel.

Accounts by friends of the victim, who met with her just after the supposed rape, now differ significantly enough to put into question the entire story. Friends, which by the way, were never contacted by the Rolling Stone journalist for the story, or anyone else, until now. (read the whole thing)

You cant make this stuff up!

"No matter what Jackie said, we should generally believe rape claims"

"In important ways, this is wrong. We should 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, U-Va. should have taken her word for it during the period while they endeavored to prove or disprove the accusation. This is not a legal argument about what standards we should use in the courts; it’s a moral one, about what happens outside the legal system."

"The accused would have a rough period. He might be suspended from his job; friends might defriend him on Facebook... The cost of disbelieving women, on the other hand, is far steeper." (read the whole thing)

“I didn’t want a trial” Jackie said: Rolling Stone Magazine Apologizes to Readers

"Several key aspects of the account of a gang rape offered by a University of Virginia student in Rolling Stone magazine have been cast into doubt, including the date of the alleged attack and details about the alleged attacker, according to interviews and a statement from the magazine backing away from the article."

Helen Dragas, a member of the university’s governing Board of Visitors, said Friday that U-Va. needs to continue its focus on preventing sexual assault.

“Despite doubts that have been cast on the Rolling Stone story, we need to keep our eyes on the prize, which is nothing less than zero tolerance for rape,” Dragas said. “There will be time enough to look back and ask hard questions of our administrators about how rapes have gone unreported and unanswered, and I have no doubt our Board of Visitors will do just that. But for now our primary concern must be for the well-being of our students. We need to get this right for them, and do so with no hesitation or concern for image.”

Capt. Gary Pleasants of the Charlottesville Police Department said detectives are looking into the allegations at the request of the university but declined to comment on the status of that investigation.

Rolling Stone’s editors apologized to readers for discrepancies in the story, issuing a statement and posting it on their Web site. Will Dana, Rolling Stone’s managing editor, said there is fresh doubt about the account.

“In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” he said in the statement.

Speaking for the first time since the details of her alleged sexual assault were published in Rolling Stone, the 20-year-old U-Va. junior told The Post that she stands by her version of the events.