UVA Rape Hoax: The Megaphone Never Suffers a Loss; It’s Always Either a Win or a Rainout

04/09/2015

A friend with a lot of experience in how the media works calls to note that his prediction last fall that the prestige press would just bury the Haven Monahan hoax with boring technical details is coming true. He says: They never admit a Loss; every narrative is either a Win or a Rainout. This one is becoming a tedious, indeterminate rainout.

In particular, almost nobody in America to this day realizes just how preposterous Jackie Coakley’s hoax was from the get-go. In particular, almost nobody has the timeline right. A lot of folks assume that Jackie maybe embroidered some facts in the wake of something distressing happening to her.

Probably only a single digit percentage of the audience that has any acquaintance with the story understands that she elaborately spoofed “Haven Monahan” into digital existence many days before the purported rape.

Even fewer know that five days after trying to win poor Randall/Ryan’s heart with her made-up story of rape, she dropped the whole rape angle and sent Ryan the bizarre “Ryan’s great” email, supposedly from Haven, which she had plagiarized from James van der Beek’s description of Katie Holmes on Dawson’s Creek and the like. That made no sense even within Jackie’s fantasy.

In other words, Jackie is no mastermind fabulist as the Rolling Stone officials now contend. She’s just a very silly girl who makes up nonsense. But it turned out to be the kind of nonsense that Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone, the national press, and, unfortunately, much of the public was dying to hear.

So, in reality, there’s nothing boring, technical, and murky about this story: it’s hilarious. But almost nobody knows how funny it is.

Here’s a way to document quantify how much the press has avoided making this story interesting. Go to Google News, limit pages to the last year, and see for yourself how many hits you get for the following searches:

“Sabrina Rubin Erdely” — 20,500

So let’s use 20,500 as the denominator.

“Haven Monahan” — 30, or 0.15% as frequently mentioned as SRE
“Jackie Coakley” — 8, or 0.04%
“Sabrina Rubin Erdely” and “catfish” — 7, or 0.03%
“Sabrina Rubin Erdely” and “Haven Monahan” — 12, or 0.06%
Sabrina Rubin Erdely and “Ryan’s great” — 1, or 0.005%

Or, if you want, you can restrict the search on Google News to the past week. Then you get:

“Sabrina Rubin Erdely” — 5,830
“Haven Monahan” — 6

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