The rape hysteria flag has been hoisted over the University of North Carolina.
The lawyers have been called; new legal eagles, big guns, have been hired by the school. University officials are issuing bland, meaningless statements reassuring the concerned public that they really don’t like their students getting raped.
And of course, rape hysteria advocates are piling on as much spin as they can.
Much of the hoopla stems from allegations that the school is systematically underreporting sexual assaults on campus.
Melinda Manning, formerly UNC’s Assistant Dean of Students, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education alleging that Dean of Students Jonathan Sauls, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Winston Crisp and the Office of University Counsel all conspired to hide the actual number rapes on campus — and subsequently created a “hostile environment” for Manning when she would not cooperate.
“Hostile environment” is legal code speak in North Carolina and elsewhere for, “Ima sue yall’s asses.”
It appears what has happened here is that Manning inflated the number of campus rapes in order to inflate the magnitude of the problem, and she got called on it.
The fact that she was challenged at all is a minor miracle, but that may be related to one of her poster children in the case, Landen Gambill (picture at top).
Gambill, one of the “rape” cases so hostilely dismissed by the evil patriarchs at UNC is quite a case herself. The credibility of her story is so low that it almost prompts one to put the word “allegation” in scare quotes.
Gambill, a woman with a history of extensive mental health problems, including a suicide “attempt,” says she got raped by her boyfriend. He raped her many times, even as she continued a romantic relationship with him. But she forgot to tell anyone it was happening.
She did not tell campus police, or city police, or her friends, or her family. But she has a lot of “pages of evidence,” whatever that means, to prove beyond a doubt that she was raped.
Gambill finally found someone to tell her struggles to; her school administration, which conveniently provides a process that places her under little scrutiny and does not carry the threat of a false police report.
The man she accused was placed on “trial” by University of North Carolina University Honor Court in the spring of 2012.
For those that do not know, the Honor Court is a tribunal conducted by pimple faced college students with a few hours of training and standards of proof so low that they were last seen in the vicinity of Monica Lewinski’s knees. The ruling panel needed only be 50.01% more convinced that Gambill was telling the truth than the man she claimed raped her.
They found him not guilty.
Of course, the fact that a superficially attractive blond could not secure support from a panel of college students appears to have been quite a blow. Gambill has been making as much noise as possible ever since. She has even been following her rapist around on campus harassing him. She has also started a vendetta against the system that “wronged” her by siding with the man who raped her.
Part of the vindictiveness demonstrated by Gambill appears to stem from her trial, where she claims she was forced to answer “irrelevant and inappropriate questions.”
“[A] woman student said to me, ‘Landen, as a woman, I know that if that had happened to me, I would’ve broken up with him the first time it happened. Will you explain to me why you didn’t?’”
Imagine the nerve of someone asking a rape accuser why she kept dating her rapist.
Wait, have I been saying rapist? How can that be you ask? The man was never arrested, never charged and never convicted of anything except dating a personality disordered bleach blond with an appetite to punish anyone who she doesn’t like.
Yet here I am, calling him a rapist.
I’m not alone. You see, the standard of evidence in some places is even lower than it is at a collegiate Honor Court. And as I said, the rape hysteria posse is deputizing.
For instance, if you read dailytarheel.com’s Caitlin McCabe’s coverage of the case, you will see her toss the word rape around like pepperoni in a pizza joint. It appears that McCabe’s standard of proof, along with her journalistic integrity, somehow managed to hit the floor harder than Courtney Love’s prom dress. Instead of covering the story, McCabe is covering Gambill’s allegedly raped but undoubtedly lying ass, perpetuating and expanding on the very serious problem of false allegations.
McCabe is joined in this total abandonment of principles by Annie-Rose Strasser, a writer for the uber-liberal thinkprogress.org, who similarly concludes the legitimacy of the “rape” and writes about it as though it were already proven in a court of law.
I wrote Strasser an email yesterday asking her for her sources justifying her language in the article, which began with:
A college sophomore at the University of North Carolina is being sent to the school’s “Honor Court” and may be expelled for speaking publicly about her rape.
I am sure you are shocked to hear I have had no response from Strasser, but you may well join me in the slight startle to learn that the school is actually looking to administer some discipline to Gambill for continuing her vendetta against an innocent man after the Honor Court had ruled on the case.
That would be an ever so slight suggestion for a correction for Strasser. Annie-Rose, she is not in trouble for talking about her rape. She is in trouble because there was no rape and she won’t stop running around lying about it.
Just saying.
The real story here is not Gambill. False rape liars are a chronic, systemic problem and not a single one of them is any more special than the other.
The real story here is the systemic part; the false rape culture. The problem is so pronounced that we now have a university scrambling to cover its collective ass for supposedly trying to hide campus rapes, even as it puts men in godforsaken laymen trials for matters that would never hold muster where they belong, in the criminal justice system.
And we have a rising voice in the media that instead of offering real coverage of the problem, is playing tag team trial by pundit, passing judgment where it cannot be credibly justified, and pawning it all off as journalism.
Landen Gambill is a nutter. And there is similar cause for concern about Melenda Manning. It is the same kind of sociopathy expressed by Annie-Rose Strasser and Caitlin McCabe, who hold the power of public perception in their hands, and choose to distort the truth in order to bend that perception to their ideology.
So much sickness, so little time.
So what do we do here? Well, as always we talk about the problem and use the reach of this website to inject some sanity into a literally insane scenario. We also try to remember that there is a young man out there somewhere who has been to hell and back over one bad relationship choice, and that right now he is watching his fellow students act like they are preparing for candlelight vigils for his “victim.”
The victim that never was.
If he wants to tell his story, and keep his name out of it, I am sure he will figure out how to contact us.
There will be some who think we should add Landen Gambill to the registry of false accusers at register-her.com.
There is a problem with that, however. As overwhelming as the circumstantial evidence is that she is in fact a false rape accuser, she does not meet the standard of proof to place her there, yet.
There are some places where standards still mean something.
In the meantime, we will follow this case. We will take note of whether the school yields to pressure to drop the Honor Court charges against Gambill, which she is desperately trying to bully her way into now.
If they stand with the charges against her, as they should, we will wait and watch to see whether they punish her accordingly, or simply ask her to not ruin anyone else’s life at the school for a while.
Most importantly, we will do everything we can to follow what changes the school may make in the future regarding the reporting of rape, or as it is known by Landen Gambill, “My boyfriend broke up with me.”
The pressure will surely mount on them to make handling of sex crime allegations even more draconian. There will be pressure to allow the next Melinda Manning, who wants to include allegations in reports as surely as they were proven rapes, to do it.
All we can do at this point is wait.
Well, and write.
Note: This article is also available in Spanish.
