Yesterday at 4:11 p.m. ET, Eugene Volokh at the Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy blog sharply criticized Time.com's Eliza Berman for not being "quite fair" — i.e., being quite unfair, given the author's penchant for understatement — to Breitbart.com's John Nolte, the reporter who investigated the veracity of Lena Dunham's detailed claims about and descriptions of her alleged Oberlin College rapist.
Volokh's critique was based on language in Berman's original writeup which Time pulled at some point after Volokh's post without any notice that it had done so. Berman, as Volokh noted, "casually dismiss(ed) an investigation ... that actually succeeded in getting a publisher to correct a statement," and in the process betrayed fundamental tenets of journalism as it's supposed to be practiced.
Before getting to the deleted language, let's look at the flat-out lie contained in Berman's opening paragraph:
In her recent essay collection, Not That Kind of Girl, Lena Dunham recounts being sexually assaulted as an undergraduate by a fellow student named Barry whom she portrays as Oberlin College’s “resident conservative” at the time. He wore cowboy boots and sported a moustache, hosted a radio show and worked at the library. This description, it turns out, is very similar to an actual student named Barry, who, since the book’s publication, has denied he raped Dunham.
Nolte found that Dunham's description of "Barry" bears almost no resemblance to the real-life Barry or any other person enrolled at Oberlin at the time, to wit: "[N]o amount of digging could verify even a single detail of Dunham's rape claim."
Just a few specifics:
... Dunham describes Barry as a "super senior" with "one more semester to finish" who went on to "graduate in December." That leads the reader to believe her rapist graduated in December of 2005. Barry One graduated in May of 2006.
... Dunham describes Barry as sporting a mustache like a "big buck hunter." Two sources who knew Barry One during the time in question confirmed that he never had a mustache of any kind.
... Dunham describes Barry as having a voice that "went Barry White low." Video of Barry One speaking for more than a few minutes confirms he had a normal pitched voice.
Berman, in falsely claiming that the fictional "Barry" is "very similar" to real-life "Barry" — text which remains in her Time.com writeup — joins the person or persons who wrote Tuesday evening's unbylined Associated Press report on Random House's "clarification" to be incorporated into future print versions and downloads of Dunham's book. AP would only concede that the real-life Barry doesn't "fully match" Dunham's "Barry." Both Berman's and AP's contentions are outrageously deceitful.
Now let's look at the key section in the original which is now gone. Fortunately, Volokh blockquoted it. Berman accused Nolte, who actually visited the college during the week before Thanksgiving, of being on a mission to discredit Dunham (bolds are mine):
Following the book’s publication, the conservative news site Breitbart.com launched an investigation attempting to disprove Dunham’s claim of sexual assault, concluding that the claim could not be verified. It’s unclear, however, how a reporter could hope to validate or invalidate something that happened behind closed doors a decade ago. And, the details of this particular case strike a sensitive chord at a time when discussions about sexual assault on college campuses are more charged than ever.
Here is part of Volokh's reaction (bolds and italics are his):
It ... seems that the TIME.com account isn’t quite fair to Nolte and Breitbart.com here. But my concern is much broader than that: The dig at Breitbart seems to me to reflect a dangerous attitude towards journalism. The implication, as I read the first quoted paragraph, is that an investigation of a story is hopeless — and thus pointless and even suspicious — as long as all one can prove is that some parts of the story are false. So long as Dunham might have been sexually assaulted (and she certainly might have been), something that of course can’t be proved or disproved at this point absent someone’s confession, what’s the point of checking into whether particular factual allegations are accurate? Details, details.
But it seems to me that a basic tenet of journalism is that details matter. First, they matter to people’s reputations. Maybe the fact that Dunham’s alleged rapist wasn’t named “Barry” is irrelevant to those who care about “sexual assault on college campuses.” But they matter to a particular man named Barry, whose reputation was jeopardized by Dunham’s labeling the alleged rapist Barry without stating that this was just a pseudonym. Likewise, while there’s no legal cause of action for libeling a political group, if it turns out that Dunham’s alleged rapist also wasn’t a campus conservative — the Breitbart story casts some doubt on that detail, though it doesn’t conclusively disprove it — then this little detail isn’t really fair, either.
Second, the inaccuracy of some details that a person gives does cast doubt on the accuracy of other details. Of course, even honest people make mistakes. Of course, it’s eminently possible that all the other details Dunham gives are accurate, and the only thing that was fictionalized was the name. Of course, more generally, that a person who says she has been raped makes a slight mistake as to one detail doesn’t that she’s lying about other details that relate to the alleged rapist’s identity or actions.
Yet ultimately, when we — as journalists, as readers, as jurors — judge the credibility of sources, often the only way we can tell what happened “behind closed doors” is precisely by looking at how accurate and candid the witness has been as to other matters. An error or an unacknowledged falsification doesn’t categorically, automatically invalidate everything else a person is saying. But it does shed some light on the degree of trust we should place in that person.
To casually dismiss an investigation — an investigation that actually succeeded in getting a publisher to correct a statement — on the grounds that the investigation couldn’t directly verify another aspect of a story is, it seems to me, to miss this basic point about journalism, and about truth-seeking more broadly. I hope this attitude expressed by the Time writer is not characteristic of newspaper and magazine writers more broadly.
Sadly, Eliza Berman is far from alone.
Along with pulling Berman's "attempting to disprove" language directed at Breitbart's Nolte, Time has incorporated the web site's reaction. The relevant section of Berman's revised writeup, including Breitbart's response, now reads as follows (bolds are mine):
Following the book’s publication in September, the conservative news site Breitbart.com launched an investigation into the specifics of the alleged assault as described by Dunham. And on Tuesday, Kurt Bardella, a spokesperson for Breitbart.com, had this to say about the site’s investigation and Dunham’s apology:
"The investigative piece published by Breitbart was never about trying to prove if Lena Dunham was raped or not–that’s absurd and impossible–rather the piece was about a real-life person named Barry who, regardless of her intentions, found himself at the center of a story he was never a participant in and doing him the courtesy of due diligence that he wasn’t afforded prior to the publication of Lena Dunham’s book. By her own admission, the “resemblance to a person with this name is an unfortunate and surreal coincidence” but also illustrates the unintended consequences that can reverberate when chronicling such a sensitive story. The story of real-life Barry and of Leah Dunham’s rape are not mutually exclusive–one doesn’t have to be right for the other to be wrong–they can both be right and in Breitbart’s eyes, they should both be told."
For the reasons Volokh cited, it is fortunate that Time has pulled Berman's original outrageous swipes at Breitbart and Nolte. But it's completely unacceptable that her lie about how Dunham's fictional "Barry" and real-life "Barry" are "very similar" remains.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
