"Ich habe Mails bekommen, ich solle ermordet oder vergewaltigt werden"

Die Dekanin, die vom Rolling Stone verleumdet wurde, bricht ihr Schweigen – und Hanna Rosin berichtet darüber:

Nicole Eramo is the associate dean of students who heads the sexual misconduct board at the University of Virginia. She was also the villain of the now-infamous and recently retracted Rolling Stone story about the gang rape of a freshman named Jackie that never happened at a UVA fraternity.

In Rolling Stone's piece, Eramo was painted as the frontline responder who never really responded. She was the one who, when she heard Jackie’s story, tried to steer her away from reporting it, supposedly to protect the university’s reputation. Reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely never spoke to Eramo, but she did put words in her mouth, presumably told to her by Jackie.

"If Dean Eramo was surprised at Jackie's story of gang rape, it didn't show," Rubin Erdely wrote, and then topped it off with an all-too-perfect quote. When Jackie asked the dean why UVA doesn’t publish statistics on sexual violence, "she says Eramo answered wryly, ‘Because nobody wants to send their daughter to the rape school.’"

Eramo has been silent since the story came out. Today, she issued "An Open Letter to Rolling Stone," in which Eramo condemns "the article's false and grossly misleading portrayal of the counseling and support that I provided to Jackie, including encouraging her to report" and arranging for Jackie to meet with detectives. She also accuses Erdely of having "purposefully omitting information that she received during interviews” with UVA's president and students that did not fit “her preconceived narrative" about the university's callous response to a horrific crime.

Most viscerally, Eramo details how the debacle impacted her personally:

"Using me as the personification of a heartless administration, the Rolling Stone article attacked my life's work. I saw my name dragged through the mud in the national press ... protestors showed up at my office, demanding I be fired. Perhaps most egregious and shocking were the emails I received expressing hope that I be killed or raped, and commenting that they hoped I had a daughter so that she could be raped. Equally distressing ... is the fact that while the false allegations in the magazine were being investigated, the University had no choice but to remove me from working with the students with whom I had spent so much time building a relationship, forcing them to 'start over' with someone else."

Whatever Eramo decides to do in the future, her name will likely be "forever linked" to the article, as she writes. Even now, if you do a Google Image search of her name, you will see the Rolling Stone caricature of her smiling in her office as protests rage outside.

Wahrscheinlich liegt es an mir, aber irgendwie habe ich den Eindruck, diese "Rape-Culture"-Propaganda ist auch für feministische Ziele enorm kontraproduktiv geworden.