by Robby Soave
But much like the one-in-five statistic, the 2–8 percent rate of false reports relies on a shakier foundation than most activists concede. Its most extreme version—just 2 percent of rape victims are lying—is an unscientific, evidence-free conjecture made by a public servant and copied into Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, the 1975 book authored by second-wave feminist Susan Brownmiller.
Studies have produced a wide range of false report rates: on the low end, the 2010 study “False Allegations of Sexual Assault: An Analysis of Ten Years of Reported Cases” found a false report rate of 5.9 percent.30 On the high end, a 1994 study by the sociologist Eugene Kanin produced a false report rate of 40 percent.31 But the limitations of these and other studies on this subject are striking. In order for the police to label a report as false, they had to produce significant evidence that the accuser lied; otherwise, a possibly false rape was simply listed as unproven. Additionally, researchers could use only the data available to them, which means they ran the numbers on rapes reported to the police. But when it comes to campus sexual misconduct, accusations are often reported to someone other than the police: a professor, a coach, an administrator, a Title IX official.
It’s possible that alleged victims are incredibly unlikely to file false police reports but somewhat more likely to embellish a story when talking with a sympathetic professor or administrator. It’s also possible the activists are right—the rate of false reports made to any authority figure is very low, and the cases labeled as “unproven” were simply insufficiently investigated. Then again, it’s also possible that a significant number of unproven police cases and unfairly investigated Title IX episodes represent genuinely false accusations. Unfortunately, as Bloomberg View’s Megan McArdle wrote in an article about false rape report statistics, “We don’t know. Anyone who insists that we do know should be corrected or ignored.”32
Last but not least is the serial predator statistic: most rapists are repeat offenders, and perhaps as many as 90 percent of rapes are committed by serial predators. This number has not provoked nearly as much controversy as the one-in-five and 2–8 percent statistics, perhaps because it seems comparatively innocuous. Indeed, it even appears to explain the discrepancy between the huge number of alleged victims of rape and relatively small number of accused rapists. Amanda Marcotte, a well-known contributor to the feminist blogosphere, put it this way in an article for Slate: “That 1 in 5 college women have been assaulted doesn’t mean that 1 in 5 men are assailants. Far from it. A study published in 2002 by David Lisak and Paul Miller, for which they interviewed college men about their sexual histories, found that only about 6 percent of the men surveyed had attempted to rape or successfully raped someone.” Her article went on to explain that the “high rates of campus sexual assault are due mostly to a small percentage of men who assault multiple women.”33
The serial predator theory is indeed the handiwork of one psychologist: David Lisak, formerly of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. His study, “Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists,” released in 2002, supposedly found that most college rapists attacked multiple women—an average of 5.8 each.34
It would be difficult to understate just how influential this theory and the man behind it have become over the last decade—and not just among activists. Lisak was cited in the 2014 White House memo on campus sexual assault prevention, and in training materials for university Title IX coordinators. He was referenced more than a hundred times in Missoula, Jon Krakauer’s 2015 book about sexual assault at the University of Montana.35 His thinking undergirds The Hunting Ground, the Oscar-shortlisted 2015 documentary that argues campus rapists essentially prey upon women (Lisak even appeared in the film). Lisak was paid to give talks at colleges and universities; people who wanted to understand the way rapists think have turned to Lisak, who has repeatedly suggested that he extensively interviewed the serial predators captured by his study.36 The notion that campuses are scary places filled with serial sexual predators rests on an intellectual foundation built by Lisak, as do activist efforts to reduce due process and make blind faith the only reasonable reaction to an accusation.
But in early 2015, an administrator at Davidson College made an interesting discovery: the survey data for “Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists” were not collected by Lisak. Rather, he used data collected by his graduate students for four separate studies; these studies were about violence and abuse, but not campus sexual assault specifically.
Linda LeFauve, an associate vice president of planning and research at Davidson, had been surprised to learn that 90 percent of campus rapes were perpetrated by serial predators who committed an average of nearly six rapes each. “That sent up statistical red flags that became more concerning when the claims about premeditation and psychopathic tendencies were added,” she later told me in an email. “When virtually all incidents of a complex act are supposedly the result of a rare psychological type, my skepticism goes on high alert.”
She read Lisak’s paper, but that only gave her more questions. And so in March she telephoned Lisak.
Lisak confirmed that the data were not his own but rather his graduate students’. These feeder studies, Lisak told LeFauve, “may have been about child abuse history or relationships with parents.”37
Some 1,882 men participated in the studies. Just 120 of them confessed to actions that met the legal definition of rape or attempted rape, and 76 of the 120 were repeat offenders.
“Lisak told me that he subsequently interviewed most of them,” wrote LeFauve in an article for Reason that I helped edit. “That was a surprising claim, given the conditions of the survey and the fact that he was looking at the data produced long after his students had completed those dissertations; nor were there plausible circumstances under which a faculty member supervising a dissertation would interact directly with subjects. When I asked how he was able to speak with men participating in an anonymous survey for research he was not conducting, he ended the phone call.”
A mutual friend put LeFauve in touch with me, and together we published a series of articles about the flawed scientific basis of the serial predator theory. Suffice it to say that Lisak did not respond to any additional requests for comment.
However, I was able to speak with James Hopper, a former student of Lisak’s whose dissertation data were included in the 2002 study. “This is not a typical college sample,” he told me when I interviewed him.38
Not typical at all: UMass Boston, for one thing, is a commuter school, and none of its students live on campus. Nor were the participants in the surveys necessarily all students; researchers set up booths on campus and asked men who walked past them if they would consider participating in a study. The average respondent was twenty-six and a half years old—older than the average student nationwide—and one participant was in his seventies.
Some participants checked a box indicating that they would agree to be interviewed at a later date. Based on my conversation with Hopper, who relayed some of my questions to Lisak, I was able to estimate that this applied to 22 of the 120 participants who were deemed serial predators. The purpose of the follow-up interviews was to double-check whether participants had given truthful answers, not probe the criminal mind for insights into psychopathy.
Let’s recap the serial predator theory: it is based on just one study, situated at an unrepresentative commuter school, in which researchers asked men about their histories of domestic and child abuse. They were not asked specifically about violence they had committed on a college campus, at a college party, or inside a dorm room. They were not asked whether their victims were students. They were not asked whether they were students at the time they had committed the violence. They were not interviewed extensively by David Lisak.
And yet the campus serial predator theory is ubiquitous: the anti-rape activist movement treats it as foundational to their cause.
Lisak’s work received little scrutiny until LeF
auve and I dug into it. Around the same time that we published our investigative series, JAMA Pediatrics released a paper taking aim at the campus serial predator assumption’s “surprisingly limited” scientific foundation. The paper concluded that “although a small group of men perpetrated rape across multiple college years, they constituted a significant minority of those who committed college rape and did not compose the group at highest risk of perpetrating rape when entering college.”39
One of its coauthors was Mary Koss, the originator of the one-in-five statistic (not a rape denier, in other words). In an interview with me, Koss accused Lisak of deliberately promoting the idea that his research was relevant to the campus rape issue.40
Lisak, one presumes, did not take kindly to the suggestion that his research was out of date. Hopper went so far as to file a scientific misconduct complaint against Kevin Swartout, the lead researcher and Koss’s coauthor of the JAMA Pediatrics paper. Georgia State University later cleared Swartout of any wrongdoing.41
What does it mean if the serial predator theory is false, or inapplicable to campus sexual assault? It dramatically increases the need for fundamental due process, for one thing. If most accused rapists have victimized five other women, the case for speedily ejecting them from campus appears stronger. But if the reality is that the campus sexual misconduct problem runs the full gamut—from obvious forcible rape to one-off drunken hookups that weren’t perfectly consensual at all times—we must insist on the full set of legal protections for discovering the truth of the matter.
It’s thus no surprise that activists are so fond of the serial predator theory, despite its flaws. As Vanessa Grigoriadis, the Blurred Lines author, said in an interview with Slate: “One tactic of the young activists who are primarily responsible for bringing sexual assault at colleges to some mainstream media is to make all sexual assault sound extremely violent. To make them sound like they are done by a very small group of serial predators, and to frighten Americans into thinking that if we don’t change something at this exact second, people’s daughters are in extreme danger.”42 When hunting for witches, first scare the villagers.
Believing Jackie
One of the most horrible sexual assault episodes in recent memory occurred at Vanderbilt University in 2013. Four football players—Brandon Vandenburg, Cory Batey, Brandon Banks, and Jaborian McKenzie—dragged a wholly unconscious woman into a dorm room and proceeded to beat, rape, and dehumanize her.43 Vandenburg, who had been on a date with the woman before she passed out from drinking too much, slapped her in order to demonstrate to his teammates that she wouldn’t wake up. Someone sodomized her with a water bottle. They took pictures of her in compromising positions. They raped her. Batey even urinated all over her hair. (Vandenburg, Batey, and Banks were all eventually convicted of rape; McKenzie received ten years of probation and lifetime sex offender status.)
I make note of the Vanderbilt case in order to dispel any notion that rape is a nonexistent problem. No one should take away from this chapter the idea that the college rape crisis is a myth: sexual assault is all too common, on campus and off. (The data suggest that for all the attention paid to the campus problem, college-aged women who aren’t enrolled in school are actually at greater risk of being raped than female students.)44 The debate is over the size, scope, and shape of the problem—with the activists often taking the most extreme position that patriarchal forces systematically oppress and violate women, particularly women who are, for identity-based intersectional reasons, extra susceptible to marginalization (women of color, trans women, women with mental health problems, et cetera).
But most sexual misconduct cases are thoroughly unlike the Vanderbilt case. Many involve some degree of ambiguity; such is the problem of mixing copious amounts of alcohol, party drugs, and horny teenagers. United Educators, an insurance company that covers universities’ financial losses in sexual misconduct lawsuits, analyzed data from five years’ worth of its cases. Victims were under the influence of drugs or alcohol 92 percent of the time, and 60 percent of the time were so intoxicated they couldn’t clearly recall the assault.
Encounters often begin consensually, but different expectations or an inability to vocalize desires in the manner required by the affirmative consent doctrine make one party feel violated. In some cases, women who suffered through bad sex later recontextualized the experience as assault. “In the claims reviewed, the accuser often did not immediately report the incident, but waited days, weeks, or months before coming forward,” United Educators noted in its report. While it’s not always easy to draw bright lines between consensual sex and coercive assault, the activist assumption that all accusers are always automatically telling the truth further complicates the matter.
One of the best examples of the folly of this kind of thinking was the infamous Rolling Stone/University of Virginia debacle—a gang rape accusation that at first blush seemed even more horrific than the Vanderbilt assault. In November 2014, Rolling Stone magazine published a bombshell cover story about “Jackie” (full name withheld), a University of Virginia freshman who claimed that she endured a violent rape at a fraternity party. According to Jackie’s account, her date, the pseudonymous “Drew,” lured her into a dark upstairs bedroom, shoved her through a glass table, and invited eight or nine of his frat brothers to rape her as part of some kind of initiation ceremony. Jackie was fully conscious—she hadn’t been drinking—as guy after guy took his turn. These attackers—monsters, truly—referred to her as an “it.” Bleeding profusely from the glass shards digging into her back, Jackie finally passed out from pain.
Jackie came to hours later, bolted from the house, called her friends to rescue her, returned to her dorm room, and collapsed into bed. One friend, concerned that Jackie would develop a reputation as a tattletale and end up blacklisted from parties, advised her not to go to the cops. Jackie eventually told Nicole Eramo, an associate dean at the university, about her ordeal, but the administration’s failure to do anything only succeeded in traumatizing Jackie a second time.
Jackie met Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a freelance writer and contributor to Rolling Stone, through Emily Renda, a University of Virginia graduate and mutual friend. Renda, who survived a sexual assault during her first year on campus, later became involved with the campus’s Women’s Center and sexual assault awareness advocacy.45 She had served as a member of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault and joined UVA’s administration as a coordinator for sexual misconduct prevention. Renda had heard Jackie’s story and offered the young woman emotional support; when Erdely called Renda, asking if she knew of any sexual assault survivors who might be willing to share their stories for a major magazine feature, Renda suggested Jackie.
Jackie agreed to speak with Erdely, but she made a major demand: Erdely could only use Jackie’s first name, and she couldn’t seek comment from Jackie’s attacker. These terms were agreed upon by Rolling Stone’s editors, and the story went to print.
Jackie’s tale, published in Rolling Stone as “A Rape on Campus,” was horrifying. It was also a lie, and one that unraveled with remarkable speed. Within a few days, several critics—this author among them—began voicing concerns.46 Erdely conceded that she hadn’t sought to question Jackie’s friends or attacker, but trusted Jackie implicitly. Privately, Erdely began to panic. She finally persuaded Jackie to provide the real name of her attacker: Haven Monahan. But no one named Haven Monahan had attended the University of Virginia during the semester of the attack.
Jackie’s friends—who had, according to Jackie, declined to talk to Erdely—came forward to contradict key parts of her account. They were no longer in contact with Jackie and would have been happy to speak with a reporter, they said. It became increasingly clear that Jackie had had a crush on one of these friends and went to elaborate lengths to gauge his romantic interest in her: she sent him fake text messages from a made-up persona, a practice known as “catfishing.” The made-up persona’s name was Haven
Monahan.
Rolling Stone was eventually forced to retract the article, though its editors waited months to do so. Nicole Eramo, the dean portrayed as unwilling to take Jackie’s allegations seriously, sued the magazine and won $3 million in damages.47 Phi Kappa Psi, the alleged scene of the crime, won $1.65 million in a settlement.48 Rolling Stone initially seemed to have caught a lucky break with the third lawsuit, filed by individual members of the fraternity: a judge tossed out the lawsuit on the grounds that these young men weren’t actually named in the story. But an appeals court reversed course, arguing that two of three fraternity brothers could plausibly argue that the article made indirect reference to them and would have caused people who knew them to suspect they were involved in the gang rape.49 In December 2017, Rolling Stone’s founder and publisher, Jann Wenner, sold his controlling stake in the magazine. Erdely has yet to write another article for Rolling Stone or any other publication. Renda left her job at UVA and abandoned her work as an advocate for sexual assault survivors. (She did not respond to repeated requests to be interviewed for this book.)
“A Rape on Campus” was a complete disaster for everyone involved in its production, but things turned out least bad for Jackie, whose full name is known to reporters familiar with the story (including this one) but was never printed in any reputable news outlet. She kept her anonymity and avoided becoming the subject of a lawsuit. (I reached out to Jackie for comment; she did not respond.) The Charlottesville police declined to charge Jackie with making misleading statements to authorities; they refused to even characterize her claims as false.50 (As the journalist Emily Yoffe observed in an interview with me for Reason, Jackie’s unfounded rape accusation would not be counted in any false rape reporting statistic.)51
