The Fulford File | Sabrina Rubin Erdely's Third Strike—Her "Rape In The Military" Story
12/10/2014
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We’ve seen Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone article about the UVA rape deconstructed, refuted, and retracted. Eugene Gant and the Catholic League’s Bill Donahue have both noted that Erdely’s apparent lack of elementary skepticism earlier caused her to believe an improbable accuser in the case of an alleged pedophile priest. [Before Rolling Stone Was Conned By 'Jackie' They Fell for 'Billy'. Bigtrial.net, December 6, 2014] So this rape-in-the-military story is her third strike.

Posted by Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit)

December 10, 2014
CLAIRE MCCASKILL AND KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND getting some flak for their stands on campus sexual assault. Has Gillibrand said anything about the Erdely fiasco, given that she used it to justify her bill, and that she’s relied on Erdely’s military-rape story — now presumably also suspect — to support her initiative on military rape?

(Link in original).

That reminds me that I've been resisting writing about this obviously false story [Rolling Stone, February 14, 2013]because in this case the "rape victim"—a Navy Petty Officer—used her real name: Rebecca Blumer, and Rolling Stone printed it. I’m not outing her, the story was literally on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

However, in light of Instapundit's post, Roosh’s tweet, and Steve Sailer’s post on the imaginary nature of the roofie epidemic, here it is. The discredited Sabrina Rubin Erdely [Email her]  describes one woman's "victimization" in terms that show that Erdely doesn't have a sufficient skepticism to keep her from falling for conmen on the street who need gas money to get their wife to a hospital.

The night before, February 12th, 2010, [Rebecca Blumer] and some friends had gone to a bar not far from base for a couple of beers. Three Army guys – one with light hair, the other two dark-haired – had sent Blumer a shot of Jägermeister, a drink she didn't care much for but had downed anyway. The light-haired man had rounded the bar to talk to her. The last thing ­Blumer remembered was being overwhelmed by a dizzy, sluggish feeling, her limbs and head too heavy to lift, the ­noises in the bar rising up and caving in on her. Only later would Blumer find out the rest: that at 1:40 a.m., police had noticed her driving with her headlights off. That she'd barely been able to stand upright during her field sobriety test, but when placed under arrest she'd gone berserk, trying to break free of the police car and screaming incoherently. In jail, she'd yelled for a doctor and fought with the cops so ­wildly that she'd been hosed down in an effort to quiet her. Now, crouching in her cell with a swollen jaw; bruises smudging her wrists, ankles and neck; her abdomen sore inside; and her lower back and buttocks afire with what felt like rug burn, it dawned on ­Blumer. She'd been roofied and raped.

Either that—or had an alcoholic blackout. Blumer can’t remember what happened, and this common in alcoholic blackouts, which can be caused simply by excessive drinking. It’s happened to me, although not for thirty-plus years.

You need to know some things about alcoholic blackouts:

  • They can happen to anyone who gets sufficiently drunk—you don’t have to be an alcoholic.
  • You “last memory” isn’t just before you went unconscious—you were walking, talking, and in all too many cases either driving or fighting afterward.
  • If you’re drunk enough to have amnesia, you’re drunk enough that you probably behaved very badly last night.

This woman woke up in jail to find that she’d gone “berserk, trying to break free of the police car and screaming incoherently.” That’s mild—one man told me that waking up in the same circumstances, not for the first time, he asked the guard “when do I get out?” expecting the usual hearing and fine, and the guard said “Probably not for years—you tried to kill someone last night.”

Another recovering alcoholic put it this way: “No one ever came out of a blackout to find that he’d been helping the Little Sisters of the Poor.”

Of course, all this is not Blumer’s fault if she was drugged, as she apparently believes. But there’s no evidence that she was drugged. She had toxicology tests, they came up negative:

By then, the JAG overseeing Blumer's case had already revealed that the toxicology results had come back negative: No date-rape drugs had been detected. ­Blumer was shocked – and confused, since the emergency-room nurse had already told her during a follow-up visit that drugs had been found. "So who do you believe, the nurse who was handling it? Or the command saying it didn't happen?" says Blumer

In a case like that, I’d believe the technicians who signed the report, not something Blumer says she remembers a nurse saying, and I’d believe that absent proof of a conspiracy.

I mean, what we have is someone who wakes up in jail after being arrested raving drunk, and claims it was the result of drugging. Told that chemical tests have come up negative, she says it’s a Navy medical conspiracy to hide the fact that she’d been drugged.

Theoretically, the tests could have come up negative even if she was drugged.

Concerned with privacy, she opted to discuss the issue not with a base social worker or victim's advocate, but with a therapist at an off-base crisis center, who reminded Blumer that depending on the drug, the dose and her metabolism, a date-rape drug could have left her system in less than 12 hours – and Blumer's urine had been tested 18 hours after that Jägermeister shot.

Did the off-base crisis center therapist raise the possibility that the whole thing was imaginary, the result of a normal alcoholic blackout? I doubt it. An alcohol treatment counselor certainly would have done—many such counselors  are recovering alcoholics who have experienced blackouts themselves—but a crisis center’s staff are more likely to be indoctrinated to “believe the victim.”

After waiting more than a year for the results of her rape investigation, the end came swiftly for Rebecca Blumer in April 2011, when she found herself sitting across a desk from a new rape investigator – the old one had been transferred. But the new agent assured her that she'd read through Blumer's file, and had just one question about her assault: "Do you think you could have imagined it?" she asked. Blumer seethed.

"She was blatantly calling me a liar," she recalls.

Actually, no. She was saying that Blumer was deluded, and had no evidence that she’d been either drugged or assaulted. And, by her own testimony, Blumer was assuming the drugging and rape—she was not an eyewitness either her own conduct, or her putative rape, and there was no physical evidence.

Within days the JAG informed Blumer that the investigation had ­concluded there was no evidence that her assault had taken place. (Blumer says the NCIS agent later told her over the phone, "We closed it because we don't have any leads to go on," not for lack of an assault.) Found guilty by default of a DUI, Blumer was discharged from the Navy 10 days later. Instead of receiving her final paycheck on her way out, Blumer says she was handed a bill for $14,000 – re-enlistment bonus money she now owed for the three years remaining on her Navy contract.

Blumer has had a hard time after the Navy—suicidal thoughts, homelessness—and it all seems to stem from the idea that she was raped, when there was no evidence for this. There wasn’t even evidence, in the form of seminal fluid, that she’d had sex during the blackout, a thing that can happen—consensually—to men and women.

The one bright spot for Blumer herself is that she “hasn't had a sip of alcohol since” the blackout. "I may not ever really know what happened to me that night," she says.

The other bright spot, in terms of the rape hysteria epidemic, is that the three Army guys who sent her a drink—“one with light hair, the other two dark-haired”, so presumably white—apparently couldn’t be identified and prosecuted for something that I haven’t seen proof ever happened.

But public policy is being made on the basis of this article and many articles like it, because of Cultural Marxist control of the Megaphone.

James Fulford [Email him] is a writer and editor for VDARE.com.

 

 

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