“It’s March - everyone is going through ‘a lot.’ If you can’t handle Carolina, then say it.” “I’m going through a lot.” ( I was raped, please let me tell you.) I went to Academic Advising to ask about dropping a class and told the advisor that I didn’t need the course and was dealing with a difficult personal trauma. Here’s how she portrayed it in an essay for the Huffington Post: But the specifics of who made the “lazy” comment, and under what circumstances, have varied widely. The villain of Pino’s campus rape narrative is an unidentified UNC academic, who allegedly told her that she was “lazy” in a discussion after the alleged assault. These narratives differ in specifics and location, but have basic similarities: the attacker is not identified, the attack itself is often oddly incidental to the narrative, and the focus is on other parties-one or more employees of the institution, sometimes along with the accuser’s friends-who behaved in an unfathomably horrific fashion. Pino’s story is one of several campus rape narratives targeting institutions like Yale and Amherst and Occidental, produced by a loosely connected network of activists first identified (ironically, given its generally terrible coverage of this issue) by the New York Times. (Note the similarity to the bloodied “Jackie” in Rolling Stone, whose wounds party attendees and friends likewise failed to notice.) Pino reported her attack neither to the Chapel Hill Police nor to UNC (the latter at least in part because friends discouraged her from doing so), though since she couldn’t identify her attacker, who might not have even been a UNC student, it’s not clear how UNC could have adjudicated the case anyway.
(How, therefore, she knew that her alleged attacker was a UNC student remains unclear.) Even though she was allegedly left bloodied by her attack, no one else at the party seems to have noticed what happened to her. Pino says that in 2012, she was violently raped-leaving her bloodied-at an off-campus party by another student, whose identity she didn’t know and who she never saw again.
And she clearly is a believer in the film’s storyline: in her telling, nearly 50 percent of the women in her dorm were sexually assaulted in either their first or second year at school, a rate that far exceeds even the Obama administration’s wild claims. Because Pino never reported her alleged assault to police, and identified neither her alleged assaulter nor anyone else in her story, the UNC accuser’s narrative is unfalsifiable. And an e-mail from one of the film’s producers, Amy Herdy, featured Herdy confessing, “We don’t operate the same way as journalists - this is a film project very much in the corner of advocacy for victims, so there would be no insensitive questions or the need to get the perpetrator’s side.”įrom the standpoint of someone like Herdy, the story told by another Hunting Ground protagonist, former UNC student Andrea Pino, is ideal. Ashe Schow caught a staffer affiliated with the film doctoring film-related Wikipedia entries. Stuart Taylor did the same for how the film discussed a case at Florida State.
Emily Yoffe’s Slate investigation exposed the film’s extraordinarily misleading treatment of a case at Harvard Law. Any fair-minded observer would already have recognized The Hunting Ground (broadcast tonight on CNN, the “most trusted” name in news) as propaganda.