When it Comes to Jameis Winston, Enough is Enough

At what point is enough, enough?

Jameis Winston was cleared in his FSU code of conduct hearing by Justice Major Harding over the weekend. The decision, as sent to Winston’s attorney, essentially says that there was not sufficient evidence to find Jameis Winston guilty of any of the charges leveled against him.

This was by no means an exoneration.

Something happened that night. Nobody denies that. This is now the third entity to decide (based on evidence) that whatever it was though — however unsavory it may or may not have been — it wasn’t rape. But in 2014, in an age when it’s societally acceptable to just swear off facts entirely in the pursuit of making your arguments, that really doesn’t matter. To many across the country the narrative of the accuser — no matter how much it evolves and changes — will always be unimpugnable.

“I applaud, agree with and demand that you continue to not mention the name of an alleged sexual assault victim, you should and must not. But you also must determine when the woman loses that protection,” said Winston’s attorney, David Cornwell, on Erik Kuselias’ radio show this morning. “Is it after a local police department refuses to file charges? Is it after a state attorney’s office refuses to file charges? Is it after the woman herself declines for two years to bring an administrative proceeding against the accused?”

No. No. And no. At least not judging by the media coverage that has followed this story for the past 14 months. In fact if the past few hours are any indication, it’s not even after a retired state supreme court justice — one who the accuser’s legal team even signed off on — reviews all of the available evidence and clears Winston.

The New York Times, USAToday, Sports Illustrated, ESPN and a whole host of other outlets have bought into the accuser’s narrative without hesitation. Without fact-checking. This is what got the national media into trouble with the Manti Te’o/Lennay Kekua story– the narrative was too good to worry about vetting.

That’s because the accuser’s legal team (hey, I’m not getting sued) has put on a clinic in terms of how to utilize the media to win a case in the court of public opinion before it ever gets heard by anyone else. They had you convinced that Winston’s accuser was going to get the raw deal from the outset– that the deck was stacked against her. And over the course of the past year the narrative has become less about the actual facts from that evening and more about how the accused might never get justice.

But that approach tends to make you miss things. Or omit things. Or just flat out misrepresent things in some cases.

In this case part of that is due to fear, plain and simple. Sexual assault is a hot-button issue. It’s messy to write about. And lately it seems the push to protect the accuser — not just in this, but in any sexual assault case — has extended to the point where even questioning that narrative can be labeled as “slut-shaming” and “perpetuating rape culture.” Some were scared to toe that line.

But plenty of others just preferred to run with the most salacious version of events. The New York Times, in particular, comes to mind. The Times went through pain-staking efforts to tell just half of the story. The initial long-form report done by Walt Bogdanich, the one that many around the country still point to as some of the most damning evidence, also leaves out some of the most important details.

How you can spend several thousand words — an entire page in a newspaper — on that fateful December night, yet not mention the fact that the alleged incident was initially reported as a violent assault in which the accuser was struck on the head and woke up with a large black man on top of her is inexplicable. At best it’s irresponsible journalism. At worst it’s downright dishonest.

Here is the 911 call made by Jenna Weisberg on the morning of December 7th, 2012– hours after the alleged sexual assault. The call has been edited (by the New York Times– which is how we know they have this audio) to omit the accuser’s name and any personal information given during the call:

If you don’t have time — or don’t want — to listen, I’ll transcribe the most salient part here.

"|30::Weisberg::She’s very like shaken up, she said that she’s hurt. She got hit.|33::Responder::OK she got hit. Do you, does she know what she got hit with?|38::Weisberg::No, she said like, she said she like kept blacking out like she only remembers pieces.|43::Weisberg::She was like trying to tell me the story but it’s very in pieces.|46::Responder::OK do you know where she was hit at?|48::Weisberg::She said she thinks she was hit on like the back of the head and then she ended up in somebody’s room."

The New York Times, Bogdanich in particular, had this recording. And as of the writing of Bogdanich’s original piece, released April 16, 2014, he also knew the results of the medical examination and the toxicology reports had proven this account to be completely unfounded. He knew that this was a glaring contradiction in the accuser’s narrative.

He also knew that the accuser told not one, but two different friends that she had been hit over the head within hours of the incident. He knew that by the time the police showed up the story had already changed.

If Bogdanich did his job as an investigative reporter, then he knew all of this — it’s in multiple reports from several different agencies — but he opted not to mention it at any point, even if just to let the reader decide what to think of it. That’s not a journalistic decision, that’s a narrative choice.

Two years later, the accuser’s story has shifted so much that during Winston’s Code of Conduct hearing she alleged:

"“[Accuser] testified that while she did not physically resist or seek help her conduct was not voluntary because she was intimidated and/or scared of the consequences of not cooperating and getting in the cab. [Accuser] provided the same response as to why she did not seek help from the cab driver or physically resist or seek help when leaving the cab.”"

In 24 months the narrative has gone from she was hit on the head by Jameis Winston and raped to she was black out drunk, to she was drugged, and finally to the point where she didn’t resist or try to escape at all because she was just too scared– an account that Harding categorically rejected.

"Further, [accuser] did not identify any evidence that you acted in a manner that would reasonably justify her developing such beliefs. The evidence is undisputed that people were present, but [accuser] did not seek help. This lack of evidence, among other things, is relevant to the charged violations of physical violence and endangerment."

But this was all ‘explained away’ by the suggestion that the trauma from the night scrambled the accuser’s memory to the point where it took her two years to completely recollect the events from that evening. This is an idea proposed by the accuser’s team that almost nobody has dared question– except law enforcement, a state attorney and a former chief justice of the state supreme court.

They all found it unlikely.

“I think she was abused by her lawyers,” said Cornwell, who went on to say the accuser’s two attorneys were more akin to investors than actual representation. “To walk her into this hearing room and say she suffered from traumatic memory loss without offering any evidence of a physical or mental exam, let alone any expert to suggest that such a trauma exists that enables you to have a better memory two years after an event than you do 20 hours after it.

“I think in many respects Justice Harding was charitable [to her].”

But don’t hold your breath waiting for the national media — who has largely taken the accuser at face since the outset — to delve into any of this. That would be akin to admitting, ‘hey, maybe we didn’t get this one right.’

You probably won’t read much about how Harding — a Wake Forest alum who had no skin in the game — didn’t even consider all of the evidence set forth by Winston’s side in determining no violations had occurred. That evidence was turned away over a technicality — not because it wasn’t relevant — after the accuser’s team complained about the timing of the filing.

"“You and your advisor were aware of this deadline and timely submitted other supplemental materials, but proposed exhibits 6, 7, and 8 were not submitted. As such, these proposed exhibits were permitted to be used as demonstrative aids at the hearing but are not admitted into evidence. I have not considered them.”"

The accuser’s team got to help determine who would preside over this hearing and even successfully eliminated three of Winston’s proposed exhibits of evidence from consideration– even then they failed to prove their claims.

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But after the ruling went against them they resorted to the same tactic they’ve used all along– blame the process and appeal to public opinion through the media. John Clune issued a statement on Sunday evening alleging that Winston, Casher and Darby didn’t even answer the Justice’s questions– a clear attempt to undermine the hearing and give the impression of impropriety.

“I could release the transcript today and prove that he’s lying,” Cornwell told Kuselias this morning. “I could prove today that he’s lying if I release the transcript and he has lied throughout this process, primarily to the insider — in quotes — Schlabach at ESPN, who covered this story as if he’s a personal PR flack for John Clune.”

The natural inclination is to question why Cornwell doesn’t just release said transcript. But confidentiality considerations aside, why can’t the same be asked of Clune? Shouldn’t the burden to back up his statements — especially at this point — be more on Clune, his team and the accuser?

At what point does the rest of the nation stop, take a step back and think about how unbelievable this alleged cover-up is starting to become.

I’ll concede to you that a local police force could be corrupt, sure– and much of the “cover-up” narrative stems from the idea that the TPD botched the initial investigation. But in the two years since, a State Attorney’s investigation as well as a comprehensive review by an agreed upon third party — a former chief justice of the state supreme court — have both reached the same conclusion.

Enough is enough.

At some point the national media is going to have to turn to the accuser and her attorneys and say the same thing everyone else who has actually investigated this case said: something doesn’t add up.

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