Another day, another uninformed writer destroying their own credibility with a piece on former Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston.
The group who has held steadfast to Winston being guilty has diminished greatly these past few months as more and more people have become aware of the facts of the December 2012 case of accused sexual assault against him. It’s not hard to see why many people are on his side: The guilty crowd have visions of mass conspiracy and a cover-up throughout the entire Florida legal system while the crowd that seems to have left the pitchforks at home have had at least a significant majority of actual evidence on their side.
It seems that almost every month, another institution found Winston either not guilty or found insufficient evidence to charge him with anything. Yet, the accusations kept rolling on, and regardless of what actual evidence says, some continue to hold steadfast to persuade others to Winston’s guilt.
So here we are with two Salon articles: one on the first of the month and the other written Monday. We’ll first focus on the May 1st article written by Katie McDonough while taking a quick peek at the May 11th article. To anyone paying attention, neither are real rooted in fact.
The first sentence from McDonough reads: “I’ve got to work,” Jameis Winston, Heisman Trophy winner, No. 1 NFL draft pick and alleged serial rapist said Thursday night after being tapped to lead the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Alleged serial rapist? That’s interesting, because “serial” implies that he has had multiple allegations against him. There has been one so far — Erica Kinsman.
In April of 2014, the New York Times mentioned another woman who felt violated from a sexual encounter with Winston. Yet, Roy Cummings and Joey Johnston of the Tampa Tribune investigated the alleged “second accuser” and found out that she wasn’t an accuser at all.
In fact, an assistant at the State Attorney’s Office, Georgia Cappleman told investigators that the girl “doesn’t even consider herself a victim.” She hasn’t spoken with the girl herself, but she has presumably spoken to the FSU counseling representative that the girl first came to.
We can form all the hypotheses we want, but the fact of the matter is that there is no second accuser. She has not come forward to accuse Winston of anything, point blank. The moment she does we can talk about the possibility, but until then, calling him “an alleged serial rapist” is not only factually incorrect, but a gross misrepresentation. Does McDonough know this vital piece of information? Well, if she did proper work, she would have.
A couple of paragraphs down McDonough is back at it with the statement of: “…even as damning reports on failed police investigations, destroyed evidence and civil lawsuits followed him over the last two years. The Bucs needed a franchise quarterback, and if that quarterback happened to be a man who allegedly abuses women then so be it.”
It’s beginning to be a question of whether or not McDonough understands plural vs. singular construction. Presumably the “failed police investigations” is a reference to the Tallahassee Police Department not pursuing the case as intensively as a police force should. If you’re looking for a defense of the TPD as a whole, you won’t find it here. Its incompetence in many areas has been talked about enough, so there’s no need to detail full thoughts on the department.
What we will be detailing is the fact that the TPD investigation, while not thorough, is not the only investigation into the matter. The State Attorney’s Office investigated the matter as well and no charges were filed. The Governor’s Office reviewed the case files and decided not to pursue it.
The university held a Code of Conduct hearing with a preponderance of evidence standard. Rather than having the hearing be judged by FSU personnel, the school recused itself and hired former Florida Supreme Court Justice Major Harding to oversee the hearing. Again, Winston was cleared of all charges.
At what point do some in the media realize that they are on the losing side here? If they want to criticize the TPD for being lax, that’s something entirely different. Indicting Winston because of one lesser investigation out of three seems to be the ultimate desperation move. It’s telling the readers that they are on their last leg and have no more arguments aside from hypotheticals as to why Winston might be guilty.
It’s also a question as to what McDonough is referring to when she mentions “destroyed evidence”. Presumably that would be Chris Casher’s video of the encounter between Winston and Kinsman being deleted before it could be obtained. But it could also very well be the accuser deleting evidence from her phone and her social media profiles. Does the writer know about that? Probably not.
Later in the article, McDonough talks about suspicions around whether or not FSU may have interfered with the investigation. Matt Baker of the Tampa Bay Times elaborated in a series of tweets that the evidence did not necessarily say that, and included a reason that he did not report it. Reasonable people can come to different conclusions, so it’s best to wait until more information is uncovered or revealed.
The athletics department knowing about an investigation doesn’t indicate that they interfered — it means that they are made aware of it. If they were under the impression that the investigation was static and not moving forward, it would make no sense to punish or suspend an athlete from the team. Head football coach Jimbo Fisher has a policy of not suspending players unless they are arrested or have broken major team rules multiple times.
Early last football season, when Winston was suspended for the ACC opener versus Clemson, Fisher was reportedly very upset with the university for extending the punishment for the whole game. If you’re of the persuasion that there is a giant coverup from hundreds of people at the university, you’re more likely to jump to a conclusion that fits your idea. The rest of us will wait for more concrete evidence.
Not surprisingly, McDonough once again makes a mistake in her article. She cites the accuser’s lawyers when she says “(Ronald) Darby is alleged to have told Winston that Kinsman was telling him to “stop,” and the civil suit includes a remorseful Facebook message Darby posted after the incident, saying he felt “the worst almost I felt in my life.”
A simple search would have revealed the truth behind this claim. The status didn’t come the day after the alleged incident, it came two days after. Even worse for the lawyers, Darby’s very next status says that it was his teammate writing that, not him.
In fact, on the original status he comments “I’m gucci” meaning that he was actually fine and thereby giving credence to his claim that it wasn’t him who posted that. Once again, which is more likely: Darby somehow knew two years before the case erupted that his status could be used against Winston, or a friend really was just messing with him about something completely unrelated to any alleged sexual assault?
The rest of the article is McDonough waxing poetic about social issues while maintaining that Winston’s problems have been overlooked because of his talent. Before one goes to check, there is no mention of the Bucs interviewing over 75 people about Winston and vetting his background. Why would she? It doesn’t fit her conclusion that teams have disregarded investigating him for the chance to draft Winston. Unfortunately, this is too often par for the course for Salon when writing about the topic.
TALLAHASSEE, FL – DECEMBER 2: Florida State Seminoles quaterback Jameis Winston leaves his student conduct code hearing on December 2, 2014 in Tallahassee, Florida. The hearing will continue on Wednesday December 3rd. (Photo by Jeff Gammons/Getty Images)
The next article about Winston is related to him countersuing his accuser, and it includes a familiar name in Jessica Luther. Luther is a VICE sports writer that has continuously failed to provide accurate coverage of Winston and still does so to this day. While we will focus solely on this article for now, take note of her name for a later piece.
While this one was written by Jenny Kutner, it has a similar bend to it that falls in line with what we have previously seen with Salon: Give half the story and pretend the other side doesn’t exist.
Early on Kutner links to a piece that she claims shows how police “grossly mishandled” the investigation. Click on the link and it’s — you guessed it — another piece from McDonough who has once again made it her life’s mission to mislead people about the case. And once again, there is not a single mention of the State Attorney’s Office report. There’s not enough time in the day to go through and correct everything wrong, but keep in mind where Kutner is getting the information from.
We get another statement from Kinsman’s Colorado-based attorney John Clune where he says “Refusing to answer questions isn’t going to work here. I’m not sure how well this will end up for him.”
Considering that this was the same team who had a blisteringly optimistic look at the Code of Conduct hearing, one begins to wonder if Clune really believes what he is publicly saying. He has already recently been dishonest about Darby and his Facebook status, so his track record with this case seems shaky at best.
Kutner then claims that Winston’s attorney David Cornwell “cites the woman’s behavior the night of the alleged rape as proof that their encounter was consensual“. However, this is not accurate. The quoted segment is most likely responding to questions regarding allegations of drug use/alcohol presence in the accuser’s system.
The accuser’s lawyers have claimed that she was not of sound mind and body when leaving the bar with Winston and his teammates, yet her conduct and her own friends’ testimony seem to speak against that. She has claimed that she felt intimidated by them before she got into the cab, yet Justice Harding found that less than credible.
While these statements make no claims about what happened at Winston’s apartment, they do make claims about her reliability in telling the truth of what happened. Cornwell’s statement most likely pertained to that and we are able to further support that by the very next section Kutner quotes: “Winston’s filing repeatedly refers to Kinsman’s claims as “lies,” saying the encounter between the two was proven by medical evidence and two teammate witnesses to be nothing more than consensual.”
Finally she quotes Luther, who appeared on the MSNBC show Morning Joe to talk about the latest news regarding the case. This isn’t too surprising, considering that the show’s main host Joe Scarborough incorrectly told viewers a week ago when that there were “…charges, not allegations” against Winston.
On the show Luther, said this:
“When the state’s attorney announced about 11 months later, in November 2013, that he was not going to press charges, he was pretty clear that the initial investigation … was not very thorough…It wasn’t necessarily that he’s innocent, it was that [the state’s attorney] didn’t feel like he could win this in court.”
It seems as though the the misinformation and notions of mass collusion will always be out there. The case seems to be that since you can’t 100 percent indisputably prove he’s innocent, therefore it is just as likely that he is guilty and you are justified in making ludicrous claims about the case.
Does Luther realize that investigator Jason Newlin was actually on Winston’s side in the Code of Conduct hearing? In fact, Kinsman questioned him during the hearing and attempted to downplay her statements about being drugged.
That was before The Hunting Ground documentary came out and she reasserted that she is “totally certain” that something was in her drink. So an investigator decides to not pursue charges against Winston, testifies for his side in a hearing, gets cross-examined by the accuser…and we are led to believe that his only hangup was that he “didn’t feel like he could win this in court”? That’s quite the interesting summary of events from Luther.
The rest of the interview includes easy questions for Luther where she is once again not forced to actually answer for some of her claims. She points out that the hearing took a while to take place, yet she doesn’t mention that Kinsman’s lawyers declined a proposed student disciplinary hearing last February. Her statement is made worse when she alleges that there were questions surrounding Florida State and whether or not they were the ones who delayed the hearing. We have evidence for one claim, and conjecture for another. Which one should we choose?
That’s about all there is to discuss in these Salon articles. It’s quite simply par for the course for the publication. It however, is certainly not the only offender and in fact we will take a look at some of the more egregious ones in a later piece. But for now, there needs to be some questions asked:
When will the campaign stop? When will writers fess up to their misleading statements? When will those who are concretely convinced Winston is guilty admit that they don’t have much of a case?
Every day, it seems like we get another writer claiming that Winston is clearly not innocent, yet the past rulings have all said otherwise. How many more venues will these people need before they just admit they have an ideological commitment they’re not willing to break? At some point, they need to ask themselves why they hold the beliefs they do and what could possibly convince them to change their minds.
Four different institutions have now decided that they don’t have enough evidence to find him guilty. One of those didn’t even need to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. How long will these websites and their writers continue to feed their readers the wrong information?
Every single article from the publication seems to portray Winston as guilty and that he will be punished — yet here we are. How many more statements will they have to make before they are held accountable?
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem like it’ll ever happen.
