Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  Schambelan suggests that “Little Red Riding Hood” could be a “parable of rape, yes, of rape and murder and the most extravagant transgression imaginable.”

  But possibly it was less a warning than a ritualized mnemonic. Maybe its function, or one of them, was to ensure that no one could forget or deny the price they had agreed to pay, the price of maintaining a Männerbund, an institution of wolfishness. There is no darkly romantic teleology here, no unbroken chain of historical inheritance linking wolf boys to frat boys, just as there is no primordial wellspring of masculine violence that forces wolf boys to kill or frat boys to rape. There are two institutions, two leagues of young men, one belonging to an archaic and semi-mythic past, the other flourishing here and now. Institutions, by definition, are not natural or primal. They are not what just happens when you let boys be boys. They are created and sustained for a reason. They do work.

  Rape is an inescapable function of a world that has been designed to give men a maximal amount of lawless freedom, she argues. It “cannot, logically, be just a vile anomaly in an ethical system otherwise egalitarian and humane.” Writing six months before the Harvey Weinstein revelations and everything that followed, she goes on: “There is, as yet, nothing and no one to make us know [the injustice of rape], nothing to make it public knowledge, knowledge that we all share and that we all acknowledge that we share. To create that kind of knowledge, you must have more power than whatever forces are working to maintain oblivion.” Perhaps, she suggests, it was in some misguided attempt to claim this power that Jackie told her lie.

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  —

  In January 2015, in the aftermath of the Rolling Stone story, I went back to Charlottesville to write about fraternity rush. It was the first story I’d ever reported, and I was nervous, looking at UVA, feeling my vantage point change from participant to observer. On my first night back, I sat in a booth in the Virginian and drank beer with my friend Steph to calm my jitters, listening for the tone of the chatter in a sea of khaki-and-North-Faced fraternity hopefuls, sorority rushees with tall boots and curled hair.

  It quickly became apparent that there was a much larger and deeper story transpiring than what Erdely had captured. The Rolling Stone story had arrived in the midst of a season of shocking local brutality, bookended by the death of a young woman named Yeardley Love in 2010 and the fatal white-power rally in 2017. Love, whom I’d met during sorority rush, was murdered in her bedroom by her ex-boyfriend George Huguely, who kicked down her door and brutalized her until her heart stopped. In 2014, a second-year student named Hannah Graham disappeared from downtown. Later, a cab driver named Jesse Matthew was charged with murdering Graham, as well as Morgan Harrington, a girl who’d disappeared five years earlier. He, like Huguely, had a history of violence. He pled guilty in both cases, to murder and to “abduction with intent to defile.”

  Charlottesville is a small community: it takes just fifteen minutes on the old-fashioned trolley to go from the UVA chapel to the pedestrian mall downtown. These crimes reverberated. One of my best friends from college—a girl named Rachel, blond and white and beautiful, as all these girls had been—was the last passenger Matthew drove in his cab before he abducted and murdered Morgan Harrington, a fact she found out from police much later, in the midst of the intensive Hannah Graham investigation. And yet, at the same time, other young women disappeared and hardly anyone noticed. When Sage Smith, a black trans woman, went missing in the fall of 2012, the police department waited eleven days before requesting external support. In contrast, as Emma Eisenberg noted in a piece for Splinter, nearly every law enforcement agency in Virginia knew Graham’s name and face within forty-eight hours, with the FBI and a slew of volunteer search groups following close behind. Coverage of Graham was inescapable; coverage of Smith was nonexistent. (Eisenberg told me that she tried twenty-eight outlets before finding one that would publish the piece.) Alexis Murphy, a seventeen-year-old black girl who went missing near Charlottesville in 2013, also received a minimum of press coverage. When a white man named Randy Taylor was found guilty of murdering her, his pale, gaunt face was mostly absent from the news. But Matthew—his dark skin, his full lips, his thick locs—was everywhere you looked.

  Charlottesville’s history of gendered violence and its history of racial violence, long intertwined, were emerging. A vast undercurrent of trauma and inequity was welling up. Women’s bodies have always been test sites upon which governing hierarchies are broken down and reiterated. In the nineteenth century, black men convicted of rape in Virginia got the death penalty, where white men were imprisoned for ten to twenty years. In the first half of the twentieth century, Virginia citizens became very concerned about the rape of white women—but almost exclusively in cases when the accused were black.

  Violence against women is fundamentally connected to other systems of violence. Though Erdely tried, it’s not possible to capture the reality of rape—or even of fraternities—at UVA without writing about race. When I left Charlottesville that January, I kept thinking about a damning fact that a grad student named Maya Hislop had told me, a fact that had not surfaced either in Rolling Stone or in the exhaustive coverage that followed it: UVA’s first reported rape occurred in 1850, when three students took an enslaved girl into a field and gang-raped her.

  UVA was founded in 1819, by a seventy-six-year-old Thomas Jefferson, who retired from politics to Monticello, his Virginia plantation, and dedicated himself to what at the time was a radical vision: a secular public university that would be accessible to all white men, regardless of whether they were rich or poor. Today, the Thomas Jefferson cult is intrinsic to the UVA experience. Jefferson is frequently, and creepily, referred to as “TJ,” or as “Mr. Jefferson.” My full ride to UVA came from the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. The school enthusiastically celebrates Jefferson’s ingenuity, his integrity, his rebelliousness, his vocabulary. When I was in college, every Valentine’s Day, flyers blanketed the campus with Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings depicted in cameo silhouette, and the cutesy slogan “TJ ♥s Sally” below that.

  Sally Hemings was thirty years younger than Jefferson, and she was an infant when she became his property, courtesy of his wife, Martha. Hemings was Martha’s slave, and her half sister; she was three quarters white. When she was fourteen, she was put in charge of one of Jefferson’s daughters on an overseas voyage. Jefferson met them in Paris, and by the time he left, Hemings was sixteen and pregnant. (At the time, the age of consent in Virginia was ten.) Hemings considered staying in Paris, where the French freedom principle had emancipated her by default. But, according to her son Madison, Jefferson persuaded her to return by promising her “extraordinary privileges,” and assuring her that he would free her children once they turned twenty-one.

  In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson muses that blacks are “much inferior” to whites in their critical capacities, and that the obvious inferiority of black people is “not the effect merely of their condition of life.” It may have been because of these views, not in spite of them, that Hemings, a light-skinned ladies’ maid, appeared particularly attractive. The relationship was an open secret. In 1818, the Richmond Recorder wrote, “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.” But Jefferson never commented, and so the story was suppressed. (One of his grandchildren wrote in a letter, “I would put it to any fair mind to decide if a man so admirable in his domestic character as Mr. Jefferson…would be likely to rear a race of half-breeds….There are such things, after all, as moral impossibilities.”) He did free Hemings’s children before he died, but not Hemings herself, who was freed by Jefferson’s daughter in 1834. In 1835 she died, and was buried in an unmarked grave that likely lies under a parking lot near the Hampton Inn in downtown Charlottesville. Jefferson, of course, is buried at Monticello, along with his descendants—th
e white ones.

  In 1987, Monticello was designated, along with the UVA campus, as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It remains a popular tourist destination in Charlottesville, and it has been steadily altering its programming to acknowledge the lived reality of Jefferson’s slaves. In 2018, Monticello finally mounted an exhibit about Hemings, which depicted her in silhouette—there is no record of what she looked like—and noted, “Enslaved women had no legal right to consent. Their masters owned their labor, their bodies, and their children.” Annette Gordon-Reed, whose 1997 book on Jefferson and Hemings cemented the truth about their relationship, points out that Martha had no legal right to refuse her husband, either. (Spousal rape was not criminalized in Virginia until 2002, and the state senator Richard Black is still fighting to decriminalize it.) A Times piece about the Monticello exhibit mentions the inevitable backlash, quoting a woman in the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, which is dedicated to disputing the narrative that Jefferson fathered Hemings’s children. “Some nights I just curl up in the semidark and just read his letters,” the woman said. “He just doesn’t seem to be a person who would do this.”

  This tension between honorable appearances and unsavory reality was embedded at UVA in the nature of its founding. “The school was new and experimental, unsure of the public’s support and uncertain of its own future,” write Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos in Rot, Riot, and Rebellion, their 2013 history of UVA in its infancy. “No powerful church denomination backed the university, no well-connected alumni group stood ready to come to its defense. Its leaders understood that student drunkenness, violence, and rebellion could result in the university’s ruin.” The students, drawn from the Southern slave-owning class, were uncontrollable nonetheless. In the classroom, they displayed an “exaggerated sense of self-importance.” Outside class, they drank and fought. A teacher in Fredericksburg called the school “a nursery of bad principles.” A student wrote, “Here nothing is more common than to see students so drunk as to be unable to walk.” Bowman and Santos note that Jefferson believed that “pride, ambition, and morality would lead students to behave….Students’ honor would make strict rules unnecessary.” But the concept of honor, particularly where white men and the South are concerned, is inextricably tied to violence. UVA’s greatest self-designated virtue served, from the beginning, as cover and fuel for its greatest sins.

  From even these early days, administrators feared student violence primarily as a publicity problem. “A murdered student would bring unwanted attention to the students’ widespread lawlessness,” write Bowman and Santos, as well as “bad publicity to a university bent on protecting a fragile image as a quiet ‘academical village.’ ” The school suppressed compromising information: after a typhoid outbreak in 1828 that killed three students, UVA failed to officially record the deaths or report them to the state, as was required by law. After a resurgence of typhoid the next year, students began withdrawing. Robley Dunglison, UVA’s first professor of medicine, suggested that these students were spreading “an alarm throughout the Country highly calculated to injure the institution.”

  All of this has been swept behind the curtain of Thomas Jefferson’s reputation. UVA boosters point out that he wrote legislation opposing slavery, even though he also brought slaves to the White House, and used them as human collateral for the debts he accrued while turning Monticello into a future UNESCO landmark. On UVA’s opening day, enslaved people—construction workers, cooks, laundresses—outnumbered the students. There are very few traces left of the lives of enslaved women at UVA, and yet it was on these women’s perceived lack of personhood that the personhood of UVA students was established. The first recorded sexual assault on campus took place seven months after the school opened, when two students stormed into a professor’s house and stripped an enslaved woman of her clothes. The men who studied medicine under the supervision of Robley Dunglison owed their education in part to the work of one enslaved woman named Prudence, who cleaned blood off the floors of the Anatomical Hall.

  UVA didn’t go coed until 1970. Before that, on the terms of the university, women were fundamentally other. Women were prohibited from walking on the Lawn when school was in session—an “unwritten rule,” the Cav Daily notes, that was enforced until the twenties. In 1954, in response to a proposal that “house moms” be installed in dormitories, one student joked to the paper, “I think housemothers would be fine if they were deaf, dumb, and blind, their arms and legs cut off, and would be contented with bread and water while being chained to the basement furnace.” In April of the same year, a nineteen-year-old girl was brutally gang-raped in a Lawn room. She was brought there by a date just before two in the morning; she emerged, dazed and beaten, at ten A.M.

  The girl, who was from a well-connected family, went to her parents soon afterward. Her parents went directly to Colgate Darden, UVA’s president at the time. Darden expelled or suspended all twelve men who were involved in the gang rape, a move that provoked widespread anger on campus. Three of the accused wrote a letter to the Cav Daily saying that they were “charged only with a failure to put a halt to the actions of others.” Darden stuck to his convictions, and the students rose up, submitting a sixteen-page formal complaint to the university. A hundred men showed up at a faculty meeting to protest. Soon afterward, students lobbied to change the structure of the university’s government. They formed a student judiciary committee that would, the Cav Daily noted, “return the disciplinary power of the President’s Office to the student body with a machinery vastly different from that of previous years.” Student self-governance is a Jeffersonian ideal, and it remains one of UVA’s proudest practices. The Office of the Dean of Students lists it first in a line of traditions that make the school a “special place.”

  A month after the 1954 gang rape, the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education. Harry F. Byrd, the senator who controlled Virginia politics, began promoting the program known as Massive Resistance—a group of laws that would reward students who opposed integration and close any public school that complied. In 1958, Charlottesville closed down its schools for five months rather than admit black students. In 1959, a federal judge overruled this, ordering that nine black students be admitted to Venable Elementary—the school on Fourteenth Street, whose shrieking recess breaks I used to observe with a beer on my roof. My friend Rachel, the one who rode in Jesse Matthew’s cab just before he killed Morgan Harrington, now sends her own daughters to Venable. The girls are twins, gorgeous and funny and brilliant; Andrew and I are their godparents. Some days I feel crazed with hope and certainty that the world they grow up in will be unrecognizably different. And yet, on the day of the Unite the Right rally, David Duke and his band of white supremacists marched right by Rachel’s house.

  College towns, which turn over their population every four years, are suffused with a unique and possibly necessary sort of amnesia. If you know the history, you have to remake it, or at least believe that remaking it is possible. You have to believe that there is a reason you are there now, not the people who got it all so wrong before. More likely, though, you feel like you’re the only person who’s ever stepped on campus. Most likely you have no tangible sense of historical wrongdoing. The ugliness, the trauma, of UVA’s past half decade is related to how intensely and consistently the school has tried to suppress the idea that it could ever be ugly or traumatic. (The same is true of America under Trump.) The school’s self-conception will never become completely true until it can admit the extent to which it has always been false: that its fetishized campus was built by slave laborers; that it has, in fact, a long history of gang rape; that Alderman Library, where I spent so many nights writing terrible papers, was named after a staunch eugenicist who, as president of the university, thanked the Ku Klux Klan for a donation with the sign-off “Faithfully yours.”

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  —

  Years have elapsed since the Rolling Stone story. Much o
f what Erdely wanted to achieve with her reporting has, within the past two years, come to pass. The public has been galvanized by sexual assault reporting, riveted by stories of abuse and institutional indifference. I sometimes wonder: if Rolling Stone hadn’t botched this piece in such a spectacular fashion, would the wave that came later have been so relatively impeccable? With the coverage of the accusations against Bill Cosby, starting with New York’s groundbreaking 2015 cover, and with the Harvey Weinstein story and everything that followed, reporters avoided presenting any single woman or experience as broadly representative. They demanded a lot of their subjects, and in doing so, strengthened their subjects’ positions. They showed their readers what they, as reporters, knew and did not know.

  Things have started to change at UVA, too. Students have stopped yelling “Not gay!” during the school song. (Now they yell “Fuck Tech!,” a reference to UVA’s Virginia Tech rivalry.) No one says “GDI.” Young people readily call themselves feminists. There’s a discussion about renaming Alderman Library, and there’s a Charlottesville chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Sexual assault prevention is now a major part of new student orientation—even though this sort of programming is, at any school, effective mostly in that it raises awareness of the issue. The percentage of UVA students who report confidence in their school’s ability to handle a sexual assault complaint has doubled, although the total percentage remains under fifty. And during the year that followed the Weinstein story, the year that ended with Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, female students at UVA continued to write to me, telling me, often, that they’d been assaulted and essentially written off.