Stuart Taylor, Jr.A Smoking-Gun E-mail Exposes the Bias of ‘The Hunting Ground’ – Stuart Taylor, Jr. https://www.stuarttaylorjr.com Online Archive Fri, 20 Aug 2021 13:35:39 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.stuarttaylorjr.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon-32x32.png A Smoking-Gun E-mail Exposes the Bias of ‘The Hunting Ground’ – Stuart Taylor, Jr. https://www.stuarttaylorjr.com 32 32 A Smoking-Gun E-mail Exposes the Bias of ‘The Hunting Ground’ https://www.stuarttaylorjr.com/a-smoking-gun-e-mail-exposes-the-bias-of-the-hunting-ground/ https://www.stuarttaylorjr.com/a-smoking-gun-e-mail-exposes-the-bias-of-the-hunting-ground/#respond Mon, 16 Nov 2015 13:30:26 +0000 Stuart Taylor, Jr. http://www.stuarttaylorjr.com/?p=17045 A so-called documentary about campus rape, The Hunting Ground, is set to air Thursday on CNN, which co-produced it. But a newly available e-mail from an investigative producer of the film spectacularly belies its pretensions to be honest, balanced journalism. Instead, the e-mail adds to the large body of evidence that that the film is highly misleading if not dishonest. In the December 21, 2013, e-mail from Amy Herdy (billed in the film as working with independent director Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering), Herdy sought an interview with Erica Kinsman and her lawyer about her highly publicized rape accusation […]

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]]> A so-called documentary about campus rape, The Hunting Ground, is set to air Thursday on CNN, which co-produced it. But a newly available e-mail from an investigative producer of the film spectacularly belies its pretensions to be honest, balanced journalism. Instead, the e-mail adds to the large body of evidence that that the film is highly misleading if not dishonest.

In the December 21, 2013, e-mail from Amy Herdy (billed in the film as working with independent director Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering), Herdy sought an interview with Erica Kinsman and her lawyer about her highly publicized rape accusation against Jameis Winston, the Heisman Trophy–winning, first-NFL-draft-pick former Florida State quarterback. The Herdy e-mail, sent to Kinsman’s then-lawyer, included this assurance: “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” (emphasis added).
This e-mail appears directly contrary to claims by both Dick and CNN — which calls itself “the most trusted name in news” — that this is an accurate, balanced documentary, fair to both sides of every story. While calling himself “both an activist and a filmmaker,” Dick stressed in a typical promotional interview that “for us first is accuracy.”
Jeff Zucker, president of CNN Worldwide, let slip the network’s own bias at the Sundance premiere, where he brushed aside anticipated criticism of the film by universities — which it smears as covering up for rapists — by saying that “they are on the wrong side.”
The Herdy e-mail, originally sent to Kinsman’s then-lawyer (and aunt) Patricia Carroll, and related documents were made available to this writer today by Florida State, which obtained the e-mail in connection with Kinsman’s lawsuit against the school.
A second e-mail from Amy Herdy, dated February 12, 2014, asked accuser Kinsman’s lawyer whether she was “ok with us sending [to Jameis Winston] the official request this week” for an interview. Herdy added: “I’m sure he will say no . . . and then I want him to have a gap of a couple of weeks to get complacent because then we will ambush him.”
Also today, FSU president John Thrasher issued a statement that the film’s claim that FSU and many other schools have turned their backs on Erica Kinsman and other alleged victims of sexual assault “contains major distortions and glaring omissions to support its simplistic narrative.” He added: “It is inexcusable for a network as respected as CNN to pretend that the film is a documentary rather than an advocacy piece.”
Thrasher likened the film to the notorious, now-retracted Rolling Stone article about what proved to be a fabricated story about an alleged sadistic gang rape, atop shattered glass, at a University of Virginia fraternity. The Rolling Stone article, Thrasher said, took a purported rape victim’s “story at face value without getting the other side or checking the details with other sources, including the accused.” He said that FSU had expressed to top CNN executives, to no avail, “our concerns about the factual, statistical and ethical defects in the film.”
Thrasher is far from alone is assailing the film’s veracity. Among others, 19 Harvard Law School professors, including eminent feminists and progressives, said last week in a press release that “this purported documentary provides a seriously false picture both of the general sexual assault phenomenon at universities and of our student Brandon Winston,” who was “vindicated by the Law School” and by a criminal jury that found him not guilty of any sexual misconduct.
The Hunting Ground, which runs 103 minutes, has been shown since last January at the Sundance Film Festival, in hundreds of theaters around the country (mostly at colleges), and at the White House, where President Obama has led a major propaganda effort linked to his administration’s campaign to destroy due process for students falsely accused of rape.

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