Lies, webstats and the Isla Vista murders
or, why everything you think you know about Elliot Rodger is wrong
On Friday night, in the university town of Isla Vista, California, a wealthy young college student, a virgin frustrated because he had been repeatedly rejected by women who didn’t appreciate his polite “nice guy” persona, went on a murderous shooting spree that left seven dead, and ended in his suicide.
Maybe 30% of the sentence above this one is factual. The source for everything else: the written manifesto and videotaped justifications of a murderer.
The case of Elliot Rodger (or The Virgin Killer, in tabloid-ese) provides a startling glimpse at the frayed fabric of the American media, and how the internet is steering, and warping, the narrative of breaking news stories.
At 9:32 pm Pacific Time on May 24, the first thread on Reddit was launched with a growing compilation of real-time transcriptions from the Santa Barbara sheriff’s scanner. Simultaneously, scanner reports and crime scene photos began appearing on the EdHat blog.
Within hours, the Reddit community had located and shared links to Elliot Rodger’s YouTube channel and provocative comments he had made on various message boards.
Somehow that night, independent social media reporter Matthew Keys obtained a copy of Rodger’s emailed manifesto and uploaded it to Scribd—almost certainly prior to actually reading the 137 page, single-spaced document.
As of this writing, it has been viewed more than three million times, primarily through embedding on tabloid websites and blogs. As justification for having published the document, Keys has shared detailed stats via Twitter.
The Los Angeles Times and other old media sources were hours or days behind, as they sought to responsibly parse the material, redacting names and omitting potentially libelous or hurtful information. (Is it newsworthy that Elliot Rodger wrote about wanting to murder his six-year-old brother?)
And yet, apparently using Keys’ upload as its source, The New York Post produced a cover story that could be reasonably expected to terrorize its innocent, uninvolved subject.
While the Post cover is easy to deride, far worse is the near universal journalistic reliance on Elliot Rodger’s manifesto, YouTube videos and social media presence for rushed, unsourced background on the killer’s life history and criminal motivations.
Such lack of skepticism reveals a deep generational divide: young people, who live online, understand that what someone shows on their Facebook page or YouTube channel is just what they want you to see.
People who actually knew Elliot Rodger have said they do not recognize the suave / sociopathic persona in the videos. Just because a narrative offered by a social media user appears to hang together, doesn’t make it truthful.
Yet in the hunger to be first with the scoop, to get those three million embeds (or upvotes, or Adsense clicks) and the bragging rights that go along with them, bloggers and Tweeters have used their social media channels to promote the unreliable and hateful narrative of a maniac—a narrative that’s been echoed by mainstream journalists and is echoed back by the blogosphere, and which threatens to completely obscure the true story of what happened in Isla Vista, what was wrong with Elliot Rodger, and what, if anything, could have been done to stop him before he ran amok.
And unspoken among all the outrage over the attacks is the fact that Isla Vista is a roiling pot of alcohol-fueled hedonism, a repulsive and terrifying place for any shy, prudish or unbalanced person.
It was about six weeks ago that the sheriff fired tear gas to quell rioting in the streets during the annual Deltopia bacchanal. There have been two recent (reported) outdoor gang rapes. It’s a place where out-of-control behavior is the norm—and where there were scant consequences for the three sexualized assaults (assuming they actually happened), described by Rodger in his manifesto. For violence less severe than murder, Isla Vista doesn’t deal well in consequences.
It could be said that Elliot Rodger’s delusions and obsessions perfectly reflect the scene outside his door. Maybe Isla Vista, a deranged and brutal culture, made its own monster—not just once, but twice.
But so long as we’re promoting, analyzing and debating the simplified fantasy spun by a man whose next act was to shoot up the streets, we’re not getting any closer to understanding what happened last Friday night, to making women or men safer, or to finding answers to how to help the mentally ill and recognize the dangerous ones before it’s too late.
So what do we really know about the Virgin Killer? Not all that much, it seems. But he’s teaching us plenty about ourselves.
True crime writer Kim Cooper is creator of the 1947project time travel blog and host of Esotouric’s Los Angeles crime bus tours, including The Real Black Dahlia. She is the author of the acclaimed 1920s mystery novel The Kept Girl and obtained her Master’s in Art History from U.C. Santa Barbara. You can follow her on Twitter or find her on Facebook.
