VICE (2013) s03e11 Episode Script

Shane Smith: This week on Vice, the Ebola outbreak continues in Africa.
The epidemic has been horrific.
We were not able to keep up.
Just fucking do something.
Shane: And then, covering up sexual assault on America's campuses.
I can't even feel safe in here anymore, because it happened in here.
A school would rather cover up a rape or a sexual assault than hurt their reputation.
(intro music playing) We're here in Sierra Leone.
It is the hardest-hit country by the current Ebola outbreak.
There's a huge protest going on behind me.
They say that their college has swept these cases under the rug.
(chanting) Carry that weight! Last year, the world was fixated on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
The virus swept through Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, claiming more than 10,000 lives in the process and dominating global news.
Can Ebola be stopped? And is it too late to prevent it spreading even further? Health officials have upped the death rate to 70%.
Reporter: Infections will climb exponentially unless patients are isolated.
Then, once the emergency responders and volunteers got the disease somewhat under control, the media moved on.
For many of us, Ebola is now an afterthought, even though the crisis exposed critical weaknesses in our ability to identify and prevent deadly outbreaks.
So we sent Danny Gold back to West Africa to see what lessons were learned and whether those lessons have truly prepared us for whatever epidemic comes next.
So this is it right here.
Most scientists believe that the bats that were in this tree were what started the entire Ebola outbreak that's been happening over the past year.
Bats are known host of the virus.
Scientists think that in December of 2013, a small boy named Emile came into contact with one of the bats that gather in the tree at dusk.
Within a few days of getting sick, Emile passed away.
We spoke with his father, Etienne.
(softly) Tell us what happened when your son first got sick.
(speaking foreign language) Danny Gold: This family's tragedy was the start of what would become a massive epidemic.
Because Ebola had never been seen in the region before, it spread undetected, and similar deaths started occurring in other areas of the country.
By the end of September, more than 7,000 cases of Ebola had been reported across West Africa, with nearly 50% of the cases proving fatal.
In the Fall of 2014 we went to Monrovia at the height of the outbreak in Liberia.
(people shouting) I'm sorry, sir.
Are you okay? He clearly has the virus.
Why can't we get him inside right now? Everywhere is occupied? Hospitals and treatment centers across the city were filled to capacity.
Many people had nowhere to go and were left to die in the streets.
There's just a complete shortage of medical professionals, of healthcare facilities, of space to treat this disease.
You know, this is what it is here.
It's chaos.
The world's first Ebola epidemic has been horrific.
Gold: We spoke to Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, about what went wrong.
The scenes in West Africa are scenes that those of us who worked there will never forget.
Ebola had never been present there, and there weren't the systems in place in West Africa to have found this early.
Gold: Early on, Doctors Without Borders publicly described the outbreak as unprecedented, pleading with the international community for more help.
The World Health Organization, tasked with handling these outbreaks, dismissed their warnings.
It's relatively small still.
The biggest outbreaks have been over 400 cases.
They have since admitted to reacting too slowly.
And without the proper medical infrastructure in place to fight the disease, Ebola continued to spread.
It spreads only by direct contact with someone who's sick or someone who's died or their body fluids.
But as it gathered steam, we were not able to keep up.
Not the CDC, not globally, and certainly not from within the countries.
Frieden: They were not prepared.
They didn't have the isolation capacity, they didn't have safe burial capacity, and they didn't have the awareness of Ebola.
So this is the first time we've really seen these city-wide massive epidemics.
We were not able to scale up a global response as quickly as we would have liked to.
Gold: In 2014, we saw firsthand as NGOs and few brave Liberians were forced to take control in Monrovia.
People like Archie Gbessay, a resident of the West Point neighborhood, who were left with no choice but to organize their own efforts.
Gold: So what can you do for her at this point? And who's taking care of her? I mean, her daughter is young.
She's here.
Does she know not to touch her? Okay.
You're taking a huge risk yourself by doing this.
Ebola is extremely contagious on recently deceased victims, which makes every dead body a potential biohazard.
So you have to do this I mean, does that affect your mind? It's pretty clear from seeing them in action that, you know, these guys are taking a tremendous risk.
And they're heroes that are going to stop this infection from infecting, you know, the entire community here.
Six months after our initial report we went back to Liberia, and met up again with Archie Gbessay.
At Redemption Hospital, we spoke to Dr.
Mohammed Sankoh, whose facility had been the epicenter of the outbreak in Monrovia.
Was the medical infrastructure here ready to deal with Ebola? There was a lot of denial in the community in the beginning.
Why is that? Distrust of government and foreigners in the region is nothing new.
A history of foreign exploitation as well as recent civil wars, corruption and poor leadership has left local populations hesitant to cooperate with their governments and NGOs.
In Forecariah, we met up with Almamy Barry, part of a UNICEF team in charge of breaking down resistance in remote parts of the country.
Many locals told us the initial messaging about the outbreak was counterproductive and further fueled their resistance.
(speaking foreign language) (speaking foreign language) You guys weren't even allowed to come here up until a few weeks ago.
What are we looking at right here? It's easy to look at the situation and be really confused and think, "How could they fight against people trying to help them with this disease?" But if you really look at it, you know, you've got people telling you that a disease you've never heard of exists.
They're coming in in these suits that look like spacemen.
They're taking away your relatives.
They're telling you you can't see them, you can't touch them.
They disappear, and you never see them again.
And you've got to realize that no matter who you are, whether you're a villager in Guinea or anywhere else in the world, if that was going to happen, most people are going to be resistant towards that.
(man speaking foreign language) Gold: While spreading awareness is incredibly important, it hasn't been enough to contain the disease.
The three countries struck the hardest by Ebola are deeply interconnected, with people regularly traveling back and forth between them.
(man speaking foreign language) Gold: So we've got people coming off right here.
They're coming from Sierra Leone, where you have a lot of people who still have this disease.
And they're being held right now until they can get a crew together to check their temperature, see if they show any symptoms, just to make sure that anyone that's coming off isn't infected.
'Cause if they are and they get loose in this community, you're going to have a big problem here in Guinea.
In regions hit by Ebola, check points like these are actually commonplace.
And borders between countries have been closed intermittently.
In a more extreme measure, Sierra Leone has made frequent use of quarantines.
We're here in Sierra Leone.
It is the hardest-hit country by the current Ebola outbreak.
Behind me, this orange netting is blocking off this community because the entire neighborhood is under quarantine.
These quarantines confine potentially infected people for up to three weeks.
Because it can take up to 21 days for people with Ebola to show symptoms, it is believed that a new round of Ebola cases broke out in the Freetown neighborhood of Aberdeen after a fisherman returned with the infection.
How has it been inside the quarantine for 21 days? The baby got it from the breast milk? But as we were to learn, it's almost impossible to keep track of all those who are potentially infected.
In fact, we got word that a man fled from Aberdeen to his hometown near Makeni where the disease had been under control to seek help from a traditional healer, so we went to see the consequences.
(man speaking) This is why Ebola is so dangerous.
It only took one sick person to bring the disease raging back.
Gold: There's hundreds of bodies buried here in this Ebola cemetery.
There's workers there right now that are digging more holes for more bodies.
You know, we in America, we think this disease is over, but clearly it's still wreaking havoc here in this region.
You may notice that there's no relatives here.
Their relatives are all still quarantined.
So there's no send-off.
And it's just, you know, people in a plastic bag being thrown into the ground.
Gold: Things can change incredibly quickly with Ebola.
The outbreak was winding down here at the Mateneh Treatment Center near Makeni.
But, after the sick man from Freetown arrived, cases began to skyrocket.
How many patients do you have in the clinic right now? And last week, you were the busiest treatment center in the history of the outbreak? And that's going to be a huge morale boost for you and for the people in the town as well, yeah? Gold: What we saw near Makeni was just a fraction of the devastation caused by the virus, which has so far claimed more than 10,000 lives in West Africa.
This time, it didn't spread to the rest of the world beyond a few high profile cases.
The first confirmed case here in America.
We learned overnight that a second healthcare worker tested positive for the virus.
former Ebola czar Ron Klain warns that the next epidemic could be a much-bigger global threat unless things change.
What did we learn through this epidemic? The world wasn't prepared for this kind of outbreak when it happened.
There was no prearranged group of responders ready to jump in quickly and deal with this kind of epidemic.
We have to have that next time.
We need to build CDC-like capacities in other countries around the world.
We need to have trained epidemiologists on the ground, ready to go.
Ebola broke out in three relatively-small countries that don't have that many travelers to the West.
Imagine another epidemic someday in a country like India or Pakistan where there are some major cities, where the disease could spread rampantly.
And imagine a disease in the future that might be airborne, or might have people who are contagious without obvious symptoms.
Those scenarios are the scenarios that are much more dangerous than Ebola.
And compared to that, Ebola was much less dangerous than what might come next.
We're either going to find, fight, and stop these diseases overseas, or we're going to face them here at home.
Sexual assault is a huge problem on American college campuses.
And as more and more survivors come forward to tell their stories, there's growing concern and, at many universities, public outrage.
But a much-publicized Rolling Stone story about campus rape last year gave more oxygen to those who say the issue is overblown and that some women are even making these stories up.
Now, all of this controversy has obscured the issue that the institution deciding the truth in these cases usually isn't even a court of law, but the colleges themselves, holding their hearings, in many cases, behind closed doors.
So we sent Gianna Toboni to find out what's really happening on American campuses and why so many students feel that they're not being kept safe.
I'm a freshman.
I have been on this campus for two weeks, and I was sexually assaulted six days ago.
And no one tells you where to go from there.
I have seen so many friends suffer and be silenced, and I am sick of it! So administration, Barnard, Columbia, just fucking do something.
(all cheering) I'm at Columbia University, and there's a huge protest going on behind me, and it's led by students who say that they were raped by classmates on this campus.
But the craziest part is that they're not here just because of that.
They're here because they say that their college has swept these cases under the rug and even protected their rapists.
Woman: I'd like to give a quick shout-out to Dean Todd Smith-Bergollo.
He is currently making the sanctioning decisions for rapists at Columbia College.
So I hope you're listening carefully.
Hey, Dean Bergollo? Can I-- Okay, can I just ask you a couple questions? I mean, I'm just kind of shocked to see these signs.
They say that Columbia University protects rapists.
I don't mean to be rude, but can't you support the event and talk to us at the same time? Okay.
Gianna Toboni: When we asked a university spokeswoman about the protest, she provided a stock response about steps that Columbia has taken.
But, the students we talked to said it isn't enough.
And these protests at Columbia are just a small part of what has turned into a nation-wide protest known as the Carry That Weight movement where students carry a mattress to symbolize the scene of the crime.
Our bodies, our rights! They're fighting a culture of sexual violence that many say is completely out of control and largely mishandled by their administrators.
To learn why this is such a massive issue on campuses, we spoke to Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a former sex-crimes prosecutor who recently conducted a nationwide survey of colleges on sexual assault.
Why are colleges even handling this in the first place? Why isn't the criminal-justice system handling this? Because of a much higher standard of proof.
There are many of these cases that might not be taken by a prosecutor's office for actual prosecution, because the factual scenario is difficult.
Mm-hmm.
To prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
The laws governing sexual assault and rape vary by state.
But because they require standards of proof that are incredibly difficult to meet, only a very small percentage of these cases make it to court.
However, under the federal equal rights law called Title IX, universities are required to address cases of sexual violence as to not discriminate against women, even if law enforcement won't.
The Title IX process is a way to have some accountability, to protect the young woman on campus, so she doesn't have to be in the same class, she doesn't have to be in the same dorm, she doesn't have to be seeing the person who assaulted her day-in and day-out.
Toboni: But while the law requires schools to investigate and manage these claims, how they do it is left largely up to the colleges themselves.
The process often fails to deliver justice for victims, as we heard from Laura Dunn, an advocate who works with survivors of sexual assault.
If you were a student that experienced sexual violence on campus, you have the right to an investigation.
And if the investigation shows that there is sufficient evidence to support your complaint, that there needs to be a hearing.
But oftentimes you'll hear the campus process described as a kangaroo court.
And having recently sat through a hearing, I can say that's fairly accurate.
Adjudicators can be anything from panels of students or professors to outside investigators.
People will ask inappropriate questions.
People will make up procedures on the moment.
We also see, very commonly, investigations that are very victim-blaming.
The entire time they're scrutinizing the person who's reporting rather than the person they're reporting against.
A lot of schools just don't get it.
Toboni: These shortcomings are at the heart of students' complaints across the country, like at the University of Michigan where we quickly got the impression that many students don't trust their university to handle these cases.
How do you think this university handles cases of sexual assault? Really poorly.
Yeah, very poorly.
You're more likely to have someone look into a stolen laptop than if you're raped.
Toboni: We met Fabiana, a junior who alleges that two years ago, she was sexually assaulted by an acquaintance in her dorm room.
It was apparently just her second day on campus.
Some say that women are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence in the period just after they arrive at school.
This is something called "the red zone" because students are likely to be drinking heavily, or, like in Fabiana's case, associating with people they don't know well yet.
I always said, like, "If that ever happened to me, "like, I would just punch him.
I would just scream.
" And then there comes a moment where it happens to you, and you're like-- you're frozen.
You're just-- I just cried.
It was all I could do.
Where do you think the university screwed up in processing your case? It was just like, "Here's some tissues.
" Like, "Here are your papers.
" Like, "Here are your files.
" And that was it.
So she basically said, "He's not getting any punishment.
" Mm-hmm.
So no suspension, no expulsion.
Hm-mmm, nothing.
He's on campus.
Every time I see him, he just, like, looks at me like he knows.
Like it-- he'll wink sometimes.
Toboni: We couldn't independently verify what happened behind closed doors that night, but we do know that Fabiana feels like her college failed her.
The University of Michigan legally couldn't comment on the case, but said that they are committed to ending sexual assault on campus.
But, some say that schools don't want these cases coming to light at all.
Larry Kirk was a police investigator on a college campus he asked us to keep anonymous.
With my experience on the campuses and also speaking with other investigators at other college campuses, sexual assaults and rapes are crimes that sometimes won't be handled administratively, because that's a criminal stat that you don't want on record.
I mean, think about it.
If you're sending your 17-, 18-year-old daughter three states away to college, and you realize that this campus has had some issues with sexual assault or rape, then do you really want to send your child there? So do you think in some of these cases the schools are actually trying to cover these crimes up? Yeah, I have no doubt.
I mean, that's something that if they can keep off the records, then it doesn't harm their public image.
Toboni: This issue of institutions trying to keep assaults off the record has gotten the attention of a number of US politicians, like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who along with Senator McCaskill is working to address the problem on a federal level.
I think there are many cases where a school would rather cover up a rape or a sexual assault than endure the bad press, than have to be known as a rape school.
It obviously would hurt admissions.
It would hurt their reputation.
And any time you have an institutional bias where it prefers to protect the institution over the individual, that's when justice is not possible.
Toboni: Among those institutional biases is athletics.
Sports generate huge amounts of money for schools, as much as $800 million in revenue each year.
And because athletes are often the face of their schools, it's believed that some of them have been protected from punishment in a number of high-profile cases.
Elly, a sophomore at the University of Arkansas, was allegedly assaulted by an athlete in October.
My concern was that he's, you know, like a star-athlete guy, that he's going to get special treatment.
Toboni: She says she's constantly reminded of the assault, because it allegedly happened in her dorm room.
Yeah, I mean, he came in, and he made me do stuff I didn't want to do for an hour and a half.
He raped me in-- in my own room.
Like, I can't even feel safe in here anymore, because it happened in here.
Like it's not fair.
Toboni: After the assault, Elly says she felt deeply uncomfortable sleeping here in the room where it allegedly happened.
According to her mother, it was only after angry calls and emails to the school that they even offered to change her accommodations.
The family contacted Laura Dunn to help Elly navigate the bureaucratic process.
We followed as Laura went with Elly to the school's hearing.
Toboni: So we're getting ready to go to Elly's college court hearing where the school is basically going to adjudicate her case.
We're putting on hidden mics and hidden cameras.
Toboni: Panelists are required to be trained in the basics of sexual violence, impartiality, and how to assess evidence, but it's hardly the forensic expertise that victims might hope for.
The audio's picking up, so we're actually listening to the hearing in real time right now.
Elly: You know, I try to get away and, you know, he pulls me down.
And, you know, I keep saying no, you know? Like, I've never said "no" so many times in my life.
Like, I held on so tight to my pants.
And, like, he finally got them off, you know? He's stronger than me.
(man speaking) Elly: The only things I noticed were in my inner thighs.
(woman speaking) Elly: Yes.
Is that-- okay.
Very pressured.
Okay.
(woman #2 speaking) Elly: I think it's expulsion.
That's the Okay.
highest level that the school can do.
Toboni: The accused was found responsible for sexual misconduct and ordered expelled.
But after an appeal, the school told Elly had moved the expulsion date to after graduation, meaning he could receive his diploma even though he'd been banned from campus.
Laura Dunn demanded a harsher punishment, but the university affirmed their decision in a detailed three-page letter.
It was only when a reporter inquired about the matter six days later that the school backtracked, making the expulsion immediate, and calling the original decision "an internal error.
" The university maintains that its handling of this case was compliant with official policy throughout the process, but based on this case, it's obvious that the system could work better for students like Elly.
We couldn't independently verify what happened in Elly's dorm room.
When we reached out to the accused to give him an opportunity to respond to these allegations, he denied all of the charges and said the encounter was consensual.
And that's the problem with reporting on these stories.
Details of these cases can be murky.
And, even after the university has made its decision, it remains one student's word against another with critics picking apart the accounts.
Could the accused have more to lose? If we're drowning in this epidemic of rape on college campuses, why are all the cases they keep giving us hoaxes? Could they give us a real one? But, what's impossible to ignore, is that this is a nationwide issue.
The Department of Education reported that between 2009 and 2013, there was an 84% increase in reported forcible sex offenses on campuses.
What's more, in the spring of 2014, the Department of Education reported that 55 American colleges were being investigated for their inability to protect student victims of sexual assault.
Since then, that number has more than doubled.
And many of these are the colleges with the best academic reputations in America.
As the controversy rages on, the one thing that's clear from the students we spoke with and the thousands protesting across the country is that women don't feel safe on their campuses.
And that needs to change.
What do we want? Safe campus! When do we want it? Now! Schools are more concerned about their lawyers' advice or their insurers' advice or having PR specialists.
That's not where their concerns should be lying.
They should be concerned with the wellbeing of the students and their families, who entrust their children to these institutions to educate them.
So, now a bi-partisan group of senators is trying to attack the issue with a new bill that would hold colleges more accountable for what happens to the students under their care.
It calls for more transparency, greater student inclusion, and stronger collaboration with law enforcement.
This bill lays out that there are consequences and that they will pay a stiff price.
As the bill makes its way through the legislative process, political leaders and students themselves are ramping up pressure on universities to change.
in our country had not done any sexual-assault investigation in five years.
Students camped in the hallways at Dickinson College.
We won't stop until our demands are met.
For decades, accusations have been "handled.
" That is not justice.
We are crafting legislation to make some changes to Title IX, and the universities are afraid of this.
This era of benign neglect, when it comes to sexual assault on campuses, is over.