Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News
Jennifer-Ruth Green, who is campaigning to flip an Indiana congressional seat Republican for the first time since the Hoover administration, minced no words when she addressed a recent piece about her life and career.
Green, the subject of a magazine-length feature by Politico’s Adam Wren, accused both the journalist and Frank Mrvan, her opponent in the upcoming general election for Indiana’s 1st Congressional District, of re-victimizing her years after she suffered a sexual assault while serving as an Air Force captain in Iraq.
Speaking to Fox News Digital, Green said she requested that the details of her assault be left out of Wren’s report, a request that was not honored. She alleges that the report, which was part of her military record, was leaked illegally at the request of Mrvan.
The reality of it is — like I said at one point in my life to my assailant, ‘No. Please stop. Don’t.’ — and he did what he wanted to do … This is the exact same situation all over again, all because there was a man who wanted some sort of gratification. Congressman Frank Mrvan gets his gratification of trying to think he’s smearing my name. Adam Wren gets his gratification of thinking he’s going to get a good smear story out of it. And all it does is essentially reopen wounds for victims.
Mrvan had not, as of publication, responded to Green’s allegations. Wren had not commented on his article since it ran on Friday.
In that article, Wren reported Green’s military record had been shared with him by a third party who was not affiliated with the Mrvan campaign but who Wren said acquired the documents via a public information request.
Green said she has written to the Air Force Inspector General and the Department of Defense requesting a criminal investigation into how Politico came to possess the documents.
“Coming as when it does — in the closing weeks of my campaign for Congress — makes me believe that this is a politically motivated attempt to impact the upcoming election,” Green wrote.
That Wren received Green’s record, even if the third party should not have leaked it, is not illegal or even viewed as unethical in journalism circles. According to law, a journalist who receives information legally is free to share all or some of the information even if the information was originally obtained through illegal means.
U.S. courts have long held that journalists can use ill-gotten information so long as the journalist is not the person who committed a crime. Countless journalists have made their names by disseminating the content of documents leaked to them by another source who, strictly speaking, violated one or more laws in so doing.
There are no industry-wide rules in journalism, but as a general practice, journalists strive to not add to victims’ trauma by reporting on the details of sexual assaults. It is on each observer and ultimately Wren’s employers to decide whether he towed the ethical line.
From a journalistic standpoint, the story of Green’s assault exists in an ethical gray area. While the assault itself is of limited news value — beyond satisfying prurient interests — Green’s military career suffered when an evaluator, who did not know what Green faced in Iraq, gave Green a poor performance assessment.
As part of an exploration of Green’s service record, which Wren described as “mostly stellar,” the assault informs why Green received one of just two negative evaluations during her career.
Green says the problem stemmed from her having been talked out of reporting her assault by a staff sergeant. Eventually, absent context or a record of the assault, the performance reviewer questioned Green’s leadership traits.
Importantly — and this was in Wren’s report — Green has appealed the negative evaluation that followed her assault and included a letter of support from the officer to whom she directly reported. This officer appears to have given Green a full endorsement.
Green believes that the entire point of the leak was not to shed light upon the horrible day upon which she was assaulted but rather to highlight her two negative evaluations — the other being a reprimand for having loaded her weapon inside a military facility — and therefore damage her standing in the public eye.
“I believe Congressman Frank Mrvan illegally obtained those documents and was floating them around to press,” Green said. “That’s what our Politico team told us, that they were farming it out to several different press outlets to see who could write a very disgusting, ugly smear piece against me with the intent to paint me as a disgraced military officer.”
“Congressman Mrvan and his cronies were definitely responsible for this, and he’s going to try to deny it in every way possible,” Green added.
For a journalism student, the issue becomes how much of the assault needs retelling to contextualize Green’s overall military record. That should also be weighed in consideration of respect for her privacy as a victim of sexual assault.
Wren and Green clearly have a major difference of opinion on where that line should be drawn.
“They did what they wanted, got what they wanted,” Green said in her Fox interview.
Among the points of contention, Green complains that Wren gave rich details of Green’s activity and appearance during an interview time the two shared — including a vivid description of Green, a military pilot, flying Wren over the district she hopes to represent. However, Green said, Wren became vague when discussing her assault.
Green’s position seems to be that if the assault had to be included in the article, it should have been given more context.
“I’m surprised because Adam Wren spent time in this article focusing on every single detail down to the skirt I was wearing, down to the color of the skirt I was wearing, down to every single knob I touched, all of those things, but yet he writes clinically about one of the worst days of my life,” Green told Fox.
He has no idea the concept of being forced to be in a four by four, round circular area, 30 feet in the ground in a tower where you only have windows and a 30-foot drop on the other side, 30-foot drop to escape somebody who was blocking your path [with] somebody who has a clear intent with a weapon in hand, who is focused on trying to take advantage of you, and you’re able to escape that with minimal physical harm. And he wants to reduce that to 50 characters.
Wren’s writing choices could be down to journalistic norms. While there are certainly journalists who spare no detail, no matter how lurid, when reporting about any crime, there is a contingent of reporters who seek to address tough issues without traumatizing their media consumers who have suffered similarly. This could have led Wren to take a “just the facts” approach to that portion of his article.
Indiana’s 1st Congressional District comprises two counties in the northwestern corner of the state. As much a part of Greater Chicago as Indiana, the 1st District contains such cities as Gary and Hammond. Democrats have controlled the seat since 1931.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In an effort to honor Green’s request, the specific details of her assault have been left out of this story, save those she felt comfortable enough to share during the Fox interview.