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Did UVA Student Plagiarize ‘Dawson’s Creek’ In Love Letter To Friend?

Chuck Ross Investigative Reporter
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The story of Jackie, the University of Virginia student at the center of a discredited Rolling Stone article, only gets weirder.

An email likely sent by Jackie to a friend of hers who she was romantically interested in appears to be plagiarized from an episode of Dawson’s Creek, a popular television show which ran from 1998 to 2003 on The WB.

A friend of Jackie’s, a UVA freshman named Ryan Duffin, received an email on Oct. 3, 2012 from a person he knew as Haven Monahan.

This was five days after Jackie claimed she was forced to give oral sex to five men after she went on a date with Monahan. Monahan is now believed to have never existed. His fabrication is one of many inconsistencies in Jackie’s story. In the Rolling Stone article, she claimed she was brutally gang-raped by seven members of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. (RELATED: Here Is What UVA Student Jackie Wrote In Email To Friend She Liked)

The email, sent from Haven Monahan’s email address to Duffin’s university email account, reads:

Ryan is fine. Ryan’s great, actually. I mean he’s smart. He’s attractive. He’s funny. He’s a scaredy cat. If you creep up behind him, he’ll jump right out of his skin. It’s pretty amusing. He’s honest. He always calls them just like he sees them. You can constantly count on getting the truth from Ryan, even if the truth hurts. He has the most incredible taste in music. He’s like this walking, talking music library. And he understands how truly important music is. He’s stubborn. He has this regimented way about him that can be so frustrating sometimes. And sometimes the things he says hurt. But he’s a really, really good friend. And loyal to a fault. He’s realistic about everything. And I’m a dreamer so I mean, it’s good to have somebody like that in my life. He’s one of my best friends here, you know? He’s more than that…he’s everything.

That letter is almost identical — with a few grammatical tweaks and name changes — to the script of a scene from Dawson’s Creek in which Dawson, played by James Van Der Beek, expressed his love for Joey, played by Katie Holmes.

She’s great. I mean, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, she’s funny, she’s a big ol’ scaredy cat. If you creep up from behind her she’ll jump out of her skin. It’s pretty amusing. She’s honest. She always calls them just like she sees them. You can always count on getting the truth from Joey even if the truth hurts. She’s stubborn. We fight a lot. She can be so frustrating sometimes. But she’s a really, really, good friend. I know her to a fault. She believes in me. And I’m a dreamer so it’s so good to have somebody like that in my life. If she goes away, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I mean, she’s my best friend, you know? She’s more than that. She’s everything.

This is all reminiscent of an episode from the popular TV show Seinfeld, in which a woman who main character Jerry Seinfeld had broken up with wrote a letter convincing him to take her back. Seinfeld later found out that his girlfriend plagiarized the letter from a Neil Simon play called Chapter Two.

(h/t Kimberly Leonard)

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