I don’t think I’ve ever had so many people send me a “Streisand Effect” story as the one about a small town having nearly every copy of a newspaper stolen. Many people assumed that the culprit who stole the papers did so to try to perhaps protect the perpetrators of a sexual assault (or possibly one of the accused’s step-father, the local police chief). In reality, it turns out that it was actually someone who (incorrectly and naively) thought they were protecting the victim of the crime. But, the Streisand Effect still applies one way or the other — and the stolen newspapers brought way, way, way more attention to the whole thing.
First, the background of the story:
Last week, the Ouray County Plaindealer, which covers the news in the sparsely populated Ouray County, Colorado (way out in the San Juan mountains of Western Colorado) reported on arrests by the Colorado Bureau of Investigations of three suspects in a sexual assault and rape case. But the notable part of the story is that the victim — a 17-year old girl — told investigators that the rape occurred at the home of Ouray’s police chief. One of the three suspects arrested is the police chief’s stepson.
A 17-year-old girl told investigators she was raped more than once at the Ouray police chief’s home in May during a late-night party with the chief’s stepson and two other suspects. During interviews with investigators she said she screamed and fought back, while others slept upstairs.
A Colorado Bureau of Investigation affidavit for arrests in the case details a night of drugs, drinking and alleged sex assault, where the victim told investigators she went in and out of consciousness and was raped at least three times in a bedroom and bathroom by two different people.
Ouray is a small town in Ouray County, with a population under 1,000 people, so it seemed likely the story would spread no matter what, but someone did not want people to see that particular story in print. Because when the print version of the paper came out, it disappeared. Someone stole all the copies.
Nearly all the copies of a small-town Colorado newspaper were stolen from newspaper racks on the same day the Ouray County Plaindealer published a story about charges being filed over rapes alleged to have occurred at an underage drinking party at the police chief’s house while the chief was asleep, the owner and publisher said Friday.
Mike Wiggins vowed to get to the bottom of it, posting Thursday on X, formerly Twitter: “If you hoped to silence or intimidate us, you failed miserably. We’ll find out who did this. And another press run is imminent.”
As anyone familiar with the Streisand Effect would suspect, this move to hide the newspaper didn’t work out so well, as it’s now national news — though many people jumped to the (eventually revealed to be) wrong conclusion that whoever stole the newspapers was trying to protect those accused in the assault.
And, yes, as that image shows, after the story started to go national, someone dumped a bag full of the over 200 stolen newspapers at the Ouray County Plaindealer’s offices.
Not surprisingly, it did not take long to identify the culprit, Paul Choate, though police noted that he’s “not a member or relative of local law enforcement and not associated with the defendants” in the rape case. Yet he did admit to stealing the papers because of the story, though the Plaindealer says it “is not disclosing Choate’s relationship to the sexual assault case.”
Choate, who owns Kate’s Place restaurant in Ridgway, admitted he took the newspapers because of the front page story.
That’s a weird way to put things, and Marisa Kabas, who writes The Handbasket newsletter, tracked down Choate to get the full story, which is that he says he stole the newspapers to try to protect the victim as he thought the story relayed too many details about the assault.
So I texted McIntyre on Saturday to clarify what this meant and she replied: “It’s not connected to the defendants in the sex assault case or the police department.” I understood this to mean that it was possibly connected to the rape victim. I asked McIntyre if that was accurate and didn’t receive a reply.
Later that day I found Choate’s Facebook page and saw that he’d published a post personally confessing to the theft. I then sent him a direct message to see if my suspicion was correct—that he stole the papers to protect the victim. On Monday, he confirmed.
“I read the paper weekly and it disgusted to me to point of the actions I took,” he told me via phone. He confirmed that the victim is indeed someone he knows personally, but The Handbasket is not disclosing specifically how they are connected to avoid unwanted attention for the victim.
Choate then posted more to Facebook, to publicly state that his intentions were not at all to protect the defendants, but rather the victim:
“I want to make it clear that my intentions were completely opposite of what has been portrayed in the media. My motivation behind this is to bring to light that no details in any victims statements and interviews should be posted without their consent. Specifically, I was appalled by the graphic details reported; I would never want this information to come out about someone I cherish. It was irresponsible to publish this without the consent of the victim and without links to resources.”
And while this does make Choate at least somewhat more sympathetic than much of the original story portrayed the (for a while unnamed) thief, it doesn’t change the basic fact that stealing all the copies of the newspaper was never going to suppress the story and would only draw more attention to it.
As the publishers of the paper, Erin McIntyre and Mike Wiggins, said in their statement over this:
“Whoever did this does not understand that stealing newspapers doesn’t stop a story.”
Indeed. It might just make it a much bigger story — and that’s true no matter how well intentioned you might be.