All In with Chris Hayes, Transcript 04/10/15

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice-over): Tonight on ALL IN -- UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Suspect being tased. Suspect being tased. HAYES: A California horse chase turns into a police beating caught on tape. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It`s disturbing. HAYES: Tonight, the latest from San Bernardino, the latest from South Carolina. And the question -- how much do we know about how often police turn violent? Then, Hillary Clinton is ready for Hillary. But is she ready for the press corps? Plus, my interview with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. (on camera): I want you to response something Ted Cruz said. He said, "We should repeal every word of Common Core and we should get the federal government out of the business of curriculum." (voice-over): And, an ALL IN exclusive. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I`m tainted by the whole "Rolling Stones" situation. HAYES: The incredible story of the other woman featured in the discredited "Rolling Stone" article on rape. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It`s like they took my experience and invalidated it. HAYES: Tonight, why Liz Seccuro says her true story of rape on campus is being lost in the controversy. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you think that Jackie perhaps believed that your story was hers? HAYES: ALL IN starts right now. (END VIDEOTAPE) HAYES: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. On the heels of one of the shoes shocking instances of police violence caught on tape ever seen, the fatal shooting of Walter Scott by Officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, South Carolina, there`s yet another new video seeming to depict disturbing brutality, this time by sheriff deputies in San Bernardino County, California. The victim`s lawyer says it`s worse than what happened to Rodney King. You can judge for yourself. The chain of events begun when police arrived yesterday at a house in Apple Valley, about 80 miles northeast of Los Angeles, to serve a search warrant in an identity theft investigation. According to police, they made contact outside of a house of a male, later identified as 30-year-old Francis Jared Pusok, who took off in a car, driving at high speed until the car became disabled. Pusok then fled on foot until he found a better mode of transportation. He allegedly stole a horse from a man in the area, continuing for miles into the rocky desert terrain, all the while being trailed by deputies and off-road vehicles, on foot and in helicopters. When they finally caught up with him, a KNBC News chopper was there to record what went down. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Here we go. Here`s the deputy chasing him. The deputy fell down. Oh, he shot him with the taser. Here we go, here we go, suspect being tased, suspect being tased. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: At this point, the sound cuts out as you see the deputies begin to beat on the suspect. But it`s not just these two gentlemen. Soon, more will arrive. Keep watching. A third joins and kicks. A fourth joins and also appears to kick. They continue to punch and kick the suspect, who has been on the ground now for a good 20 seconds. A seventh man runs up and kicks. This goes on and on with deputies taking breathers occasionally or sitting back and watching the whole time, uncannily the horse there. They`re just continuing to beat him on the ground. Eventually -- eventually they stop. And you can imagine what the man at the center of that looked like. That was it. That was Francis Pusok`s mugshot after what you just saw. According to the sheriff`s department, he was treated at a hospital for abrasions and bruising and transferred to a detention facility. The apartment has opened an internal and criminal investigations into the use of force by the 10 officers seen on the video who have all been placed on paid administrative leave. And while Sheriff John McMahon said while their actions did not appear to be in line with proper procedure, he attempted to offer a possible explanation for his officer`s state of mind. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SHERIFF JOHN MCMAHON, SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY: It is difficult to manage your adrenaline when you get to the end of a pursuit after driving at high speeds through crazy situations, blowing stop signs, near collisions, and ultimately running on foot after a suspect, and when ultimately, you catch that suspect at the end of the pursuit, it is very difficult at times to control your emotions and clearly to control the adrenaline. Not that that`s an excuse for what occurred yesterday, but it is certainly a challenge that deputy sheriffs and law enforcement officers across the entire country face. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: The FBI now says it`s opening an investigation to the incident. Joining me now, Marq Claxton, former NYPD detective, director of the Black Law Enforcement Alliance. Well, Marq, what the heck is going on here? MARQ CLAXTON, BLACK LAW ENFORCEMENT ALLIANCE: What`s going on in this case and in other cases around the nation is that, you know, videotape is really bringing to light some of the issues that have been expressed in communities of color for a long period of time. And what`s sad -- what really strikes me are the comments made by the sheriff there. He said it was not an excuse, but most definitely sounded like an excuse. And really, what he was in essence saying is that there is a thin line between vigilante behavior and professional police behavior, and that`s sad. And that points to the larger need to engage in conversation and to actually enact reforms in police and law enforcement. HAYES: Let me just -- to be clear, the suspect in this case was white. I think believe -- most, if not all the officers were white, so there was not the same kind of racial issue at the heart of this. What strikes me so much about this video is the group nature of it, and the sense that everyone is participating in what looks clearly to be an illegal beating of a suspect after he`s been detained with the expectation that no one was going to know and they`re not going to have any problem explaining why this guy and his mugshot is going to look like he just lost a boxing match. CLAXTON: Well, see, you just clearly laid out what the problem -- how it occurs in law enforcement. You know, there`s a theory in gang assaults and mob behavior and riot behavior. It`s called the contagion theory. Basically, other individuals will join into the fray, not because it was their idea, but just because that`s part of joining or bonding with the others who are engaged in it. And that in essence is what`s occurring throughout the nation in law enforcement. And it goes across the board, across racial divide, et cetera. But that is what we`re faced with now, and that`s what happens when you don`t expect the professional police or law enforcement agencies, when you accept vigilantism, when you accept excuses, when you accept misconduct, when you label and classify criminality as brutality, as opposed to what it is, we have got to tighten down and develop a strategy nationwide strategy, and nationwide standards to avoid this types of incidents. HAYES: OK, let me ask you this about your own experience. You`re a police officer for many years. Obviously, there are tussles that happened with police officers, people who are genuinely resisting arrest, in which, you know, force is needed to subdue them. This kind of just sort of collective beat-down as an expression it appears of just anger and frustration that this guy made you chase him for a few hours, is that something you had ever seen firsthand in your experience as a cop? CLAXTON: It`s unacceptable, it`s unacceptable. As a matter of fact, what makes it more scary is that not one of those individual police officers could be seen pulling his colleagues away from or trying to stop the beatdown. As a matter of fact, more people joined in. And what it points to is there is a culture in law enforcement, there is a fraternity that far goes beyond law, rules, regulations, et cetera. And in those heated situations, where your training to kick in. Of course, there are times when you`re worked up with emotion, when your adrenaline is pumping, when you`re in the midst of a pursuit, et cetera, but that`s when your training is supposed to kick in. And when your training doesn`t kick in, it`s up to your colleagues to correct you. That`s not happening now in current day law enforcement. HAYES: Marq Claxton, always a pleasure -- thank you. There`s new dash cam video from the day Officer Michael Slager shot Walter Scott from a different officer patting down the passenger who appears to have been in the car with Scott when he was pulled over. That passenger was interviewed this afternoon by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the state body investigating the shooting. They say he`s not a suspect and does not want to be identified. Even with two dash cam videos, I think it is inarguable that we wouldn`t be here where we are now without the cell phone video recorded and released by Feidin Santana. According to the editorial board of "The New York Post" however, the violence in that video is not a sign of a bigger problem, it`s just the opposite. Quote, "Cameras are everywhere today -- even a near-abandoned stretches of Southern towns. With easy uploading to the Internet, the imagined epidemic of criminal cops would be all over the Web, were it real." But it is all over the web. Just search police brutality on YouTube and you`ll come up with hundreds of thousands of results. Just this week, cell phone video emerged showing a disturbing interaction between police in Vineland, New Jersey, and a black man named Phillip White, who had allegedly been screaming on the sidewalk. White later died in custody. Officers involved have been placed on administrative leave and the county prosecutor is investigating the incident. And then there`s this incident of a couple of teenagers in Virginia being stopped by police who said they smelled marijuana in their car. Warning, what happens next may be upsetting. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) (SCREAMING) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Taser, taser, taser. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ahh! Ahhh! UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get out of the vehicle now! (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: And there`s this surveillance tape, which may have seen this week, apparently showing NYPD cops stealing more than $2,600 from a deli during a raid. That officer has been stripped of his gun and badge, and placed on desk duty, and internal affairs has opened an investigation. As eye-opening as these may be, these videos do not tell the whole story about what was happening and whether in each of these cases, the police necessarily did something wrong. Although stealing $2,600 seems pretty clear cut. They don`t answer how common is police abuse and misconduct? It seems like every time, something like a shooting in North Charleston occurs, we`re told the overwhelming majority of cops are good, do their job well, are professional, and there`s a few bad apples. But it is hard to know the extent of police misconduct, thanks to a startling lack of data on policing in America. I`m joined now by Philip Atiba Goff, co-founder and president of the Center of Policing Equity. And one of the things you guys do there is attempt to collect the statistics. So, here`s what I want to know this -- I am weary of falling into the trap we fall into cable news, which is to spotlight the extreme and give people the wrong sense of how likely an event is going to occur. Airplane crash is a perfect example, right? We have this joke, we don`t cover all the planes that land. If you just watch cable news, or you just watch the news, you`d think that flying is dangerous. In fact, it`s extremely safe. I can see a police officer or someone else in the country saying, if I just watch your program, all I see are these dramatic videos of police doing terrible things, when there`s hundreds of thousands doing great things every single day, and not being shown. At the same time, there are people who argue, if these are just the ones that happen to be caught on tape, how often is this happening when not being caught on tape? And so the question is, what do we know about how common abuse is? PHILLIP ATIBA GOFF, CENTER FOR POLICING EQUITY: I`m glad that you`re asking questions about data, because as a social justice nerd, that fits right in my wheel house. The sad thing is, we know very, very little. There are a bunch of data sets that have really bad data in them, right? So, we`ve got the justifiable homicide database that the FBI keeps, but that`s a voluntary thing, and it`s 750 something odd agencies. It`s not very many folks. There was the Death in Custody Reporting Act that was passed in 2000 and it was just reauthorized this past December. But when it was past in 2000, it was 2005, 2006, before they really started getting the data and it expired in 2006. So, in terms of federal data, we`ve got basically nothing that tells us anything. HAYES: Wait a second, let me stop you. The Death in Custody Act, that requires mandated reporting of every law enforcement agency of everyone that dies in custody? GOFF: That was kind of the goal, yes. And it started in 2000 when it was first authorized. Then, in 2006, it expired. And it just got reauthorized again in December of this past year. HAYES: Right. So, we have -- we just don`t have any data between 2006 and then? GOFF: We don`t have any data from 2000 to 2005 really. The hard thing to understand is it takes a lot of energy and infrastructure to get these data to be captured, because municipal law enforcement is just that, it`s municipal. We have 17,000 some odd agencies all over the country and each one does policing differently. Whether it`s 10 people in a department and most of them are on patrol most of the time, who is in charge on making sure your data comes in and that`s clean and that`s easy to report to the federal government and how much of a priority is that for you, right? So, it takes a lot of money, a lot of commitment, and it was doing that in the Death in Custody Act, but then it expired. So, then we didn`t have anything, and that`s the situation we`re in, but without the act that it really gave us anything, and those were just counting the deaths and not the actual shots fired. And the best estimates we have, which are still pretty bad, is that 50 percent of the time that an officer discharges his firearm, nobody dies. So, that means that we have to at least double the number of deaths to figure out how many times an officer discharges their firearm. HAYES: So, wait a second. I mean, I know that we have no national database even or we`re working to establish a database of people killed in officer involved shootings, right, killed by police. Whether that`s ruled justified or not. That data we still do not have comprehensively, right? GOFF: That`s right. That`s what I`ve been trying to do with the Center for Policing Equity with Jack Glaser and all of my colleagues this year is to do it in a private way, because law enforcement is reluctant to give it over to the federal government, and frankly, I`m not sure that we`ve got things set up for the federal government to collect those data right now anyway. HAYES: So, what you`re saying to me, is when I look at this video of this beatdown that was administered in San Bernardino, I don`t know if that is as rare as a plane crash or as common as a divorce, right? I mean, I -- that could be something that happens extremely rarely or it could be something that actually happens a fair amount. There is no empirical way to -- for me to know? GOFF: Well, the best data that we`ve got does say that it`s far less common than divorce in this country. And I`m mad at you for making me make that comparison. Every major city in law enforcement that we look at, use of force is a relatively rare occurrence. We`re talking in the range of 5 percent is really, really high, 2 percent and 1 percent is relatively sort of common and low. So, we`re talking about rare occurrences. But how often does it get out of hand when force is used? That`s a harder thing to estimate. HAYES: So you can take the universe of application of force, and we don`t know how often that`s being used properly, even if force -- the application of force is actually a pretty small percentage of what police departments do as a sort of general matter in the big departments. GOFF: That`s exactly right. And we don`t know about disparities. Again, there`s a lot we don`t know. I will say from the departments where I`ve taken a look at the data, it is the case, it`s a fair thing to say, it`s rare when folks use force, and it`s rarer still when they use excessive force. So, I think we should be comfortable saying that from what we`ve seen anecdotally. But we shouldn`t be comfortable relying on anecdote for too much longer. We`ve relied for wage long already. HAYES: Thank you very much, Phillip Atiba Goff. GOFF: Thanks. HAYES: All right. Still to come today, we`ve learned that Bloomberg.com is the greatest 404 error page in history. This is what you got, after the site pulled down this story, false report that Nancy Reagan is endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. But Hillary fever causes people to do and say all sorts of strange things and we`ll be discussing that ahead. Plus, did Jackie, the woman at the center of "Rolling Stone`s" discredited story of gang-rape at UVA, actually co-opt another woman`s true story? An exclusive interview you don`t want to miss is coming up. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: At the NRA leadership forum, a number of Republican presidential candidates, including one who has declared, took the stage, as well as the NRA`s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre. And there were a few references to a certain former secretary of state and imminent Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) WAYNE LAPIERRE, NRA EXEC. VICE PRESIDENT: Whitewater-gate, cattle-gate, Gennifer Flowers-gate. GOV. BOBBY JINDAL (R), LOUISIANA: I wonder what her slogan is going to be. It may be, what difference does it make? LAPIERRE: Nanny-gate, Lincoln Bedroom-gate, travel-gate. GOV. SCOTT WALKER (R), WISCONSIN: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton actually gave Russia a reset button. LAPIERRE: Trooper-gate, file-gate, Paula Jones-gate. FORMER GOV. JEB BUSH (R), FLORIDA: It`s the liberal progressive world view of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Eric Holder. LAPIERRE: Vince Foster-gate, helicopter-gate, White House coffee-gate. SEN. TED CRUZ (R), TEXAS: You know, we had good news ready for Hillary, had their first hire -- the head of e-mail security. LAPIERRE: Web hobble hush money-gate, pardon-gate, illegal gift-gate, Monica-gate, Benghazi-gate, email-gate, wipe server-gate. Hillary Clinton has more gates than a south Texas cattle ranch. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: It`s a long, long climb for a short slide there from Wayne LaPierre. If you`re keeping track, email-gate and wipe server-gate got two different gates. "New Republic`s" Rebecca Traister who literally wrote on Hillary Clinton running for the White House, and former senior adviser to President Obama, David Axelrod, join me just ahead. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hillary Clinton, the leading Democrat in terms of the 2016 race. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The presumptive Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The likely frontrunner Hillary Clinton. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The likely Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She is the presumptive Democratic nominee. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: In what is both news and its literal opposite, Hillary Clinton is expected to declare her presidential bid as early as Sunday, with an announcement online. And to follow up with campaign stop next week, including in first of the nation caucus state Iowa. Clinton has already been subject to more raw press coverage than any other candidate and has her first, quote-unquote, "scandal" with revelation she used private e-mail for State Department business. Clinton has a famously fractious relationship with the press, and her campaign staff, as well as her husband, believe the media favored Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 campaign. Clinton herself acknowledged the acrimony between her and the media last month. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) FORMER SECY. HILLARY CLINTON, U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT: You know, my relationship with the press has been, at times, shall we say, complicated. (LAUGHTER) And when Peter asked if I wanted to spend an evening with a roomful of political reporter, I thought to myself, what could possibly go wrong? (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Now, the amazing Clinton campaign is trying to address the problem. Apparently, last night, Clinton`s campaign reportedly held an off the record dinner with journalists in Washington, D.C. It was, according to this report, "quite a scene." With Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta hosting and cooking the dinner himself, serving pasta with walnut sauce, which I`ve never tried, to the assembled journalists. Tonight, another key Clinton staffer Joe Benenson was reportedly set to host a similar event in New York. I`m sitting here but I didn`t get an invite. What does this mean for Clinton`s campaign and the weird reality of distortion field that is the campaign press corps and presidential campaign writ large? Joining me now, Rebecca Traister, senior editor of "The New Republic", and author of the fantastic book, "Big Girls Don`t Cry", about the 2008 presidential election. And David Axelrod, NBC News senior political analyst, former senior adviser to President Obama, author of "Believer: My Four Years in Politics". All right, Rebecca, the big question, the chicken and egg question -- is the media unfair to Hillary Clinton, therefore Hillary Clinton and people in Hillary Land bunker down and act with this kind of like embattled attitude towards the press? Or does the embattled hostility towards the press produce the bad relationship in this relationship? REBECCA TRAISTER, THE NEW REPUBLIC: That`s the chicken and the egg question, and you sort of have to go back so far to a different generation of press really, to the sort of embryonic stage of Hillary`s place in the national conversation, in the national spotlight, to when she was -- you know, in the early `90s, running as a prospective first lady alongside Bill Clinton, and was a lightning rod at that point, and was just sort of pummeled for all kinds of things. She was an -- HAYES: Crazy stuff, too. (CROSSTALK) HAYES: Things are just manifestly, obviously, sexist. TRAISTER: Oh, yes. But she was really new. And we forget how far we`ve traveled as far as first ladies go and the amount of time -- thanks to Hillary in large part. I mean, she was a total anomaly on the presidential scene. She had a career and education that was comparable to her husband`s. He tried optimistically to sell it as a two for one presidency which didn`t go over so well. She represented a generation of women who had brought change that remained discomforting to the nation. And so, she was treated in the press, especially the presidential press that was unused to this kind of first lady, with real aggression. And she, who doesn`t have, I think, it`s also true, a natural ease with the press. HAYES: Yes. TRAISTER: Though she does have a natural social ease, but not with the press -- responded in kind and that`s been going on for 30 years now. HAYES: So, David, it`s now 2015. We`re seven years past that primary, so you can be totally honest here. You guys did get better coverage than Hillary Clinton in 2007 and 2008. DAVID AXELROD, NBC NEWS SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: I think we did. We got good coverage. We were a better story, frankly. And I think we didn`t bring to it the sense of -- the adversarial sense that seemed to consume their campaign. You know, I`m a former journalist and I understand journalist jobs aren`t to be stenographers, just simply writing down what candidates say. You know, I tried to impart that to the entire operation. Obama himself is a writer. And, you know, he enjoyed interaction. I can`t say he always loved the coverage he got. Sometimes he can be thin skinned, too, but generally, he had a pretty good relationship with his press corps. HAYES: The irony here is I would say, actually, I bet you if there was some metric to measure it, Barack Obama`s attitude towards the press corps is probably more similar to Hillary Clinton`s now having been through this for six years than it was back in 2008. Wouldn`t you say that? AXELROD: There`s no doubt that he`s been through some -- the relationship has been tested over these years. HAYES: Right. AXELROD: You know, even though every president says they don`t read this stuff, they read this stuff. And they react to it. But he does continue to have off the record sessions with reporters, conversations with reporters. He does go back in the plane from time to time. It is not a kind of sense of embattlement that sometimes has consumed -- Hillary, I think, look, one of the encouraging things from her standpoint is -- in terms of press relations is that she`s hired some people, Jen Palmeri, who came from the White House, Christina Shockey, who had so much to do with Michelle Obama`s communications, and a number of young people who they brought with them, all of whom have good relationships with the news media. I think that`s going to be helpful to her in this campaign. TRAISTER: I agree that her improved relationships with young people is going to make a real difference, including a new generation of people -- HAYES: That`s a great point. There`s actually -- TRAISTER: -- covering her, who aren`t informed (ph) of 25 years of Hillary Clinton and view her with fresh eyes. HAYES: Don`t have a sort of preemptive eye-rolling of, well, what`s the story here, or I know everything about her, or have preconceived notion that the Clinton people are difficult, et cetera. TRAISTER: Right, and they aren`t coming with that baggage that made her such a lightning rod in the `90s. They`re more -- they know the text from Hillary Hillary, the new meming of Hillary as the cool, tough brood, which was unthinkable in the early `90s. It was unthinkable even six years ago when we were doing this the first time. There`s no easy way to sell Hillary Clinton as the cool, tough lady. There now is, thanks a lot of young people and their media, and that`s going to really shift. If she embraces it and remains sort of calm and casual and cool about it, I think could work very well for her. AXELROD: I think, Chris, there`s another element to this, which is one of the great challenges for her is to be more revealing of herself, to give people more of a sense of who she is, of what motivates her in an authentic way. That was missing for at least half the campaign in 2007. I would argue that she got to be a much better candidate after she lost the Iowa caucuses, and she threw caution to the wind. Her vulnerabilities were more obvious. Her sense of identification with people became more obvious. She has to be more like that candidate. But you have to -- that necessarily means you also have to be able to communicate through and with and to the media in an authentic way. That`s a challenge she`s going to have to meet in this campaign. TRAISTER: David is highlighting one of the real worries about her not being primaried, which is that Hillary has always been at her best and her most authentic and relatable when she`s down. When she feels like she has something to lose, when she`s going in a position of power, (a), the press, and arguably Americans view her, you know, more negatively. But also, she is tighter, more canned, more controlled, more careful. And when she feels like she has nothing to lose, and you could see that if you look at the 2008 race, in New Hampshire when she was going to lose, she let go a bit. Toward the end, as it was clear she was going to lose, she let go again. And, of course, her greatest rhetorical moment was the moment concession. Hillary is great when losing, challenged, and scrappy. And the idea she`s not going to get primary here is very worrisome. HAYES: That is a fantastic point. Rebecca Traister and David Axelrod, thank you both. AXELROD: Good to be with you. HAYES: All right. We are celebrating a very special anniversary here tonight. I`ll tell you what it is. That`s next. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: The first show that ever aired at 8:00 p.m. on MSNBC was this: "Internight," 19 years ago, which interviewed President Bill Clinton in its inaugural show. Over the court of history of MSNBC, we`ve had a lot of shows in the 8:00 p.m. hour and elsewhere. Some of them were on and off the air so fast there is very good chance you, and even we, didn`t quite remember them. Everything from Alan Keyes`s "Making Sense," to Jesse Ventura`s "America," airing on Saturday`s, to Dietl and Daniels featuring former New York City detective Bo Dietl. All of which is to say, cable news is an ephemeral medium. And I say this, because while I was in Mexico last week I missed a number of things, and one of the things I missed was the two-year anniversary of this show. We`re two. That means we`re walking now, stumbling around like a drunkard, but still soiling ourselves, if cable development looks anything like human development. We love having you watch the show and getting your feedback. We really do. This past year, we launched "All In America." We traveled around the country and talked to all sorts of people and it`s something I`m incredibly proud of. We have even more ambitious plans for the coming year. So stay tuned. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: At the center of a now discredited and retracted report from Rolling Stone magazine on an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia campus was a woman known to readers only as Jackie. In the story, Jackie described to the reporter Sabrina Reuben Edderly was beoynd horrific. She said she had been raped by seven men at a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house while two others gave instructions and watched. And according to Rolling Stone`s reporting, this wasn`t the first time something so heinous had happened on the campus, I`m quoting here, "you can trace UVA`s cycle of sexual violence and institutional indifference back at least 30 years. And incredibly the trail leads back to Phi Psi. In october 1984, Liz Seccuro was a 17-year-old virgin, when she went to a party at the frat, was handed a mixed drink. Things became spotty after Seccuro had a few sips. But etched in pain was a clear memory of a sranger raping her on a bed." Now, for the first time since Rolling Stone`s report was released last November, Liz Seccuro is speaking out, sitting down for an exclusive interview with MSNBC`s Ronan Farrow. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) LIZ SECCURO: I`m coming from a singular place in this story in that I spoke with a reporter, I gave context, it actually happened to me. I wrote a book about it and ostensibly it had happened again. Who am I to question the veracity of such a report? RONAN FARROW, MSNBC CORRESPONDENT: Liz Seccuro was the other woman featured in the now infamous discredited Rolling Stone article. In 1984, she was a 17-year-old freshman at the University of Virginia. SECCURO: I was invited to a fraternity rush party. I was offered a drink from the bar by two men who said they were brothers at Phi Kappa Psi. FARROW: Liz Seccuro she says she was gang raped that night at Phi Kappa Psi, the same fraternity where the Rolling Stone article claimed Jackie`s eerily similar attack took place some 28 years later. SECCURO: I remember -- I remember during the night thinking I was going to die. And I woke up in the room that I recognized from the night before, and I`m covered in a sheet, and a filthy sheet, and it`s covered in blood. And I look down with horror and I realize it`s my own blood. FARROW: Years later, in 2005, one attacker wrote to Liz asking for forgiveness. William Bebee, a man the fraternity maintains was not an initiated Phi Kappa Psi brother, but who Liz says was no outsider, renting a room in the house and appearing in numerous photos with fraternity brothers. Liz turned over his letters to the Charlottsville police department who took on the investigation. William Bebee (ph) eventually pled guilty to aggravated sexual battery and served time behind bars. Liz says that`s what made her story appealing to Rolling Stone and its reporter, Sabrina Erdely. SECCURO: I`m sort of that rare bird who has something that is on the public record, and can be used in the context to bolster the story she was trying to tell. FARROW: And that`s what you think she wanted to accomplish to bolster Jackie`s story? SECCURO: Well, absolutely. I think providing anything of context, especially if you`re talking about a gang rape at the same fraternity, the same school, at the same time of year to a first-year student, what are the odds? It`s like seeing a unicorn, do you know what I mean? FARROW: And seeing it twice. SECCURO: And seeing it twice. FARROW: And then there were those similarities between Liz`s story and Jackie`s, similarities first learned about in a call from Erdely, the reporter, the night before the piece of published. SECCURO: She goes, this is going to blow you away, because it`s so much like your case, anonymous people, blog commenters, my friends and my family all called me or commented or wrote to me and said, this is your story. I can`t comprehend how someone would co-op someone else`s pain and story for this. FARROW: Do you think there`s a chance that`s what happens, that Jackie co- opted your story? SECCURO: I think -- as I said, it`s been suggested to many so many times that I have to allow it to be a possibility. It struck me as extremely odd, because there are 38, maybe 37 now that at the time -- but there are 38 fraternities. This one is occupying a huge piece of real estate right right on the corner. It`s also the only one where there`s a documented gang rape, my own. Things like that sort of make me, you know, feel that there is some need on the part of a survivor to make legitimate her experience and a need on the part of the publication to then bolster it with an actual account because it matches it up and book ends it and it makes it all meet, doesn`t it? FARROW: They almost conflated the two stories for credibility. SECCURO: Almost. You know, I can`t say. I was not, you know, there. But it just seems too convenient. FARROW: Liz says her 2011 memoir of her rape "Crash Into Me" was well known on campus. I understand the crisis management center there gave out your book to survivors. SECCURO: Yes. FARROW: Do you think that Jackie perhaps believed that your story was hers? SECCURO: I think that somebody who has now told the story so many times and stuck by her story, even after being discredited, I believe that that person would have some mental issues and would believe -- would believe that. FARROW: If this is true, if by some happenstance Jackie co-opted your story, to use your words, what is your message to her? SECCURO: Well, I think right now my message to her is to get some help and to understand -- and I`m not ruling out that nothing happened to her. I think something traumatic has happened to her in her life. And I think she needs to get some help to address that. It`s very easy to become enamerred with the survivor community and dive into that. But unless you`re willing to talk to the police and to file a complaint, you can`t level these sort of allegations. It was hard for me, and we had evidence. You can`t make these sort of things allegations that live on forever, because look at the mess we`re in now. (END VIDEOTAPE) HAYES: Liz Seccuro says that while the Rolling Stone story has set sexual assault survivors back, she will keep fighting for accountability. Still ahead, my interview with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: This is a very polarizing, controversial issue. Jeb Bush is going to have to go to town hall in Iowa and defend himself in the face of people who say this is Obamacare for education. (END VIDEO CLIP) (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: OK, another very big anniversary happened yesterday, more significant I would dare say, the 150th anniversary of the south`s surrender at Appomattox, which more or less brought an end to the American Civil War. And here we are 150 years later with no end in sight to how strongly people still react to the Confederate Flag, and more importantly, what it represents to so many people. About 100 activists rallied against the Klu Klux Klan yesterday in Tallahassee, Florida, according to the Tallahassee Democrat, the rally came in response to leafletting of Leon and Jefferson county neighborhoods with Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan recruiting flyers last monght. And the arrest last week of two Department of Corrections employees and one former employee linked to the group in a plot to murder the black foreign inmate. The activist burned a Confederal flag on the steps of the old capital, which was fitting, because it was the veterans of the Confederate Army who founded the Klan during reconstruction and udsed it as a terrorist organization to murder the south back in the hands of white control If only that surrender at Appomattox had been more enduring. (END VIDEOTAPE) HAYES: Mark my words, the sleeper issue of the 2016 campaign is not something anyone would have guesssed a few years ago. It`s not immigration or abortion, it`s Common Core. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SEN. MARCO RUBIO, (R) FLORIDA: We do not need a national Common Core curriculum that the federal government uses and forces on our states. DONALD TRUMP, BILLIONAIRE: Common Core is bad. Bad. GOV. BOBBY JINDAL, (R) LOUISIANA: We must repeal Common Core. RICK SANTORUM, FRM. SENATOR FROM PENNSYLVANIA: We should cut off that money and give the states the flexibility to use that money as they see hit, not how Arne Duncan sees fit. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Republican 2016 hopefuls are lining up against the voluntary national education standards with one very notable exception: Jeb Bush who steadfastly supports the guidelines and has encouraged their national adoption. But it`s not just Republican politicians that are coming out strong against Common Core: parents, teachers and students are in open revolt against the standardized tests that have come out of the guidelines or have been tailored to fit them, which have been adopted by 43 states. And that puts them directly in conflict with the Obama administration, which has urged states to adopt the voluntary standards as part of its Race to the Top Program. I got a chance to sit down with one of Common Core`s biggest advocates, the man who crafted Race to the Top, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. And that interview is next. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: Much of the controversy over Common Core has been due to its conflation with a controversy over high stakes testing, the type of testing spawned by No Child Left Behind which linked school funding to testing and testing results. I sat down with the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. And I asked him what, if anything, was achieved in the 13 years since President Bush signed that bill into law. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) ARNE DUNCAN, U.S. SECRETARY OF EDUCATION: The one thing that did work was the focus on achievement gaps and looking at are black children improving each year or not, the Latino what`s happening there. But No Child Left Behind is fundamentally broken. I lived on the other side of the law when I led the Chicago public schools. It`s been broken for a while. Sadly, congress has been dysfunctional as well. So we`ve done is we`ve partnered directly with states to provide wavers and provide flexibility to move away from the most onerous, the most disappointing parts of the law. HAYES: But on the equity, my reading of the data -- and obviously one of the issues here is there are so much data, there are so many statistics you can find things that are good and things that are discouraging, so it`s sort of this soup, right. My reading of the data is that at this basic level, we`re talking about testing gap and we`re talking about issues of equity, we have not seen much of a narrowing at all, certainly not the narrowing that we were promised back in 2001. DUNCAN: No, we have a long way to go. And I say every single day how far we have to go. Te fact of the matter is, we have seen gains over the past 20, 30 years, but we are not getting better fast enough. And again, at its heart, this law has to be about equity. And so what we`re pushing very hard in congress, put politics, put ideology aside, you know, Democrats, Republicans have to work together, this law has to focus on early childhood education, that has never been in there. That`s the best investment we can make to level the playing field and give every single child, particularly disadvantaged children, a chance in life. And we have bring more resources, more dollars to poor communities and to disadvantaged children. And in too many states, the children of the wealthy get more spent on them and the children of the poor get less spent on them. The children who need the most get the least. So we think there`s a chance for congress to fix this law. Have a huge focus in equity. That is so critically important. HAYES: I want to talk about Common Core for a second, becuase it`s -- are you surprised by how controversial Common Core, which is kind of a fairly obscure issue, how much of a lightning rod it`s become? DUNCAN: It`s actually very simple. The goal is to have high standards. And what we saw, Chris, udnerneath -- under No Child Left Behind, and this was horrible, we had about 20 states dummy down standards, reduce standards, to make politicians look good. And what happens then is kids who are working hard and think they`re on track to go into college and be successful, far too often they weren`t even close and they would graduate and they would have to take remedial classes. They wren`t prepared and burned through financial aid. It was one of the worst things that happeend. So what you saw was tremendous leadership from governors and educators in many, many places saying we have to stop lying to children. We have to be honest here. Let`s have true college and career ready standards for every single child. HAYES: So when you describe it that way, it sounds like OK, well that seems like sort of a common sense notion. But then to go back to my original question, this is a very polarizing, controversial issue. I mean, Jeb Bush is going to have to go to town hall in Iowa and defend himself in the face of people who say that this is Obamacare for education. DUNCAN: It`s only polarizing to the politicians that you talk to. If you talk to parents, if ou talk to real parents.... HAYES: I disagree. I strongly disagree. DUNCAN: Well, let me just say -- if you talk to parents and say do you want your children to be truly college and career ready, do you want them to be able write well, do want them to be able to think critically, do you want them to have a real chance in life through education, the overwhelming majority of paretns say that`s exactly what we want. HAYES: That`s right. But if you go in and you say, what parents are getting -- and it`s happening from New York to Louisiana to California, their kid comes home with some homework or they go to some test, they`re stressing, and in their head, the thing that is the source of their kid`s anxiety is Common Core. That is what has happened is that Common Core has come to be the name for all testing related stress. DUNCAN: So there`s misinformation, there`s whatever. Again, it`s being high standards are being implemented with differing degrees of success or not. And so we need to work with parents and communicate very carefully with them and work with students. I`ll just give you a quick example. Tennessee was one of the states that arguably had the lowest standards in the nation. They were given an F, it was embarrassing. And when they raised standards, theywent from saying -- my numbers won`t be exact, but saying about 91 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math to like 30 something. So from 90 to 30-something. Children weren`t any less smart, they just were finally telling the truth. And from that point, them having the courage, first the Democratic governor, and then a Republican governor, to raise the bar, Tennessee is now the fastest improving state in the nation. That`s the kind of progress we need. HAYES: I want you to respond something Ted Cruz said. He said we should repeal every word of Common Core. We should get the federal government out of the business of curriculum. DUNCAN: He`s already one. We`re not in the business of curriculum. In fact, we`re prohibited. There`s nothing to repeal. HAYES: The last thing on Common Core, from a Democratic standpoint, right, I mean, if you say to me we should have high standards, they should be universal so that we don`t have this gaming, all this sounds... DUNCAN: We never said universal. So you have many states we`re working with who are doing their own thing. But our only question is, have your local universities there say that if students are hitting this bar they don`t have to take remedial classes. So the goal here is not common, the goal here is high. HAYES: But there is a question of like who makes those standards, right? DUNCAN: Absolutely. HAYES: And I think part of the concern is or part of the fear is that some nefarious actor somewhere is making them. DUNCAN: Again, this is where the truth is important. And there`s no nefarious actors. This has been led at the local level on a voluntary basis by governors from both parties, fantastic teachers and educators who said our children deserve better than what we`ve done. HAYES: All right, finally, I want to ask you about higher education. There`s a for profit school called Corinthian. It was a disaster. The federal government essentially cut it off from access to federal loans. It has left people with thousands of dollars of debt, while going under and not really giving them much to show for it. You have nine attorneys general calling on the Department of Education to forgive those student loans. Should the department do that? DUNCAN: So, we`re looking at this stuff very closely. And just to be very clear, way before this, we had difficult battles with congress. We put in place something called gainful employment. This was to all for-profits accountable. we took tremendous heat from both sides of the aisle, quite frankly. HAYES: It was one of the best things that this Department of Education -- no, I`m serious, it was politically risky and it was one of the most impressive things. DUNCAN: It`s the right thing to do. But we continue to be very concerned with these issues. We have met with some of these young people as recently as the past two weeks. And we`re going to continue to look at this very closely and see what the right thing is to do, not just in this situation, but more broadly. HAYES: I mean, that`s a non-answer. But your answer is you are looking into whether you should. DUNCAN: We`re looking at this very, very closely and again talking to young people who have been negativity impacted. And for me, it`s not just about those individuals, it`s about where you have bad actors for far too long, they were allowed to do just what they wanted. We have tried to be very, very clear that we will not tolerate that. And whatever political pushback we get, we`re fine with that. HAYES: Arne Duncan, secretary of education, one of the originals, been in there a while. DUNCAN: Thank you so much. HAYES: Great to see you, thanks a lot. (END VIDEOTAPE) HAYES: All right, that is All In for this evening. END THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. 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