Jackie had called up friends on the night in question, but the account she had given them didn’t match what she’d told Rolling Stone.īut the culture wasn’t primed to look for such inconsistencies. There was no party at the fraternity in question at the time described, and no student who fit the descriptions of the alleged ringleader of the attack. Her cinematic writing style had obscured that she was telling a largely single-source story, and it would later be revealed her source had fabricated virtually the entire thing. In early interviews, Erdely declined to say what she knew about Jackie’s alleged attackers or if she’d reached out to the man at the center of the story for comment. The dialogue was sensational – it read like something from a movie. It’s easy to see why so many reacted so strongly early on.Įrdely’s writing was almost devoid of the journalistic qualifiers like “allegedly”, leaving the reader with the impression the events described were undisputed facts. Nationally there were petitions, op-ed columns, cable news conversations and tweets from politicians and celebrities, calling out fraternity culture. When it first came out, the Rolling Stone piece sparked protests at UVA, and the school announced the suspension of all college Greek life.
Not that anyone would have predicted that at the time of publication. Shortly thereafter, the story of Rolling Stone’s reporting failure would eclipse the larger problem of the systematic abuse and mistreatment of women across college fraternities and beyond – even as it would help inspire a new commitment to tenacious sexual assault reporting down the road. (Her last tweet, on 30 November 2014, is a Washington Post profile of her looking at how the UVA story came to be.) Rolling Stone faced years in the courts, paying out millions to those who suffered reputational damage – losses which may have contributed to the sale of the magazine in 2017 amid other financial strains.Įrdely’s public life, as embodied by her Twitter account, still seems frozen, a perfect time capsule of the moment right before everything came down around her. The story’s trail of destruction was also significant for the people directly involved. In a way the story presaged a wave of high-profile dedication to sexual assault reporting across news organizations, as well as attacks from many – including the president and his supporters – that the media are an enemy who can’t be trusted. Now five years later, in the aftermath of #Metoo, what was its legacy really? “We have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” Rolling Stone wrote of Jackie, before ultimately retracting the story. Erdely hadn’t factchecked her central source, and Jackie’s claims were not borne out by subsequent reporting. Afterwards Jackie stumbled away from the frat house barefoot and bleeding in the middle of the night, and called several friends for support only to have them raise concerns about the “social price” of Jackie reporting her rape.īut cracks soon surfaced in the story. And that’s when Jackie knew she was going to be raped.” At one point a fraternity brother shoves a beer bottle into her as others cheer. “‘Grab its motherfucking leg,’ she heard a voice say. Rolling Stone and Erdely had an agenda, and they were recklessly oblivious to the harm they would cause innocent victims in their ruthless pursuit of that agenda.In the story Jackie was pushed through a low-lying glass table and pinned to the ground amid shards of glass.
Rolling Stone set out in advance to find a sensational story of graphic and violent rape, searched for such a story at elite universities, and rejected other possible stories because the sexual assaults they portrayed were too ‘normal.’ Rolling Stone endorsed and encouraged Erdely’s efforts to troll elite American college campuses in search of a sensational and graphic rape narrative, and rejected potential stories from universities such as Yale that lacked the sensational quality Rolling Stone sought. They also claim that the publication was seeking for a sensationalized story, which fueled the poor editorial decisions leading up to its’ publication. In the lawsuit, the fraternity claims that Rolling Stone knew that the girl who claimed she was raped was an unreliable source, but they printed her story without attempting to verify her claims. There wasn’t a gang rape that occurred at the fraternity.The student who was named as the main attacker didn’t attend U-Va, nor did he belong to the fraternity.Phi Kappa Psi didn’t host a party on the night in question.
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