It was Nov. 19, 2014, when the world first learned about “Jackie,” a young woman who claimed in the pages of Rolling Stone that she had been gang-raped as part of a fraternity initiation.
While many began questioning — whether publicly or privately — the validity of her story almost immediately, Rolling Stone and the author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, stuck by their story and their main source. Those who asked whether Erdely had contacted the accused ringleader of the gang-rape were met with hostility and smugness from the author and her editors.
For example, in a Dec. 1 email, Erdely told the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi that she “wasn’t going to comment” on whether she contacted the alleged ringleader. “Suffice it to say, we took many steps to verify Jackie’s story and feel confident with what we published,” she added.
But on Dec. 5 — just 16 days after the article was published and just four days after the email to Farhi — Erdely sent a frantic email to her editors, writing in the subject line: “Our worst nightmare.”
Originally, Rolling Stone was going to issue a statement in response to questions and doubts over the validity of Jackie’s story.
“Obviously, we regret any factual errors in any story,” the statement was supposed to read. “But Rolling Stone believes the essential point of Jackie’s narrative is, in fact, true: A young woman suffered a horrific crime at a party, and a prestigious university reacted with indifference to her claim.”
“This happens too often at college campuses all over America,” the statement continued. “Any mistakes we made were honest ones, trying hard to create a narrative and an investigation that would improve the prevention, investigation and prosecution of sexual violence. For that we would never apologize.”
Note the insistence that the narrative was more important than the facts when it comes to combating campus sexual assault. Forget the fact that continually covering hoaxes makes the public less likely to believe the next accuser.
In Erdely’s Dec. 5 email, she told her editors, Will Dana and Sean Woods, not to run the statement. “In fact,” she wrote, “we’re going to have to run a retraction.”
Erdely had finally concluded that Jackie was not truthful after she spoke to her and a friend, writing to her editors that she did not find Jackie “credible any longer.”
“Today Jackie was interviewed by police but declined to report; her explanation to me for why she didn’t go forward was lacking. I’ve been trying to verify the identity of her assailant, and when I asked her for help, it spiraled into confusion,” Erdely wrote. “By the time we ended our conversation, I felt nearly certain that she was not being truthful. I then called her friend Alex, who has been a valuable resource; I found out that over the past day, Alex has also come to the conclusion that Jackie has probably been lying.”
She added: “Jackie gave specific details to her friends about her alleged assailant, including a full name (the same one she gave to me), which they discovered belonged to someone at a different fraternity, not Phi [Kappa] Psi. They showed her a picture of that person, and Jackie denied it was him. But later, when Alex and Sara pressed her, she said that maybe it WAS him.” (Emphasis original.)
Finally, Erdely wrote that “The whole thing stinks” and that “Alex feels betrayed.”
The email, first reported by the Washington Post among 431 pages of detailed notes taken by Erdely during her five-month “investigation,” shows the date the author finally realized she had perpetuated a hoax.
Erdely’s notes make it clear that she had previously had reason to doubt Jackie’s claims, including the fact that the number of men who allegedly raped her kept changing. The documents show Erdely was never very concerned with finding the alleged gang-rape organizer, but was very insistent on naming the fraternity where the alleged rape occurred.
Yet after the article was published, Erdely went on national television and Slate’s DoubleX Gabfest podcast claiming she knew who the student was and had contacted him. Erdely told the hosts of the podcast: “Me and several other people know exactly who did this to her.” Woods, her editor, said that while they didn’t speak to the men, they “verified their existence.” It was ultimately discovered that the man Jackie claims lured her to the fraternity party never existed.
To that last point, Erdely’s notes quote Jackie as saying she didn’t want to get the student involved because she “just kind of wanted him to never exist again.” Funny, since he never existed in the first place.
Erdely also claimed she couldn’t find the three friends who allegedly tried to talk Jackie out of reporting the story (the Washington Post’s T. Rees Shapiro found them within days of the article being published). What, exactly, did Erdely do for five months while she “investigated” Jackie’s claims?
There were other clues that the story was made up. Jackie claimed she was raped for hours atop a shattered glass table, yet she had no scars from the encounter. Her boyfriend (yes, this girl ended up getting a boyfriend) told Erdely: “I haven’t really seen any marks on your back.” This guy was a better fact-checker than Erdely.
Erdely even wrote “In the dim lighting, I see nothing.”
But what should have been obvious disbelief was spun by Erdely as evidence of malice. When she discovered that Jackie’s story — including the involvement of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity — resembled the gang-rape of Liz Securro, instead of taking a closer look at the stories to see if Jackie just pulled details, Erdely assumed it meant the fraternity must have been doing this all along.
“Every hair on my arm is standing up,” Erdely wrote. “Seems like more than a coincidence.”
Oh, and Jackie’s alleged rape also closely resembled accounts in books on sexual assault and an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” One could forgive Erdely for not recognizing this except Jackie mentioned these things while speaking to the author.
After Erdely sent the Dec. 5, email, Rolling Stone appended an editor’s note to the article, but did not officially retract it until April of the following year. In her lawsuit against Rolling Stone, University of Virginia Dean Nicole Eramo — who was portrayed in the article as being callous toward sexual assault accusations like Jackie’s — claims that the numerous red flags should have shown that Jackie was not a credible source.
Eramo’s lawyer, Libby Locke, told the Washington Post that “none of those facts stood in the way of Rolling Stone publishing a false and defamatory article, relying on a source who was not credible and painting Ms. Eramo as a callous and indifferent administrator.”
It was Eramo’s lawsuit that saw the release of the documents, and showed that Erdely had it out for the U.Va. dean all along.
“I’ve been hearing these women talking about her, they love her, she’s so warm and responsive to them and yet in each of their stories they don’t go to police,” Erdely wrote in her notes about Eramo. “The perpetrators walk free. And yet they love her.”
Even worse, according to Erdely, Eramo was “preserving the status quo while giving the illusion that she’s helping the victims.”
This would seem to refer to the fact that Eramo wasn’t forcing students to go to the police. Campus sexual assault activists, even in the wake of the Rolling Stone debacle, continue to argue against urging accusers to go to the police, instead wanting accusations to be handled by universities (that can be more heavily influenced by federal threats and negative media attention).
The latest developments continue to shed light on an article that would never have been published had the media cared more about facts and evidence than a “narrative.”
If you need to find something to laugh about in all this, remember that Erdely’s last tweet, from Nov. 30, 2014, scolded the editor of Texas Monthly for referring to her as the “woman” behind the article and not the “journalist.” Clearly Texas Monthly had it right the first time.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
