Rolling Stone magazine’s credibility took another blow Wednesday as the Washington Post continued to hammer away at the pop magazine’s now-disavowed exposé on campus sexual assault at the University of Virginia.
The dubious Nov. 19 Rolling Stone profile, a 9,000-word article titled “A Rape on Campus,” alleged that a student, “Jackie,” had been brutally gang-raped in 2012 by five men at a fraternity party, that she told three friends of the attack immediately after it happened and that the school and her friends worked to cover up the incident.
But Post reporter T. Rees Shapiro talked to the three aforementioned friends and said Wednesday that “in their first interviews about the events of that September 2012 night, the three friends separately told The Post that their recollections of the encounter diverge from how Rolling Stone portrayed the incident in a story about Jackie’s alleged gang rape at a U-Va. fraternity.”
Shapiro also said the three friends “provide a richer account of Jackie’s interactions immediately after the alleged attack, and suggest that the friends are skeptical of her account.”
Referring to the Rolling Stone story, “Andy” told the Post “It didn’t happen that way at all.” Shapiro also reported that “the friends said they never were contacted or interviewed by the pop culture magazine’s reporters or editors.”
The three friends, each speaking to the Post on condition of anonymity, said that they have long questioned “Jackie’s” story, noting that the number of assailants and the names of those involved have changed over time.
Rolling Stone also reported that it had contacted “Jackie’s” friend “Randall,” but claimed that he wouldn’t comment on the attack out of loyalty to his fraternity.
Randall said “he never was contacted by Rolling Stone and would have agreed to an interview,” the Post reported.
The Post also hunted down images “Jackie” showed her three friends of the student who supposedly invited her to a party at his fraternity. After review, the Washington Post determined that the person in the photos provided was never a UVA student and that he had not been back to Charlottesville, Va., in six years.
Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author of the original story, and Rolling Stone magazine did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
