A federal judge has ordered Jackie, the woman who told a fake gang-rape story to Rolling Stone in 2014, to hand over communications and documents that related to her hoax.
Judge Glen Conrad ordered the release of the documents on behalf of a lawsuit filed by University of Virginia Dean Nicole Eramo, who was maligned in the article and is now suing Rolling Stone for defamation. Eramo’s lawyers argued that Jackie had documents that proved Eramo did not do the things she was accused of doing in the Rolling Stone article. And even though Jackie is not being sued, the judge ordered her to hand over her communications.
Which means we might get to learn more about the accusation that captured the world’s attention for weeks back in late 2014. At that time, Rolling Stone published a 9,000-word article detailing the alleged gang rape of Jackie as part of a fraternity initiation ceremony.
After the article was published, police and reporters began investigating the accusation, and determined it did not happen. Police said they were “not able to conclude to any substantive degree” that what was described in the Rolling Stone article actually happened.
Reporting from the Washington Post’s T. Rees Shapiro discovered what appears to have actually happened to Jackie in the fall of 2012. As it looks now, Jackie was infatuated with a fellow freshman named Ryan Duffin, who didn’t reciprocate her feelings. So Jackie made up a fake student, named “Haven Monahan” and created a fake texting account to talk to Duffin to convince him that Jackie was worthy of affection.
When that didn’t work, Jackie told Duffin she was dying of some kind of terminal disease. When that also didn’t work, Jackie claimed she was going on a date with Monahan, and later called Duffin crying to tell him her date had led her to a fraternity party where several of his pledges forced her to perform oral sex on them.
Years later, Jackie would say she was gang-raped by these men and claim that when Duffin came to help her, along with two other students, he and her friends discussed the social ramifications of reporting a rape, claiming their reputations on campus would be ruined in doing so.
Once the falsehoods in Jackie’s story were exposed, Rolling Stone apologized for the article and eventually retracted it.
Now Dean Eramo is suing (as are three members of the fraternity chapter accused of facilitating the rape and the chapter itself) and her lawyers requested communications between Jackie and her friends, family, U.Va. administrators and the author of the Rolling Stone article, Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Judge Conrad said he would likely require Jackie to turn over communications with U.Va. administrators and Erdely, but was still considering whether he would compel her to hand over communications between friends and family.
Eramo’s lawyers requested the communications because they believed the documents would prove Jackie’s story had changed dramatically and that Rolling Stone should easily have seen she was not a credible source.
“We are pleased with the court’s decision,” one of Eramo’s lawyers, Libby Lock, told the Washington Post. “Jackie was the primary source for Rolling Stone’s false and defamatory article. It appears that Jackie fabricated the account of the sexual assault portrayed in Rolling Stone, and that Rolling Stone knew she was an unreliable source.”
The Post also reported that a lawyer for Rolling Stone claimed Erdely had never been told the name of “Haven Monahan.” That would be a good excuse, if it hadn’t been easy for Erdely to discover that name by following journalistic standards and actually talking to Jackie’s friends or the men she accused.
Instead, Erdely accepted Jackie’s claims that she had spoken to her friends and obtained quotes from them declining to comment for the article. And Erdely took only basic steps to discover the men who allegedly raped Jackie, but sending vague emails to the fraternity chapter asking about a sexual assault without offering any specific details.
This is a big development for Eramo’s lawsuit, and could help shed some light on just how many pains Erdely had to take to ignore Jackie’s credibility issues.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
