During a meeting held by the University of Virginia Board of Visitors, Rector George K. Martin called Rolling Stone’s treatment of the university “drive-by journalism” and denounced the damage done to the university’ reputation.
Martin opened the meeting by expressing the board’s “collective sorrow” for the students, faculty, fraternities and others on campus who had been “wrongly maligned and traumatized” by Rolling Stone’s now disputed article alleging a gang rape and massive cover up by U.Va.
“Like a neighborhood thrown into chaos by drive-by violence, our tightly knit community has experienced the full fury of drive-by journalism in the 21st century,” Martin said.
He also acknowledged Jackie, the woman at the center of the Rolling Stone article, by saying the board’s “thoughts and prayers” were with her. Jackie had told Rolling Stone author Sabrina Rubin Erdely that she had been gang-raped by seven men as part of a fraternity initiation when she was a freshman. The story has since unraveled.
Jackie’s story had changed since she first told her friends of the incident — first that she was forced to perform oral sex on five men, then that the five men gang-raped her, and finally, as reported by Rolling Stone, that seven men gang-raped her while two more egged them on.
Her friends, depicted in the Rolling Stone article as sociopaths more concerned with social status than an allegedly bloody and bruised friend, disputed Jackie’s tale. It turned out she made up a story about having a date with an upperclassmen potentially to make one of her friends jealous.
Jackie has not made public statements since the story began to fall apart.
