Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana took a second swing late Friday at apologizing to his readers for publishing what appears to be a deeply flawed story on campus sexual assault, titled “A Rape on Campus.”
“The fact that there is a story that appears in Rolling Stone in which I don’t have complete confidence is deeply unsettling to me,” Dana said in a series of tweets on the topic. “We made a judgment — the kind of [judgment] reporters and editors make every day. And in this case, our [judgment] was wrong.”
The original report, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, alleged that a group of male students at a University of Virginia fraternity had gang-raped a student, “Jackie,” at a party and that school officials worked to hide the crime.
However, after close scrutiny from news media outlets, including the Federalist and the Washington Post, the story started to come apart, its many inconsistencies immediately noticeable.
“We should have either not made this agreement with Jackie,” Dana tweeted late Friday, “or worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story. That failure is on us — not on her.”
Dana’s tweets are likely a response to the harsh criticism brought on by his original note to readers.
When Rolling Stone initially distanced itself from the campus rape report early Friday afternoon, Dana wrote: “Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her.”
“In the months Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made Erdely, or Rolling Stone’s editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie’s credibility. Her friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported Jackie’s account,” the note said.
Dana claims Rolling Stone contacted the local branch and the national leadership of the UVA fraternity where “Jackie” was supposedly sexually assaulted.
“They responded that they couldn’t confirm or deny her story but had concerns about the evidence. In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” Dana wrote.
“We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story,” he added.
This original note was seen by many as being insufficiently penitential. Further, more than a few critics noted on social media that it appeared that Rolling Stone had placed all the blame for the article’s existence on “Jackie,” rather than on Erdely and the magazine’s editors.
