Rolling stone issued a statement today regarding its widely publicized story, A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA.
To Our Readers:
Last month, Rolling Stone published a story titled "A Rape on Campus" by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie at a University of Virginia fraternity house; the university's failure to respond to this alleged assault – and the school's troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual assaults. The story generated worldwide headlines and much soul-searching at UVA. University president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation and also to examine the way the school responds to sexual assault allegations.
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. She had spoken of the assault in campus forums. We reached out to both the local branch and the national leadership of the fraternity where Jackie said she was attacked. 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. 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.
Will Dana
Managing Editor
(All emphasis mine.)
Three things:
First, Rolling Stone, and Will Dana in particular, have a journalistic responsibility to further explain their statement. As it is written, it leads one to believe that they no longer stand by the report, even though they don't explicitly make that claim. The way this has been presented by them to the public is reckless, lazy, an irresponsible. In my view, they must either issue a full retraction or explain to their readers exactly what "new information" has made them lose trust in Jackie.
In addition, "[i]n the months Erdely spent reporting the story" there certainly had to have been enough time to for the due diligence that other news outlets have since shown. The "no reason to doubt" doesn't past muster for a magazine that many of us trust and respect. Given the nature of this story, RS had to have recognized the impact it would have. That they failed to protect themselves from doubts about its accuracy is extremely disappointing.
Second, the reason for my emphasis in the statement is this: RS concedes that UVA has a "troubling history of indifference" in other sexual assault cases. Let's not let that be forgotten, regardless of this particular story.
And, finally, I want to look critically at the so-called discrepancies in this case. I do not want to demonize either Jackie or the alleged attackers. I only want to focus on Jackie's allegations as told to RS, and the subsequent reporting on her story that seems to contradict her.
(Note for sensitive readers: details of the alleged assault are below the fold.)
Let's start with the original story, as reported by RS.
A) Jackie attended a Phi Kappa Psi party with "Drew," a man she met "while working lifeguard shifts together at the university pool." Drew, whom RS claims was a Phi Kappa Psi brother, invited her upstairs.
B) Once upstairs, Drew took her into a bedroom and shut the door behind them. She was then knocked over by another man, sending them crashing into a glass coffee table. One man was on top of her, spreading her thighs, another kneeling on her hair pinning down her arms. A hand (unknown if it belonged to one of the first two men or another), covered her mouth and she bit it, and the (presumably same) man punched her in the face.
C) Over the course of three hours, she was raped by seven men while Drew and another man "gave instruction and encouragement."
D) The last man that raped her (whom she recognized from her anthropology discussion group) used a foreign object (a beer bottle). At this point, Jackie lost consciousness.
E) At around 3 a.m., Jackie came to, left the house, and called her three best friends ("Randall," "Andy," and "Cindy"). Randall said they had to get to her a hospital, but Andy and Cindy talked him out of it due to fears that her reputation would be ruined and that Andy and Randall would jeopardize their own chances to rush fraternities.
Those are the key points of the night in question, according the RS story.
Now, here are the key points of WaPo's reporting on the doubts about the case.
A) Phi Kappa Psi released a statement denying the allegations stating that through internal fact-checking, they found that:
1) The 2012 roster of employees at the fitness where Jackie and Drew met had no Phi Kappa Psi members.
2) "The Chapter did not have a date function or a social event during the weekend of September 28th, 2012."
3) The chapter's pledging and initiation periods take place solely in the Spring semester, not the Fall, and that "no ritualized sexual assault is part of our pledging or initiation process."
B) A group of Jackie's close friends believe something happened to her but have grown to doubt her account due to details in her story changing. For example:
A name of an alleged attacker that Jackie provided to them for the first time this week, for example, turned out to be similar to the name of a student who belongs to a different fraternity, and no one by that name has been a member of Phi Kappa Psi.
Reached by phone, that man, a U-Va. graduate, said Friday that he did work at the Aquatic Fitness Center and was familiar with Jackie’s name. He said, however, that he had never met Jackie in person and had never taken her on a date. He also said that he was not a member of Phi Kappa Psi.
C) One of Jackie's advocates, Renda, states that when Jackie first told her of the story, there were five attackers. Renda later learned months later that it was now being reported as seven attackers. Renda is the person who put Jackie in contact with Sabrina Rubin Erdely.
D) Jackie became overwhelmed with the interviews and asked Erdely to take her out of the story. Erdely refused and:
Jackie said she finally relented and agreed to participate on the condition that she be able to fact-check her parts in the story, which she said Erdely accepted. Erdely said in an e-mail message that she was not immediately available to comment Friday morning.
“I didn’t want the world to read about the worst three hours of my life, the thing I have nightmares about every night,” Jackie said.
One last note from Wapo's story:
Jackie said early in the week that she felt manipulated by Erdely, the Rolling Stone reporter, saying that she “felt completely out of control over my own story.” In an in-person interview Thursday, Jackie said that Rolling Stone account of her attack was truthful but also acknowledged that some details in the article might not be accurate.
Jackie contradicted an earlier interview, saying on Thursday that she did not know if her main attacker actually was a member of Phi Kappa Psi.
“He never said he was in Phi Psi,” she said, while noting that she was positive that the date function and attack occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on Sept. 28, 2012. “I know it was Phi Psi because a year afterward my friend pointed out the building to me and said that’s where it happened.”
So what do we make of this?
First, and I can't emphasize the enough, Rolling Stone was incredibly irresponsible to publish this story without doing more fact-checking. Slate Magazine interviewed Erdely and "asked her in several different ways" if she ever contacted the alleged attackers or knew anything about them.
And yet, based on Erdely’s answers, we couldn’t tell how hard she’d tried.
I reached out to them in multiple ways. They were kind of hard to get in touch with because [the fraternity’s] contact page was pretty outdated. But I wound up speaking … I wound up getting in touch with their local president, who sent me an email, and then I talked with their sort of, their national guy, who’s kind of their national crisis manager. They were both helpful in their own way, I guess.
...
Erdely’s editor at Rolling Stone, Sean Woods, has confirmed that the writer did not talk to Drew or any of the men that Jackie alleges participated in the rape. “We did not talk to them. We could not reach them,” he told the Washington Post, although he added that the magazine verified their existence by talking to Jackie’s friends. “I’m satisfied that these guys exist and are real,” he said. “We knew who they were.”
Second, the main source for the doubt in WaPo's report is the fraternity itself, which, as you'll note above, did "
internal fact-checking" regarding the allegations. This is as troubling to me as the doubt itself.
Third, let's review, again, the questions that have been raised by others (presumably) not connected to the fraternity:
-Jackie told Renda that there were five attackers, then later said there were seven.
-Jackie provided the name of an "alleged attacker" but he was not a member of Phi Kappa Psi.
These two facts alone may raise enough doubt in the eyes of others, but I am still troubled by this story.
My general impression is that Erdely wanted to do a story about rape on campus, a story that is incredibly worthy and important, and used Jackie as the face of it. This is problematic to me for a couple of reasons.
Our culture dictates that the woman who has been raped must be 100% accurate all the time. That isn't necessarily possible, since victims of emotional, mental, or physical trauma often suffer from memory loss as a coping mechanism. Rape is all three of those traumas.
Our culture also finds other ways to discredit victims of sexual assault. From the petty (what the victim was wearing, where s/he was), to the cruel (she was a slut).
I still believe that something happened to Jackie that night, regardless of how accurate the RS reporting was. I think she credible given the circumstances.
That being said, when Rolling Stone turned this story into the story of one woman, rather than a collective voice of campus rape victims, it should have known damn well that the woman herself would be discredited, leaving the larger story- the much-needed spotlight on campus rape- to be forgotten.
Rolling Stone owes more apologies that they've given.
Only they can redeem themselves at this point.