By
failing to make basic efforts to check the facts of its
attention-grabbing story about an alleged gang rape at a University
of Virginia fraternity house, Rolling Stone
has done a tremendous disservice to rape victims.
Now, when victims tell their stories, and when journalists or
advocates report on those stories or share them publicly in any
way, those inclined to disbelief will have a prominent example of a
shocking, horrific story that was reported as if true, and that was
initially defended by its reporter and editor even when significant
questions were raised about the strength of the reporting.
Reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s
piece, “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for
Justice at UVA,” opens with a detailed, ugly account of the
alleged gang rape of a young women named Jackie at a date function
at UVA’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in the fall of 2012. In the
story, Jackie is lured into a dark room by her date, then pushed to
the ground, through a glass table, and raped for hours by multiple
men, including one who uses a glass bottle. The story is told
without any journalistic distance. It’s presented not as what
allegedly happened, but what did.
Since the story was published, the magazine repeatedly offered
assurances that the story had been thoroughly reported and verified
before publication. “Through our extensive reporting and
fact-checking, we found Jackie to be entirely credible and
courageous and we are proud to have given her disturbing story the
attention it deserves,” a statement
sent to The Washington Post declared earlier this
week. In response to a separate set of questions from another
reporter at the Post, Erdely insisted that she found the
story credible. “I think I did my due diligence in reporting this
story; RS’s excellent editors, fact-checkers, and lawyers all
agreed,” she
said in an email. Story editor Sean Woods also
vouched for the story.
What
the follow-up investigation published by The Washington
Post this afternoon makes clear is that very basic steps to
corroborate details surrounding the central event in the story—the
alleged gang rape of a young student named Jackie—were not taken at
all. And in the course of defending the story against critics,
Erdely and Woods were cagey and arguably misrepresented what they
actually knew and had confirmed about the story’s most prominent
event.
Erdely, for example, told Slate that she had attempted
to contact the accused. On a
podcast with several of Slate’s editorial staffers,
she was asked, “Did you try and call them? Was there any
communication between you and them?” She
responded, “Yeah, I reached out to them in multiple ways,” and
then said “they were kind of hard to get in touch with because
their contact page was pretty outdated.” Erdely was asked multiple
questions about whether she contacted “the boys” and “the actual
boys” involved, but responded only that she ended up speaking to
two national figures involved in the fraternity.
It’s now clear that Erdely did not reach out to the individuals
accused of perpetrating the attack. She agreed not to as part of a
deal with Jackie. According to Rolling Stone’s own
statement today, “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.”
Indeed, it appears that not only did Erdely not contact the
accused, the follow-up in the Post indicates that she did
not know the full name of the alleged primary assailant. “Earlier
this week,” the report says, “Jackie revealed to friends for the
first time the full name of her alleged attacker, a name she had
never disclosed to anyone.” Emphasis on
anyone. Unless the Post’s follow-up report
is mistaken, then that includes Erdely and the fact-checkers at
Rolling Stone.
Yet that is not what Woods, the editor on Erdely’s story,
told The Washington Post earlier this week. “We
verified their existence,” he
said to the Post, indicating that the magazine
had checked with Jackie’s friends. “I’m satisfied that these guys
exist and are real. We knew who they were.” If Jackie had truly
never revealed the name of the attacker to anyone, then
what Woods said cannot have been true.
In fact, according to the Post, the individual Jackie
named this week isn’t even a member of Phi Kappa Psi, the
fraternity at the center of the story. The Post appears to
have been unable to definitively identify an individual who matches
every one of the details Jackie gave in the story.
Erdely also apparently failed to corroborate other basic details
from Jackie’s story. Her Rolling Stone report says
that the rape happened during fraternity rush, at a date event on
September 28, 2012, and that the primary assailant worked as a
lifeguard with Jackie on campus. Erdely did check that Jackie was a
lifeguard. But no corroboration was provided for the other details,
and an official statement
from the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity this afternoon disputes all
of them: There was no social function of any kind the week of
September 28, 2012, rush—the frat’s pledging period—takes place in
the spring rather than the fall, and no Phi Kappa Psi member
appears on the aquatic centers employee roster for 2012, the
statement says.
These details cannot have been impossible to check; in less than
a week, The Washington Post managed to check many of
them. We don’t have a complete accounting of Erdely’s
reporting methods, but what seems likely is that Erdely’s
confirmations of Jackie’s story came entirely from people who had
heard Jackie tell the same story that she told to Erdely;
essentially, the entire account originated from a single
source.
But even Jackie’s friends in the sexual assault awareness
advocacy community at UVA, people who have no interest in her story
being untrue, have now “come to doubt her account,”
according to the Post’s follow-up today.
They believe that something traumatic happened to
Jackie, but they too have tried to check her story, and found
inconsistencies and details that cannot be proven or verified.
Advocates for rape victims and sexual assault awareness
understandably tend to prioritize support, communication, and
community building; they do not have a great responsibility to
doubt, to verify, and to rigorously check all the minute details of
the accounts they hear. But journalists do. To be sure, this sort
of checking is almost always difficult, time-consuming, and
stressful. Inevitably, some mistakes will be made (I’ve certainly
made a few regretful errors of my own). There are tradeoffs between
time and accuracy. But the more sensational the story, the more
shocking and potentially consequential its allegations, the more
that effort is necessary—especially with a long-form account that
is not under the pressures and deadlines of daily journalism, and
especially when the subject and major source of the story tries to
back out, as Jackie apparently did.
The Post’s damning follow-up story today makes it clear
that, despite its claims to diligence, Erdely and Rolling
Stone simply didn’t make much effort at all. And by failing so
thoroughly to corroborate so many essential details of Jackie’s
account—and by insisting, even after reasonable questions were
raised, that the story had been verified to be true, they have made
life much harder for the same victims of assault and advocates of
awareness that a story like this ought to
help.
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