Brendan O’Neill on Rape Culture and Suspending Disbelief

Now
that Rolling Stone has retracted its University of
Virginia gang-rape story—a piece of penny-dreadful writing dolled
up as journalism —the hunt is on for the culprit in this fiasco.
Who’s to blame for the appearance of what seems to be a straight-up
hoax in the pages of a once respectable magazine? “Jackie,” the
woman who claimed to have been gang-raped for hours by drunken frat
boys yet who offered not so much as a smidgen of evidence to back
up her tale? Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author of this piece of
fiction, who failed to execute the most basic of journalistic
tasks, such as finding the alleged rapists and, err, talking to
them? The editors at Rolling Stone, who gave the
green light to such thin-gruel hackery? No doubt all these people
have a lot of questions to answer. But, writes Brendan O’Neill, we
also need to cast the net wider and think about the broader climate
that could allow such a tall tale to appear in an esteemed
publication.

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