Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?

Journalists who contemplate such matters are now
wondering whether the
incredible Rolling
Stone story about the gang rape of a University of
Virginia student is just that: not credible.

Last week,
I wrote that the breathtaking story was an indictment of the
university’s feeble attempts to address the so-called campus sexual
assault crisis. For me, the lesson is clear: Rape is a serious
crime, not an academic infraction. The police—and only the
police—are equipped to deal with it. “The best way to confront
campus rape is to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves
and make violent crime the business of the normal criminal justice
system,” I wrote.

I didn’t question the incident itself, because my point stands
regardless. Making universities investigate and adjudicate
rape—something that both federal and state governments are
pushing—is the wrong approach, and what happened at UVA is just one
example of why that’s the case.

Unless, of course, it didn’t happen. Then it would be an example
of something else, entirely.

A recent
Washington Post profile of Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the
author of the Rolling Stone story, raised some
eyebrows:

Erdely spent weeks corroborating details of Jackie’s account,
including such minutiae as her work as a lifeguard. She concluded:
“I find her completely credible. It’s impossible to know for
certain what happened in that room, because I wasn’t in it. But I
certainly believe that she described an experience that was
in­cred­ibly traumatic to her.”

Some elements of the story, however, are apparently too delicate
for Erdely to talk about now. She won’t say, for example, whether
she knows the names of Jackie’s alleged attackers or whether in her
reporting she approached “Drew,” the alleged ringleader, for
comment. She is bound to silence about those details, she said, by
an agreement with Jackie, who “is very fearful of these men, in
particular Drew. . . . She now considers herself an empty shell. So
when it comes down to identifying them, she has a very hard time
with that.”

The story does take one journalistic shortcut. The alleged
assault, described in graphic detail, is presented largely without
traditional qualifiers, such as “according to Jackie” or
“allegedly.” The absence of such attribution or qualification
leaves the impression that the events in question are undisputed
facts, rather than accusations. Erdely said, however, that her
writing style makes it clear that the events are being told from
Jackie’s point of view.

I have no reason to disbelieve Erdely, and I understand why she
would choose not to disclose anyone’s identity. But she
should be able to confirm that she knows who the
attackers are, shouldn’t she? Again, we don’t have to know
who they are, but we should know that she knows—or else
the story is just one long uncorroborated accusation. And
regardless of whether or not the story is told “from Jackie’s point
of view,” it was written by Erdely, who treats its contents as
fact.

Journalist Richard Bradley read the story with a respectful but
skeptical eye and came away with
several important questions. After fretting about whether
Erdely had done her due diligence and contacted the alleged
attackers, he turns to the rape itself and finds the circumstances
almost unbelievable:

The allegation here is that, at U.Va., gang rape is a rite of
passage for young men to become fraternity “brothers.” It’s
possible. One would think that we’d have heard of this before—gang
rape as a fraternity initiation is hard to keep secret—but it’s
possible.

So then we have a scene that boggles the mind. (Again, doesn’t
mean it’s untrue; does mean we have to be critical.)

A young woman is led young woman into a “pitch-black” room. She
is shoved by a man, who falls on her; they crash through a glass
table and she lands in shards of glass. She bites his hand; he
punches her; the men laugh. (Really? A man punches a woman and
people laugh?) With the smell of marijuana (not usually known as a
violence-inducing drug) hovering over the room, he and six more men
rape her. …

Having been raped for three hours while lying in shards of glass
“digging into her back”—three hours of which Jackie remembers every
detail, despite the fact of the room’s pitch-blackness—she passes
out and wakes up at 3 AM in an empty room.

Jackie makes her way downstairs, her red dress apparently
sufficiently intact to wear; the party is still raging. Though she
is blood-stained—three hours with shards of glass “digging into her
back,” and gang-raped, including with a beer bottle— and must
surely look deeply traumatized, no one notices her. She makes her
way out a side entrance she hadn’t seen before. She calls her
friends, who tell her that she doesn’t want to be known as the girl
who cried rape and worry that if they take her to the hospital they
won’t get invited to subsequent frat parties.

Nothing in this story is impossible; it’s important to note
that. It could have happened. But to believe it
beyond a doubt, without a question mark—as virtually all the people
who’ve read the article seem to—requires a lot of leaps of faith.
It requires you to indulge your pre-existing biases. …

“Grab its motherfucking leg,” says the first rapist to one of
his “brothers.” It reminds me of Silence
of the Lambs: “It rubs the lotion on its skin…” But Silence of
the Lambs was fiction.

Bradley notes that his experience editing the works of infamous
fabulist Stephen Glass taught him to be extra critical of stories
that confirm his pre-existing biases. And he notes that the UVA
rape story seems to confirm biases that many in the media have
about colleges, fraternities, and rape.

I would like to think that I am relatively free of these biases.
I have no particular axe to grind with fraternities, although I do
think they play a regrettable and occasionally dangerous role as
alcohol distributors to the under-21 crowd, courtesy of the federal
drinking age. And I don’t believe sexual assault is as grave a
problem at college campuses as many activists have made it out to
be—if the 1-in-4 statistic were anywhere close to accurate, it
would be a baffling outlier in a sea of falling rape rates.

So when I say that I was initially inclined to believe the
story, it’s not because I wanted or needed it to be true to fit my
worldview. Rather, I assumed honesty on the part of the author and
her source—not because I’m naive, but because I didn’t think
someone would lie about such an unbelievable story. This isn’t a
case of he-said / she-said; this is an extraordinary crime that
indicts a dozen people and an entire university administration.
Assuming a proper investigation—which the police are now
conducting—confirming many of the specific details should be
relatively easy. If “Jackie” is lying, there is a good chance
she will be caught (and Erdely’s career ruined). So I believed
it.

However, some of the details do strike me as perplexing on
subsequent re-reads. One issue now being raised by skeptics is the
nature of her injuries, which sound as if they would have required
immediate medical attention. (According to the story, everybody
involved was basically rolling around in broken glass for hours.)
If the frat brothers were absolute sociopaths to do this to Jackie,
her friends were almost cartoonishly evil—casually dismissing her
battered and bloodied state and urging her not to go to the
hospital.

Universities should be divorced from the rape adjudication
process, regardless of what actually happened at UVA that night.
That said, I’ll be following any and all developments in this case,
and am eager to see this particular story either confirmed as true
or exposed as a hoax.