The Federalist ran a story entitled, “ Leftist Media Show How Not To Defend Rolling Stone UVA Rape Story”. But such considerations may have tipped Erdely toward being overly deferential.Īs the holes in her reporting were revealed, conservative backlash took root. Such a climate gave rise to a new heightened journalistic awareness around the need to be respectful and not retraumatize a source. And in 2014 – the same year the Rolling Stone piece was published – Columbia undergraduate Emma Sulkowicz received national attention for carrying her mattress around campus after the school declined to take action against her alleged rapist. In 2013, two high school football players were found guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio, following global attention to the case. In 2012 there was blanket coverage of the Jerry Sandusky trial, the assistant football coach at Penn State convicted of rape and child sexual abuse. The title IX civil rights law governing equity in college athletics had expanded to include cases of harassment and sexual assault, and the media were taking the topic more seriously. The years leading up to the publication of the Rolling Stone story had been a period of growth for sexual assault reform. Rolling Stone contributing editor Sabrina Rubin Erdely walks to federal court in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2016 for a court case stemming from her article. ![]() Jackie had called up friends on the night in question, but the account she had given them didn’t match what she’d told Rolling Stone.īut the culture wasn’t primed to look for such inconsistencies. There was no party at the fraternity in question at the time described, and no student who fit the descriptions of the alleged ringleader of the attack. Her cinematic writing style had obscured that she was telling a largely single-source story, and it would later be revealed her source had fabricated virtually the entire thing. In early interviews, Erdely declined to say what she knew about Jackie’s alleged attackers or if she’d reached out to the man at the center of the story for comment. The dialogue was sensational – it read like something from a movie. It’s easy to see why so many reacted so strongly early on.Įrdely’s writing was almost devoid of the journalistic qualifiers like “allegedly”, leaving the reader with the impression the events described were undisputed facts. Nationally there were petitions, op-ed columns, cable news conversations and tweets from politicians and celebrities, calling out fraternity culture. When it first came out, the Rolling Stone piece sparked protests at UVA, and the school announced the suspension of all college Greek life. Not that anyone would have predicted that at the time of publication. Shortly thereafter, the story of Rolling Stone’s reporting failure would eclipse the larger problem of the systematic abuse and mistreatment of women across college fraternities and beyond – even as it would help inspire a new commitment to tenacious sexual assault reporting down the road. (Her last tweet, on 30 November 2014, is a Washington Post profile of her looking at how the UVA story came to be.) ![]() Rolling Stone faced years in the courts, paying out millions to those who suffered reputational damage – losses which may have contributed to the sale of the magazine in 2017 amid other financial strains.Įrdely’s public life, as embodied by her Twitter account, still seems frozen, a perfect time capsule of the moment right before everything came down around her. The story’s trail of destruction was also significant for the people directly involved. In a way the story presaged a wave of high-profile dedication to sexual assault reporting across news organizations, as well as attacks from many – including the president and his supporters – that the media are an enemy who can’t be trusted. ![]() Now five years later, in the aftermath of #Metoo, what was its legacy really? “We have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” Rolling Stone wrote of Jackie, before ultimately retracting the story. Erdely hadn’t factchecked her central source, and Jackie’s claims were not borne out by subsequent reporting. Afterwards Jackie stumbled away from the frat house barefoot and bleeding in the middle of the night, and called several friends for support only to have them raise concerns about the “social price” of Jackie reporting her rape.īut cracks soon surfaced in the story. And that’s when Jackie knew she was going to be raped.” At one point a fraternity brother shoves a beer bottle into her as others cheer. “‘Grab its motherfucking leg,’ she heard a voice say. In the story Jackie was pushed through a low-lying glass table and pinned to the ground amid shards of glass.
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