By Ashe Schow
Sunday, April 05, 2015
Rolling Stone has published the Columbia Journalism
Review's autopsy of the magazine's now officially retracted article about an
alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia.
In the original story, a woman named "Jackie"
claimed she had been gang raped as part of a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity
initiation. Her story quickly fell apart as the friends she talked to after the
alleged incident disputed her account, and her primary attacker turned out to
be a fictitious person.
Now that the review has been published, here are 16
things we have learned:
1. What happened to the bloodied red dress?
One of the biggest questions remaining from the original
RS report was whatever happened to the red dress Jackie wore the night of the
alleged attack. The dress was supposed to be covered in blood and ripped due to
the broken glass Jackie was allegedly raped upon, yet we never knew what
happened to such a damning piece of evidence.
Jackie told Erdely that her mother had thrown it away.
2. Erdely asked for corroborating evidence — but never
got it
"Erdely asked Jackie for introductions to friends
and family. She asked for text messages to confirm parts of Jackie's account,
for records from Jackie's employment at the aquatic center and for health
records. She even asked to examine the bloodstained red dress Jackie said she had
worn on the night she said she was attacked," Columbia Journalism Review
reported.
Jackie confirmed her employment at the aquatic center and
provided the name of her roommate, whom she had told about the gang rape late
in 2012. Other than that, Jackie was dodgy. She claimed the dress had been
thrown away but gave her mother's number to Erdely. The mother never responded
to Erdely's calls or messages.
3. The dean who spoke to Jackie says her portrayal was
inaccurate
Dean Nicole Eramo, who was portrayed in the RS article as
being indifferent to Jackie's claim, wrote to the Columbia Journalism Review to
tell them she was portrayed inaccurately. Eramo had not responded to any other
requests from comments since the story was first published.
In an email sent through her lawyer to CJR, Eramo wrote
that RS "made numerous false statements and misleading implications about
the manner in which I conducted my job as the chair of University of Virginia's
Sexual Misconduct Board, including allegations about specific student
cases." She added: "Although the law prohibits me from commenting on
those specific cases in order to protect the privacy of the students who I
counsel, I can say that the account of my actions in Rolling Stone is false and
misleading."
Eramo also wrote that the Rolling Stone article
"trivializes the complexities of providing trauma-informed support to
survivors and the real difficulties inherent in balancing respect for the
wishes of survivors while also providing for the safety of our communities."
Eramo also wrote that, contrary to the original RS
article, she had never called U.Va. "the rape school" or said that
parents wouldn't "want to send their daughter" there.
4. Taking Jackie at her word was not the only problem
with the story
Columbia Journalism Review contends that Rolling Stone's
trust in Jackie "cannot adequately account for what went wrong"
because the magazine failed to "pursue important reporting paths even when
Jackie had made no request that they refrain," as she did when asked to
give details about her alleged rapists.
For example:
"Jackie told the writer that one of her rapists had been part of a small discussion group in her anthropology class. Erdely might have tried to verify independently that there was such a group and to identify the young man Jackie described. She might have examined Phi Kappa Psi's social media for members she could interview and for evidence of a party on the night Jackie described. Erdely might have looked for students who worked at the aquatic center and sought out clues about the lifeguard Jackie had described. Any one of these and other similar reporting paths might have led to discoveries that would have caused Rolling Stone to reconsider its plans."
But CJR pointed to three specific failures by Erdely and
RS: Corroborating the friends' account of what happened, following up with the
fraternity where the rape allegedly occurred and trying to locate the man who
allegedly orchestrated the gang rape.
5. "Randall's" quote in the article came from
Jackie
Erdely barely tried to contact Jackie's three friends who
helped her the night of her alleged rape. She reached out to Jackie's friend
and fellow activist Alex Pinkleton for help in identifying them but never
followed up. Erdely asked Jackie to help her connect with Ryan Duffin (Randall
in the article), one of the three friends portrayed poorly in the article.
Erdely made it seem like she had reached out to Duffin, providing a quote in
her original article about how he currently belonged to a fraternity and was
loyal to them.
But that quote came from Jackie herself. When Erdely met
with Jackie in person and asked about contacting Duffin, Jackie claimed to have
spoken with him. Duffin said, according to Jackie: "No! … I'm in a
fraternity here, Jackie, I don't want the Greek system to go down, and it seems
like that's what you want to happen. … I don't want to be a part of whatever
little s--- show you're running."
Duffin told the Review that Jackie had never contacted
him about the RS article and that he hadn't even spoken to her since the
previous April.
6. Erdely was too "busy" to locate the three
friends
Erdely "grew busy reporting on UVA's response to
Jackie's case," according to a paraphrase from the Review's report. Erdely
apparently didn't think it was that important to corroborate Jackie's story
with three people who were there shortly after the event took place.
Erdely told her editor, Sean Woods, that she had done
everything she could to find the friends. At that point he let it go.
7. Erdely gave the fraternity no details on which to
comment
Erdely reached out to Phi Psi to get a comment for her
article. She sent a two-sentence email: "I've become aware of allegations
of gang rape that have been made against the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi. Can
you comment on those allegations?"
As CJR noted, Erdely did not provide Jackie's details of
the alleged gang-rape or the night it took place. She did not tell them about
the "date function" that supposedly took place that night and that
pledges were there. She did not ask about any members who worked as a life
guard at the aquatic center.
8. Jackie never made her involvement conditional on not
contacting her alleged rapist
"Jackie made no demand that Rolling Stone not try to
identify the lifeguard independently. She even suggested a way to do so – by
checking the fraternity's roster," CJR reported. "Nor did she
condition her participation in the story on Erdely agreeing not to try to
identify the lifeguard."
9. Jackie may have lied about wanting to withdraw from
the story
Jackie told the Washington Post that she asked Erdely to
remove her from the article. Erdely told the CJR that no such conversation
happened, and no evidence for it appears in the notes turned over by RS.
10. Based on what Jackie initially told U.Va., the school
couldn't have done anything
Jackie's initial account to Eramo — eight months after
the alleged rape — was similar to what she told her friends the night of Sept.
28: that she was forced to perform oral sex on several men at a fraternity
party. At the time she mentioned nothing about hazing.
Jackie also refused to name the fraternity house where
the alleged incident took place or the names of anyone involved. Without any
information and Jackie refusing to file a report, there was nothing Eramo could
do other than tell Jackie what her options were going forward.
11. Some sexual assault activists disagreed with Erdely's
portrayal of U.Va.
Alex Pinkleton told CJR that Erdely's account of how
U.Va. responded to sexual assault accusations was wrong. "The university's
response is not, 'We don't care.'" Pinkleton said. "When I reported
my own assault, they immediately started giving me resources."
Sara Surface, another activist, said that "The
administrators and staff that work directly with and advocate for survivors are
not more interested in the college's reputation over the well-being of its
students."
12. Rolling Stone editors agreed to stop looking for the
alleged rapist when Jackie stopped responding
Rolling Stone editor Sean Woods told CJR he repeatedly
asked Erdely to find the man Jackie claimed had raped her. Rolling Stone's
Managing Editor Will Dana said he didn't know that Erdely hadn't found him.
"But when Jackie became unresponsive to Erdely in
late October, Woods and Dana gave in," CJR reported. "They authorized
Erdely to tell Jackie they would stop trying to find the lifeguard. Woods
resolved the issue as he had done earlier with the three friends: by using a
pseudonym in the story."
13. Editors cut important disclosures from the final article
Erdely had added a disclosure that she did not know the
alleged rapists name and hadn't contacted him, but Woods removed the passage.
Woods also allowed the quote from Ryan Duffin — "Randall in the
article" — to be included without making it clear that the quote was
provided by Jackie and that RS had never reached out to Duffin or the other two
friends.
14. Rolling Stone would have been fine with burying
doubts "deep in the story."
Dana said that if they had been alerted to doubts about
the veracity of Jackie's story, the magazine could have included them "in
a paragraph deep in the story."
So even if he had been aware of the discrepancies in
Jackie's story, he still would have run with it, hoping no one would notice if
he buried the information toward the end of the story.
15. Rolling Stone doesn't think it needs to change
Dana told CJR that he doesn't think Rolling Stone needs
"to overhaul our process" or "institute a lot of new ways of
doing things." Instead, he doesn't believe the magazine's policies were
lacking, just that "decisions were made around those [policies] because of
the subject matter."
16. No one is getting fired
Not Erdely, not her editors, not the fact checkers.
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