was naïve.” In her own deposition, Erdely says, “I mean, she was aware it was entirely up to her whether she was going to participate.”
What should have been reportorial red flags, too, were passed over as normal parts of the rape recovery process. When Erdely asked to speak to the two women Jackie knew who’d also been gang-raped at Phi Psi, Jackie insisted on serving as a go-between. (She most likely fabricated the texts attributed to them that she eventually showed Erdely.) Erdely believed, reasonably enough, that Jackie only hoped to spare them further trauma. She wasn’t too concerned that Jackie’s story had changed. “I do know that [rape victims’] stories do sometimes morph over time as they come to terms with what happened to them,” she says in her deposition. In this, Erdely replicated the mechanism of self-delusion that’s embedded at UVA: she acted as if the story she believed in, that she thought she was working for, was already real.
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I have sympathy for the experience of being fooled by what you want to believe in. Good intentions often produce blind spots. It’s hard to blame Erdely for believing that Jackie’s memory had initially been obscured by trauma. It’s easy to understand how a college administrator might believe in her institution’s moral progress despite evidence to the contrary, or how a reporter would believe that stories tend to shift in the direction of truth. This is, after all, what happened with Liz Seccuro, the woman who was gang-raped at Phi Psi in 1984. When her rapist, William Beebe, wrote her an apology twenty-one years later, she asked him—having been haunted by an unplaceable feeling—if he was the only one who raped her. Yes, he said. And also, he didn’t remember the night the same way she did. In his original letter, he hadn’t used the word “rape.” He had written, “Dear Elizabeth: In October 1984 I harmed you. I can scarcely begin to understand the degree to which, in your eyes, my behavior has affected you in its wake.” In the follow-up letter to Seccuro, he wrote, “There was no fight and it was all over in short order.”
“I awoke wrapped naked in a bloody sheet,” Seccuro wrote back.
“I am sincere in my recollection,” Beebe replied, “though it may not be the whole truth of what happened to you that night.”
In her memoir Crash into Me, Seccuro writes that she had been a virgin when she was assaulted, and that her dean told her, “Well, you know these parties can get out of control….Are you sure you didn’t have sex with this young man and now you regret it? These things happen.” Her story was squashed by the school, the police department, and the era she lived in—there were no rape kits at the UVA hospital when she dragged herself there after her assault. Out of options, Seccuro eventually went to a reporter and told her story under a pseudonym: a man had raped her at a frat one night, she said.
Two decades later, after she had Beebe’s apology letter, the Charlottesville police began reinvestigating and interviewing witnesses. An officer called her one day. “Liz, you were right,” he said. “Beebe was one of three. Three men raped you that night and Beebe was the last. I am so sorry to be the one to tell you this.” One of the men “had allegedly been seen digitally raping me,” Seccuro writes, “with four men witnessing and cheering as he hiked my sweater above my neck and my skirt above my waist.” Another one had left her bleeding and unconscious, and walked to the frat’s communal showers, “naked except for a towel, high-fiving friends along the way.” Beebe had been seen dragging Seccuro into his room while she was screaming; afterward, he had dragged her body into the bathroom and tried to clean her up. His story had become less true with time, and monstrously so: he had come to believe that there was “no fight,” that there was plenty of ambiguity, that it was just a confusing, ungentlemanly night.
It seems possible that Beebe, honing the trajectory of his life in recovery, genuinely convinced himself of this over the ensuing decades, and that he contacted Seccuro in part to validate his altered narrative. Conversely, I’ve always thought that Jackie must have believed, at some deep and bizarre level, in the truth of her imagined story. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been able to consistently fool