of raping an unconscious woman. The struggle to adjudicate campus rape was nationwide news. The Rolling Stone article went viral within an hour of being posted, and would end up being the most-read non-celebrity story in the magazine’s history. I had changed, too. I was working at Jezebel. I felt almost disembodied by dread, in my office chair, thinking about how many women would read the piece and feel the need to compare their stories to Jackie’s—to play down the harm they’d faced, to preface their own experiences, as we already do, with “It wasn’t that bad.”
At UVA and within the school’s network, the story was explosive. Reactions were mostly supportive, but they were mixed. My Facebook feed flooded with messages from UVA alumni expressing outrage and recognition; for my boyfriend, a former UVA fraternity member, a number of his college acquaintances expressed a stiff, suspicious distance or disbelief. In Charlottesville, the police department opened an investigation into Jackie’s assault. Phi Psi was vandalized. There was an emergency Board of Visitors meeting. Bright Post-it notes and posters—“Expel Rapists,” “Harm to One Is Harm to All”—covered the brick walls and buildings surrounding the Lawn. Protesters walked Rugby Road with signs that said “Burn Down the Frats.” (“Nobody wants to rape you!” a few people yelled back.) The Cavalier Daily, the campus newspaper, overflowed with responses from both students and alumni. Letter writers acknowledged the insidious leeway given to the Greek system on campus; they criticized the school’s history of suppressing victims and accusers; they questioned Rolling Stone’s intentions and Erdely’s cherry-picked account of UVA life. “It feels immensely frustrating to be singled out, when inaction on rape and sexual assault cases persists across the country,” one student wrote. The newspaper’s managing board ran an op-ed acknowledging the mood of “anger, disgust, and despair.”
A couple of days after the piece went up, Emma, my editor in chief, asked me if the reporting seemed right. Some details were off, I said. But people who knew the school recognized what Erdely was talking about. She was right that UVA had a systemic problem—that the school believed in itself as an idyll, a place of genteel beauty and good citizenship, and that this belief was so seductive, so half true, and so widely propagated, that the social reckonings that had come elsewhere had been suppressed and delayed.
At this point, I had never reported a story or edited a reported story—Emma had brought me to Jezebel from my first job in media, at The Hairpin, a small blog where I mostly edited and wrote essays. I didn’t understand that it did matter that the details were off: that the piece’s epigraph came from what Erdely called a “traditional University of Virginia fight song,” which I had never heard, and which she said was in the standing rotation of an a cappella group called the Virginia Gentlemen, whose repertoire I knew from top to bottom because they were the brother group to my own. If I’d been more experienced, I would have known that it was actually suspicious, not just a matter of writerly flourish, that she described Phi Psi as “upper tier.” (Phi Psi was, at best, somewhere in the nondescript middle of UVA’s rigid fraternity caste system—a hard social fact that would have been easy to check.) I would’ve noticed the absence of disclosures and parentheticals telling the reader how the people in the story—the seven men who raped Jackie, or the friend who said, as if reading aloud from a bad screenplay, “Why didn’t you have fun with it? A bunch of hot Phi Psi guys?”—responded to the allegations. I would have noticed that there was no way, within the story, to tell exactly how Erdely knew what she knew.
At twenty-five, I was closer to my time at UVA than I was to the age I am now—closer to the idea of being the subject than the idea of being the writer. I didn’t know how to read the story. But a lot of other people did.
* * *
—
It didn’t take long for journalists to start pulling apart “A Rape on Campus.” At first, it seemed possible that the doubters had some ideological motivations. Richard Bradley, who’d previously edited the fabulist Stephen Glass, wrote that the lede “boggled the mind,” and required a reader to “indulge your pre-existing biases” against “fraternities, against men, against the South,” as well as “about the prevalence—indeed, the existence—of rape culture.” Robby Soave, a blogger at