the libertarian site Reason, who had previously written that the movement against campus rape was a large-scale criminalization of campus sex, wondered if the whole story was a hoax.
Then The Washington Post interviewed Erdely, who declined to disclose whether she knew the names of Jackie’s attackers, or if she had contacted “Drew,” the man who had taken Jackie to Phi Psi. Erdely went on the Slate podcast Double X and skirted the same questions. Then she and her editor, Sean Woods, confirmed to the Post that they’d never talked to any of the men. “I’m satisfied that these guys exist and are real,” Woods said. Erdely told the Post that by dwelling on these details, “you’re getting sidetracked.”
Soon afterward, the Post reported that Phi Psi had not held a party on the night in question. The Washington Post found convincing evidence that “Drew” did not exist, at least not as the person Jackie had described. CNN interviewed the friends quoted in the article, who detailed major discrepancies in what Jackie told Erdely and what Jackie had told them. Late at night on December 4, Erdely received a phone call from Jackie and Jackie’s friend Alex, who had, apparently, spoken to Jackie about her story’s inconsistencies.
At 1:54 A.M. on December 5, Erdely emailed her editor and her publisher: “We’re going to have to run a retraction….Neither I, nor Alex, find Jackie credible any longer.” That day, Rolling Stone put up a statement, explaining that Jackie had requested that they not contact “Drew” or any of the men who raped her. They had honored this request, as they found her trustworthy, and took seriously her apparent fear of retaliation. But “there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.” (Later on, that last unfortunate clause, about trust, disappeared.) As I read the note, my eyes kept flicking to one sentence, about how Jackie’s friends on campus had “strongly supported” her story. Those friends had supported her emotionally; they’d offered sympathy for the experience she told them about. But they had not corroborated her story, or supported it the way a journalist should have been obligated to—the way that walls support a house.
The following March, the Charlottesville police department issued a statement saying that there was no evidence to back up Jackie’s account of her assault. Later on, the Columbia Journalism Review published an extensive report laying out exactly how Erdely and her editors erred. Jackie and Erdely were subsequently deposed in Eramo v. Rolling Stone, a lawsuit lodged by Dean Eramo, who was portrayed as discouraging Jackie from reporting the alleged assault and had been quoted, on Jackie’s word alone, worrying that no one would want to send their kids to “the rape school.” (In November 2016, a jury found both Erdely and Rolling Stone responsible for defamation. Eramo was awarded $3 million in compensatory damages.) Through CJR’s report and the court documents, a story behind the story assembles itself.
Something likely happened to Jackie on September 28, 2012. Late that night, she called her friends, distraught. She met them outside freshman dorms, with no visible injuries, and told them that something bad had happened. Soon afterward, she told her roommate that she’d been forced to perform oral sex on five men. On May 20, 2013, she reported the assault to Dean Eramo and declined to pursue action. A year later, in May 2014, she went back to Eramo to report an act of retaliation—someone had thrown a bottle at her on the Corner, the main social drag, she said—and asserted that she knew two other women who’d been gang-raped at the same frat. Eramo, by her account, encouraged Jackie to report the alleged assault to the authorities and arranged for Jackie to meet with the Charlottesville police; she said that Jackie had two such meetings in the spring of 2014.
Erdely confirmed her assignment around the same time. She was an experienced journalist in her early forties who had recently been given a star contract at Rolling Stone: she was set to receive $300,000 for filing seven feature stories over two years. She had written about sexual abuse before. Her 1996 Philadelphia article about a woman who had been raped by her gynecologist was nominated for a National Magazine Award, and at Rolling Stone, she had recently published two consequential exposés about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the US Navy. (In December 2014, Newsweek noted