that Erdely’s reporting on the Catholic Church story was also remarkably flawed.) Her intent, with this new Rolling Stone piece, was to follow a single assault case on a “particularly fraught campus,” she wrote, in a memo—she wasn’t sure which one. But she talked to rape survivors at a few Ivy League schools and was unsatisfied with the stories that turned up. She came down to Charlottesville in the summer of 2014, and heard about Jackie from a former student named Emily, who had met Jackie in a sexual assault prevention group. “Obviously,” Emily told Erdely, “her memory may not be perfect.” A few days later, Erdely sat down with Jackie, whose story had changed: on September 28, she told the reporter, she had met her friends outside Phi Psi, bloody and bruised and shoeless, after escaping an hours-long gang rape at the hands of seven men. She declined to provide the names of those friends, or the name of the boy who took her to the frat.
The two of them kept talking. In September, Jackie and her boyfriend had dinner with Erdely, who asked about the scars from the shattered glass. “I haven’t really seen any marks on your back,” the boyfriend said. Jackie told Erdely, “When you’ve come from a background where you’re always told that you’re worthless…it’s like you’re an easy target…like I was easily manipulated because I didn’t have the self-esteem to—I don’t know.” A week later, Jackie texted a friend, “I forgot to tell you that Sabrina [Erdely] is really nice, but you have to choose your words really carefully because she’s taken some things I’ve said out of context and skewed them a little.” She started to get cold feet. In October, one of her friends texted Erdely, “I’m talking to Jackie right now, and she’s telling me she 100 percent doesn’t want her name in the article.” Erdely replied that she was “up for discussing whether she wants to discuss changing her name, et cetera, but I need to be clear about this. There’s no pulling the plug at this point.” Erdely emailed her photo editor, writing, “Yeah, unfortunately, I would say Jackie is not in great mental shape right now and won’t be for a long while.” At the end of October, Jackie stopped answering Erdely’s calls and texts, but Erdely coaxed her back into the process for fact-checking. In final edits, two all-important disclosures—that Jackie had refused to provide the name of the boy who had taken her to the frat party and that the magazine had not contacted her friends to corroborate her story—disappeared.
The piece came out in mid-November. Erdely gave her suspiciously vague interviews to Double X and The Washington Post. The day before Thanksgiving, Erdely called Jackie and pressed her for the name of the boy who brought her to Phi Psi, and Jackie said that she wasn’t sure how to spell it. In public, the story started to fall apart. In early December, Jackie texted a friend, “I’m so scared. I never even wanted to do this article when it became about my rape. I tried to back out of it, but she said I couldn’t.” A few days later, she and Erdely had the late-night phone call that triggered Rolling Stone’s note from the editor. A week or so after that, Erdely emailed Jackie, finally asking her to explain her changing story. She also asked for the name of someone who had ever seen the scars on Jackie’s back.
Under oath, in her deposition testimony, Jackie doesn’t admit outright to lying. She is an unreliable narrator, and to some degree, so is Erdely. (And, given that here I’m choosing to see certain things and discard others, as a person does anytime she tells a story, so am I.) But what strikes me in reading the two women’s testimonies is the way that the structure of the original violation, the language of force and betrayal, filters into the way that they interacted with each other—in the same way that Title IX procedures often end up replicating the patterns of invasion they set out to address and negate. Jackie remembers Erdely telling her “that there was no way…to pull out at that point.” She tells the court, “I was under the impression that [the details of my assault] were not going to be published….I wasn’t—you know, I was 20 years old. I had no idea that there was an off the record or on the record. I—I