April 07--The assignment was to write about what's come to be called a "rape culture" on college campuses.
The "overarching point of the article," the reporter would later insist, was not one woman's horrific account of a fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia but "the culture that greeted her and so many other UVA women I interviewed who came forward with allegations, only to be met with indifference."
To tell that story, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a reporter for Rolling Stone, set out to find a single, emblematic rape case. That was her first mistake. Of many.
On Sunday, the Columbia Journalism Review published its examination of that story, "A Rape on Campus." Within days after Rolling Stone published the story in November, other news organizations had blown holes in the victim's account.
CJR's postmortem, done at the magazine's request, prompted Rolling Stone to retract the story.
You can read the entire review here, but briefly:
Erdely met the student -- identified only as "Jackie" -- through a UVA staffer who deals with sexual assault issues. After hearing Jackie's story for the first time, Erdely hung up the phone "sickened and shaken," according to the CJR report. She was also "a bit incredulous." But she managed to get over it.
In time, Erdely and her editors came to believe in Jackie's story enough to suspend all sorts of journalistic rules in order to publish it. At least three editors, a fact-checker and a lawyer saw the story before it was printed.
Many red flags were raised, but in the end, Rolling Stone went ahead with the story without interviewing or even confirming the existence of the fraternity member who supposedly supervised the gang rape during Jackie's freshman year.
The story included secondhand quotes, provided by Jackie, of three friends who met with her after the alleged assault. They were presented to readers as if they had been confirmed. In fact, Rolling Stone never tracked down the friends -- though The Washington Post was able to find them easily enough.
Erdely made only a cursory effort to get a response from the fraternity.
"Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim," explains Sean Woods, Erdely's direct editor.
The gatekeepers at Rolling Stone didn't want to further traumatize Jackie, they say. They also believed her, describing her to CJR as confident, secure and consistent.
But they also acknowledged that she was "hard to pin down," that she sometimes stopped returning calls or texts for weeks, and that she agreed to facilitate interviews and didn't follow through. When Jackie refused to name her alleged attacker, saying she was afraid of him, Erdely decided not to "go around" her for fear that she'd stop cooperating.
They were afraid that if they pushed too hard, they'd lose the story. Which is exactly what should have happened.
As Erdely later reflected to CJR: "Maybe the discussion should not have been so much about how to accommodate (Jackie) but should have been about whether she would be in this story at all."
Which brings us back to rape culture.
Rolling Stone's story was not about rape culture. It was a very one-sided account of one sensational, alleged rape.
Campus sexual assault is a serious problem that colleges, under pressure from the federal government, are struggling to address. This newspaper has reported extensively on schools' failure to promptly and thoroughly investigate rape allegations. Those cases are better handled by police and prosecutors.
A valuable examination of rape culture would have focused on less dramatic, more nuanced examples. Erdely apparently had many of those in her notebook. But Rolling Stone chose to go with the story it didn't really have.
