Police on Monday are set to release the results of an investigation into the alleged gang rape of a University of Virginia student that was questioned after a high-profile Rolling Stone article last year.
Weeks after the article was published in November 2014, the magazine distanced itself from claims that a young woman, known as Jackie, had been raped by seven men at the university’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in 2012.
Rolling Stone’s managing editor, Will Dana, apologized for running the story – Sabrina Rubin Erdley’s A Rape on Campus – and said: “There now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account.”
After the veracity of the article was called into question, captain Gary Pleasants of Charlottesville police said the department would continue to investigate the incident. The results are to be announced at a press conference on Monday at 2pm.
Doubts about the article were spurred by the Washington Post’s interviews with Jackie’s friends, including those who are advocates for victims of sexual assault. Her friends told the Post that “they believe that something traumatic happened to her, but they also have come to doubt her account”.
Jackie defended her story as the media scrutinized her claims, which, according to the Washington Post, she had asked Erdley to remove from the article.
Its content provoked the University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan to suspend all Phi Kappa Psi activities; they were reinstated in January.
In December, Rolling Stone announced that it asked Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism to independently review the story. Rolling Stone’s publisher, Jann Wenner, told CNN Money on Sunday that the university’s review would be shared in early April.
