![]() ![]() Earlier that summer, Renda had even appeared before a Senate committee and had made reference to Jackie’s allegations during her testimony – another apparent sign of the case’s seriousness. Erdely said later that when she first encountered Jackie, she felt the student “had this stamp of credibility” because a university employee had connected them. Renda put the writer in touch with a rising junior at UVA who would soon be known to millions of Rolling Stone readers as “Jackie,” a shortened version of her true first name. Renda added, “And obviously, maybe her memory of it isn’t perfect.”Įrdely’s notes set down her reply: “I tell her that it’s totally plausible.” “One girl I worked with closely alleged she was gang-raped in the fall, before rush, and the men who perpetrated it were young guys who were not yet members of the fraternity, and she remembers one of them saying to another … ‘C’mon man, don’t you want to be a brother?'” Renda told Erdely that many assaults take place during parties where “the goal is to get everyone blackout drunk.” She continued, “There may be a much darker side of this” at some fraternities. Erdely said she was searching for a single, emblematic college rape case that would show “what it’s like to be on campus now … where not only is rape so prevalent but also that there’s this pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture,” according to Erdely’s notes of the conversation. Last July 8, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a writer for Rolling Stone, telephoned Emily Renda, a rape survivor working on sexual assault issues as a staff member at the University of Virginia. (A condensed version of the report will appear in the next issue of the magazine, out April 8th.) They would receive no payment, and we promised to publish their report in full. We agreed that we would cooperate fully, that he and his team could take as much time as they needed and write whatever they wanted. We reached out to Steve Coll, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter himself, who accepted our offer. Then, when The Washington Post uncovered details suggesting that the assault could not have taken place the way we described it, the truth of the story became a subject of national controversy.Īs we asked ourselves how we could have gotten the story wrong, we decided the only responsible and credible thing to do was to ask someone from outside the magazine to investigate any lapses in reporting, editing and fact-checking behind the story. ![]() A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: Last November, we published a story, ‘A Rape on Campus’, that centered around a University of Virginia student’s horrifying account of her alleged gang rape at a campus fraternity house. Within days, commentators started to question the veracity of our narrative. ![]()
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