"A Rape on Campus" is a retracted, defamatory Rolling Stone magazine article written by Sabrina Erdely and originally published on November 19, 2014, that describes a purported group sexual assault at the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville, Virginia. Rolling Stone retracted the story in its entirety on April 5, 2015. The article claimed that a UVA student, identified only as "Jackie", had been taken to a party hosted by UVA's Phi Kappa Psi fraternity by a fellow student and led to a bedroom to be gang raped by several fraternity members as part of a fraternity initiation ritual.
Jackie's account generated much media attention, and UVA president Teresa A. Sullivan suspended all fraternities. After other journalists investigated the article's claims and found significant discrepancies, Rolling Stone issued multiple apologies for the story. It has since been reported that Jackie may have invented portions of the story in an unsuccessful attempt to win the affections of a fellow student in whom she had a romantic interest. In a deposition given in 2016, Jackie stated that she believed her story at the time.
On January 12, 2015, Charlottesville Police officials told UVA that an investigation had failed to find any evidence confirming the events in the Rolling Stone article. Sullivan acknowledged that the story was discredited. Charlottesville Police officially suspended their four-month investigation on March 23, 2015, based on lack of credible evidence. The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism audited the editorial processes that culminated in the article being published. On April 5, 2015, Rolling Stone retracted the article and published the independent report on the publication's history.
UVA associate dean Nicole Eramo, the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, and several fraternity members later filed lawsuits against Erdely and Rolling Stone. Eramo was awarded $3 million by a jury who concluded that Rolling Stone defamed her with actual malice, and Rolling Stone settled the lawsuit with the fraternity for $1.65 million.
Story
On November 19, 2014, Rolling Stone published the now retracted article by Sabrina Erdely titled "A Rape on Campus" about an alleged gang rape of a University of Virginia (UVA) student, Jackie. The UVA student, identified only as "Jackie" by the magazine, had been taken to a party by a fellow student, hosted at UVA's Phi Kappa Psi fraternity during 2012. At the chapter house party, Jackie alleged in the article, her date led her to a bedroom where she was gang raped by several fraternity members as part of their initiation ritual. For anonymity, Erdely only used Jackie's first name and gave pseudonyms to other students discussed in the story.
According to Los Angeles Times columnist Jonah Goldberg's summary of the story, on September 28, 2012, Jackie, a freshman at UVA, had a date with a Phi Kappa Psi member "Drew", a junior at UVA. After the date, they allegedly went to a party at his fraternity house, where he brought her to a dark bedroom upstairs and "a heavy person jumps on top of her. A hand covers her mouth. Someone gets between her legs. Someone else kneels on her hair. And for the next three hours she's brutally raped and beaten, with Drew and another upperclassman supposedly shouting out instructions to the pledges, referring to Jackie as 'it'." According to Goldberg, "It is an account of a sober, well-planned gang rape by seven fraternity pledges at the direction of two members." After leaving the party around 3 a.m., allegedly with bruises and blood stained clothes, Jackie called her three best friends, "Andy", "Randall" and "Cindy", for support. In Rolling Stones version, Jackie's friends discouraged her from going to the hospital to protect her reputation and because Andy and Randall planned to rush fraternities and worried their association with Jackie might hurt their chances if she reported it. Erdely wrote that Randall was no longer friends with Jackie and, "citing his loyalty to his own frat, declined to be interviewed".
Jackie's academic performance reportedly declined, and she became socially withdrawn due to emotional distress. In May 2013, Jackie reported the sexual assault to dean and head of UVA's Sexual Misconduct Board, Nicole Eramo, who, according to a recap in New York magazine, offered three options: "file a criminal complaint with the police, file a complaint with the school, or face her attackers with Eramo present to tell them how she feels". The university would not take further action unless Jackie disclosed the names of the individuals or the fraternity involved. In September 2013, Eramo connected Jackie with Emily Renda, a UVA staff member, recent graduate and leader in the college's sexual assault support group One Less. Two years later, in search of a college student to feature in a story about sexual assaults that occur at a prestigious university, Erdely interviewed Renda, who suggested Jackie for the story and made the introduction.
Initial response from UVA community
Within hours of the article's publication, UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan called the governor's chief of staff and the Charlottesville police chief to start preparing a response. She said her initial reaction was surprise and "a certain air of disbelief" because during her 44-minute interview for the story, Erdely never brought up Jackie or asked about any of the allegations made in the article. Sullivan said: "I was plainly not prepared for what the story looked like. Nor do I think her characterization of my interview was fair."
The next day, Phi Kappa Psi voluntarily suspended chapter activities at UVA for the duration of the investigation. A few days later, Sullivan suspended all Greek organizations until January 9, 2015.
UVA's student newspaper The Cavalier Daily described mixed reactions from the student body, stating: "For some, the piece is an unfounded attack on our school; for others, it is a recognition of a harsh reality; and for what I suspect is a large majority of us, it falls somewhere in between."
Also within the first day following publication, Phi Kappa Psi's fraternity house at UVA was vandalized with spray-painted graffiti that read "suspend us", "UVA Center for Rape Studies", and "Stop raping people". In addition, several windows were broken with bottles and cinder blocks, and police officials said that the group received "disparaging messages" on social media. A few hours after the incident, several news groups received an anonymous letter claiming responsibility for the vandalism and demanding that the university implement harsher consequences for sexual assault (mandatory expulsion), conduct a review of all fraternities on campus, the resignation of Nicole Eramo, and the implementation of harm reduction policies at fraternity parties. A few days later, hundreds of people participated in a protest and march organized by UVA faculty as "part of a series of responses to the recently published Rolling Stone article". A student quoted in The Daily Progress said that men at a nearby bar were "quick to yell 'insults and slurs' at the protesters as they walked by". A local business owner expressed support of non-violent demonstrations and told The Cavalier Daily that "The only way thing[s] change is if you talk about what's happening." The march ended outside of the Phi Kappa Psi house where protesters challenged a perceived "culture of sexual assault at the University". Community members offered suggestions for immediate steps administration could take to implement preventive measures and address safety concerns regarding sexual assault. One student protester told The Cavalier Daily: "I really hope the University takes this article and the protest movement as a sign that they need to be more transparent about the way they deal with sexual assault." Four participants who were sitting on the steps to the Phi Kappa Psi house were arrested on trespassing charges for refusing to move when police officers asked them to leave.
The Interfraternity Council (IFC) at UVA released a statement on its website in response to the article that said: "an IFC officer was interviewed by Rolling Stone regarding the culture of sexual violence at the University. Although the discussion was lengthy, the reporter elected not to include any of the information from the interview in her article."
Story's veracity
Questions emerge Richard Bradley, editor-in-chief of Worth magazine, was among the first mainstream journalists to question the Rolling Stone article, in a blog entry written on November 24, 2014. Recalling his experience with Stephen Glass before he was exposed for journalism fraud, Bradley argued the article relied heavily on confirmation bias. He also faulted Erdely for not interviewing Jackie's alleged assailants or the three friends who tried to dissuade her from going to the police. After an interview Erdely gave to Slate, in which she was questioned about the way she investigated the piece, some commentators escalated their questioning of the veracity of the article. It was later revealed Erdely had not interviewed any of the men accused of the rape. Erdely defended her decision not to interview the accused by saying that the contact page on the fraternity's website "was pretty outdated". The Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple rejected Erdely's statement, saying that the severity of the accusations she was reporting required "every possible step to reach out and interview them, including e-mails, phone calls, certified letters, FedEx letters, UPS letters and, if all of that fails, a knock on the door. No effort short of all that qualifies as journalism."
Fraternity officials, who rejected the published allegations, noted a number of discrepancies in the story: there was no party held on the night that Jackie was allegedly raped, no fraternity member matched the description in the story of the "ringleader" of the rape, and details about the layout of the fraternity house provided by the accuser were wrong. Fraternity officials also noted that, prior to the Rolling Stone story, there had never been a criminal investigation or allegation of sexual assault against an undergraduate member of the chapter. Fraternity officials further disputed a claim in Erdely's piece that said the rape had occurred as part of a pledging ritual by observing that pledging on the UVA campus occurs in spring, not autumn as the story stated. They said that no pledges were resident in the fraternity at the time Erdely claimed.
The Washington Post reporters later interviewed the accuser at the center of Erdely's story and two of the friends that Rolling Stone said she had met on the night of the incident. The accuser told the Post that she had felt "manipulated" by Erdely, and claimed she asked Erdely not to quote her in the article, a request the journalist denied. Jackie requested that her assailants not be contacted, and Rolling Stone agreed.
Bruce Shapiro of Columbia University said that an engaged and empathetic reporter will be concerned about inflicting new trauma on the victim: "I do think that when the emotional valence of a story is this high, you really have to verify it." He also explained that experienced reporters often work only with women who feel strong enough to deal with the due diligence required to bring the article to publication.