Allah:
And to think, this morning it looked like TNR would surely have the worst day among old liberal magazines that no one reads anymore.
A total travesty. But no lessons will be learned here.
Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her. In the months Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made Erdely, or Rolling Stone’s editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie’s credibility. Her friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported Jackie’s account. She had spoken of the assault in campus forums. We reached out to both the local branch and the national leadership of the fraternity where Jackie said she was attacked. They responded that they couldn’t confirm or deny her story but had concerns about the evidence.
In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.
“We decided to honor her request not to contact” the alleged rapist is RS-speak for “we’re terrible, irresponsible journalists.” As for the unspecified “discrepancies,” WaPo found all kinds of details that the crack Rolling Stone fact-checking team somehow missed:
Officials close to the fraternity said that the statement will indicate that Phi Kappa Psi did not host a party on Sept. 28, 2012, the night that a university student named Jackie alleges she was invited to a date party, lured into an upstairs room and was then ambushed and gang-raped by seven men who were rushing the fraternity…
The officials also said that no members of the fraternity were employed at the university’s Aquatic Fitness Center during that time frame — a detail Jackie provided in her account to Rolling Stone and in interviews with The Washington Post — and that no member of the house matches the description detailed in the Rolling Stone account…
A group of Jackie’s close friends, who are sex assault advocates at U-Va., said they believe something traumatic happened to Jackie but have come to doubt her account. They said details have changed over time, and they have not been able to verify key points of the story in recent days. A name of an alleged attacker that Jackie provided to them for the first time this week, for example, turned out to be similar to the name of a student who belongs to a different fraternity, and no one by that name has been a member of Phi Kappa Psi.
I can’t quote more than that for fair-use reasons but read it all, as it includes their own interview with “Jackie,” the alleged victim. One key detail: Jackie claims that, after being interviewed by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author of the Rolling Stone piece, she actually asked Erdely to remove her from the story. Erdely refused. She’d spent weeks interviewing students at universities across the country looking for a blockbuster story of campus rape (“rape shopping,” as Daily Caller writer Chris Bray puts it). Jackie’s story was too good to pass up and ultimately, quite literally, too good to check. Jackie went on to tell the Post that she felt manipulated by Erdely and, while insisting that the story is true, admitted that “some details in the article might not be accurate.”
Gee, in her account she was repeatedly raped while on a broken glass table top with shards of glass tearing into her…..yet she never bothered to get a smidgeon of medical attention afterward.
Yeah, I’d call this ”story” ”too good to fact check.”
They ran with it until somebody else did their homework for them.