Rolling Stone’s Journalistic Failure

Washington Post Joined-in Without Fact-Checking

The 2014 Rolling Stone magazine story was the type that would infuriate nearly every reader. “Jackie” was a freshman student who was invited on a date by an upperclassman. The pair went to his fraternity’s party, where Jackie was brutally raped only weeks after starting her college career. In fact, she was gang-raped by seven men with another two men egging them on over a three-hour period. It turned out the rape was part of a pledge ritual. One of the men, unable to sexually perform, “shoved [a beer] bottle into her.”^[1]

The brutal, three-hour attack occurred in a darkened upstairs bedroom of her date’s fraternity chapter house while a raucous party raged downstairs. When the victim later regained consciousness, she fled to the first floor, where the late-night festivities were still underway, but no one reacted to the disheveled, barefoot teen with a blood-splattered dress and beaten face.^[2]

Rolling Stone characterization of alleged attack

The gang rape had taken place two years earlier at the Phi Kappa Psi chapter house at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, according to Rolling Stone magazine, which published the tragic story. Sabrina Rubin Erdely was the author of the explosive piece.

Reaction to the story nationwide was swift. The day after the story appeared, the Phi Kappa Psi chapter voluntarily surrendered its fraternity agreement with the school and ceased all chapter activities, pending an investigation.^[3] University President Teresa Sullivan went a step further, immediately suspending all fraternity and sorority activities and requesting the Charlottesville Police Department launch a criminal investigation.

A large group of protestors vandalized the Phi Kappa Psi chapter house by spray-painting graffiti on the building and smashing windows with rocks and cinder blocks. Fraternity members were bullied, called names, received threats, and had hateful comments posted on their social media accounts. Most fled the chapter house and went into hiding.

Protestors at Phi Kappa Psi chapter house

The Rolling Stone story was damning. But it got even worse. The Washington Post led a journalism crusade against the university in publishing nearly twenty stories in about a ten-day period after the Rolling Stonearticle appeared. The Post attacked the alleged perpetrators, the fraternity, the university, the campus atmosphere, and just about anything else related to the University of Virginia. As it later became apparent, the Washington Post did not conduct any meaningful investigative journalism, but merely cribbed its stories from the Rolling Stone article.

The Post poured it on and claimed - without offering proof - an “epidemic of rapes occurring at the University of Virginia,” that “student life have aided and abetted what can only be described as a culture of rape in some U-Va. Fraternities,” and it demanded a “sea change in the college’s culture.” The Post further charged that the University’s “frat boys…are not men,”^[4] it claimed as fact - without any evidence - that “university officials had been told about other instances of sexual assault at this same fraternity but failed to investigate,” and it editorialized that the alleged perpetrators “belong in prison.”

Washington Post claim: UVA didn’t investigate assaults

The Washington Post doubled-down on its opinion that a culture of rape was permitted to exist on the UVA campus. The Post claimed “[a]t least a few dozen people” knew of Jackie’s alleged gang rape, but – shockingly – it had not been reported “for more than two years.” These were amazing charges the Post leveled at the school. If only they were true.

Washington Post claim: “a few dozen people” knew of alleged attack

A writer began probing the Rolling Stone article shortly after it was published. The writer questioned various details of the fantastical account and reached the conclusion that the Erdely-authored story was not on the up-and-up.

Once other journalists started asking questions, the Rolling Stone story quickly fell apart. The fact that there is a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at the University of Virginia in the city of Charlottesville was about the only detail that could be proven. But many more details in Erdely’s story could not be confirmed. In fact, nearly all of the critical details Erdely included in her story were proven to be untrue.

Yet, even as the Rolling Stone story was quickly unraveling, the magazine issued a strong statement of support for the article. “Through our extensive reporting and fact-checking, we found Jackie to be entirely credible and courageous and we are proud to have given her disturbing story the attention it deserves,” said the statement [emphasis added].^[5]

Rolling Stone magazine, November 2014

It appears the most basic tenets of journalism including fact-checking the claim, interviewing alleged witnesses and the accused, and confirming dates were not practiced. Key details in the story were untrue. There was no party at Phi Kappa Psi chapter house the night of the alleged attack. There was no fraternity member by the name or description Jackie reported. Jackie’s description of the chapter house layout did not match the actual layout. Further, the pledging of freshmen to the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity occurs in the spring and not the fall, when the alleged attack occurred.^[6]

The Rolling Stone article claimed three friends of Jackie arrived to pick her up after the alleged assault. The article implied Erdely spoke with them. She did not. Their eyewitness account of that night differed dramatically from the Rolling Stone version of events. For example, when the trio met Jackie after the alleged incident, Jackie told them a far different story then Erdely reported. The three friends also said Jackie was not battered and bloodied, that would have come with being punched in the face as the Rolling Stone article claimed.

In fact, Jackie’s friends had their suspicions about Jackie’s fraternity-member date long before the alleged date-turned-rape occurred. Jackie gave them a name and showed them a photo of him and his telephone number. However, no one by that name was enrolled as a student at the school, the photo was taken from the social media account of a high school classmate of Jackie’s, and the telephone number belonged to a burner phone.^[7]

Shockingly, Erdely never spoke with any of the alleged perpetrators—the very people she was defaming in her article.^[8] When Erdely conducted a nearly forty-five-minute interview of University President Teresa Sullivan, she did not once mention the alleged gang rape.

It became obvious that Rolling Stone’s “extensive reporting and fact-checking” was either incredibly sloppy and slip-shod, or the claim there was any rigid, journalistic fact-checking was an outright lie.

On December 5, more than two weeks after the Rolling Stone story first appeared, the magazine published an online note stating, “There now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account.”

Rolling Stone: our story is deeply flawed

In January, the Charlottesville Police Department reported they could not find any credible evidence that supported the Rolling Stone account.^[9]

On April 5, 2015, a 12,000-word scathing analysis of the Rolling Stone magazine article by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism was published. The magazine requested the school look into how the magazine got such an explosive story so wrong. The Columbia University report underscored that the magazine did not follow the most basic rules of journalism, resulting in perhaps the biggest media debacle of 2014.

It is easy to see how Rolling Stone managed to write such an agenda-driven, nonfactual story about the University of Virginia. The school represented so many traits that many progressives at Rolling Stone and the Washington Post find offensive. As pointed out in the magazine article, the school has a student body of “overwhelmingly blond students,” “a reputation for wealth” and “old-money privilege,” it was steeped in “patriarchy,” and it “[wa]sn’t an edgy or progressive campus by any stretch.” The University of Virginia was just the sort of entity progressives love to hate. This made the school a natural target of Rolling Stone and the Washington Post.

It appears neither Rolling Stone nor Washington Post apparently learned the lesson of another rush-to-judgement false claim made against an elite university. Merely a three-hour drive away is Duke University, where another false gang rape claim was championed by countless news outlets years earlier. Curiously, not a single Rolling Stone employee involved in the “A Rape on Campus” article was fired over the scandal.

In November 2016, Rolling Stone magazine and Sabrina Rubin Erdely were ordered by a jury to pay $3 million to a University of Virginia administrator, who was defamed in the magazine’s fake gang rape story.

In June 2017, the magazine agreed to pay nearly $1.7 million to the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity in order to settle a defamation lawsuit. In December 2017, Rolling Stone settled a third defamation lawsuit involving individual members of the fraternity. Terms were not disclosed.

In what some observers may consider an incredible case of irony, back in 2004, Sabrina Rubin Erdely wrote an article about the New Republic writer Stephen Glass.^[10] Glass was the reporter who famously cut corners, fabricated conversations, and failed to follow even the most basic tenets of journalism in order to crank out one sensational yarn after another. Erdely claimed to have been a friend of Glass when the two attended the University of Pennsylvania. It is not known if anyone fact-checked that claim.

Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, Post, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.

His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).

---

^[1] Sabrina Rubin Erdely, “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,” Rolling Stone, November 19, 2014.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Phi Kappa Psi, “Statement from Phi Kappa Psi,” The Cavalier Daily, November 20, 2014.

^[4] Richard Cohen, “Alleged Rape at U-Va. Reveals a Lack of Real Men,” Washington Post, November 25, 2014.

^[5] Allison Benedikt and Hanna Rosin, “Why Didn’t a Rolling Stone Writer Talk to the Alleged Perpetrators of a Gang Rape at the University of Virginia?” Slate, December 3, 2014.

^[6] “VA Alpha Statement Regarding Rolling Stone Article,” Phi Kappa Psi, December 5, 2014.

^[7] T. Rees Shapiro, “Friends Recount Night with Alleged Rape Victim,” Washington Post, December 11, 2014.

^[8] Benedikt and Rosin, “Why Didn’t a Rolling Stone Writer Talk….”

^[9] T. Rees Shapiro, “Fraternity at U-Va. Cleared by Police,” Washington Post, January 13, 2015.

^[10] Sabrina Rubin Erdely, “Reflections on a Shattered Glass,” Pennsylvania Gazette, January-February 2004.