Everyone, including myself, has thus far focused on Rolling Stone's myriad failures with regard to their opus, "A Rape on Campus." And for good reason! Rolling Stone behaved shamefully throughout this whole ordeal. Indeed, they continue to behave shamefully, refusing to fire a single person involved in the scandal and pledging that the disgraced author of the report, Sabrina Rudin Erdely, would continue to write for the magazine.
As I noted last night, this is how I feel about Rolling Stone's complete and utter dereliction of duty:
Anyway. It's all well and good to focus on the failure of Rolling Stone here; as Erik Wemple notes, one could easily make the case that Erdely and her editors' sins are worse than anything Jayson Blair did. All that idiot managed to do was hurt himself and the Times. Erdely and Rolling Stone helped trash the reputation of an entire university (from which, full disclosure, I graduated).
But at some point we also have to focus on "Jackie," the woman who said she was gang-raped by a pack of sociopaths as part of a fraternity initiation ceremony. And we have to turn our attention to her because of sentences like this:
Yet Rolling Stone's senior editors are unanimous in the belief that the story's failure does not require them to change their editorial systems. "It's not like I think we need to overhaul our process, and I don't think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things," Dana said. "We just have to do what we've always done and just make sure we don't make this mistake again." Coco McPherson, the fact-checking chief, said, "I one hundred percent do not think that the policies that we have in place failed. I think decisions were made around those because of the subject matter."
As one of the stellar student journalists working for the Cavalier Daily wrote a few months back, they didn't investigate whether or not "Jackie's" story was true because, well, it sounded like something they thought might have happened and, hey, aren't we supposed to believe this sort of story just cuz?
There are some who argue that we should believe those who claim to have been raped no matter what. We are told time and again that invented rapes and false claims of rape are so incredibly rare that the idea should, simply, never enter our brain.
And, look, that's a noble sentiment. (Not terribly useful as a journalistic sentiment or a legal mandate, but noble, I guess.) That being said, there's a tension here. You can't create a norm like "Never disbelieve rape victims" and then give obvious fraudsters a pass.
And "Jackie" is, it seems, rather obviously a fraudster. "Jackie" is a girl who had a crush on a boy and when that boy did not reciprocate that crush, she seems to have invented a suitor to make him jealous. And then, when that gambit failed, she seems to have invented a gang rape in order to win the object of her desire by forcing him to become her white knight. And then, when she found herself in some sort of academic trouble, she dusted off the gang rape story she had used before to weasel out of it:
Longo said Jackie's first mention of an alleged assault came without key details, during a meeting she had with a dean about an academic issue in May 2013. The dean brought in police, but the case was dropped because Jackie didn't want them to investigate, Longo said.
Jackie had multiple chances to come clean, to back out of the story. But she didn't. Indeed, she renewed her participation after Erdely and Rolling Stone seemed to give her an out:
By October’s end, with the story scheduled for closing in just two weeks, Jackie was still refusing to answer Erdely’s texts and voicemails. Finally, on Nov. 3, after consulting with her editors, Erdely left a message for Jackie proposing to her a "solution" that would allow Rolling Stone to avoid contacting the lifeguard after all. The magazine would use a pseudonym; "Drew" was eventually chosen.
After Erdely left this capitulating voicemail, Jackie called back quickly. According to Erdely, she now chatted freely about the lifeguard, still without using his last name. From that point on, through the story’s publication, Jackie cooperated.
Emphasis again mine, because, holy crap, look at this manipulative little liar go to work! Withhold attention from someone who needs your help until she caves, and then give them everything they want after they agree to hew to the lie you've built. Impressive work!
It's impossible to prove a negative. But it seems pretty clear that "Jackie" is a serial liar who has abused a flawed-but-noble norm created to defend actual victims of rape from psychic harm. It is time to stop thinking of her as a victim.
And it's time for the University to look into ways to punish her. UVA is well known for its honor code. For our purposes, here's the relevant passage from the Honor Committee's website:
Today students at the University make a commitment not to lie, cheat, or steal within Charlottesville, Albemarle County, or where they represent themselves as University students in order to gain the trust of others. Because of this commitment, there's a strong degree of trust among the various members of the University community. Students are also expected to conduct themselves with integrity and are presumed honorable until proven otherwise.
It seems to me that no one has done more to damage the assumption of trust on grounds than "Jackie." One of the (in hindsight, morbidly humorous) angles to Erdely's original piece is that the school expels cheaters and plagiarists, but gives rapists a slap on the wrist. It would be a bit of cosmic justice if "Jackie" were to find herself before the honor committee.
Odds are, this will never happen. The press would be bad, and the jury would probably have enough silly dopes on it to let her off anyway.
And that's a shame. Because if we want society to respect the norm that anti-rape activists have strived to create—that we should believe people who claim to have been victimized first, foremost, and always—then we need to castigate those who violate this norm.