Rolling Stone and UVA: The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Report
Three friends and a ‘shit show’
During their first interview, Jackie told Erdely that after she escaped the fraternity where seven men, egged on by her date, had raped her, she called three friends for help.
She described the two young men and one woman – now former friends, she told Erdely – as Ryan, Alex and Kathryn. She gave first names only, according to Erdely’s notes. She said they met her in the early hours of Sept. 29, 2012, on the campus grounds. Jackie said she was “crying and crying” at first and that all she could communicate was that “something bad” had happened. She said her friends understood that she had been sexually assaulted. (In interviews for this report, Ryan and Alex said that Jackie told them that she had been forced to perform oral sex on multiple men.) In Jackie’s account to Erdely, Ryan urged her to go to the university women’s center or a hospital for treatment. But Alex and Kathryn worried that if she reported a rape, their social lives would be affected. “She’s going to be the girl who cried ‘rape’ and we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again,” Jackie recalled Kathryn saying.
Jackie spoke of Ryan sympathetically, but the scene she painted for Rolling Stone‘s writer was unflattering to all three former friends. Journalistic practice – and basic fairness – require that if a reporter intends to publish derogatory information about anyone, he or she should seek that person’s side of the story.
Erdely said that while visiting UVA, she did ask Alex Pinkleton, a student and assault survivor, for help in identifying or contacting the three. (Pinkleton was not the “Alex” to whom Jackie referred in her account.) But Pinkleton said she would need to ask Jackie for permission to assist the writer. Erdely did not follow up with her. It should have been possible for Erdely to identify the trio independently. Facebook friend listings might have shown the names. Or, Erdely could have asked other current students, besides Pinkleton, to help.
Instead, Erdely relied on Jackie. On July 29, she asked Jackie for help in speaking to Ryan, “about corroborating that night, just a second voice?” Jackie answered, according to the writer’s notes, that while “Ryan may be awkward, I don’t understand why he wouldn’t.” But Jackie did not respond to follow-up messages Erdely left.
On Sept. 11, Erdely traveled to Charlottesville and met Jackie in person for the first time, at a restaurant near the UVA campus. With her digital recorder running, the reporter again asked about speaking to Ryan. “I did talk to Ryan,” Jackie disclosed. She said she had bumped into him and had asked if he would be interested in talking to Rolling Stone. Jackie went on to quote Ryan’s incredulous reaction: “No! … I’m in a fraternity here, Jackie, I don’t want the Greek system to go down, and it seems like that’s what you want to happen. … I don’t want to be a part of whatever little shit show you’re running.”
“Ryan is obviously out,” Erdely told Jackie a little later.
Yet Jackie never requested – then or later – that Rolling Stone refrain from contacting Ryan, Kathryn or Alex independently. “I wouldn’t say it was an obligation” to Jackie, Erdely said later. She worried, instead, that if “I work round Jackie, am I going to drive her from the process?” Jackie could be hard to get hold of, which made Erdely worry that her cooperation remained tentative. Yet Jackie never said that she would withdraw if Erdely sought out Ryan or conducted other independent reporting.