Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  This was a different era. In the five years since my graduation, feminism had become a dominant cultural perspective. Title IX, the 1972 civil rights law that had at first been invoked in service of equal-opportunity college athletics, was now being applied to sexual assault and harassment cases. In a 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter from the Office of Civil Rights, the Obama administration proclaimed, “The sexual harassment of students, including sexual violence, interferes with students’ right to receive an education free from discrimination and, in the case of sexual violence, is a crime.” There had been several high-profile news stories about college assault and harassment. In 2010, Yale suspended the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon for five years after their pledges chanted “No means yes, yes means anal!” in front of the school’s Women’s Center. In 2014, Emma Sulkowicz started carrying their mattress across Columbia’s campus in protest of the administration finding their alleged rapist not responsible. (They continued carrying the mattress until graduation.) In 2015, two Vanderbilt football players were found guilty of raping an unconscious woman. The struggle to adjudicate campus rape was nationwide news. The Rolling Stone article went viral within an hour of being posted, and would end up being the most-read non-celebrity story in the magazine’s history. I had changed, too. I was working at Jezebel. I felt almost disembodied by dread, in my office chair, thinking about how many women would read the piece and feel the need to compare their stories to Jackie’s—to play down the harm they’d faced, to preface their own experiences, as we already do, with “It wasn’t that bad.”

  At UVA and within the school’s network, the story was explosive. Reactions were mostly supportive, but they were mixed. My Facebook feed flooded with messages from UVA alumni expressing outrage and recognition; for my boyfriend, a former UVA fraternity member, a number of his college acquaintances expressed a stiff, suspicious distance or disbelief. In Charlottesville, the police department opened an investigation into Jackie’s assault. Phi Psi was vandalized. There was an emergency Board of Visitors meeting. Bright Post-it notes and posters—“Expel Rapists,” “Harm to One Is Harm to All”—covered the brick walls and buildings surrounding the Lawn. Protesters walked Rugby Road with signs that said “Burn Down the Frats.” (“Nobody wants to rape you!” a few people yelled back.) The Cavalier Daily, the campus newspaper, overflowed with responses from both students and alumni. Letter writers acknowledged the insidious leeway given to the Greek system on campus; they criticized the school’s history of suppressing victims and accusers; they questioned Rolling Stone’s intentions and Erdely’s cherry-picked account of UVA life. “It feels immensely frustrating to be singled out, when inaction on rape and sexual assault cases persists across the country,” one student wrote. The newspaper’s managing board ran an op-ed acknowledging the mood of “anger, disgust, and despair.”

  A couple of days after the piece went up, Emma, my editor in chief, asked me if the reporting seemed right. Some details were off, I said. But people who knew the school recognized what Erdely was talking about. She was right that UVA had a systemic problem—that the school believed in itself as an idyll, a place of genteel beauty and good citizenship, and that this belief was so seductive, so half true, and so widely propagated, that the social reckonings that had come elsewhere had been suppressed and delayed.

  At this point, I had never reported a story or edited a reported story—Emma had brought me to Jezebel from my first job in media, at The Hairpin, a small blog where I mostly edited and wrote essays. I didn’t understand that it did matter that the details were off: that the piece’s epigraph came from what Erdely called a “traditional University of Virginia fight song,” which I had never heard, and which she said was in the standing rotation of an a cappella group called the Virginia Gentlemen, whose repertoire I knew from top to bottom because they were the brother group to my own. If I’d been more experienced, I would have known that it was actually suspicious, not just a matter of writerly flourish, that she described Phi Psi as “upper tier.” (Phi Psi was, at best, somewhere in the nondescript middle of UVA’s rigid fraternity caste system—a hard social fact that would have been easy to check.) I would’ve noticed the absence of disclosures and parentheticals telling the reader how the people in the story—the seven men who raped Jackie, or the friend who said, as if reading aloud from a bad screenplay, “Why didn’t you have fun with it? A bunch of hot Phi Psi guys?”—responded to the allegations. I would have noticed that there was no way, within the story, to tell exactly how Erdely knew what she knew.

  At twenty-five, I was closer to my time at UVA than I was to the age I am now—closer to the idea of being the subject than the idea of being the writer. I didn’t know how to read the story. But a lot of other people did.

  * * *

  —

  It didn’t take long for journalists to start pulling apart “A Rape on Campus.” At first, it seemed possible that the doubters had some ideological motivations. Richard Bradley, who’d previously edited the fabulist Stephen Glass, wrote that the lede “boggled the mind,” and required a reader to “indulge your pre-existing biases” against “fraternities, against men, against the South,” as well as “about the prevalence—indeed, the existence—of rape culture.” Robby Soave, a blogger at the libertarian site Reason, who had previously written that the movement against campus rape was a large-scale criminalization of campus sex, wondered if the whole story was a hoax.

  Then The Washington Post interviewed Erdely, who declined to disclose whether she knew the names of Jackie’s attackers, or if she had contacted “Drew,” the man who had taken Jackie to Phi Psi. Erdely went on the Slate podcast Double X and skirted the same questions. Then she and her editor, Sean Woods, confirmed to the Post that they’d never talked to any of the men. “I’m satisfied that these guys exist and are real,” Woods said. Erdely told the Post that by dwelling on these details, “you’re getting sidetracked.”

  Soon afterward, the Post reported that Phi Psi had not held a party on the night in question. The Washington Post found convincing evidence that “Drew” did not exist, at least not as the person Jackie had described. CNN interviewed the friends quoted in the article, who detailed major discrepancies in what Jackie told Erdely and what Jackie had told them. Late at night on December 4, Erdely received a phone call from Jackie and Jackie’s friend Alex, who had, apparently, spoken to Jackie about her story’s inconsistencies.

  At 1:54 A.M. on December 5, Erdely emailed her editor and her publisher: “We’re going to have to run a retraction….Neither I, nor Alex, find Jackie credible any longer.” That day, Rolling Stone put up a statement, explaining that Jackie had requested that they not contact “Drew” or any of the men who raped her. They had honored this request, as they found her trustworthy, and took seriously her apparent fear of retaliation. But “there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.” (Later on, that last unfortunate clause, about trust, disappeared.) As I read the note, my eyes kept flicking to one sentence, about how Jackie’s friends on campus had “strongly supported” her story. Those friends had supported her emotionally; they’d offered sympathy for the experience she told them about. But they had not corroborated her story, or supported it the way a journalist should have been obligated to—the way that walls support a house.

  The following March, the Charlottesville police department issued a statement saying that there was no evidence to back up Jackie’s account of her assault. Later on, the Columbia Journalism Review published an extensive report laying out exactly how Erdely and her editors erred. Jackie and Erdely were subsequently deposed in Eramo v. Rolling Stone, a lawsuit lodged by Dean Eramo, who was portrayed as discouraging Jackie from reporting the alleged assault and had been quoted, on Jackie’s word alone, worrying that no one would want to send their kids to “the rape school.” (In November 2016, a jury found both Erdely and Rolling Ston
e responsible for defamation. Eramo was awarded $3 million in compensatory damages.) Through CJR’s report and the court documents, a story behind the story assembles itself.

  Something likely happened to Jackie on September 28, 2012. Late that night, she called her friends, distraught. She met them outside freshman dorms, with no visible injuries, and told them that something bad had happened. Soon afterward, she told her roommate that she’d been forced to perform oral sex on five men. On May 20, 2013, she reported the assault to Dean Eramo and declined to pursue action. A year later, in May 2014, she went back to Eramo to report an act of retaliation—someone had thrown a bottle at her on the Corner, the main social drag, she said—and asserted that she knew two other women who’d been gang-raped at the same frat. Eramo, by her account, encouraged Jackie to report the alleged assault to the authorities and arranged for Jackie to meet with the Charlottesville police; she said that Jackie had two such meetings in the spring of 2014.

  Erdely confirmed her assignment around the same time. She was an experienced journalist in her early forties who had recently been given a star contract at Rolling Stone: she was set to receive $300,000 for filing seven feature stories over two years. She had written about sexual abuse before. Her 1996 Philadelphia article about a woman who had been raped by her gynecologist was nominated for a National Magazine Award, and at Rolling Stone, she had recently published two consequential exposés about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the US Navy. (In December 2014, Newsweek noted that Erdely’s reporting on the Catholic Church story was also remarkably flawed.) Her intent, with this new Rolling Stone piece, was to follow a single assault case on a “particularly fraught campus,” she wrote, in a memo—she wasn’t sure which one. But she talked to rape survivors at a few Ivy League schools and was unsatisfied with the stories that turned up. She came down to Charlottesville in the summer of 2014, and heard about Jackie from a former student named Emily, who had met Jackie in a sexual assault prevention group. “Obviously,” Emily told Erdely, “her memory may not be perfect.” A few days later, Erdely sat down with Jackie, whose story had changed: on September 28, she told the reporter, she had met her friends outside Phi Psi, bloody and bruised and shoeless, after escaping an hours-long gang rape at the hands of seven men. She declined to provide the names of those friends, or the name of the boy who took her to the frat.

  The two of them kept talking. In September, Jackie and her boyfriend had dinner with Erdely, who asked about the scars from the shattered glass. “I haven’t really seen any marks on your back,” the boyfriend said. Jackie told Erdely, “When you’ve come from a background where you’re always told that you’re worthless…it’s like you’re an easy target…like I was easily manipulated because I didn’t have the self-esteem to—I don’t know.” A week later, Jackie texted a friend, “I forgot to tell you that Sabrina [Erdely] is really nice, but you have to choose your words really carefully because she’s taken some things I’ve said out of context and skewed them a little.” She started to get cold feet. In October, one of her friends texted Erdely, “I’m talking to Jackie right now, and she’s telling me she 100 percent doesn’t want her name in the article.” Erdely replied that she was “up for discussing whether she wants to discuss changing her name, et cetera, but I need to be clear about this. There’s no pulling the plug at this point.” Erdely emailed her photo editor, writing, “Yeah, unfortunately, I would say Jackie is not in great mental shape right now and won’t be for a long while.” At the end of October, Jackie stopped answering Erdely’s calls and texts, but Erdely coaxed her back into the process for fact-checking. In final edits, two all-important disclosures—that Jackie had refused to provide the name of the boy who had taken her to the frat party and that the magazine had not contacted her friends to corroborate her story—disappeared.

  The piece came out in mid-November. Erdely gave her suspiciously vague interviews to Double X and The Washington Post. The day before Thanksgiving, Erdely called Jackie and pressed her for the name of the boy who brought her to Phi Psi, and Jackie said that she wasn’t sure how to spell it. In public, the story started to fall apart. In early December, Jackie texted a friend, “I’m so scared. I never even wanted to do this article when it became about my rape. I tried to back out of it, but she said I couldn’t.” A few days later, she and Erdely had the late-night phone call that triggered Rolling Stone’s note from the editor. A week or so after that, Erdely emailed Jackie, finally asking her to explain her changing story. She also asked for the name of someone who had ever seen the scars on Jackie’s back.

  Under oath, in her deposition testimony, Jackie doesn’t admit outright to lying. She is an unreliable narrator, and to some degree, so is Erdely. (And, given that here I’m choosing to see certain things and discard others, as a person does anytime she tells a story, so am I.) But what strikes me in reading the two women’s testimonies is the way that the structure of the original violation, the language of force and betrayal, filters into the way that they interacted with each other—in the same way that Title IX procedures often end up replicating the patterns of invasion they set out to address and negate. Jackie remembers Erdely telling her “that there was no way…to pull out at that point.” She tells the court, “I was under the impression that [the details of my assault] were not going to be published….I wasn’t—you know, I was 20 years old. I had no idea that there was an off the record or on the record. I—I was naïve.” In her own deposition, Erdely says, “I mean, she was aware it was entirely up to her whether she was going to participate.”

  What should have been reportorial red flags, too, were passed over as normal parts of the rape recovery process. When Erdely asked to speak to the two women Jackie knew who’d also been gang-raped at Phi Psi, Jackie insisted on serving as a go-between. (She most likely fabricated the texts attributed to them that she eventually showed Erdely.) Erdely believed, reasonably enough, that Jackie only hoped to spare them further trauma. She wasn’t too concerned that Jackie’s story had changed. “I do know that [rape victims’] stories do sometimes morph over time as they come to terms with what happened to them,” she says in her deposition. In this, Erdely replicated the mechanism of self-delusion that’s embedded at UVA: she acted as if the story she believed in, that she thought she was working for, was already real.

  * * *

  —

  I have sympathy for the experience of being fooled by what you want to believe in. Good intentions often produce blind spots. It’s hard to blame Erdely for believing that Jackie’s memory had initially been obscured by trauma. It’s easy to understand how a college administrator might believe in her institution’s moral progress despite evidence to the contrary, or how a reporter would believe that stories tend to shift in the direction of truth. This is, after all, what happened with Liz Seccuro, the woman who was gang-raped at Phi Psi in 1984. When her rapist, William Beebe, wrote her an apology twenty-one years later, she asked him—having been haunted by an unplaceable feeling—if he was the only one who raped her. Yes, he said. And also, he didn’t remember the night the same way she did. In his original letter, he hadn’t used the word “rape.” He had written, “Dear Elizabeth: In October 1984 I harmed you. I can scarcely begin to understand the degree to which, in your eyes, my behavior has affected you in its wake.” In the follow-up letter to Seccuro, he wrote, “There was no fight and it was all over in short order.”

  “I awoke wrapped naked in a bloody sheet,” Seccuro wrote back.

  “I am sincere in my recollection,” Beebe replied, “though it may not be the whole truth of what happened to you that night.”

  In her memoir Crash into Me, Seccuro writes that she had been a virgin when she was assaulted, and that her dean told her, “Well, you know these parties can get out of control….Are you sure you didn’t have sex with this young man and now you regret it? These things happen.” Her story was squashed by the school, the police department, and the era she
lived in—there were no rape kits at the UVA hospital when she dragged herself there after her assault. Out of options, Seccuro eventually went to a reporter and told her story under a pseudonym: a man had raped her at a frat one night, she said.

  Two decades later, after she had Beebe’s apology letter, the Charlottesville police began reinvestigating and interviewing witnesses. An officer called her one day. “Liz, you were right,” he said. “Beebe was one of three. Three men raped you that night and Beebe was the last. I am so sorry to be the one to tell you this.” One of the men “had allegedly been seen digitally raping me,” Seccuro writes, “with four men witnessing and cheering as he hiked my sweater above my neck and my skirt above my waist.” Another one had left her bleeding and unconscious, and walked to the frat’s communal showers, “naked except for a towel, high-fiving friends along the way.” Beebe had been seen dragging Seccuro into his room while she was screaming; afterward, he had dragged her body into the bathroom and tried to clean her up. His story had become less true with time, and monstrously so: he had come to believe that there was “no fight,” that there was plenty of ambiguity, that it was just a confusing, ungentlemanly night.