Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  It seems possible that Beebe, honing the trajectory of his life in recovery, genuinely convinced himself of this over the ensuing decades, and that he contacted Seccuro in part to validate his altered narrative. Conversely, I’ve always thought that Jackie must have believed, at some deep and bizarre level, in the truth of her imagined story. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been able to consistently fool Erdely and the fact-checker. I wonder if she thought that a written record, a big-deal Rolling Stone piece, would enshrine the narrative she wanted as the truth.

  Seccuro published her memoir in 2012, five years after her court case concluded. She suggests in the book that gang-raping a freshman girl might have been some Phi Psi rite of passage, “a tradition of sorts.” This is what Jackie suggested to her friends, as well as to Erdely—who, when Jackie noted the similarities between her story and Seccuro’s, responded, according to the tape transcripts read aloud in the deposition, “Holy shit. Every hair on my arm is standing up. Seems like more than a coincidence.” In her own deposition, Jackie states that a professor assigned Crash into Me in a class that she took in 2014. She read only a portion of it, she says—the portion describing Seccuro’s assault.

  The most generous way to describe Jackie’s sense of reality is to say that it was porous. She could lie wildly even in cases where the stakes were low. One of her friends, Ryan, had once received an email from a guy named Haven Monahan—the guy who Jackie later said took her on a date on the night of her rape. (In Rolling Stone, Haven was the person identified as Drew.) “Haven,” a composite figure whose purported email account was likely controlled by Jackie, forwarded Ryan an email that Jackie had supposedly sent him. It was a love letter about Ryan, and it was lifted almost word-for-word from Dawson’s Creek. All of this—the fake persona, the dummy email account, the plagiarized letter—was Jackie’s casually deranged way of expressing a crush.

  Jackie also told Erdely, during one of their interviews, about a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode that, she said, portrayed a situation like her rape. Erdely admits in the deposition that she never watched the episode. It was called “Girl Dishonored,” a lawyer tells her. In it, a young woman is gang-raped at a fraternity, and one of the perpetrators says, “Grab her leg.”

  At one point during the proceedings, Erdely reads aloud a statement, written the morning that Rolling Stone posted its mea culpa, in which she explains that Jackie’s “case seemed to get to the heart of the larger story I sought to tell.”

  “Were you sincere when you wrote those words?” the lawyer asks her.

  “Was I sincere?” Erdely replies.

  “Were you making that up, or were you being sincere when you wrote those words?” asks the lawyer.

  “I don’t make anything up,” says Erdely.

  “Were you being sincere, then, when you wrote those words? Did you believe that statement when you wrote it?” the lawyer asks.

  Erdely says yes. But the choice is not always between being sincere and untruthful. It’s possible to be both: it’s possible to be sincere and deluded. It’s possible—it’s very easy, in some cases—to believe a statement, a story, that’s a lie.

  * * *

  —

  In April, after Rolling Stone retracted the story, UVA’s president, Teresa Sullivan, issued a statement slamming the magazine for what they had published. “Irresponsible journalism unjustly damaged the reputations of many innocent individuals and the University of Virginia,” she wrote. “Sexual violence is a serious issue for our society, and it requires the focus and attention of all in our communities. Long before Rolling Stone published its article, the University of Virginia was working to confront sexual violence. And we will continue to implement substantive reforms to improve culture, prevent violence, and respond to acts of violence when they occur.”

  Just like that, we were back to the old story. Rolling Stone was the problem, and the problem had been nullified, and UVA could continue on as it was. I remembered a late night a few years prior. In the back corner of a bar after a wedding reception, a woman told me that she knew a couple of the boys who had played Duke lacrosse during the 2006 scandal. The boys had been injured permanently, she said—scarred forever, along with their families, by some whore’s disgusting lie. Her anger was raw, palpable, blooming. It cowed me, and reminded me that most people still find false accusation much more abhorrent than rape. In 1988, the Cav Daily published a piece by a student who wrote, “Don’t ask for increased prosecution of allegations of rape until women who falsely accuse men of rape and attempted rape are investigated with similar intensity, prosecuted with equal vigor, and jailed for a greater length of time.”

  In the Bible, Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce Joseph, who has been enslaved by her rich husband, and cries rape after Joseph resists her advance. In Greek mythology, Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, does the same to Hippolytus. These stories, and the many others like them, are framed as obscene anomalies. Rape itself, though, is sanctioned in the same texts. In Numbers, Moses commands his army to kill all the men and the nonvirgin women, and save all the virgin women for themselves. In Greek myth, Zeus rapes Antiope, Demeter, Europa, and Leda. Poseidon rapes Medusa. Hades rapes Persephone. For centuries, rape was viewed as a crime against property, and offenders were often punished by the imposition of a fine, payable to the victim’s father or husband. Until the 1980s, most rape laws in America specified that husbands could not be charged with raping their wives. Rape, until very recently, was presented as a norm.

  This extends to UVA, which for many decades expelled students for plagiarism while refusing to consider rape a serious offense. From 1998 to 2014, 183 students were kicked out of UVA for honor code violations: one of them had, for example, cribbed three phrases from Wikipedia while on study abroad. When, in the late nineties, a student was found guilty of sexually assaulting another student, named Jenny Wilkinson, UVA punished him by adding a letter of reprimand to his record, which could be removed after a year if he completed an assault education program. Because of student privacy laws, Wilkinson could not protest this outcome in public. “In fact, in a crazy twist, I could have faced charges from the university if I had talked about them,” she wrote in the Times in 2015. Her assailant, meanwhile, was allowed to keep one of UVA’s top honors: he lived on the Lawn.

  In the decades that followed, things got microscopically better. After Erdely’s story was published, I interviewed one of my former UVA classmates at Jezebel, referring to her with the pseudonym Kelly. In 2006, Kelly filed university charges against the student who sexually assaulted her. After ten months, UVA found him guilty. (Again, the rarity of a guilty finding can’t be overstated: at the time when I interviewed Kelly, there were only thirteen other guilty findings in the school’s history—one of whom was Wilkinson’s assailant.) Kelly was assaulted, as many college women are, in the fall of her first semester: she went to a frat party, where a guy she knew poured her drinks until she passed out. In the university’s investigation, it came out that a witness had seen Kelly’s limp body being carried up the stairs. A nurse visiting her younger brother in the frat that night testified that Kelly’s pulse had been “low, in the 20s and 30s.” At the hearing, a male faculty member asked Kelly if she’d ever cheated on her boyfriend. But her assailant was found guilty, and suspended for three years.

  This was, in the context of UVA’s long record of apathy and inaction, an extreme success story. In the year prior to the Rolling Stone piece, thirty-eight students had reached out to Dean Eramo to report being sexually assaulted. Only nine of those incidents resulted in formal complaints, and only four resulted in misconduct hearings. And, as at most colleges, those thirty-eight reports were the visible fraction of a vast and unseen iceberg. Though I rarely back away from difficulty, I feel sure that, if I had been traumatically assaulted in college, I wouldn’t have had the courage—or the stamina for the inevitable bureaucratic humiliation—t
o report.

  Erdely noted, in her piece, that “genteel University of Virginia has no radical feminist culture seeking to upend the patriarchy.” And it’s true that the school is far from radical. But, though I never thought to learn about this while I was on campus, UVA’s women have been agitating to change the institution ever since it went coed. “The fact that none of us here are afraid to pursue the truth wherever it may lead,” a woman wrote in the Cav Daily in 1975, referencing a much-used Thomas Jefferson quote, “pales alongside the fact that many of us have good reason to fear pursuing a midnight snack on the Corner.” That fall, a local committee surveyed the local statistics—rape was almost twice as prevalent in the town as in Virginia as a whole—and labeled Charlottesville “rape city” in a widely shared report. At the same time, a Jack the Ripper–themed Corner bar called the Minories English Pub put up a sign featuring a nude female corpse dangling from a lamppost. In the Cav Daily, another student wrote, “People are now tired of the rape issue coming up time and again in the news. Well, I’m tired, too; more than you could ever fathom.” She had been raped, she wrote, six weeks before. That year, UVA’s president, Frank Hereford, sent a letter to a Virginia delegate assuring him that there was no rape problem on campus. He provided ten pieces of evidence that the school was being proactive. Number six was that the student council sold women “alarm devices” at “well below cost.” Number nine was that women were locked inside their dorms at midnight.

  During this period, UVA’s default assumption of male dominion over women became more strident in response to the rise of two student demographic groups that inherently challenged this idea: women and gay men. In 1972, the Cav Daily ran a disgusted “humor piece” envisioning a sissy new fraternity called Gamma Alpha Yepsilon, or GAY. The same year as the “rape city” report, the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority passed a ruling “prohibiting homosexuals from alcohol-serving restaurants,” and UVA used the rule to bar gay people from a pavilion on the Lawn. Hereford, as president, attempted to remove a student named Bob Elkins from his RA position because he was a “professed homosexual.” In 1990, a student publication ran a satire piece called “Great to Be Straight,” laying out a schedule for a week of heterosexual pride and celebration that included a “Take Back the Bathrooms” march. When I went to football games in college, people would sing UVA’s “The Good Old Song,” to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” after every touchdown. After the line “We come from old Virgin-i-a, where all is bright and gay,” a huge portion of the crowd always screamed “Not gay!”

  In the nineties, student conversation started to sharpen around the role that fraternities—a source of violence against women, against gay men, and against their own members—played in the prevalence of sexual assault at UVA. “The only first-week social option is attending Rugby Road fraternity parties,” wrote a Cav Daily editor in 1992. “Intimidating for some and dangerous for others, the Rugby option is simply not an adequate answer to initial social needs of first-year students.” That same year, at Pi Lambda Phi, another UVA fraternity, an eighteen-year-old woman was trapped in a storage room, pinned down on a mattress, raped, and beaten.

  In his 2009 history of white fraternities, The Company He Keeps, Nicholas Syrett writes, “Fraternities attract men who value other men more than women. The intimacy that develops within fraternal circles between men who care for each other necessitates a vigorous performance of heterosexuality in order to combat the appearance of homosexuality.” (The chair of the UVA women’s studies department gave a similar statement after the 1992 rape at Pi Lamb: “Fraternities and sororities reinforce the subordinate position that women hold in general,” she said. “Men experience a sense of male identity by abusing women and hazing each other.”) Syrett writes that fraternity men prove their heterosexuality through “aggressive homophobia and the denigration of women”—through using homoerotic hazing rituals to humiliate one another, and through framing sex with women as something engaged in “for one’s brothers, for communal consumption by them.”

  White fraternities have historically existed for the purpose of solidifying elite male power and entitlement. In the nineteenth century, wealthy men separated themselves from their poorer classmates through the frat system. In the twentieth century, men used frat houses to preserve an exclusively male space in an “increasingly mixed-gender world,” Syrett writes. As the idealism of the earliest frats was subsumed, in the twentieth century, by a changing idea of masculinity that increasingly allowed high-class status and low-class behavior to coexist in a single individual, fraternity members “used their status as self-proclaimed gentlemen to justify their less-savory antics….In performing gentlemanliness in public, they justified their existence. What they did behind closed doors was then supposed to be their business alone.”

  Universities have a tendency to overlook fraternity violence in part because fraternities are a significant source of institutional capital. Frats funnel enormous amounts of alumni money back toward universities, and free them from the obligation to provide housing for their most privileged students. In return, frats enjoy a built-in leeway. Boys who join frats today are mostly conscious of wanting good parties, funny friends, hot girls around every weekend. Underneath this lies the thrill of group immunity, of being able to, on the wholesome end, throw a sink out the window without being written up for property destruction. On the unwholesome end, frats provide social cover to engage in extraordinary interpersonal violence, through the hazing process; to purchase and consume as much alcohol and as many drugs as one wants to; and to throw parties at which everyone is there at the pleasure of the “brothers”—particularly the girls.

  As early as the 1920s, Syrett writes, fraternity culture started to explicitly invoke sexual coercion. “If a girl don’t pet, a man can figure he didn’t rush ’er right,” a fraternity member says in the 1923 novel Town and Gown. In 1971, William Inge wrote a novel called My Son Is a Splendid Driver, based on his experience in a University of Kansas frat in the twenties. The characters go on dates with sorority girls, take them home, and then go back out to solicit sex from prostitutes. One night they participate in a “gang-bang” in the frat basement. “I felt that to have refused,” the narrator thinks, “would have cast doubts upon my masculinity, an uncertain thing at best, I feared, that daren’t hide from any challenge.” The woman at the center of the event yells, resigned and aggressive, “Well, go on and fuck me….That’s what I’m here for.”

  Thirty-five percent of UVA students belong to a fraternity or sorority. When I was on campus, people outside the Greek system were referred to as goddamn independents, or GDIs. Because first-year students live in dorms, and mostly can’t buy alcohol or throw parties, a huge amount of partying at UVA takes place in frat houses, on frat terms. (Due to the Greek system’s dogged adherence to gender traditionalism, sororities aren’t allowed to throw parties at all.) There is as much individual variance within the Greek system as within any other: I was welcomed into it despite being openly averse to many of its central features, and Andrew, my partner of a decade, lived in his UVA frat house for two years, volunteered at the daycare across the street on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and remains a sweeter, more sincere person than I am. But it’s been well documented that men in fraternities have a higher perpetration rate than college men in general. A recent study at Columbia showed that they are victimized more often, too. The fraternity environment doesn’t create rapists as much as it perfectly obscures them: every weekend is organized around men giving women alcohol, everyone getting as drunk as possible, hookups as the performative end goal, and a lockable bedroom only a handful of steps away.

  Jackie’s false accusation, in this context, appears as a sort of chimera—a grotesque, mismatched creation; a false way of making a real problem visible. In 2017, in a beautiful piece for n+1, Elizabeth Schambelan wrote about her own lingering obsession with Jackie’s story, which she observed, in retrospect, wa
s guided by a sort of fairy-tale inevitability: a girl in a red dress walked into a wilderness and encountered a pack of wolves. “In retrospect, the failures of its naturalism seem so clear,” she writes. “The dark chamber, the silhouetted attackers….But most of all, it’s the table, the crystalline pyrotechnics of its shattering. That’s the place where the narrative strains hardest against realism, wanting to move into another register altogether.” Jackie had woven another version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” which Susan Brownmiller once argued was a “parable of rape.” A girl is intercepted on her journey by a wolf, a violent seducer, who then disguises himself, and falls upon her, and eats her up.

  Schambelan quotes two anthropologists, Dorcas Brown and David Anthony, who in 2012 wrote an article tracking the association of wolf symbols with “youthful war-bands” in ancient Europe “that operated on the edges of society, and that stayed together for a number of years and then were disbanded when their members reached a certain age.” These war-bands were “associated with sexual promiscuity,” Brown and Anthony write. They “came from the wealthier families…their duties centered on fighting and raiding…they lived ‘in the wild,’ apart from their families.” In Germanic legend, this organization is called the Männerbund, a word that means “men-league.” The men disguised themselves with animal skins, which allowed them to break social restrictions without guilt until their time in the Männerbund was over. “At the end of four years,” Brown and Anthony write, “there was a final sacrifice to transform the dog-warriors into responsible adult men who were ready to return to civil life. They discarded and destroyed their old clothes and dog skins. They became human once again.” In her piece, Schambelan wonders: once you have formed leagues of men, isolated from their wealthy families, trained for collective wildness—“once you make that choice, as a society, to create that institution, how do you keep the chaos at bay? How do you make sure it never turns against you?”