It was proven to be a case of media malfeasance: in November 2014, Rolling Stone published a story describing the horrific 2012 gang rape of a girl named Jackie, a University of Virginia (UVA) freshman, and how the school mishandled the incident. The story turned out to be a hoax; Jackie's tale was fiction. Now, in court documents we learn that the author of the piece, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, learned about Jackie from Emily Renda, an adviser on the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, who told the Jackie story in Senate testimony months before the Rolling Stone story, Renda was also a UVA employee.
As soon as the Rolling Stone piece was published, there was a mass outrage and a rush to punish the presumed-guilty parties. The UVA president Teresa Sullivan canceled all campus fraternities and sororities until January 9, because Jackie said the incident happened at a party sponsored by the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. She asked the Charlottesville Police Department to investigate Jackie's rape, and started a fact-finding effort to discover how the school could better handle sexual assault cases.
On December 5, The Washington Post published a report that poked major holes in the Rolling Stone story and soon the entire house of cards fell down and Jackie's account published in Rolling Stone was proven to be a hoax.
Feeling she was maligned in the story as not caring about the campus rape, University of Virginia Associate Dean Nicole Eramo filed a $7.5 million libel lawsuit filed in May against Rolling Stone and the article's author. But, Rolling Stone is now fighting back with a counter suit, which names the White House adviser, UVA employee as the source of the story.
As reported by Campus Watch:
The 76-page suit filed in Charlottesville (Va.) Circuit Court accuses Rolling Stone LLC, Wenner Media LLC, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, of defamation for characterizing the associate dean as the “chief villain” and the university as “indifferent to rape on campus, and more concerned with protecting its reputation than with assisting victims of sexual assault.”
Thursday, Rolling Stone countered Eramo’s lawsuit with a paragraph-by-paragraph response, confirming that Erdely was introduced to “Jackie” through Emily Renda, an adviser on the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault and an employee of the university.
Five months before the Rolling Stone story was published Renda testified before a Senate committee as a member of the task force and told the Jackie story (see video below). On the official Senate transcript, it says that Renda used the name Jenna for the victim she spoke about to maintain victim confidentiality:
One of the student survivors I worked with, Jenna*, was gang-raped by five fraternity men early in her freshman year. Despite the severity of the assault and injuries she sustained, Jenna still experienced a feeling of personal responsibility.
Looking for affirmation, she sought out peers and told her story. Sadly, each and every one of the friends she reached out to responded with varying denials of her experience; these responses worsened her feelings of self-blame – that she must be confused because that fraternity “is full of great guys”; that she must have made them think she was “down for that”; questioning how no one else at the party could have heard what was going on if she was telling the truth; or discouraging her from seeking help because “you don’t want to be one of those girls who has a reputation” for reporting “that kind of thing.” These statements haunted Jenna. She told me that they made her feel crazy, and made her question whether her own understanding of the rape was legitimate.
*Not the survivor’s real name for the purposes of confidentiality.
The magazine contends that since Renda worked closely with Dean Eramo, they felt the Jackie tale came with the endorsement of the Dean and the University. But the Dean's attorney told The Hollywood Reporter the claim was nonsense:
Renda was a student advocate for sexual assault victims at the time she directed Erdely to Jackie. She was not working closely with Dean Eramo on sexual assault cases, she did not — and has never — had access to University sexual assault case information in any capacity, and Dean Eramo did not participate in providing Renda or Rolling Stone facts to support this false and reckless story. It is shameful that Rolling Stone is trying to shift the blame to Dean Eramo for their own malicious and reckless reporting."
While Rolling Stone is guilty of reckless reporting, what's been left out of this entire debate is that Ms. Renda's tale had the halo of someone who was a White House adviser, who testified before the Senate.
Perhaps, those federal institutions should bear some of the blame for believing a story told by a young woman who may have thought the tale true, but never checked out its veracity before sharing it with the United States Senate or Rolling Stone.