Scan national publications over the past few years, and you will find that the topic of sexual assault on college campuses has garnered an immense amount of attention. Members of Congress, college administrators, student activists, alumni and parents have all taken an interest in seeing change come about on college campuses. A recent White House report cited a statistic that one in five college women will be the victim of attempted or completed sexual assault over the course of her college career, highlighting the frequency at which college-aged women face the threat of sexual violence. The recent publication and subsequent retraction of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Nov. 19 Rolling Stone 9000-plus word story, “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice,” captures some of the journalistic and ethical dilemmas that arise in the coverage of this issue. Specifically, issues regarding sensitivity to survivors’ rights to privacy come into direct conflict with the journalistic directive to fact-check a story as thoroughly as possible.
Initially, the story of Jackie’s brutal gang rape at Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at the University of Virginia and the University’s failure to respond to the alleged assault made tremendous waves — even prompting UVA president Teresa Sullivan to promise a full investigation into both the case itself and the school’s investigative process for sexual assault allegations. Shortly after the story’s publication, however, the Washington Post and other news sources began to point out discrepancies in Jackie’s account. On Dec. 5, Rolling Stone issued a retraction that put much of the blame for these discrepancies on Jackie and her misrepresentation of her story, saying “our trust in her was misplaced.” Shortly after this, the magazine covertly revised its retraction to acknowledge the role that the writer and her editors should have had in fact-checking the story prior to its publication. The retraction, which now prefaces the story, says that Rolling Stone was “mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account” and that it was the magazine’s mistake.
From a journalistic perspective, there are two important things that Rolling Stone could have done to prevent this debacle. First, Erdely’s acquiescence to Jackie’s request that she not contact the alleged assailants is an unusual one. Even if she were unable to get an on-the-record interview, an off-the-record verification of the facts that Jackie had presented might have helped her and Rolling Stone’s staff to identify potential areas of concern. Doing so is a common practice in similar situations, and Rolling Stone was willfully irresponsible in its failure to contact the subjects of Jackie’s allegations in the course of its fact-checking. Second, the magazine’s decision to throw Jackie under the bus when other sources identified discrepancies in her account was wildly unprofessional and disrespectful to both Jackie herself and to sexual assault survivors in general. Ultimately, the burden of fact-checking a source’s representation of reality falls on a publication, rather than the source. Rolling Stone’s initial retraction struck the wrong note and demonstrated a churlish refusal to acknowledge its own error, and its shifting of the blame onto Jackie devalued what was already a difficult decision to speak with a reporter about a traumatic event in her life.
However, it would also have behooved Erdely to bear in mind that survivors’ accounts may differ slightly with every telling, even when the key facts of the matter remain the same. Elizabeth F. Loftus, a cognitive psychologist, has made a career of demonstrating how our memory can change. In 2012, she and others studied how misinformation can affect a person’s memory of genuinely experienced, stressful events. The unreliable nature of memory is simply a reality — it is the reason why eyewitness accounts are among the least reliable forms of evidence, as was apparent for the prosecution in the Michael Brown case. Given this unfortunate fact, the only good counter against Erdely’s mistakes would have been simply to speak to as many sources as possible — which Erdely failed to do.
At the end of the day, there is no easy way to write about sexual assaults like Jackie’s. When a sensitive person’s natural inclination to respect a survivor’s right to privacy comes into direct conflict with a professional obligation to fact-check that person’s account of events, journalists are put into a difficult position. Clearly, asking journalists to push sources to disclose difficult personal information is an uncomfortable directive, but simply failing to fact-check serious allegations before publishing them is an equally untenable position for reputable publications. Unfortunately, this entire debacle can be used in attempts to legitimize misconceptions about the frequency of false sexual assault reports, and also will likely affect survivors’ willingness to come forward with their stories in the future.
