CHARLOTTESVILLE — Several key aspects of the account of a gang rape offered by a University of Virginia student in Rolling Stone magazine have been cast into doubt, including the date of the alleged attack and details about an alleged attacker, according to interviews and a statement from the magazine backing away from the article.
The U-Va. fraternity chapter where the alleged attack on a student named Jackie was said to have occurred in September 2012 released a statement Friday afternoon denying that such an assault took place in its house. Phi Kappa Psi said it has been working with police to determine whether the account of a brutal rape at a party there was true. The fraternity members say that several important elements of the allegations were false.
A group of Jackie’s close friends, who are sex assault awareness advocates at U-Va., said they believe something traumatic happened to her, but they also have come to doubt her account. They said details have changed over time, and they have not been able to verify key points of the story in recent days. A name of an alleged attacker that Jackie provided to them for the first time this week, for example, turned out to be similar to the name of a student who belongs to a different fraternity, and no one by that name has been a member of Phi Kappa Psi.
(Related: U-Va. and sexual assault: The scrutiny will continue)
Reached by phone, that man, a U-Va. graduate, said Friday that he did work at the Aquatic and Fitness Center and was familiar with Jackie’s name. He said, however, that he had never met Jackie in person and had never taken her on a date. He also said that he was not a member of Phi Kappa Psi.
The fraternity — which has been vilified, had its house vandalized and ultimately suspended all of its activities on campus after the Rolling Stone article — said in its statement Friday that it had immediate concerns about the story and has been working to figure out what happened.
“Our initial doubts as to the accuracy of the article have only been strengthened as alumni and undergraduate members have delved deeper,” according to the statement.
Phi Kappa Psi said it did not host “a date function or social event” during the weekend of Sept. 28, 2012, the night that Jackie alleges she was invited to a date party, lured into an upstairs room and was then ambushed and gang-raped by seven men who were rushing the fraternity.
The fraternity also said that it has reviewed the roster of employees at the university’s Aquatic and Fitness Center for 2012 and found that it does not list a member of the fraternity — a detail Jackie provided in her account to Rolling Stone and in interviews with The Washington Post — and that no member of the house matches the description detailed in the Rolling Stone account. The statement also said that the house does not have pledges during the fall semester.
“Moreover, no ritualized sexual assault is part of our pledging or initiating process,” the fraternity said. “This notion is vile, and we vehemently refute this claim.”
An attorney for the fraternity, Ben Warthen, declined to comment further.
U-Va. President Teresa A. Sullivan said late Friday that the developments will not alter the university’s focus on “one of the most difficult and critical issues facing higher education today: sexual violence on college campuses.”
“The University remains first and foremost concerned with the care and support of our students and, especially, any survivor of sexual assault,” Sullivan said in a statement. “Our students, their safety, and their well-being, remain our top priority.”
Sullivan vowed to continue taking a “hard look” at the school’s practices, policies and procedures.
Helen Dragas, a member of the university’s governing Board of Visitors, said Friday that U-Va. needs to continue its focus on preventing sexual assault.
“Despite doubts that have been cast on the Rolling Stone story, we need to keep our eyes on the prize, which is nothing less than zero tolerance for rape,” Dragas said. “There will be time enough to look back and ask hard questions of our administrators about how rapes have gone unreported and unanswered, and I have no doubt our Board of Visitors will do just that. But for now our primary concern must be for the well-being of our students. We need to get this right for them, and do so with no hesitation or concern for image.”
Capt. Gary Pleasants of the Charlottesville Police Department said detectives are looking into the allegations at the request of the university but declined to comment on the status of that investigation.
Rolling Stone’s editors apologized to readers for discrepancies in the story, issuing a statement and posting it on their Web site. Will Dana, Rolling Stone’s managing editor, said there is fresh doubt about the account.
“In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” he said in the statement.
The Washington Post has interviewed Jackie several times during the past week and has worked to corroborate her version of events, contacting dozens of current and former members of the fraternity, the fraternity’s faculty adviser, Jackie’s friends and former roommates, and others on campus. Fraternity members said anonymously that the description of the assailant doesn’t match anyone they know and have been telling others on campus that they did not have a party the night of the alleged attack.
Speaking for the first time since the details of her alleged sexual assault were published in Rolling Stone, the 20-year-old U-Va. junior told The Post that she stands by her version of the events. In lengthy in-person interviews, Jackie recounted an attack very similar to the one she presented in the magazine: She had gone on a date with a member of the house, went to a party there and ended up in a room where she was brutally attacked — seven men raping her in succession with two others watching — leaving her bloody, permanently injured and emotionally devastated.
“I never asked for this” attention, she said in an interview. “What bothers me is that so many people act like it didn’t happen. It’s my life. I have had to live with the fact that it happened every day for the last two years.”
A lawyer who is representing Jackie said Friday morning that she and her client are declining to comment beyond her interviews. The Post generally does not identify victims of sexual assault without their permission, and The Post is identifying Jackie by her real nickname at her request.
Alex Pinkleton, a close friend of Jackie’s who survived a rape and an attempted rape during her first two years on campus, said in an interview that she has had numerous conversations with Jackie in recent days and now feels misled.
“One of my biggest fears with these inconsistencies emerging is that people will be unwilling to believe survivors in the future,” Pinkleton said. “However, we need to remember that the majority of survivors who come forward are telling the truth.”
Pinkleton said she is concerned that sexual assault awareness advocacy groups will suffer as a result of the conflicting details of the Rolling Stone allegations.
“While the details of this one case may have been misreported, this does not erase the somber truth this article brought to light: Rape is far more prevalent than we realize, and it is often misunderstood and mishandled by peers, institutions and society at large,” Pinkleton said. “We in the advocacy community at U-Va. will continue the work of making this issue accessible to our peers, guiding the conversation and our community into a place where sexual assaults are rare, where reporting processes are clear and adjudication is fair and compassionate.”
The fraternity’s statement will come two weeks after Rolling Stone ran a lengthy article about what it characterized as a culture of sex assault at the flagship state university, using Jackie’s story to illustrate how brazen such attacks can be and how indifferent the university is to them. The article, which said Jackie was raped repeatedly during the course of a three-hour attack in a Phi Kappa Psi bedroom that at one point involved a beer bottle, has received increasing scrutiny in recent days as major details have come into question.
The article published in the December issue of the pop culture magazine drew headlines around the world and rekindled discussion on college campuses about sexual assault, putting U-Va. at the epicenter and sending its administration scrambling to respond. The article spawned protests and vandalism, and the university quickly suspended all Greek system activities until the beginning of next semester and put out a call for zero tolerance of sex assault.
The Rolling Stone allegations shook the campus at a tumultuous moment, as the university was still mourning the death of U-Va. sophomore Hannah Graham, whose body was found five weeks after she went missing in Charlottesville. Jackie’s story empowered many women to speak publicly about their own attacks, but it also immediately raised questions about the decisions Jackie made that evening — not going to a hospital or reporting the alleged crime to police or the school — while some expressed doubt about her story altogether.
Jackie told The Post that she had not intended to share her story widely until the Rolling Stone writer contacted her.
“If she had not come to me I probably would not have gone public about my rape,” said Jackie, who added that she had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and that she is now on a regimen of anti-depressants.
Earlier this week, Jackie revealed to friends for the first time the full name of her alleged attacker, a name she had never disclosed to anyone. But after looking into that person’s background, the group that had been among her closest supporters quickly began to raise suspicions about her account. The friends determined that the student that Jackie had named was not a member of Phi Kappa Psi and that other details about his background did not match up with information Jackie had disclosed earlier about her perpetrator.
The Post determined that the student Jackie named is not a member of Phi Kappa Psi.
Emily Renda was a U-Va. senior when she first met Jackie in the fall of 2013. In an interview, Renda said she immediately connected with Jackie as they discussed the bond they shared as rape survivors. Renda said she was raped her freshman year after attending a fraternity party.
Jackie told The Post that she bawled as she spoke to Renda about her own sexual assault.
Renda said Thursday that Jackie initially told her that she was attacked by five students at Phi Kappa Psi on Sept. 28, 2012. Renda said that she learned months later that Jackie had changed the number of attackers from five to seven.
“An advocate is not supposed to be an investigator, a judge or an adjudicator,” said Renda, a 2014 graduate who works for the university as a sexual violence awareness specialist. But as details emerge that cast doubt on Jackie’s account, Renda said, “I don’t even know what I believe at this point.”
“This feels like a betrayal of good advocacy if this is not true,” Renda said. “We teach people to believe the victims. We know there are false reports, but those are extraordinarily low.”
Renda said research shows that between 2 and 8 percent of all rape allegations are fabricated or unfounded.
“The doubt cast on Jackie’s story has been feeding the myth that we have been combating for 40 years that women lie about rape, and I feel that will put women at a disadvantage in coming forward,” Renda said.
“There’s definitely a lot of confusion and raising of a lot of questions that need answers,” Renda said.”I have faith and hope that Jackie will answer those in time.”
In July, Renda introduced Jackie to Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the Rolling Stone writer who was on assignment to write about sexual violence on college campuses. Overwhelmed from sitting through interviews with the writer, Jackie said she asked Erdely to be taken out of the article. She said Erdely refused and Jackie was told that the article would go forward regardless.
Jackie said she finally relented and agreed to participate on the condition that she be able to fact-check her parts in the story, which she said Erdely accepted.
“I didn’t want the world to read about the worst three hours of my life, the thing I have nightmares about every night,” Jackie said.
Erdely said in an e-mail message that she was not immediately available to comment Friday morning, and she and Rolling Stone did not return phone calls and e-mails seeking comment later in the day.
In a series of tweets late Friday, Dana, Rolling Stone’s managing editor, said that he “can’t explain the discrepancies between Jackie’s account and the counter statements by Phi Psi” and that “the fact that there is a story that appears in Rolling Stone in which I don’t have complete confidence is deeply unsettling to me.”
Dana tweeted that the reporters and editors at Rolling Stone made a judgment to come to an agreement with Jackie not to contact her alleged attackers, a judgment he wrote ended up being wrong. “That failure is on us — not on her,” he wrote.
Jackie told The Post that she felt validated that the article encouraged other female students to come forward saying that they, too, had been sexually assaulted in fraternity houses.
“Haven’t enough people come forward at this point?” she said. “How many people do you need to come forward saying they’ve been raped at a fraternity to make it real to you? They need to acknowledge it’s a problem they need to address instead of pointing fingers to take the blame off themselves.”
As classes resumed this week after Thanksgiving break, Jackie, whose family lives in Northern Virginia, went back to the campus where her story is still a daily topic of conversation. Although anonymous for now, she said she remains afraid that fellow students and fraternity members will somehow recognize her as the victim from the Rolling Stone article.
Jackie said she never wanted to go to U-Va. Graduating near the top of her high school senior class of 700, she had planned to attend Brown University. She dreamed of pursuing a career in medicine like her childhood hero, Patch Adams.
“I wanted to help people,” Jackie said.
She said she was disappointed when her family told her that they could not afford the Ivy League tuition. She enrolled at U-Va. without ever visiting the school.
She said she performed well in course work that included rigorous pre-med classes in psychology, chemistry and religious anthropology. She said she soon found a job as a lifeguard at a campus pool, where she said she met a charming junior who had dimples, blue eyes and dark curly hair.
Jackie told The Post that the same student later took her out for an extravagant dinner at the Boar’s Head Inn before they attended a date function on Sept. 28, 2012 at his fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi. Jackie said that her date appeared to have orchestrated the sexual assault by attempting to ply her with alcohol before escorting her into a darkened room on the second floor of the fraternity house. Jackie said she did not actually drink alcohol that night because she was on a migraine medication. She said she remembered the events that night clearly.
According to her account in Rolling Stone and in interviews, Jackie said she was thrown to a rug, breaking a low glass table in the process. She said that she did receive cuts to the back of her arm as a result but noted that her attack happened on a thick rug.
Jackie told The Post that the men pinned her down and then raped her, the trauma leaving her bleeding from between her legs.
“One of them said ‘Grab its [expletive] leg,’” she said, her lip quivering and tears streaming down her face. “Its. I’ll never forget that. I felt like nothing, like I wasn’t even human.”
Jackie’s former roommate, Rachel Soltis, said she noticed emotional and physical changes to her friend during the fall semester of 2012, when the two shared a suite on campus.
“She was withdrawn, depressed and couldn’t wake up in the mornings,” said Soltis, who told The Post she was convinced that Jackie was sexually assaulted. Soltis said Jackie did not tell her about the alleged sexual assault until January 2013. Soltis said she did not notice any apparent wounds on Jackie’s body at the time that might have indicated a brutal attack.
The Post asked Jackie on multiple occasions to reveal the full name of the two attackers she said she recognized. She declined, saying that she didn’t want the perpetrator “to come back in my life.”
Jackie said numerous times that she did not expect that an investigation the Charlottesville Police Department opened after the article’s publication would result in any charges. She said she knew there was little if any forensic evidence that could prove the allegations two years after they occurred.
“I didn’t want a trial,” Jackie said. “I can’t imagine getting up on a defense stand having them tear me apart.”
Jackie said early in the week that she felt manipulated by Erdely, the Rolling Stone reporter, saying that she “felt completely out of control over my own story.” In an in-person interview Thursday, Jackie said the Rolling Stone account of her attack was truthful, but she also acknowledged that some details in the article might not be accurate.
Jackie contradicted an earlier interview, saying on Thursday that she did not know if her main attacker actually was a member of Phi Kappa Psi.
“He never said he was in Phi Psi,” she said, while noting that she was positive that the date function and attack occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on Sept. 28, 2012. “I know it was Phi Psi because a year afterward my friend pointed out the building to me and said that’s where it happened.”
Tommy Reid, president of the Inter-Fraternity Council, said that all Greek organizations must register parties with the IFC. He said that the council’s records did not date back to the fall of 2012.
Nick Anderson, Paul Farhi, Jennifer Jenkins and Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Clarification: An earlier version of this story did not properly attribute in one instance a statement about whether Jackie had met the man she named to friends as one of her attackers. The story has been updated.
