Campus rape and ‘Rolling Stone’

The commissioner, Dr. Norman Yoder, declined to identify the students or their college. But Yoder was a respected authority on rehabilitation of blindness; he had held his state office for nine years. His story was supported by his superiors, including Governor Raymond Shafer, and even by the U.S. commissioner of rehabilitation services. So the story went out on the Associated Press wire and soon made headlines across the country.

I remember the story well because, at the time, I was editor of a daily newspaper in Indiana. When the AP dispatch came in over the ticker, I believed it just like everyone else. After all, Yoder’s report reinforced everything I had been led to believe about drug-crazed college hippie freaks. So I put it on the front page.

A week later, Yoder’s story was exposed as a hoax. In his well-meaning zeal to dramatize the possible effects of LSD, Dr. Yoder had invented the six blind students out of whole cloth, and the gullible media had swallowed his tale. But Yoder’s well-intentioned fabrication undermined efforts to confront the very real usage of drugs on college campuses, not to mention the very real potential dangers posed by LSD to the human eye.

Search for a victim

Times change. Today’s sophisticated journalists are much more skeptical toward the pronouncements of public officials. And the pressing issue on college campuses is not drugs but unpunished date rape. This year, 55 U.S. colleges were named as targets of a federal investigation for mishandling complaints of sexual violence. Yet the challenge of dramatizing this issue remains pretty much the same as the challenge of campus drugs in the ’60s — in this case, because traumatized 18- or 20-year-old rape victims are understandably reluctant to relive their nightmares, especially for the benefit of unsympathetic college administrators, police, or prosecutors.

For this reason, last summer the editors of Rolling Stone resolved to do what good journalists ought to do: dramatize the issue by publishing a compelling story about campus rape. They assigned the story to Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a contributing editor, who searched diligently for what she has called “the right story on the right campus.”

This was no easy task. Human memory is a tricky thing even in the simplest situations. A rape victim who has been plied with booze (or, as with Bill Cosby’s alleged victims, drugs) and traumatized to boot may not possess perfect recall as to who did what and when and where. But that’s hardly reason to dismiss her account out of hand, as too many cops, courts, and college administrators have been inclined to do.

Squabbling siblings

Legal standards in rape cases are necessarily strict because a false accusation can send an innocent man to prison. But a journalist’s duty is to look beyond questions of legal guilt or innocence to ask, “What really happened here?” and “What’s the bigger picture?” A rape victim’s testimony might not stand up in court, but if she is the victim, how can she be ignored?

Erdely thought she found her ideal victim in “Jackie,” a young woman who said she was gang-raped at a University of Virginia fraternity party. Jackie identified the fraternity, but she asked that her last name not be used and that the magazine refrain from contacting the men she accused of raping her. Given the trauma Jackie had undergone, those requests seemed reasonable.

Most journalists have encountered similar quandaries. Years ago, I researched a magazine article about five siblings who were fighting over their father’s estate. All five siblings refused to talk to me, despite my repeated approaches. Then one sister granted my request — but only if I promised not to talk to the others. In my zeal for access, and under the pressure of a deadline, I figured that one interview was better than none, so I acquiesced. That was a mistake: In effect I granted the sister’s narrative veto power over any rebuttal by her siblings.

Magazine’s apology

The Rolling Stone story that appeared last month did indeed trigger a national discussion about campus rape, just as the magazine had hoped. In the glare of a national media spotlight, the University of Virginia hastily suspended all campus fraternity activities for three weeks and closed down the allegedly offending fraternity altogether. And I, like most everyone else, accepted the Rolling Stone story because it jibed with everything I’d been led to believe about campus rape.

But last week, several pieces of Jackie’s story came into question. Members of the fraternity, contacted by the Washington Post, rebutted some of Jackie’s details and suggested that Jackie may have identified the wrong fraternity. The male student she said had taken her to the party turned out not to be a member of the fraternity at all.

Last weekend, Rolling Stone issued a semi-apology for its reporting methods. “I have serious questions about what happened,” Rolling Stone’s managing editor, Will Dana, told an interviewer, “and I am at this point not ready to say what happened that night. There should never be a story in Rolling Stone where I feel that way.”

Victor Hugo said it

Well, sure. In retrospect, it’s easy to suggest that Sabrina Erdely was wrong to cut a deal with Jackie that effectively prevented Erdely from checking out Jackie’s story independently. In theory, Erdely should have rejected Jackie altogether and instead continued to search for an ideal subject: an articulate, untraumatized, media-savvy rape victim, possessed of a photographic memory and endless courage to stand up to the retaliations of the academic and legal establishments. But, in that case, I suspect Erdely would still be searching.

On the other hand, the truth of what happened at the University of Virginia is coming out — in the follow-up reporting by the Washington Post and other media that are not bound by Erdely’s commitments to Jackie. Which is more or less the way truth usually emerges — not in one neat package but in gradual dribs and drabs. Rolling Stone got the ball rolling, and now that ball is being picked up by others. Erdely's crime was to listen sympathetically — O.K., maybe too sympathetically — to a rape victim and report what she heard, which is more than most college and criminal justice officials have done. She didn't write the last definitive word on campus rape — more like the first word.

“If a soul is left in darkness,” Victor Hugo observed, “sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.” If indeed Jackie was gang-raped at the University of Virginia, her “sin” was her failure to get all the details right when talking to a reporter, as well her reluctance to expose herself to her attackers all over again. We journalists are quite right to focus on the larger question: Who caused Jackie’s darkness? As to the question of how to elicit objective truth from victims of trauma — ah, that may be the great journalistic challenge of this or any age.