Review Shows Everything that Went Wrong in Rolling Stone's UVA Story

Later, Jackie claimed in an interview with Washington Post that she requested that Erdely take her out of the story; the review says there’s no evidence of such a conversation in Erdely’s notes:

In December, Jackie told The Washington Post in an interview that after several interviews with Erdely, she had asked to be removed from the story, but that Erdely had refused. Jackie told the Post she later agreed to participate on condition that she be allowed to fact-check parts of her story. Erdely said in an interview for this report that she was completely surprised by Jackie’s statements to the Post and that Jackie never told her she wanted to withdraw from the story. There is no evidence of such an exchange between Jackie and Erdely in the materials Erdely submitted to Rolling Stone.

• Erdely’s editors didn’t push her hard enough to “close the gaps” in the piece.

From the report: “Sean Woods, Erdely’s primary editor, might have prevented the effective retraction of Jackie’s account by pressing his writer to close the gaps in her reporting.” It adds:

In hindsight, the most consequential decision Rolling Stone made was to accept that Erdely had not contacted the three friends who spoke with Jackie on the night she said she was raped. That was the reporting path, if taken, that would have almost certainly led the magazine’s editors to change plans.

It’s also pretty clear that Rolling Stone’s editors weren’t aware of the significant, non-standard deal that Erdely made with Jackie regarding “Drew”:

As to “Drew,” the lifeguard, Dana said he was not even aware that Rolling Stone did not know the man’s full name and had not confirmed his existence. Nor was he told that “we’d made any kind of agreement with Jackie to not try to track this person down.”

As noted, there was no such explicit compact between Erdely and Jackie, according to Erdely’s records. Jackie requested Erdely not to contact the lifeguard, but there was no agreement.

• The story didn’t make clear what information Erdely was missing, and what people she was unable to reach.

The biggest failure in “A Rape on Campus,” in many respects, is its lack of transparency: readers weren’t made aware that “Drew” hadn’t been located or even identified, that Jackie’s three friends hadn’t been able to comment, that virtually everything was from the girl’s point of view. The most “egregious failures of transparency” in the story, the report says, are the fault of both the reporter and her editors:

— Rolling Stone’s editors did not make clear to readers that Erdely and her editors did not know “Drew’s” true name, had not talked to him and had been unable to verify that he existed. That was fundamental to readers’ understanding. In one draft of the story, Erdely did include a disclosure. She wrote that Jackie “refuses to divulge [Drew’s] full name to RS,” because she is “gripped by fears she can barely articulate.” Woods cut that passage as he was editing. He “debated adding it back in” but “ultimately chose not to.”

— Woods allowed the “shit show” quote from “Randall” into the story without making it clear that Erdely had not gotten it from him but from Jackie. “I made that call,” Woods said. Not only did this mislead readers about the quote’s origins, it also compounded the false impression that Rolling Stone knew who “Randall” was and had sought his and the other friends’ side of the story.

In the end, the report adds, “The editors invested Rolling Stone’s reputation in a single source.” The editors seem to still place much of the responsibility for the story’s flaws on this source: story editor Sean Woods states, “We were too deferential to our rape victim; we honored too many requests in our reporting… We should have been much tougher, and in not doing that, we maybe did her a disservice.” Managing editor Will Dana states, “I don’t think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things.”

• The story’s fact-checker had concerns about the reporting, but wasn’t comfortable sharing them with her boss.

The fact-checker, who isn’t identified by name in the report, is said to have had some concerns about the reporting of the story, namely that the three friends hadn’t been interviewed and yet were quoted as if those quotes had been vetted and verified with someone besides Jackie. She marked these as potential issues in the draft, but Woods and Erdely “came to the conclusion that they were comfortable” with the story’s careful elisions. She did not raise her concerns with her boss, the head of the fact-checking department.

Additionally, the magazine’s legal counsel is also said to have looked at the final story before publication, although this is where Columbia’s team wasn’t able to get very far. It’s clear that Rolling Stone will likely be sued by University of Virginia and/or Phi Kappa Psi, and nobody would answer questions about what the magazine’s attorneys had thought about the story or how they greenlit it for publication:

It is not clear what questions the lawyer may have raised about the draft. Erdely and the editors involved declined to answer questions about the specifics of the legal review, citing instructions from the magazine’s outside counsel, Elizabeth McNamara, a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine. McNamara said Rolling Stone would not answer questions about the legal review of “A Rape on Campus” in order to protect attorney-client privilege.

In the end, the Columbia review concludes that there was no catastrophic meltdown here, just one basic failure from which everything else proceeded: “There is no evidence in Erdely’s materials or from interviews with her subjects that she invented facts; the problem was that she relied on what Jackie told her without vetting its accuracy.”

The Columbia reviewers suggest that Rolling Stone’s editorial management review their policies on pseudonyms in stories, their requirements regarding checking “derogatory” information with the person it concerns, and providing enough detail when asking for comment.

The review ends with suggestions about how all of us can do better in reporting on campus rape stories. Ultimately, these stories are about powerful institutions and how they respond to sexual assault; the Columbia reviewers point out that journalists are “rarely in a position to prove guilt or innocent in a rape.” They add:

The responsibilities that universities have in preventing campus sexual assault – and the standards of performance they should be held to – are important matters of public interest. Rolling Stone was right to take them on. The pattern of its failure draws a map of how to do better.

Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana also released a statement on the report, which appears as a preface. He says the Columbia team received no payment for their work and that the magazine placed no conditions on what they could write. He closes with a mea culpa and an apology, stating that the magazine will implement the recommended changes (contradicting his statement within the story that “a lot of new ways of doing things” are unnecessary, and the review’s conclusion that “Rolling Stone’s senior editors are unanimous in the belief that the story’s failure does not require them to change their editorial systems.”

The report was painful reading, to me personally and to all of us at Rolling Stone. It is also, in its own way, a fascinating document – a piece of journalism, as Coll describes it, about a failure of journalism. With its publication, we are officially retracting ‘A Rape on Campus.’ We are also committing ourselves to a series of recommendations about journalistic practices that are spelled out in the report. We would like to apologize to our readers and to all of those who were damaged by our story and the ensuing fallout, including members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and UVA administrators and students. Sexual assault is a serious problem on college campuses, and it is important that rape victims feel comfortable stepping forward. It saddens us to think that their willingness to do so might be diminished by our failings.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely hasn’t been heard from publicly since the story began to unravel. She too at last released a statement tonight, at the same time the Columbia report went live: