Two weeks ago Rolling Stone magazine published this article on rape cases at the University of Virginia. It focuses on a woman, “Jackie”, who alleges that at a particular frat party she was taken to a dark room upstairs and brutally gang-raped for hours. The article mentions other rape allegations at the university by other women, but the overwhelming focus is on this one case. The article, by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, has gotten nationwide attention and there’s been a strong response from the UVA administration, including cancelling all events in the fraternity system for the rest of the semester. Seemingly everyone was taking the article at face value.
Then yesterday, Reason magazine published this: Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax? Now the floodgates seem to have opened. Simply by searching on Google, I’ve found articles by the Washington Post, The New Republic, Slate, and many other sources, all taking a skeptical bent towards the allegations.
Some of the problems with the story seem straightforward. For instance, Jackie was supposedly knocked through a glass table and both her and the rapists were on the floor that was covered with shattered glass for hours, a detail that strains credulity. The frat boys supposedly called each other nicknames like “Armpit” and “Blanket”, another detail that’s tough to take seriously. There are bigger problems with Erdely’s story. Despite being an experienced, professional journalist, she seems to have committed some major errors: not attempting to contact the accused or allowing them to respond to the allegations, over-reliance on anonymous sources, and so forth. When the Washington Post and Slate asked her about these things, she gave rambling, contradictory non-answers.
To me, it seems like there are a lot of other problems with the story as well. Here, for instance, is what supposedly happened when Jackie contacted three of her friends after the event:
First of all, college students don’t talk like this in barely any situation, and certainly not in a highly stressed situation like the one described. I wouldn’t expect students in that situation to speak in grammatically perfect English or to use more old-fashioned phrases than what I normally hear from them. (Or to avoid using profanity.) But beyond that, the very idea that three students would meet a mutual friend who had just been brutally raped and was bleeding badly, and would respond by only caring about reputation and access to future frat parties, is unbelievable. It’s like a parody of terrible behavior by frat boys and sorority girls. And it’s hard not to suspect that’s because it’s either an entirely fictional event, or an exaggerated version of something that did happen.
Of course more facts may come to light, and there’s no way to be certain either way at the moment. But certainly there’s a strong case to be made that it’s a hoax.