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(snip)Credit Tina Fineberg for The New York Times
The Columbia report cataloged a series of errors at Rolling Stone, finding that the magazine could have avoided trouble with the article if certain basic “reporting pathways” had been followed. Written by Steve Coll, the Columbia journalism school’s dean; Sheila Coronel, the dean of academic affairs; and Derek Kravitz, a postgraduate research scholar at the university, the report, at nearly 13,000 words, is longer than the 9,000-word article, “A Rape on Campus.”
After its publication last November, the article stoked a national conversation about sexual assault on college campuses and roiled the university.
The police in Charlottesville, Va., said last month they had “exhausted all investigative leads” and found “no substantive basis” to support the article’s depiction of the assault. Jackie did not cooperate with the police and declined to be interviewed for the Columbia report. She also declined, through her lawyer, Palma Pustilnik, to be interviewed for this article. She is no longer in touch with some of the advocates who first brought her to the attention of Rolling Stone, said Emily Renda, a rape survivor working on sexual assault issues at the University of Virginia.
In a statement responding to the report, the University of Virginia’s president, Teresa A. Sullivan, described the article as irresponsible journalism that “unjustly damaged the reputations of many innocent individuals and the University of Virginia.”
Mr. Wenner said Will Dana, the magazine’s managing editor, and the editor of the article, Sean Woods, would keep their jobs.
In an interview, Mr. Dana said he had reached many of the same conclusions as the Columbia report in his own efforts to examine the article, but he disagreed with the report’s assertion that the magazine had staked its reputation on the word of one source. “I think if you take a step back, our reputation rests on a lot more than this one story,” he said.
Ms. Erdely first heard Jackie’s account in a phone conversation last July, the report said. Jackie told her she had been lured to a darkened room at a fraternity party in September 2012, and raped by seven men, the article said, led by her date for the evening, a lifeguard at the university’s aquatic center identified only as Drew. Ms. Erdely hung up the phone “sickened and shaken,” the report said.
Despite some misgivings about the vividness of some of the details, which included a smashed glass coffee table and an assault with a beer bottle in the published account, Ms. Erdely interviewed Jackie seven more times between July and October of last year.
The first misstep during the reporting process, the Columbia report said, was that Ms. Erdely did not seek to independently contact three of Jackie’s friends, who were quoted in the piece, using pseudonyms, expressing trepidation at the idea of Jackie telling the authorities that she had been assaulted. The quotes came from Jackie’s recollection of the conversation. Those friends later cast doubt on Jackie’s story in interviews with The Washington Post and denied saying the words Rolling Stone had attributed to them. The three told the report’s authors that they would have made the same denials to Rolling Stone if they had been contacted.(snip)
(snip)The reporting errors by Ms. Erdely were compounded by insufficient scrutiny and skepticism from editors, the report said. And the fact-checking process relied heavily on four hours of conversations with Jackie.
Ms. Erdely, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone who has also written for GQ and The New Yorker, declined to be interviewed for this article. She said in her apology that reading the report was “a brutal and humbling experience.” She also acknowledged that she did not do enough to verify Jackie’s account.
Rolling Stone’s fundamental mistake, Mr. Dana said, was in suspending any skepticism about Jackie’s account because of the sensitivity of the issue. “We didn’t think through all the implications of the decisions that we made while reporting the story, and we never sort of allowed for the fact that maybe the story we were being told was not true,” he said. That was compounded by the fact that any reporting on any purported crime that has not been reported to the authorities is difficult, he said.
“Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim,” Mr. Woods, the article’s editor, said in the report. “We honored too many of her requests in our reporting. We should have been much tougher, and in not doing that, we maybe did her a disservice.”(snip)
This obviously relates to a number of previous Lounge threads relating to alleged rape victims who were ultimately found to be 'lying'. Every time such cases receive major nationwide publicity, it arguably weakens the credibility of future rape victims. Also, such nationwide publicity emphasizes the fact that unproven rape accusations alone can cause immediate and 'irreversable' damage to both accused rapists, as well as to the 'venue' where the alleged rape was claimed to have occurred, even if it is subsequently determined that no actual rape took place.
My obvious concern here is that the ongoing reduction in credibility of rape 'accusers' will work against future actual victims of rape !!! And this is likely to particularly be the case for exotic dancers, camgirls, escorts etc. - where their adult entertainment industry affiliation is likely to reduce credibility even further.



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