Rolling Stone Magazine forced to retract discredited rape story

Rolling Stone magazine retracted a widely discredited article about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia after a top journalism school issued a scathing report concluding that it had failed to meet proper journalistic standards.

The review, undertaken at Rolling Stone’s request, presented a broad indictment of the magazine’s handling of a story that horrified readers and sparked a national discussion about sexual assaults on college campuses.

The way the magazine reported, edited, and vetted the article is a “story of journalistic failure that was avoidable”, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism said in the report.

The criticism came two weeks after the Charlottesville police department said it had found no evidence to back the claims of the victim identified in the story only as ‘Jackie’, who said she was raped by seven men at a fraternity house.

Rolling Stone’s “failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking”, said the journalism school’s report.

Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana posted an apology on the publication’s website and said the magazine was officially retracting the story.

The article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, also apologised, saying she would not repeat the mistakes she made when writing the November 2014 article ‘A Rape on Campus’.

The magazine’s publisher, Jann S Wenner, however, told The New York Times that Erdely would continue to write for the magazine and that neither her editor nor Dana would be fired.

Rolling Stone had asked for the independent review after numerous news media outlets found flaws with the story about Jackie, who said the attack happened during a social event at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house more than two years earlier.

The article quoted Jackie as saying that the attack was orchestrated by a fraternity member who worked with her at the school’s aquatic centre.

She also said she told three friends about the attack, but she said they were generally unsupportive, and that at least two encouraged her to keep quiet to protect their social standing.

The report found three major flaws in the magazine’s reporting methodology: That Erdely did not try to contact the three friends; that she failed to give enough details of the alleged assault when she contacted the fraternity for comment, which made it difficult for the organisation to investigate; and that Rolling Stone did not try hard enough to find the person Jackie accused of orchestrating the assault.