The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism released its tough, comprehensive report on Rolling Stone’s now-retracted story, “A Rape on Campus,” on Sunday night. And while it documents many failings by reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely, her editors and the fact-checking department in their handling of explosive allegations about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia, one of the most trenchant observations in the report comes from Erdely herself.
“Maybe the discussion should not have been so much about how to accommodate her,” Erdely said of Jackie, the source for the central, unverifiable account around which Erdely built the article, “but should have been about whether she would be in this story at all.”
Rolling Stone’s failure and the report highlight how consistent adherence to existing journalistic practices could prevent similar disasters in the future. But “A Rape on Campus” also points us to a larger truth. The call to believe rape victims is a response to a wide array of shameful failures, including a tendency to blame survivors for being attacked, untimely and inadequate investigations into rape allegations, and mild punishments for a violent, intimate crime. But belief is actually a small thing to offer victims, a palliative response to the failure to achieve broader reforms of culture, bureaucracy and the criminal justice system. Like officers of the law and university officials, journalists owe rape victims something more rigorous and powerful than simple deference.
Over and over again, the report finds instances where the staff of Rolling Stone conflated the need to be respectful of victims of trauma with the challenging work of maintaining a source’s trust while also preserving the ability to do meaningful reporting. “Erdely struggled to decide how much she could independently verify the details Jackie provided without jeopardizing Jackie’s cooperation,” the report’s authors — Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll and Derek Kravitz — note.
When Erdely made clear to Jackie that she couldn’t tell her story to a national publication such as Rolling Stone while simultaneously keeping her alleged attacker from ever learning about the piece, Jackie dropped out of contact with Erdely; Erdely took her response as “consistent with a victim of trauma.” Under deadline pressure, Erdely resolved the deadlock not by dropping Jackie as a subject, but by suggesting to Jackie that the magazine use a pseudonym to describe her alleged attacker; afterward, Jackie resumed contact. And Erdely, as the report noted, set boundaries that Jackie had not explicitly demanded, particularly in deciding not to contact the friends that Jackie described as reacting callously to news of her alleged assault.
These might have been appropriate steps for Erdely to take if she was providing therapeutic support to Jackie. In December, as “A Rape on Campus” was coming under scrutiny, I spoke to Barbara Moynihan, a professor emeritus at the Quinnipiac University School of Nursing and an expert in the intersection of nursing and criminal investigation about best practices for figuring out what happened when someone reports a rape.
The first step is to ask victims “ ‘Are you safe now? I’m glad that you’re here.’ We don’t say ‘Now, tell me what happened.’ Because then you’re another intrusive person and the person could walk out,” Moynihan said. “The best practice is not to take over. It’s to support the person.”
But while journalists have a powerful interest in persuading their sources not to cut off a relationship, the bargain between reporters and rape victims is very different from that between rape victims and medical professionals, law enforcement or authority figures at their colleges and universities.
In December, I had two exchanges with Kristen Lombardi, an investigative reporter who has written extensively on sexual assault for the Center for Public Integrity, and who is quoted in the report. Lombardi said that for her, the best way to build reporter-source relationships with rape victims was not to change her standards for how she analyzed and verified information, but to be very blunt and clear about the details of the reporting process, including the fact that she would have to contact the people her sources are accusing of rape.
“I initially start on background and explain that much later we can decide if you’re going to put your name to this, how you want to be identified. When you build a long-term relationship, everything else follows,” she told me in our second conversation. “I’ve kind of learned to explain my goals and really prepare them for what lies ahead about the process. And this is what I think we owe victims: because as journalists we don’t explain our reporting process to anybody.”
I reported some of the other ways Lombardi tried to give victims a sense of control during the reporting process without compromising her ability to verify their stories in an earlier column; Lombardi reiterated the same ideas to the authors of the Columbia report.
It’s deeply unfortunate that the basic obligation for journalists to try to verify survivors’ stories has been treated as adversarial or cruel to victims, when rape survivors have so much to gain from rigorous reporting. Strong, comprehensive reporting can make the connections between individual cases and institutional practices that are necessary goads to comprehensive reform.
“It is wrong to assume that seeking the truth—to the extent that it is discoverable—comes from a place of mistrust or outright derision of rape victims,” Slate’s Amanda Hess wrote in a terrific piece about “A Rape on Campus” last year. “The students of UVA deserve to know whether their campus is being occupied by a pack of ritualistic gang rapists, and if so, who they are. It is also appropriate to reexamine whether UVA’s response in this case was, in fact, insufficient.”
And testing whether a victim is truly ready to go through an intensive reporting process can be an important way to check whether the person is prepared to face the national reaction that can come from being part of a widely publicized article. Jackie may have felt empowered by telling her story to others and by getting involved in anti-rape activism at U-Va. But it was no kindness to make her brutal, shocking story the selling point of “A Rape on Campus” without providing answers to many of the questions that were sure to follow the piece.
The impulse to magnify the voices of people who report being victims of violence is a powerful one. But there is a difference between speaking to friends, to a therapist, or even as a local activist, and speaking on a national stage. Thrusting someone like Jackie into a spotlight that would inevitably reveal the holes in her story, and giving her the power to scorch others in her self-immolation, is neither compassionate reporting nor effective advocacy journalism.