Rolling Stone has apologized for its riveting campus rape story regarding UVA student Jackie.
This is not the first time Rolling Stone and Jackie have been in the news recently. According to a report from the Inquisitr , Rolling Stone recently released an article “A Rape on Campus,” which accused several fraternity members of gang raping her when she was a freshman.
The fraternity in question was Phi Kappa Psi , but the rape accusation quickly fell apart as many discrepancies were revealed. Rolling Stone failed to contact any of the alleged attackers, and the stories given by Phi Kappa Psi and Jackie were unsettling in that they were very different.
“We have no knowledge of these alleged acts being committed at our house or by our members,” Phi Kappa Psi said, adding that it had “been working tirelessly” to investigate the allegations. “Anyone who commits any form of sexual assault, wherever or whenever, should be identified and brought to justice.”
After looking over the facts and the discrepancies, Rolling Stones issued an apology for their story.
“We made a judgment – the kind of judgement [sic] reporters and editors make every day. And in this case, our judgement [sic] was wrong,” editor Will Dana posted on Twitter Friday. “We should have either not made this agreement with Jackie … or worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story. That failure is on us – not on her.”
Rolling Stone continues to apologize for their story by saying, “In the months Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made Erdely, or Rolling Stone’s editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie’s credibility. Our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.”
While Jackie’s story does have holes in it, it is still under investigation by the Charlottesville police, who have suspended the fraternity’s activities. Rolling Stone , however, did apologize for their story, which accused fraternity members of rape too quickly.
[Image via Google Images]