From the start, Rolling Stone's blockbuster story of a brutal campus rape at the University of Virginia struck some people as too good (or, more precisely, too horrific) to be true. The story featured villains straight from central casting: privileged southern white frat boys. On the modern stage of identity politics, such people play the role formerly assumed by Nazis – you know they'll be up to no good.
In this case, the atrocity was a brutal gang rape that was – get this! – part of a secret initiation rite. Jackie (a pseudonym) was raped on a table that collapsed into shards of glass. Various university officials pretended to sympathize, but ultimately ignored her awful story. It was a case of justice denied. More important, it put a human face on the phenomenon of campus "rape culture," the most neglected human-rights abuse of our time.
The Rolling Stone story fell apart, but not before it made headlines across the country. Among the early skeptics was blogger and critic Richard Bradley. He thought there were too many details that didn't hang together. (Wouldn't being raped for hours on broken glass cause wounds?) He knew something about bogus journalism, having once worked with writer Stephen Glass, a number of whose articles turned out to be fake. In retrospect, Mr. Bradley realized he'd been duped because the articles "corroborated my pre-existing biases."
To its credit, Rolling Stone asked the Columbia Journalism School to conduct a forensic review. Columbia found that almost the entire story was a lie, and that Rolling Stone didn't have a shred of corroborating evidence. The writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, as well as the magazine's fact-checkers and senior editors, had allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by a fabulist.
How could this have happened? The Columbia report didn't really address that question. But the answer isn't hard to find. It happened because the story corroborated everybody's pre-existing biases.
Ms. Erdley didn't set out to write a story about Jackie. She set out to write a story about rape culture on campus, which she took to be a given. She needed to find terrible examples to make her point. With Jackie, she thought she'd hit the jackpot. Jackie's story confirmed everything she and everyone at Rolling Stone already believed about the horrors of rape culture, indifferent university officials and predatory gangs of vicious young men. No one effectively questioned the more improbable details of her story or the inconsistencies. Today, it's taken as an article of faith that it's wrong to doubt a rape survivor because disbelief denies justice to the victims.
"I 100 per cent do not think that the policies that we have in place failed," fact-checking chief Coco McPherson told the report's co-author. "I think decisions were made around those because of the subject matter."
Besides, as Michael Wolff pointed out in USA Today, Rolling Stone is skilled at playing to its demographics. The editors knew their target audience of educated, left-leaning 18- to 35-year-olds were going to lap it up.
Rape-hoax stories are nothing new. Some Rolling Stone readers are too young to remember the Duke lacrosse scandal, in which three white students on the lacrosse team were accused of raping a black stripper at a party. (The race element helped fuel the outrage.) The accused men were vilified in the press and defamed across the country. In the end, the state attorney-general not only dropped all the charges but declared the students innocent.
Interestingly, Columbia University, where the Rolling Stone forensic was conducted, is the scene of its own high-profile rape story. Emma Sulkowicz, informally known as Mattress Girl, says she was raped by a classmate in her dorm room, and that Columbia bungled the case. Now she's lugging around a twin-sized dorm-room mattress wherever she goes. She vows to keep lugging it until the student is no longer on campus.
Mattress Girl became a national hero. She's been sympathetically profiled in The New York Times and has won several top feminist awards. Her mattress isn't just a protest; it's a work of performance art that will be her senior thesis. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith praised it as "strict and lean, yet inclusive and open-ended, symbolically laden yet drastically physical."
We have entered deep into Tom Wolfe territory here. But I doubt even he could make this up.
Ms. Sulkowicz has alleged that she was raped by a German scholarship student named Paul Nungesser. After she reported him to the Office of Gender-Based Misconduct (yes, they have an office just for that), he was investigated and cleared by the university. The most full and fair account of the matter, by journalist Cathy Young, will leave you scratching your head, or maybe tearing your hair out.
What puzzles me is why university officials have been so cravenly defensive. Instead of pointing out that their campuses are safe and secure, which is the simple truth, they've grovelled before their accusers. After the Rolling Stone incident, the University of Virginia president rent her garments and promised a complete overhaul of campus and fraternity culture. Columbia president Lee Bollinger was so terrorized by Mattress Girl that he penned a piece for The New Republic pledging to redouble the university's fight against gender-based misconduct.
Meanwhile, Rolling Stone is gathering no moss. Nobody will be fired. The writer who so spectacularly screwed up is already working on another blockbuster. A lot of people sympathize with Jackie. They insist that Rolling Stone has blamed the victim and that even if things didn't happen exactly as she said, something must have.
As for Rolling Stone's readers, I doubt they'll be too upset. The story was wrong, but they're as convinced as ever that the meta-story is right. And in the end, isn't that what counts?