On Jezebel, a writer named Anna Merlan takes me to task for questioning elements of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone story on an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia.

Referring to me as “a guy by the name of Richard Bradley” who is “now mostly retired” (I am?), Merlan says that my post below is a “giant ball of shit.” (I would love to use that as a book blurb someday.) She doesn’t really say why she thinks I’m so fecally wrong, except that I’m male and, apparently, old, and insufficiently appreciative of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “months of work.”

I know it’s Jezebel and all, and no one there is particularly expected to be responsible or even truthful, but in the act of dismissing what I wrote, Merlan profoundly mischaracterizes it.

For example: She says in a comment that….

…Bradley writes ‘we never learn her identity’ as though it’s unusual. As though every other reported piece about rape includes the alleged victim’s name and social security number and weight and height and current address and medication allergies.

I wrote no such thing, and it’s either willful ignorance, ideological blindness or just plain maliciousness on Merlan’s part to suggest otherwise.

Here’s what I wrote:

Jackie is never identified. I don’t love that—it makes me uncomfortable to base an entire story on an unnamed source, and I can’t think of any other situation other than rape where a publication would allow that—but certainly one can see the rationale.

Doesn’t sound quite as bad as Anna Merlan makes it out to be, does it?

I know full well that media outlets don’t publish the names of rape victims without their permission. But if you’re going to base a highly accusatory 9,000-word article on an anonymous source, you should push as hard as you can to get second-hand, named corroboration from, say, the three friends who supposedly saw “Jackie” immediately after the rape.

Merlan also neglects to mention that I’m skeptical because Jackie says she knows the names of two of her alleged rapists, but those ​names are not printed (why wouldn’t they be?) and so far as one can tell from the article, Sabrina Rubin Erdely never contacted the men; I wonder if she even knows their names. (If she does, how on earth could she not contact them for comment?) And if you read the Washington Post story Merlan refers to, or listen to the Slate podcast SRE did, Rubin Erdely repeatedly dodges the question of whether she knows the identities of the two men allegedlfy involved and if she tried to contact them. I think I count four times in which the Slate interviewer tries to get Rubin Erdely to say whether she contacted the men involved, and each time Rubin Erdely conspicuously avoids answering the question. It’s weird.

Because I could not find an email for Merlan online, I reached out to her via LinkedIn and rather mildly pointed out that I am not retired. She does not seem to have accepted my offer to connect on LinkedIn, but she did subsequently update her Jezebel post thusly:

Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly said Richard Bradley is retired. In fact, he is the current editor-in-chief of Worth. I regret the error. This is what a professional journalistic correction looks like, in the unlikely event that any editors at Worth or writers at Reason [a writer there also questioned the Rolling Stone story] ever need to issue one.

This is ripe. According to her LinkedIn page, Anna Merlan is a 2010 graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism who has also worked at the Dallas Observer, the Village Voice and now Jezebel—a downward trajectory, you might say, but never mind.

This gives her about four years of professional journalism experience—more if you count her pre-Columbia days—as opposed to my 30 years.

I’m not a big one on harrumphing about kids today and all that, and I’m all for young journalists stirring the pot, but still—how kind of Merlan to identify for me what a “professional journalistic correction looks like”—in an addendum that is exactly not what a professional correction looks like. I’m guessing that using a correction to take a shot at the person you’re making a correction about is not what they taught at CSJ. It certainly isn’t what I taught at CSJ, where I was a tutor in the master’s program for two years. (Merlan and I just missed overlapping.)

I expected to get raked over the coals when I wrote the post below, so this isn’t surprising, and I imagine there’ll be more to come. It’s just disappointing when people do it in such a predictable and shallow way. I wish Merland had actually addressed the substance of what I wrote. Especially coming from a writer at Jezebel, that could have been the beginning of an interesting—maybe even important—conversation.

But I guess you don’t get as many hits that way.

Incidentally, I have emailed Sabrina Rubin Erdely to see if she would answer some questions about the piece. I have not yet heard back. (To be fair, I only emailed a few hours ago, and I am sure she is busy.) So we’ll see.