Last Friday, Rolling Stone put out a statement backing off Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s story, “A Rape on Campus,” and the account of its protagonist, a young woman named Jackie.

“There now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account,” the magazine said.

That was an artfully chosen term. The magazine didn’t know if Jackie had lied to them or misremembered what happened to her; the magazine couldn’t really say for sure if anything at all had happened to Jackie.

Hence the use of the term discrepancies; it is a vague and legalistic word that can mean very little or an enormous amount. And people on both extremes of the discussion about Jackie’s story have tried to define it.

Mostly from the right, some observers believe that the term “discrepancies” suggests that nothing happened to Jackie; that she made the whole thing up. Some websites have alleged—without a hint of proof, as far as I can tell— that Jackie has a history of making up rape allegations. These are the same folks who are livid with Rolling Stone for not holding Jackie to the highest evidentiary standards. I certainly understand the criticism, but some consistency would seem to be in order.

On the other side, the victims’ advocacy wing, there are people who keep writing about “discrepancies” as if they are by definition trivial.

The context is usually something like this: “Just because there are inconsistencies in Jackie’s story does not mean that it isn’t mostly true. So what if she got the date wrong, or the name of the fraternity? Something happened to her.”

To these people I would say, let’s not forget what Jackie’s original story was: a premeditated gang rape; nine men in a pitch-black room; rape by seven of them, the last with a beer bottle; three best friends who discouraged her from reporting the rape for fear they’d never be invited to fraternity parties.

Even if there are “discrepancies” in Jackie’s story, we are still left, frankly, with a fantastical story. The argument thus becomes: So what if she got the name of the fraternity wrong? That doesn’t disprove that she was the victim of a premeditated gang rape in a blackened fraternity room by seven men!

“So what if it didn’t happen just the way she said it? She was still forced to perform oral sex on five men!”

Like this writer for the Huffington Post, who says, “Just Because Rolling Stone Got Jackie’s Story Wrong Doesn’t Mean It Is a Hoax.”

Or this writer for the International Business Times: “Why ‘Discepancies’ in Rolling Stone Rape Story Don’t Mean ‘Jackie’ Is Lying.”

Yet the forced oral sex scenario is also an incredible story that, while it could be true, must be viewed with some skepticism.

For me the challenge has always been: How do you get from something that seems plausible—a rape at a fraternity—to forced oral sex around a circle of five or gang rape by seven men? The leap from the former to the latter does not require simply getting a few details wrong; it involves the invention of dramatic and specific scenarios.

And that doesn’t suggest “discrepancies”—again, Rolling Stone’s term to explain things just not adding up—but “fabrications.” You can’t exaggerate or misremember your way to gang rape. It either happened or it didn’t.

Which brings me to a Washington Post story by T. Rees Shapiro, just posted about an hour ago, which, I think, is going to have an enormous impact.

Rees interviews Jackie’s three friends—the three friends whom, we now know, Sabrina Rubin Erdely did not even try to interview—and they tell a wildly different story of that night than Rubin Erdely recounted in her article.

In their first interviews about the events of that September 2012 night, the three friends separately told The Post that their recollections of the encounter diverge from how Rolling Stone portrayed the incident in a story about Jackie’s alleged gang rape at a U-Va. fraternity. The interviews also provide a richer account of Jackie’s interactions immediately after the alleged attack, and suggest that the friends are skeptical of her account.

It gets worse for Jackie—and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who now appears to have lied when she said that “Randall” would not speak to her “out of loyalty to his frat.” (Randall tells the Post that Rolling Stone never contacted him—and that he would have spoken to Rubin Erdely if she had. Rubin Erdely, if you had a career left—now you don’t.)

But here’s where the plot really thickens:

[The three friends] said there are mounting inconsistencies with the original narrative in the magazine. The students also expressed suspicions about Jackie’s allegations from that night. They said the name she provided as that of her date did not match anyone at the university, and U-Va. officials confirmed to The Post that no one by that name has attended the school.

The narrative they tell is a bit confusing, and I won’t recount it here, but let me be blunt:

It is getting very hard not to think that Jackie has not invented much or most of this story out of whole cloth.

It it also getting very hard not to think that Sabrina Rubin Erdely may have made up some crucial details of her article to fit her political agenda.

In short: This may be a situation where both the writer and the subject of the story have lied.

If you thought this was messy before, it’s about to get much, much worse. We are way past “discrepancies” now.