I just read this long and interesting piece on Jezebel by a woman who traveled to UVa to check out the frat-sorority rushing process, post-Rolling Stone. (It’s a perfectly reasonable piece, free of the cant not uncommon to Jezebel). One paragraph, buried somewhat in the body of the piece, really startled me.

Erdely homed in on UVA, contacting administrators who made themselves less than available. She interviewed students, who talked gamely but grew cautious after word spread about her interview practices: multiple people told me that, for example, after the reporter spent hours talking to the president of the all-male sexual assault peer education group One in Four, she told him that she wasn’t going to use anything he told her. The conversation hadn’t been juicy enough, sources claim she said; he’d answered her questions “too well.” (He was reportedly the one to tape the conversation; Erdely did not.)

Okay, let’s take this with a grain of salt, as, despite the claim of multiple sources, it’s still essentially a single-sourced story; only two people were present at that conversation. But still—this is a deeply damning assertion, suggesting that whenever Sabrina Rubin Erdely encountered any material that conflicted with the narrative she aimed to write, she simply discarded it—apparently not even recording it.

Jia Tolentino, the author of the Jezebel piece and a UVa grad, does admit that she’s inclined to believe that women who allege sexual assault at UVa face an uphill battle to be taken seriously—okay, at least she admits where she’s coming from—but then says this about her reaction to the Rubin Erdely piece.

..it took me a day or two to admit that I found many of Erdely’s details unrecognizable. No one says “UVrApe”; no one I know has ever heard the Rugby Road-themed “traditional fight song” that poetically (“fuck for 50 cents”/”panties on the fence”) separated the article’s sections. And, in the words of one sorority girl I talked to in Charlottesville: “We knew something was bullshit when she wrote that Phi Psi was a top-tier frat.”

So much attention has been paid to the fact that Jackie’s story is false; I think not enough has been paid to the other bricks in the wall of accusation that Rubin Erdeley constructed. It’s not just that she made a mistake in believing Jackie and in how she chose to (not) report out Jackie’s story; it’s that there are abundant other details in the piece, having nothing to do with Jackie, that seem either wrong or fabricated.

I am still flummoxed and amazed at the fact that Sabrina Rubin Erdely has still said nothing publicly about the disintegration of her story; I think she’s a coward and a dishonorable person who has completely failed to take responsibility for her work.

But details like the ones provided by Tolentino suggest one reason for Erdely’s silence. It’s not just that she got one big piece of her story wrong, but that the entire article is woven out of half-truths, bias and falsehood. How on earth could her editor and fact-checker not see this?