Rolling Stone magazine says "there now appear to be discrepancies" in its story about a University of Virginia student who said she was gang-raped during a fraternity party in 2012, adding it had "come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced."
The story used a nickname, Jackie, for the woman who said she was raped, and it honored her request not to contact any of the men she said took part in the attack.
"In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced," Managing Editor Will Dana said in a statement about the story by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. "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."
Dana's note has been appended to the original article on the magazine's website.
Erdely's Nov. 19 article centered on the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and the Jackie's alleged rape when she was a college freshman. As we previously reported:
"In the article, a student named Jackie describes how her initial excitement of being invited to a party at the fraternity was suddenly replaced by fear and violence, as a group of men trapped her in a room and attacked her. "The article says Jackie was pressured by peers to keep her story quiet, and that administrators who knew about Jackie's story took no action — even after she reported allegations from two other girls who said they had been assaulted in a similar way at the same fraternity."
The article and the ensuing outrage prompted University of Virginia President Teresa A. Sullivan to suspend all of the school's fraternities until Jan. 9. The university also apologized to the student who made the allegations.
Phi Kappa Psi was planning to release a statement later today rebutting the claims in the article.
The Rolling Stone article prompted outrage at Phi Kappa Psi and other fraternities, but it also drew skepticism from several people who questioned the facts in the story. The Washington Post reported today that several of Jackie's close friends had come to doubt her account. Jackie told the newspaper that she was standing by her version of the events.
"I never asked for this" attention, she told the Post. "What bothers me is that so many people act like it didn't happen. It's my life. I have had to live with the fact that it happened every day for the last two years."
Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
