Julia Horowitz is the assistant managing editor UVA’s student newspaper. She wrote this article for Politico.

Why We Believed Jackie’s Rape Story

It was a near-unanimous reaction: shock, but not surprise. Disgust, but not doubt. Those were the feelings that characterized the endless conversations I had as a University of Virginia student following the Nov. 19 release of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s article, “A Rape on Campus,” in Rolling Stone.

“There was this horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach in [reading] the whole thing,” fourth-year student Anna Burke told me. “I have never been through something like that myself, but it was a refrain I had heard before. There was a sort of familiar sadness to it.”

There was some anger at what many perceived as mischaracterizations of student life, student standards of integrity and the University administration. But in speaking to students across the grounds — men and women, Greek and non-Greek, first and fourth years — not one sought to challenge the validity of then-first-year student Jackie’s rape, either as a whole or in part.

In all honesty, I didn’t either.

Then, suddenly, the story fell apart. After a wave of media criticism questioned Erdely for failing to interview the alleged perpetrators of the assault, the University’s Phi Kappa Psi chapter released a statement pushing back on the allegations, citing specific factual inconsistencies. Not long after, Rolling Stone posted a statement admitting there may be discrepancies in the story, withdrawing their unilateral support. Their trust in Jackie, they said, had been “misplaced.”

Misplaced is a good word for how I feel right now.

Here’s a key line:

Ultimately, though, from where I sit in Charlottesville, to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake.