The Rolling Stone UVA Hoax at Ten Years Old, A Time Capsule of the 2010s

behold the collision of real problems, low standards, social media conformity, activist journalism, and so much yelling

This November will mark the ten-year anniversary of the publication of “A Rape on Campus,” Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s notorious, comprehensively-debunked and long-retracted Rolling Stone story. The story recounts the vicious campus rape of a young University of Virginia student named Jackie. Erdely told a lurid tale of a highly-coordinated and brutal attack committed by members of a prominent fraternity, then made worse by a callous and unsympathetic administrative response by UVA. The piece created an absolute media firestorm, lighting up social media as thousands upon thousands of people declared that Erdely’s story showed the world we lived in, that our colleges as institutions were indifferent to sexual assault, that we were living in rape culture. It was just the right story at just the right time - a perfect bit of journalism for a time period where the news business was defined by increasing disillusionment with the Barack Obama administration, a resultant rise in radical liberalism, the combination of elite Twitter and its status games, a slowly-decaying media industry, and a concerted effort by many journalists to turn their profession into straightforward liberal activism. Rolling Stone and Erdely clearly expected the piece to go mega-viral, and they were proven right.

And then famously, spectacularly, and eventually legally, the story was proven to be an utter fabrication. Erdely had failed to do the most basic due diligence required of journalism, and the fantastical narrative told to her by a young woman she should never have believed fell apart in profoundly public fashion. As many, many people said at the time, the controversy badly hindered the national conversation on campus rape, and oh by the way it probably wasn’t very chill for the young men who had been falsely accused of the most unspeakable crime imaginable or for the administrators who had been portrayed as indifferent monsters. What’s remarkable about all of this is that this scenario wasn’t the end of the era of social justice yelling, but a preview of things to come. The culture of fear in media, the groupthink that culture inspired, the ongoing collapse of a distinction between Twitter diktats and professional requirements in media, the abandonment of any sense that a writer’s job was to do anything other than advance identitarian causes - “A Rape on Campus” was not the sad culmination of all of those things, but a preview of what was to come.

Let’s take a look at the specifics.