Campus Rape Story Was ‘Bulletproof’ Except for the Hoax, Says Rolling Stone Founder Jann Wenner

Jann Wenner—founder of the music and pop culture magazine Rolling Stone—is still defending an infamously inaccurate article that appeared in his publication nearly a decade ago.

“The University of Virginia story was not a failure of intent, or an attempt to be loose with the facts,” Wenner told The New York Times last week. “You get beyond the factual errors that sank that story, and it was really about the issue of rape and how it affects women on campus, their lack of rights. Other than this one key fact that the rape described actually was a fabrication of this woman, the rest of the story was bulletproof.” (Emphasis mine.)

“A Rape on Campus” was published on November 19, 2014. Its author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, claimed that a University of Virginia student named “Jackie” had been viciously raped by a group of male students at a fraternity party as some kind of initiation ritual. Jackie’s account was intended as a representative story—an example of the kind of routine sexual violence faced by young women on college campuses.

But the underlying crime never took place. Days after the story’s initial publication, it came under attack from journalists who were skeptical of the details. I came to suspect the whole thing might be an elaborate hoax, mostly because I had a hard time believing the perpetrators could have possibly expected to get away with it. Most campus sexual assaults involve incapacitation with drugs and