Her tweet from late November reads likes it’s in suspended animation, written in the calm before the storm.
“The Washington Post wrote an article about me, and how my UVA article came to be,” she tweeted, adding a link to the profile.
Over the next several days, Sabrina Rubin Erdely would be thrust into professional turmoil as her story for Rolling Stone about a bombshell rape allegation at a fraternity house quickly fell apart.
Erdely, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, has been silent since the magazine apologized in December for significant failures in her reporting. She hasn’t responded to interview requests (including one for this story), and her Twitter feed has gone dormant.
So as questions have swirled over how the botched story made it to print, there has been virtually no explanation from the author of the piece.
But that is expected to change Sunday night, when Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism releases findings from its independent review of Rolling Stone’s debacle.
The extent to which Erdely participated in Columbia’s audit is unclear. But Brian Stelter, citing sources with direct knowledge, reported on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday morning that Erdely is expected to release an apologetic statement in conjunction with the Columbia review.
Her 9,000-word story, titled “A Rape on Campus,” centered around claims from a woman identified only as Jackie who alleged that she was the victim of a horrific sexual assault at the Phi Kappa Psi house at the University of Virginia. The explosive claims reverberated around the country and on the Charlottesville, Virginia campus, where the university’s president suspended all fraternity activities.
But it didn’t take long for some people to question the story. Erdely herself contributed to those doubts.
In her interview with the Washington Post, the story she tweeted, Erdely wouldn’t say if she knew the names of seven alleged assailants, claiming that Jackie “is very fearful of these men,” namely the alleged ringleader who was identified as “Drew.”
Red flags were similarly raised in an interview with Slate, during which Erdely acknowledged that she did not speak to the accused fraternity members because they were “kind of hard to get in touch with.”
Rolling Stone deputy managing editor Sean Woods backed Erdely’s claim, saying that the magazine “could not reach” the alleged attackers.
But after the Washington Post delivered a death blow to Erdely’s story on December 5, Rolling Stone was forced to issue a retraction. In a note to readers, Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana said that “new information” brought about by the Washington Post and other outlets revealed “discrepancies in Jackie’s account.”
Dana also conceded that it was a mistake to honor “Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account” — seemingly contradicting claims from Erdely and Woods that the magazine did reach out to them. A spokesperson for the magazine later said that Woods “misspoke” when he suggested as much.
Erdely, who lives near Philadelphia and whose work has also appeared in The New Yorker and Mother Jones, has hunkered down ever since the controversy blew up.
Some of the University of Virginia students described in “A Rape on Campus” said in December that Erdely reached out to them to apologize for how they were portrayed in the story.
One student who was quoted in the story, Alex Pinkleton, said that Erdely also reached out to her. Pinkelton opted not to respond to the embattled reporter.
“I am under the impression that she just wants to know what’s going on, and I think that’s a fair question, because I think there’s a lot of confusion of what happened that night and she, like everyone else, wants to know,” Pinkleton said at the time.