Court Filings Reveal New Evidence of How "Jackie" Catfished Her UVA Classmates With Rape Allegations
It’s clear now that “Jackie”—the girl at the center of the now-retracted Rolling Stone UVA fraternity rape story—lied about most, if not all, of the alleged attack. Newly released documents in an ongoing lawsuit against the magazine show how she initially pulled it off.
The now-retracted story, “A Rape on Campus,” told the story of Jackie, a pseudonym used for an alleged rape victim who said she had been attacked by her date and his fraternity brothers outside a party. But evidence revealed after the story was published showed the man she named as her attacker, Haven Monahan, didn’t exist. Her friends later told the Washington Post they believed she’d invented the incident to get sympathy from Ryan Duffin, a male student she had an unrequited crush on.
New evidence of Jackie’s alleged catfishing is coming to light as part of a lawsuit against Rolling Stone filed by a UVA administrator who believes she was portrayed in a bad light.
Jackie used the Haven Monahan character, court papers allege, to try to make Duffin jealous. In text messages, sent from the number attributed to Monahan to Duffin, Monahan repeatedly declares both his love for Jackie and his frustration that Jackie is more interested in Duffin.
“HOw can she not Want me? wtf? She cant turn me down fro some nerd 1st yr,” one message reads, referring to Duffin, who was a freshman at the time. “She said this kid is smart and funny and worth it but I told her if he said no to fuck it Nd move onto better things like me.”
New evidence filed this week also reveals that a Yahoo email account for “Haven Monahan,” was registered just days after Jackie claimed the alleged attack occurred.
According to the Washington Post, which examined the documents, the Haven.monahan@yahoo.com email account was registered from a computer connected to the UVA computer network on Oct. 2, 2012. A day later, the user—pretending to be Monahan—forwarded Duffin a letter purportedly written by Jackie, confessing her love for Duffin.
The filings also contain photographs Jackie sent of a man she said was Monahan. The Washington Post, which tracked him down, reports he’s actually a student at a “university in a different state” who says he “barely knew Jackie and hadn’t been to Charlottesville for many years.”
But perhaps most damning of all is evidence that someone on the Stein Mitchell Muse Cipollone & Beato law firm computer network—the firm representing Jackie—accessed the Monahan Yahoo email account on March 16, 2016. Four days later, court filings reportedly allege, her attorneys claimed “Jackie was not in possession of these emails.”
