Friends of UVA Rape Victim Use Real Names to Challenge Rolling Stone
The three friends of "Jackie" described in Rolling Stone's explosive UVa fraternity gang rape expose put their real names on the record today in an interview detailing key points the magazine got wrong.
Alex Stock, 20, Kathryn Hendley, 20, and Ryan Duffin, 20, all spoke to the victim the night of the alleged attack and were described under pseudonyms in the story. The three students—originally referred to as "Andy," "Cindy," and "Randall," have been refuting points of the story in media interviews, but hadn't published their real names until Sunday.
All three told the AP that they weren't contacted by Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely until after the story came out. "I couldn't help but notice that everything that the article said about me was incorrect," Duffin told the news organization.
(Erdely, they say, later reached out to all three and apologized to Hendley for the way she was portrayed in the story.)
One of the biggest inaccuracies in a story filled with inaccuracies, the three say, was that their reaction to Jackie's story was to explain to her the social implications of reporting a rape. In fact, all three told the AP, they had tried to convince a very reluctant Jackie to call police.
As described by Duffin to the AP, this is what happened: He had returned home from a party when he got a call from Jackie. He left to meet her and she was sitting on the top of a picnic table outside U.Va.'s Tuttle-Dunnington dorm. She was shaking and "it looked like she had been crying," Duffin said. "Her lip was quivering, her eyes were darting around. And right then, I put two and two together. I knew she had been on this date and people don't usually look like that after a date."
Jackie eventually told Duffin her version of what she said had happened that night: that she was gang raped at a frat house.
"My first reaction was, 'We need to go to police,'" he said. "I wanted to go to police immediately. I was really forceful on that, actually. And I almost took it to calling (the police) right there." He said he had his phone out, prepared to call 9-1-1, "but she didn't want to and," he remembers thinking, "'I can't do that if she doesn't want to do it.'"
Stock corroborated this version of events.
"Jackie's response was, 'I don't want to,'" Stock said. "'I don't want to do that right now. I just want to go to bed.'"
Duffin said he later asked an RA whether he should report the attack against Jackie's wishes, and the AP reports that the RA confirmed that conversation had occurred.
The three students had previously told the Washington Post that they had begun to doubt Jackie's date that night had ever existed, although they all stressed that she seemed truly traumatized.
[Ryan Duffin via AP]