Two friends of Jackiethe University of Virginia student who may have falsely recounted a brutal gang rape in a 2014 Rolling Stone magazine articlesaid in federal court this week that they believe the storys author, Sabrina Erdely, acted in good faith when reporting the story.
I understand what its like to be lied to by Jackie, Kathryn Hendley, known as Cindy in the now-retracted article, A Rape on Campus, said in a video deposition played on Tuesday, the eighth day of former UVA dean Nicole Eramos defamation lawsuit against Rolling Stone. The suit claims that the magazine intentionally smeared Eramo as uncaring and indifferent to rape survivors on campus at a time when she was in charge of the schools sexual assault prevention program.
Eramos attorneys, who did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast, have to prove that Erdely and Rolling Stone acted with actual malice, meaning that they either knew what they were printing about Eramo was false or should have known it was false.
On Wednesday, the court heard the testimonies of UVAs dean of students, Allen Groves, and of Alexandria Pinkleton, a student activist who helped Erdely with the article and who was quoted in her story. In previous court filings, Eramos attorney quoted a deposition given by Pinkleton saying Erdely basically admitted she should have completely rewritten [the story] and regrets that she didnt when the two spoke the day Rolling Stone apologized for factual errors in the piece.
In court this week, Pinkleton reportedly testified that she was very upset by how Erdely portrayed her in the story and that she participated because she wanted to effect change around campus sexual assault at UVA. Eramo, she said, was not a barrier to change.
Groves reportedly said he was frustrated by Jackies refusal to name her alleged attackers at a UVA fraternity and that he had every intention of putting these people in jail and shutting down the frat.
A $25 million defamation suit filed against Rolling Stone by Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity where Jackie alleged she was assaulted, is scheduled to go to trial next year.
Prior to Wednesdays testimony, a number of witnessesincluding Jackie herselfsuggested that Erdely did not act with actual malice.
In her video deposition on Tuesday, Kathryn Hendley said that when she finally spoke to Erdely, who contacted her a week after Rolling Stone issued an apology, she felt sorry for the reporter.
Jackies other friend Ryan Duffin, who was named Randall in the story, also sympathized with Erdely, who he said was very genuinely apologetic for failing to contact both him and Hendley before publishing the article, according to local reports from the trial.
He also said Erdely acted in good faith when she wrote the article, based on the information she had.
Erdely herself testified last week that she didnt contact any of the three friends frequently referenced in the story because Jackie asked her not to do so, with Jackie stressing that Duffin had declined on the strongest possible terms to speak with her. Erdely also admitted it was a mistake to rely on someone who was intent to deceive me.
During her video deposition, Hendley said none of the quotes attributed to her in Erdelys story were true and that reading parts of the article where she was named Cindya self-described hookup queen who, according the article, told Jackie she would be the girl who cried rape if Jackie reported her alleged assault to authoritieswas like reading a fictionalized version of [her] life.
Hendley said Jackie never told her she was assaulted on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, and that she didnt understand why shed told two other friends in their close circle, Duffin and Alex Stock, instead.
Hendley claimed she was no longer friends with Jackie by the end of the next semester. When she read the Rolling Stone article in 2014, she said it was shocking to see Jackies allegations written up as a national news storyin part because the storys version of events were markedly different from what Duffin and Stock recalled from the night of Jackies alleged assault.
In his deposition, Duffin said Jackie called him on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, and asked that he meet her near UVAs freshman dormsroughly a mile away from the Phi Kappa Psi house where the Rolling Stone article said Jackies best friends Randall, Cindy, and Andy met her after she was allegedly gang rapedbecause something had happened.
When he arrived at the dorms, Duffin said Jackie seemed a little shaken but not physically battered or otherwise harmed, contrary to the dramatic and bloody scene in the article.
Duffin said Jackie told him and Stock that shed been on a date with Haven Monahan, whom theyd never met and knew only from Jackie. She’d previously said he was a junior on campus who was trying to court her. On September 12, Jackie told Duffin and Stock that shed gone with him to his room at the Phi Kappa Psi house, where five men forced her to give them oral sex.
Duffin said in his deposition that he and Stock encouraged Jackie to contact police but that she refused. The quotes in the article attributed to her friends and the description of them discussing the social price of reporting her rape were all false, he said. Jackies claim to Erdely that he had refused to speak to the journalist was also false, Duffin said.
Indeed, Jackies account to her friends differed vastly from the sensational Rolling Stone story, which described how seven men took turns raping her while her date Drew (aka Haven Monahan) and another man egged them on; how one man had barreled into her when she first walked into the room, sending them both crashing through a low glass table; how another man was on top of her, spreading her thighs, and another person kneeling on her hair, hands pinning down her arms, sharp shards digging into her back; how the last thing she remembered was being penetrated by a beer bottle.
Duffin said in his deposition that, before the alleged assault, Jackie had encouraged him and Stock to exchange text messages with Haven Monahan.
It felt kind of weird, but we saw it as a strange way to help out a friend, Duffin said, adding that it became clear to him in the weeks following Jackies alleged assault that she’d invented Monahan as part of a catfishing scheme to win Duffin over romantically. (Two days after the alleged attack, Jackie told Duffin that Monahan had apologized for what happened and that shed forgiven him.)
Eramos attorneys have also referenced the scheme and cited messages exchanged between Duffin and Monahan (PDF) in court filings, calling Monahan a fake suitor fabricated by Jackie in a strange bid to earn the affections of [Duffin].
When Duffin confronted Jackie shortly after the alleged assault about inventing Monahan, she denied it and accused Duffin of calling her a liar, according to their text messages. Duffin broke off their friendship and didnt communicate with her again until after the Rolling Stone story came out. Why did you tell us before the date happened that his name wasHaven Monahan? he asked Jackie in a text message. A name that belongs to no UVA student ever? Why has the name changed since then?
Jackies response was convoluted: His last name was Monahan, she said, and he called himself Haven, she wrote in their final text exchanges. His first name was John or jake or something. She claimed he was there that night but he was a bystander. He wasnt involved. Not really.
A fact-checker who worked with Erdely on the Rolling Stone story (and had worked with the magazine since 2010) also testified on Tuesday about the 80 hours she spent fact checking the article, confirming details through countless sources and documents, Rolling Stone said in a statement to The Daily Beast, adding: In more than 4 hours of fact checking conversations with Ms. [Elisabeth] Garber-Paul and over 20 hours of interviews with Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Jackie told the exact same account of her sexual assault.
On Monday, the court heard a recorded deposition from Jackie, who occasionally contradicted herself in her own testimony, according to The Washington Post.
At one point she suggested that the Rolling Stone story was inaccuratethat she felt like my interpretation was different than what was written and recalled reading the story and thinking I probably would not have written it that way.
Later, she said the story was accurate: I stand by the account I gave Rolling Stone and I believed it to be true at the time.
Asked whether she still believed her story to be true, Jackie said she had memory issues as a result of trauma from her alleged assault (I believed it was true but some details of my assaultI have PTSD and its foggy).
When asked in the deposition about allegedly inventing evidence to support her accusationslike fake text messages from other women who, she claimed, were also sexually assaulted at the same fraternityJackie responded: I just dont remember any of this. Its all very foggy. I dont know. I dont know.
She claimed she didnt remember whether she told Erdely that she was bloody when she left the fraternity house, and likened Erdelys attempts to identify her alleged assailant to a witch hunt.
Yet she also said she thought that Erdely had done her best to recount what Id told her in the story and that she felt bad about how Eramo and her friends were portrayed in it.
She said she wouldnt use the word indifferent at all to describe Eramo and, contrary to what the article suggested (If Dean Eramo was surprised at Jackies story of gang rape, it didnt show), believed Eramo cared very much about sexual assault and rape survivors.
The trial is expected to continue through the end of the week.
source http://allofbeer.com/2017/10/31/jackies-fog-looms-over-first-trial-against-rolling-stone/
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