“Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim”

"Rolling Stone Retracts Article on Rape at University of Virginia"

In an interview discussing Columbia’s findings, Jann S. Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, acknowledged the story’s flaws but said it represented an isolated and unusual episode. The problems with the article started with its source, Mr. Wenner said. He described her as “a really expert fabulist storyteller” who managed to manipulate the magazine’s editorial process. When asked to clarify, he said that he was not trying to blame Jackie, “but obviously there is something here that is untruthful, and something sits at her doorstep.”

The reporting errors by Ms. Erdely were compounded by insufficient scrutiny and skepticism from editors, the report said. And the fact-checking process relied heavily on four hours of conversations with Jackie.

Ms. Erdely, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone who has also written for GQ and The New Yorker, declined to be interviewed for this article. She said in her apology that reading the report was “a brutal and humbling experience.” She also acknowledged that she did not do enough to verify Jackie’s account.

Rolling Stone’s fundamental mistake, Mr. Dana said, was in suspending any skepticism about Jackie’s account because of the sensitivity of the issue. “We didn’t think through all the implications of the decisions that we made while reporting the story, and we never sort of allowed for the fact that maybe the story we were being told was not true,”