Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone article, “A Rape On Campus,” has been largely debunked in recent days after an investigation by The Washington Post called her egregiously terrible and amateur reporting methods into question.
The 9,000-word Rolling Stone bombshell was sold as the story of Erdely’s star “witness,” Jackie, who claimed to have suffered a gruesome gang rape at the University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house.
Rolling Stone has apologized for publishing the hack job.
In a deliciously perfect irony, The Daily Caller has unearthed a sanctimonious 2004 screed in The Pennsylvania Gazette by Erdely that excoriates Stephen Glass, the 1990s-era New Republic writer who spun ridiculous, fictitious tales that catered to shallow, elitist prejudices.
The Gazette is the University of Pennsylvania’s alumni magazine. Erdely, like Glass, is a graduate of the Ivy League school.
In what amounts to a review of “Shattered Glass,” a 2004 movie about Glass’s rise and fall, Erdely called Glass “a sociopathic creep” because of his fallacious reporting. She informed fellow alums that she “used to feel almost sorry” for Glass, her classmate. “I don’t anymore,” she proclaimed. “The adorable little weenie I knew was nothing but a con artist.”
In her 1,090-word rant, Erdely explained that she once believed Glass had “buckled under the pressure of his skyrocketing journalism career” to produce shocking stories. Though she didn’t mention any stories of macabre gang rape, she discussed stories by Glass about “pot-smoking, orgy-loving young Republicans” and “a teenage computer hacker who’s awarded a million-dollar contract by the company he sabotaged.”
Glass’s “peers simply want to believe him too badly” Erdely wrote back in 2004.
“I struggled to make sense of his actions,” wrote the disgraced journalist, who submitted a distorted thicket of easily-refutable assertions to Rolling Stone.
“The reporting felt almost too good to be true,” she wrote, almost uncannily, a decade ago. “At the time, it seemed like proof of Glass’s know-how. Now we wonder if it might have been our first glimpse of the fabulist he’d soon become.”
Erdely has admitted that she did not bother to interview or even contact the men her star witness, Jackie, has accused of brutal rape.
“Glass’s fabrications and cover-ups probably took more time and effort (and produced more anxiety) than if he’d just done the reporting in the first place,” she observed in 2004.
Indeed.
In addition to her blistering 2004 denunciation of Glass, Erdely has since shown a conceited penchant for frowning upon the acts of other journalists’ faux pas while acting as if she is a staunch adherent to the tenets of ethical journalism. (RELATED: Disgraced Rolling Stone Reporter’s Tweets Come Back To Haunt Her)
For example, despite now showing no public remorse for her now-crumbled mess of a story, Erdely bristled haughtily a year ago at editor Bill Simmons’ handling of the blowback to a piece which exposed a transsexual woman named Dr. V who committed suicide, allegedly after being exposed by the reporter for perpetuating a scheme involving golf club technology.
Moreover, in 2011, Rolling Stone published a scathing story by Erdely accusing two priests and a teacher of raping an altar boy, dubbed “Billy Doe” by a grand jury. Three people ended up in prison. Now, one of those verdicts has been overturned and the other two have been seriously called into question. (RELATED: That Other Time Rolling Stone Was Conned)
The fallen journalist has gone completely off the grid since the beginning of December, maintaining a steady silence as her shoddy story and journalistic practices have come under fire. (RELATED: Rolling Stone’s Disgraced UVA Reporter Has Gone Completely Silent)
Perhaps she has been busy looking for a new career. (RELATED: We Have 11 Job Ideas For The Disgraced Journalist Behind The UVA Rape Story)
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