Free Republic

Rolling Stone screwed up. In most media scandals, it's unfair to paint with such a broad brush. When Stephen Glass concocted his fables at the New Republic, he went to antiheroic lengths to conceal his deceptions from his colleagues. Janet Cooke, who famously won a Pulitzer for her Washington Post series about an 8-year-old heroin addict, "Jimmy's World," lied to her editors. That's not the case with Rolling Stone's publication of "A Rape on Campus," the story of the brutal gang rape of a student named "Jackie" at the University of Virginia that turned out to be false. Its failure...

Gotnews.com has obtained the rape obsessed Pinterest account of the 20-year-old girl at the center of the University of Virginia rape hoax. We can also confirm that Jackie Coakley has misled other students at both her high school and her college about her past sexual relations with men. Coakley’s social media postings (below) reveal a woman obsessed with rape and well aware of the political consequences of rape allegations.

There will be no repercussions for the investigative reporter or editors responsible for a now-retracted Rolling Stone cover story in November that falsely accused Phi Kappa Psi fraternity members at the University of Virginia of gang-raping a freshman coed. In a stinging report released Sunday evening, an independent review by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism said the magazine was reckless in vetting its sources, including the purported victim, identified only as “Jackie,” and neglected “basic, even routine journalistic practice.” “If Jackie was attacked and, if so, by whom, cannot be established definitively from the evidence available,” the review...

The dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism said that a four-month investigation of a now-discredited Rolling Stone article about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia found no evidence that magazine staffers committed clearly fireable offenses. Rolling Stone retracted the November article “A Rape on Campus” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely late Sunday after the publication of a 13,000-word Columbia review requested by the magazine. At an hour-long news conference on Monday, the school’s dean, Steve Coll, explained the report’s findings. When asked by reporters why no one was fired in the wake of the investigation,...

The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at the University of Virginia said Monday that it is moving forward with a possible lawsuit against Rolling Stone magazine in the wake of the now-retracted "Rape on Campus" article. "After 130 days of living under a cloud of suspicion as a result of reckless reporting by Rolling Stone magazine, today the Virginia Alpha Chapter of Phi Kappa Psi announced plans to pursue all available legal action against the magazine," the fraternity said in a statement. A spokesman for the fraternity said there has not yet been a formal decision about when a lawsuit will...

<p>The University of Virginia chapter of Phi Kappa Psi announced Monday that the fraternity house will file a lawsuit against Rolling Stone, calling the magazine’s reporting that described an alleged gang-rape by some of its members “reckless.”</p> <p>The lawsuit comes a day after Rolling Stone editors retracted a Nov. 19 story “A Rape on Campus,” that portrayed the chilling account of brutal sexual assault allegedly occurring in the Phi Kappa Psi house at U-Va. in 2012. A Columbia University report issued Sunday described significant lapses by the magazine’s staff while reporting the gang-rape allegations and the story’s writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and the publication’s managing editor, Will Dana, apologized for the deeply flawed account. But the fraternity noted that Erdely did not apologize directly to the Phi Psi chapter at U-Va.</p>

The reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and the magazine's top editor, Will Dana, say they are taking responsibility for the failures. "These are mistakes I will not make again," Erdely said in a statement. But Erdely will continue writing for Rolling Stone. Dana is standing by her, telling The Washington Post that "Sabrina's done great work for us over the years and we expect that to continue." And Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner is standing by both of them. Wenner did not respond to CNN's requests for comment about his decision. But according to people with direct knowledge of his thinking,...

Rolling Stone magazine retracted its article about a brutal gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity after the release of a report on Sunday that concluded the widely discredited article was the result of failures at every stage of the editing process. The report, published by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and commissioned by Rolling Stone, said the magazine failed to engage in “basic, even routine journalistic practice” to verify details of the ordeal that the magazine’s source, identified only as Jackie, described to the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

“The past few months, since my Rolling Stone article “A Rape on Campus” was first called into question, have been among the most painful of my life. Reading the Columbia account of the mistakes and misjudgments in my reporting was a brutal and humbling experience. I want to offer my deepest apologies: to Rolling Stone’s readers, to my Rolling Stone editors and colleagues, to the U.V.A. community, and to any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article. “Over my 20 years of working as an investigative journalist — including at Rolling Stone, a...

"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,” ...

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has a history of calling people rapists without any proof. If she hears a rape accusation, she assumes it’s true. She skips niceties like “allegedly.” The way she sees it: If the accused isn’t guilty, why does he stand accused? Due process is for ladies only. She’s not about to stop now, even after the UVA gang-rape case has been revealed as an utter hoax. Joseph Spector, Journal News: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who is pushing for stronger laws against rapes on college campuses, today warned against people criticizing the woman at the center of a University of...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. — Police here say they have found no evidence to support claims in a Rolling Stone article that a University of Virginia student was gang raped at a campus fraternity in September 2012, noting that months of investigation led detectives to discredit several claims about the alleged assault. Police Chief Timothy J. Longo on Monday afternoon said the police department had multiple meetings with “Jackie” — the woman who claimed she was gang raped at a fraternity party — and that she declined to speak about the alleged incident or provide any information about it. Numerous lines of...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. — Police here say they have found no evidence to support claims in a Rolling Stone article that a University of Virginia student was gang raped at a campus fraternity in September 2012, noting that months of investigation led detectives to discredit several claims about the alleged assault. Police Chief Timothy J. Longo on Monday afternoon said the police department had multiple meetings with “Jackie” — the woman who claimed she was gang raped at a fraternity party — and that she declined to speak about the alleged incident or provide any information about it. Numerous lines of...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va – Police say they cannot confirm that the gang rape described in a Rolling Stone article last year occurred at the University of Virginia. Police Chief Timothy Longo said during a news conference Monday that police could not confirm that a rape occurred at any fraternity house. The Rolling Stone article described the gang rape of a student identified only as “Jackie” at a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in 2012. Jackie did not cooperate with investigators. Soon after the article was published in November, discrepancies were found in it. Rolling Stone has apologized and said it would...

Phi Psi members, speaking publicly for the first time since the allegations surfaced, told The Washington Post that they went into hiding for weeks after their home was vandalized with spray-painted messages calling them rapists and with bricks thrown through windows. They booked hotel rooms to avoid the swarm of protesters on their front lawn. They watched as their brotherhood was vilified, coming to symbolize the worst episode of collegiate sexual violence against women since the 2006 Duke University lacrosse team scandal — which also turned out to be false. Although the Rolling Stone article was discredited and the student’s...

The activist that introduced false University of Virginia rape accuser “Jackie” to the Rolling Stone reporter that wrote the disgraced “frathouse gang rape” article still serves on Democratic governor’s Terry McAuliffe’s official sexual assault task force. The Daily Caller previously reported that UVA employee Emily Renda made a number of White House visits to serve on the president’s sexual assault task force with White House staffers, where she crafted official White House documents as recently as April. After national sororities decided to prohibit UVA sorority girls from attending fraternity bid parties this weekend (for the girls’ own safety), TheDC reached...

Harvard University and its law school reached a settlement Tuesday with the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, pledging to revise its sexual harassment and sexual assault policies in order to address concerns that the university had failed to adequately provide a safe campus environment for students. The agreement represents the latest example of how the Obama administration's aggressive use of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender at schools that receive federal funding, is reverberating across the country's institutions of higher learning. The Education Department's Office of Civil Rights is investigating dozens of colleges and universities...

This isn’t one of those articles where I ask a question in the headline and provide the answer in the text. Because the truth is, I don’t know how someone accused of sexual assault is supposed to prove they obtained consent under the new “yes means yes” policies. And it looks like no one else knows either. I reached out to the lead sponsor of the California affirmative consent law, state Sen. Kevin de Leon, because when I tried asking other sponsors of the bill, they directed me to him. His office provided a lengthy description of the bill that...

Students are back in class today at the University of Virginia – a school that’s been rocked by a serious sexual assault scandal. Rev. Al Sharpton talks to UVA graduate and activist Emily Renda, and Wendy Murphy about what's being done to address the...

Before circumstances and Providence brought me to a small, Christian liberal arts college in a sleepy northern Virginia town, I spent three years studying at the University of Illinois followed by a two year stint in the Army. Needless to say, I spent much of my early twenties participating in American party culture, and I'm lucky I made it through those years relatively unscathed. Looking back, I made a lot of foolish decisions. I put myself in a lot of compromising situations that could have easily taken a dark turn. What I have to say in the following paragraphs, then,...