Do you remember that Rolling Stone piece from 2014 about “Jackie,” the UVA student who was gang raped by several fraternity members as part of a hazing ritual? Do you remember that it turned out to have been completely fabricated? That Rolling Stone had to retract it? That the magazine was ordered by a jury to pay $3 million in defamation costs to an associate dean at the college, and $1.65 million to the fraternity that it had libeled?
I remember all that. Do you know who apparently doesn’t? Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone. In an astonishing interview with the New York Times, published today, Wenner described the incident like this:
The University of Virginia story was not a failure of intent, or an attempt to be loose with the facts. You get beyond the factual errors that sank that story, and it was really about the issue of rape and how it affects women on campus, their lack of rights. Other than this one key fact that the rape described actually was a fabrication of this woman, the rest of the story was bulletproof.
What? The “factual errors that sank that story” were that it wasn’t true in any way. There is no “other than this one key fact” here, because the “one key fact” was the rape, and, as Wenner concedes, “the rape described actually was a fabrication of this woman.” This being so, it is not possible that “the rest of the story was bulletproof,” because the “rest of the story” flowed from the central claim, which was false. “Other than that”? Is Wenner on drugs?
Wenner’s broader claim is also absurd. He says that the issue was “really about the issue of rape and how it affects women on campus.” But the main victim here was a woman — the associate dean to whom Rolling Stone was obliged to pay $3 million. As for his talk of a “lack of rights”? Under Joe Biden’s administration, the full might of the federal government is being deployed to ensure that men who are accused of sexual assault on campus have as few rights as is humanly possible. If Wenner were an observant man, he might have come to regard his magazine’s spectacular failure as a prime example of the sort of problems that are created when, as the result of a widespread moral panic, people and institutions prove willing to forgo fact-checking and common sense and end up crucifying innocent parties on the basis of stories that are quite obviously untrue. Apparently, though, he’s learned nothing.