Trick Mirror

Reflections on Self-Delusion

Jia Tolentino

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780008294946
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Essays in Education

A Times book of the year

A Guardian book of the year

‘Magnificent’ The Times

‘Dazzling’ New Statesman

‘It filled me with hope’ Zadie Smith

We Come from Old Virginia

I wasn’t planning on going to the University of Virginia for college. I applied mostly to schools in New England and California; at the time, having spent twelve years in a cloistered, conservative, religious environment, I wanted to get as far away from Texas as I could. For most of my senior year, I dreamed about living in a mysterious future in which I would wear wool sweaters and write for a newspaper and spend my free time in coffee shops cultivating a rigorous life of the mind. But then my guidance counselor nominated me to compete for a scholarship at UVA, insisting that the school would suit me. In the spring, I flew to Charlottesville for the final round of the scholarship competition, which began with the current scholars taking us to a house party, where I sat on a kitchen counter, drank keg beer, and started to feel the dazzle. It felt like cherry bombs were going off outside in the darkness; a strain of easy, fancy Southernness was in the air. The next day, when I walked through campus, the sun was warm and golden, and the white-columned brick buildings rose into a bluebird sky. The students lounged on the grass, glowing with conventional good looks. West of town, the Blue Ridge Mountains raised the horizon in layers of dusk and navy, and the lacy dogwood trees were flowering on every street. I stepped onto the Lawn, UVA’s centerpiece—a lush, terraced expanse lined with prestigious student rooms and professors’ pavilions—and felt an instantaneous, overpowering longing. At this school, I thought, you would grow like a plant in a greenhouse. This dappled light, the sense of long afternoons and doors propped open and drinks poured for strangers, the grand steps leading up to the Pantheon dome of the Rotunda—this was where I wanted to be.

Charlottesville sells itself this way, effortlessly, as a sort of honeyed Eden, a college town with Dixie ease and gracefulness but liberal intellectual ideals. UVA’s online guide to Charlottesville opens with an illustration of a hazy golden sunset, the mountains turning purple in the sun’s last flare. “A Place Like No Other,” the illustration states. “This is a place where the world spins as it should,” the narrator in a promotional video says. As UVA’s website informs you, Charlottesville has been named the happiest city in America by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the best college town in America by Travelers Today, and the number-five US community for well-being, according to a Gallup index. The Fiske Guide to Colleges writes that “students nationwide go ga-ga for UVA” and quotes a student who calls Charlottesville “the perfect college town.” Another student observes, “Almost everything here is a tradition.” A comment on UVA’s College Confidential message board reads, “Girls here dress very well and are very physically attractive. The key to get them is alcohol.”

When I moved to Charlottesville in 2005, I was sixteen, and nothing about that comment would have seemed off-color to me. I’d spent my whole life in a tiny evangelical school where white male power was the unquestioned default, and UVA’s traditionalism, in matters of gender or anything else, did not immediately register. (In fact, on that first visit, I found it comforting. I wrote approvingly in my journal that the political atmosphere felt “moderate, not extremely liberal.”) Sure, there were boys double-majoring in history and economics who half-jokingly referred to the Civil War as “the War of Northern Aggression,” but this still seemed like a major leap forward from the outright racism I had known. UVA was like a live-action recruitment brochure: everyone was always ostentatiously “finding their people,” carrying stacks of books around green expanses, moving from picnics to day parties in packs of best friends. Classes were just the right kind of difficult; people were sharp, but generally too basic, myself included, to be pretentious. On weekends, students dressed up in sundresses and ties to get drunk at football games, and I liked this air of debauched Southern etiquette, the sweet generic quality of mid-Atlantic preppy life. For four years I cranked out papers at the library; I wrapped myself around a boyfriend; I volunteered and waited tables and sang in an a cappella group and pledged a sorority and sat on my rooftop, smoking spliffs and reading, as the kids at the elementary school across the road shrieked. I graduated in 2009, and afterward didn’t think much about Charlottesville. I had loved my time there easily and automatically. Then, in 2014, Rolling Stone dropped its bomb.

The feature story, “A Rape on Campus,” written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was, now infamously, a graphic account of a gang rape at Phi Kappa Psi, the UVA fraternity whose white-columned house looms at the top of a big field off Rugby Road. “Sipping from a plastic cup, Jackie grimaced, then discreetly spilled her spiked punch onto the sludgy fraternity-house floor,” Erdely began. It was Jackie’s first frat party, and the line sent me into a wormhole. My first frat party had been at Phi Psi, too: I could see myself with messy long hair, wearing flip-flops, overwhelmed by a drinking game and spilling my own cup of punch on the floor. I’d left soon afterward, crossing the train tracks in hopes of finding a better party. In the Rolling Stone story, Jackie was shoved into a pitch-black bedroom, slammed through the glass of a coffee table, pinned down, and beaten. “‘Grab its motherfucking leg,’ she heard a voice say. And that’s when Jackie knew she was going to be raped.” Erdely wrote that Jackie endured “three hours of agony, during which, she says, seven men took turns raping her.” One of them hesitated, then shoved a beer bottle into her as the rest of them cheered. After the attack, Jackie ran away from the house, shoeless, with bloodstains on her red dress. She called her friends, who cautioned her against reporting it to the police or the university: “We’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.” Later on, Jackie disclosed her assault to UVA dean Nicole Eramo. Then, a year later, she told Eramo that she knew two other women who had been gang-raped at Phi Psi. Both times, according to Erdely, Eramo laid out the options available to Jackie, who declined to pursue further action, and the school left it at that. This was unforgivable, Erdely argued, given what the dean had heard.

There was a precedent at UVA for all of this—both this specific crime and the reality of institutional dismissal. In 1984, a seventeen-year-old UVA freshman named Liz Seccuro was brutally gang-raped at Phi Psi, and, by her account, when she reported the crime, a UVA dean asked her if she’d just had a rough night. In 2005, Seccuro received a traumatic validation of her memory when one of her assailants wrote her an apology letter as part of his Alcoholics Anonymous recovery process. (The school had actually given him her address.) UVA’s cycle of rape and indifference was such, Erdely wrote, that only fourteen people had ever been found guilty of sexual misconduct in the school’s history, that not a single person at UVA had ever been expelled for sexual assault, and that UVA’s fetishized honor code—in which single acts of lying, cheating, or stealing will trigger expulsion—did not consider rape to be a relevant offense. Erdely noted that the school didn’t put Phi Psi under investigation until it learned that she was writing her piece.

When the Rolling Stone story came out, I had just moved to New York to take a job as the features editor of the feminist site Jezebel. When I got to our dim, brick-walled blog factory in Soho that morning, my coworkers were giving off an odd and heavy silence, reading Erdely’s article on their computer screens. I saw the illustration of Phi Psi and realized what was happening. I sat down in my swivel chair and pulled up the story, feeling the call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house nausea that sets in when the news cycle focuses on something that feels private to you. By the time I finished reading, I was dizzy, thinking about my four years in Charlottesville, what I’d been blind to, what I’d chosen to see and not to see. I pictured my college self, never signing up for a women’s studies class, funneling my waitressing money toward sorority dues. I remembered that, whenever a classmate in one of my seminars prefaced a statement with “As a feminist,” my internal response was “All right, girl, relax.” I had never attended a Take Back the Night march. Though Liz Seccuro had brought her rapist to trial while I was in college—there’s no statute of limitations for rape in Virginia—it had barely crossed my radar at school. (Her rapist was sentenced to eighteen months, ultimately serving six.) I myself had been roofied by a grad student at Georgetown during my first semester at college, while on a weekend trip with a UVA group. Blaming myself for accepting drinks from strangers, and thanking my luck that I’d gotten violently sick shortly after he started touching me, I’d barely talked about the incident, dismissed it as no big deal.

This was a different era. In the five years since my graduation, feminism had become a dominant cultural perspective. Title IX, the 1972 civil rights law that had at first been invoked in service of equal-opportunity college athletics, was now being applied to sexual assault and harassment cases. In a 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter from the Office of Civil Rights, the Obama administration proclaimed, “The sexual harassment of students, including sexual violence, interferes with students’ right to receive an education free from discrimination and, in the case of sexual violence, is a crime.” There had been several high-profile news stories about college assault and harassment. In 2010, Yale suspended the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon for five years after their pledges chanted “No means yes, yes means anal!” in front of the school’s Women’s Center. In 2014, Emma Sulkowicz started carrying their mattress across Columbia’s campus in protest of the administration finding their alleged rapist not responsible. (They continued carrying the mattress until graduation.) In 2015, two Vanderbilt football players were found guilty of raping an unconscious woman. The struggle to adjudicate campus rape was nationwide news. The Rolling Stone article went viral within an hour of being posted, and would end up being the most-read non-celebrity story in the magazine’s history. I had changed, too. I was working at Jezebel. I felt almost disembodied by dread, in my office chair, thinking about how many women would read the piece and feel the need to compare their stories to Jackie’s—to play down the harm they’d faced, to preface their own experiences, as we already do, with “It wasn’t that bad.”

At UVA and within the school’s network, the story was explosive. Reactions were mostly supportive, but they were mixed. My Facebook feed flooded with messages from UVA alumni expressing outrage and recognition; for my boyfriend, a former UVA fraternity member, a number of his college acquaintances expressed a stiff, suspicious distance or disbelief. In Charlottesville, the police department opened an investigation into Jackie’s assault. Phi Psi was vandalized. There was an emergency Board of Visitors meeting. Bright Post-it notes and posters—“Expel Rapists,” “Harm to One Is Harm to All”—covered the brick walls and buildings surrounding the Lawn. Protesters walked Rugby Road with signs that said “Burn Down the Frats.” (“Nobody wants to rape you!” a few people yelled back.) The Cavalier Daily, the campus newspaper, overflowed with responses from both students and alumni. Letter writers acknowledged the insidious leeway given to the Greek system on campus; they criticized the school’s history of suppressing victims and accusers; they questioned Rolling Stone’s intentions and Erdely’s cherry-picked account of UVA life. “It feels immensely frustrating to be singled out, when inaction on rape and sexual assault cases persists across the country,” one student wrote. The newspaper’s managing board ran an op-ed acknowledging the mood of “anger, disgust, and despair.”

A couple of days after the piece went up, Emma, my editor in chief, asked me if the reporting seemed right. Some details were off, I said. But people who knew the school recognized what Erdely was talking about. She was right that UVA had a systemic problem—that the school believed in itself as an idyll, a place of genteel beauty and good citizenship, and that this belief was so seductive, so half true, and so widely propagated, that the social reckonings that had come elsewhere had been suppressed and delayed.

At this point, I had never reported a story or edited a reported story—Emma had brought me to Jezebel from my first job in media, at The Hairpin, a small blog where I mostly edited and wrote essays. I didn’t understand that it did matter that the details were off: that the piece’s epigraph came from what Erdely called a “traditional University of Virginia fight song,” which I had never heard, and which she said was in the standing rotation of an a cappella group called the Virginia Gentlemen, whose repertoire I knew from top to bottom because they were the brother group to my own. If I’d been more experienced, I would have known that it was actually suspicious, not just a matter of writerly flourish, that she described Phi Psi as “upper tier.” (Phi Psi was, at best, somewhere in the nondescript middle of UVA’s rigid fraternity caste system—a hard social fact that would have been easy to check.) I would’ve noticed the absence of disclosures and parentheticals telling the reader how the people in the story—the seven men who raped Jackie, or the friend who said, as if reading aloud from a bad screenplay, “Why didn’t you have fun with it? A bunch of hot Phi Psi guys?”—responded to the allegations. I would have noticed that there was no way, within the story, to tell exactly how Erdely knew what she knew.

At twenty-five, I was closer to my time at UVA than I was to the age I am now—closer to the idea of being the subject than the idea of being the writer. I didn’t know how to read the story. But a lot of other people did.

It didn’t take long for journalists to start pulling apart “A Rape on Campus.” At first, it seemed possible that the doubters had some ideological motivations. Richard Bradley, who’d previously edited the fabulist Stephen Glass, wrote in his blog that the lede “boggle[d] the mind,” and required a reader to “indulge your pre-existing biases” against “fraternities, against men, against the South,” as well as “about the prevalence—indeed, the existence—of rape culture.” Robby Soave, a blogger at the libertarian site Reason, who had previously written that the movement against campus rape was a large-scale criminalization of campus sex, wondered if the whole story was a hoax.

Then The Washington Post interviewed Erdely, who declined to disclose whether she knew the names of Jackie’s attackers, or if she had contacted “Drew,” the man who had taken Jackie to Phi Psi. Erdely went on the Slate podcast Double X and skirted the same questions. Then she and her editor, Sean Woods, confirmed to the Post that they’d never talked to any of the men. “I’m satisfied that these guys exist and are real,” Woods said. Erdely told the Post that by dwelling on these details, “you’re getting sidetracked.”

Soon afterward, the Post reported that Phi Psi had not held a party on the night in question. The Washington Post found convincing evidence that “Drew” did not exist, at least not as the person Jackie had described. CNN interviewed the friends quoted in the article, who detailed major discrepancies in what Jackie told Erdely and what Jackie had told them. Late at night on December 4, Erdely received a phone call from Jackie and Jackie’s friend Alex, who had, apparently, spoken to Jackie about her story’s inconsistencies.

At 1:54 A.M. on December 5, Erdely emailed her editor and her publisher: “We’re going to have to run a retraction … Neither I, nor Alex, find Jackie credible any longer.” That day, Rolling Stone put up a statement, explaining that Jackie had requested that they not contact “Drew” or any of the men who raped her. They had honored this request, as they found her trustworthy, and took seriously her apparent fear of retaliation. But “there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.” (Later on, that last unfortunate clause, about trust, disappeared.) As I read the note, my eyes kept flicking to one sentence, about how Jackie’s friends on campus had “strongly supported” her story. Those friends had supported her emotionally; they’d offered sympathy for the experience she told them about. But they had not corroborated her story, or supported it the way a journalist should have been obligated to—the way that walls support a house.

The following March, the Charlottesville police department issued a statement saying that there was no evidence to back up Jackie’s account of her assault. Later on, the Columbia Journalism Review published an extensive report laying out exactly how Erdely and her editors erred. Jackie and Erdely were subsequently deposed in Eramo v. Rolling Stone, a lawsuit lodged by Dean Eramo, who was portrayed as discouraging Jackie from reporting the alleged assault and had been quoted, on Jackie’s word alone, worrying that no one would want to send their kids to “the rape school.” (In November 2016, a jury found both Erdely and Rolling Stone responsible for defamation. Eramo was awarded $3 million in compensatory damages.) Through CJR’s report and the court documents, a story behind the story assembles itself.

Something likely happened to Jackie on September 28, 2012. Late that night, she called her friends, distraught. She met them outside freshman dorms, with no visible injuries, and told them that something bad had happened. Soon afterward, she told her roommate that she’d been forced to perform oral sex on five men. On May 20, 2013, she reported the assault to Dean Eramo and declined to pursue action. A year later, in May 2014, she went back to Eramo to report an act of retaliation—someone had thrown a bottle at her on the Corner, the main social drag, she said—and asserted that she knew two other women who’d been gang-raped at the same frat. Eramo, by her account, encouraged Jackie to report the alleged assault to the authorities and arranged for Jackie to meet with the Charlottesville police; she said that Jackie had two such meetings in the spring of 2014.

Erdely confirmed her assignment around the same time. She was an experienced journalist in her early forties who had recently been given a star contract at Rolling Stone: she was set to receive $300,000 for filing seven feature stories over two years. She had written about sexual abuse before. Her 1996 Philadelphia article about a woman who had been raped by her gynecologist was nominated for a National Magazine Award, and at Rolling Stone, she had recently published two consequential exposés about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the US Navy. (In December 2014, Newsweek noted that Erdely’s reporting on the Catholic Church story was also remarkably flawed.) Her intent, with this new Rolling Stone piece, was to follow a single assault case on a “particularly fraught campus,” she wrote, in a memo—she wasn’t sure which one. But she talked to rape survivors at a few Ivy League schools and was unsatisfied with the stories that turned up. She came down to Charlottesville in the summer of 2014, and heard about Jackie from a former student named Emily, who had met Jackie in a sexual assault prevention group. “Obviously,” Emily told Erdely, “her memory may not be perfect.” A few days later, Erdely sat down with Jackie, whose story had changed: on September 28, she told the reporter, she had met her friends outside Phi Psi, bloody and bruised and shoeless, after escaping an hours-long gang rape at the hands of seven men. She declined to provide the names of those friends, or the name of the boy who took her to the frat.

The two of them kept talking. In September, Jackie and her boyfriend had dinner with Erdely, who asked about the scars from the shattered glass. “I haven’t really seen any marks on your back,” the boyfriend said. Jackie told Erdely, “When you’ve come from a background where you’re always told that you’re worthless … it’s like you’re an easy target … like I was easily manipulated because I didn’t have the self-esteem to—I don’t know.” A week later, Jackie texted a friend, “I forgot to tell you that Sabrina [Erdely] is really nice, but you h...