New Report Says UVA Rape Story Was All a Big Catfishing Scheme

Article here. Excerpt:

'Just when we thought the Rolling Stone-University of Virginia situation couldn’t get worse, it turns out the entire 9,000-word article seems to have resulted from one student’s unrequited romantic feelings toward one of her friends. The disastrous cover story recounted a college student, identified as "Jackie," being sexually assaulted by seven men during a hazing ritual at one of UVA’s fraternities. However, because there was virtually no evidence that the rape actually occurred — and neither writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely nor the editorial staff at Rolling Stone fact-checked the piece's veracity — the story was quickly discounted, and cited by Columbia Journalism Review as one of the worst pieces of journalism of 2014. (Note: Rolling Stone asked the dean of Columbia University's Journalism School, Steve Coll, to investigate what went wrong in their reporting after the magazine was forced to retract the article when other publications, most notably The Washington Post, exposed glaring inconsistencies in the piece.) There have since been three defamation suits filed against Rolling Stone, including one by UVA associate dean Nicole Eramo, whose suit exposed the latest news out of this bizarre and damaging story.

In a new report by [The Washington Post], Eramo’s defamation suit contains a series of text messages between one of Jackie’s friends, and "Haven Monahan," the supposed instigator of the attack and a UVA junior, who we now know doesn’t exist. For a while, however, it seemed like the story was an“embellishment” of an actual rape that had occurred. But now, evidence suggests that the story was entirely fabricated in an attempt to “catfish” a friend of Jackie's, Ryan Duffin, with whom she was infatuated.'