In 2014, Rolling Stone published an article about a University of Virginia student named Jackie who had claimed she was gang-raped at a campus frat house. The story garnered a lot of attention when it came out, and has been questioned intensely since.
Now, it is believed that Jackie made up the guy who led the assault. We know, we rolled our eyes too. This seems like the perfect case of victim-blaming, but before we jump to any conclusions, here are the facts:
UVA’s assistant dean Nicole Eramo’s lawyers found evidence that Jackie made up the man who led her assault, according to the The Washington Post.
The Post reported that according to the Charlottesville Police, a man named “Haven Monahan,” who Jackie said was the one that initiated the rape, was never a student of UVA. But wait, there’s more…
It’s possible Jackie was using “Haven Monahan” to catfish another student named Ryan Duffin, whom she had a crush on. It turns out the pictures of “Haven,” that Jackie showed people were actually pictures of a guy she went to high school with, which further proves that “Haven” is not real.
Even worse, Jackie has allegedly been withholding possible evidence.
According to the Richmond, investigators believe that she has documents from this so-called “Haven” figure. The court ordered her to hand them over, to see if she indeed has them and possibly wrote them herself, posing as Haven. She has yet to hand them over.
All of this information has brought into question the validity of the story that Jackie told Rolling Stone. What sucks is that if Jackie really did make up this story, it will only make it harder for those who have actually been sexually assaulted to be taken seriously and not just written off as a liar, or worse, an attention-seeker. Just when we thinking we’re moving forward with how people perceive sexual assault victims, a story likes this comes out and we take two steps back.