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A highly awarded journalist disgraced after a career-ending false article that hurt many.

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Presentation, citations and research completed by:

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Journalism, Period 1, Sauerwein

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*Although I know that anything beginning with 'wiki' is very likely not a reliable source, I could find no others.*

Sabrina Rubin Erdely was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1971 (meaning she is today 47-48 years old). She's married to Peter Erdely with two children, and graduated from University of Pennsylvania in 1994. She received the Columbia Journalism Review's "Worst Journalism of 2014" award according to the Daily Pennsylvanian (who listed her as one of U-Penn's top 5 infamous alumni in this article). She ruined her career by not checking her sources or seeking multiple sources. The most infamous account remains her Rolling Stones article "Rape on Campus."

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An article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely that appeared in the Rolling Stone's December 2014 edition, and online around November 19, 2014.

Sabrina Erdely was charged with "defamation, with actual malice," of Nicole Eramo, a University of Virginia administrator responsible for overseeing sexual violence cases at the time, according to this Washington Post article. Erdely wrote a nine-thousand (9,000) word article about sexual assault and fraternity members gang-raping students on the UVA campus that sent shock and panic through the campus community. Within less than a week, the article fell apart and was discovered as wholly untrue due to many important elements of her story not matching up.

Eramo later won a $3 million dollar settlement in damages, and the aforementioned fraternity (the Virginia Alpha chapter of Phi Kappa Psi) received a $1.65 million dollar settlement, of which they will donate to groups that help college students gain sexual assault awareness and prevention tactics (as according to this New York Times article).

Erdely has made no updates or pasts to her Twitter account (@SabrinaRErdely) past the date of November 30, 2014,  although she can be quoted saying "So many students (UVA & elsewhere) have reached out with similar stories of sexual assault, shaming, silencing. Heartbreaking. Infuriating," as well as "On Thursday UVA students held a 1000-strong rally, and on Friday hundreds marched the campus in protest of rape & rape culture. Nice work," and "The @washingtonpost wrote an article about me, and how my UVA article came to be: [link to this article entitled "Sabrina Rubin Erdely, woman behind Rolling Stone’s explosive U-Va. alleged rape story"]".

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What Exactly Happened To Make The 'Rolling Stones' Cut All Ties To The Story And Destroy Erdely's Career Forever?

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What Exactly Happened To Make The 'Rolling Stones' Cut All Ties To The Story And Destroy Erdely's Career Forever?

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I could never have said it better than Augusta Free Press, in this online article.

"Interesting looking back at the Post puffer to one detail in that reporting: the writer of that piece noted how remarkable it was that no one had reported on the central part of Erdely’s piece, the alleged gang rape of a first-year student given the name Jackie for the sake of reporting the story at a frat party in 2012 that has now come into serious doubt to the point that Rolling Stone has backed away from the story and reporting by Erdely because of basic errors by the accomplished writer.

We now know that Erdely didn’t talk to the alleged perpetrators of the gang rape, and can surmise that she didn’t even know the identities of those alleged to have been involved, with the Post reporting today that the alleged victim has just recently revealed the name of the purported ringleader of the assault, and that even her closest friends now have doubts about him and about Jackie’s account.

But back on Nov. 30, the Post was retelling what Erdely was telling them about her “weeks corroborating details of Jackie’s account,” during which time neither Erdely nor anyone at Rolling Stone, editors up the chain of command or lawyers involved in the vetting of the story, felt it was necessary to seek out details like whether or not there was a party at the Phi Kappa Psifraternity the weekend of the alleged incident, or whether there was a young man by the name that Jackie had identified to Erdely at the fraternity.

Today, the Post is able to tell us that reporters there have been able to track down the student identified by Jackie as being the ringleader of her assault, and that he denies being a member of the fraternity, going on a date with Jackie or even having met her.

The Post also tells us that Jackie now feels that she was bullied into participating in the story by Erdely, who has yet to respond to any of the recent developments in regard to the story, after riding the wave of media love in the days following publication.

It’s unfathomable that someone with Erdely’s credentials and experience could make the basic mistakes that she did here in her reporting on UVA. Not checking sources, not making sure that dates lined up, writing in lurid detail about events that came down to the word of a single source, sloppy isn’t the word for this effort, or lack of effort."

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Although there is much debate on whether the source referred to as 'Jackie' was solely responsible for this mishap, or perhaps that the Rolling Stone was already doomed from the start (having a long history of not checking and rechecking sources or getting multiple accounts) with such a bad protocol for posting articles without review, one thing is for absolute certain; this article was a total failure, telling a fake story and even causing turmoil and grief for all those in the collegiate community (especially those with an actual sexual assault experience). According to The Baltimore Sun, "Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the whole business is that Rolling Stone, after its earliest years as a respectable voice for the young, hip music culture, had come to be regarded as a legitimate source of enterprise journalism. It had the necessary editing review process in place, but the editors didn't make thorough enough use of it.

With the old print media in decline, professional editing as an integral safeguard against factual error, misrepresentation and plagiarism has been eroding as well. Newsroom economic cutbacks have targeted editors as well as reporters, and the result has been sloppiness and worse in the daily print product."