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The friends of “Jackie,” the young woman featured prominently in Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone article on rape at the University of Virginia, tell a different account of the night she was allegedly raped—and say the magazine never contacted them. Andy, Cindy, and Randall, as they are referred to in the Rolling Stone piece, spoke to The Washington Post. Erdely’s article describes them as discouraging Jackie from reporting her alleged assault, but they told the Post they encouraged her to report it to the police.
Jackie’s friends say she gave them the phone number and name of a junior-year student she said she was meeting the night that she later told Rolling Stone she was raped. Her friends say they were exchanging texts with him before the date occurred. UVA said that name does not match anyone who was enrolled at the university. Similarly, photographs this student sent of himself to Jackie’s friends were in fact of a high-school classmate of Jackie’s. That ex-classmate said he has not spoken to Jackie in six years and was out of state on the night of the alleged attack.
More recently, Jackie gave a second, different name of her attacker to different friends who gave it to the Post. When the Post gave that name to the three friends mentioned in the Rolling Stone article, they said they had never heard it. However, a man “whose name is similar to the second one Jackie used for her attacker” said he worked as a lifeguard at the same time as Jackie, but never met her in person and had never taken her out on a date. He also said that he was not a member of Phi Kappa Psi, where Jackie says she was gang-raped.
The three friends also say they did not notice visible injuries on Jackie when they met with her after the alleged rape, but she seemed clearly upset. “She had very clearly just experienced a horrific trauma,” Randall said. “I had never seen anybody acting like she was on that night before and I really hope I never have to again.... If she was acting on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, then she deserves an Oscar.” Jackie’s father told the MailOnline that his daughter is telling the truth, and the only detail she botched was misidentifying the fraternity as Phi Kappa Psi. “She told the truth. She did not know the details [of the fraternity] because she had only been there for two weeks and she was 18 years old,” he said.
Jackie declined to answer specific questions or to elaborate in a brief interview Wednesday, the Post said, adding that her attorney asked journalists not to contact her.