The court case involving the suit against Rolling Stone for running the highly defamatory story involving a gang rape case at the University of Virginia – a story that turned out to be fake – took an interesting turn when e-mails came to light showing that the original author of the story, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, had gone to other Rolling Stone editors to contest the veracity of the victim’s story.

According to the Daily Caller, some of the e-mails filed in the court case – that sees UVA dean Nicole Eramo suing The Rolling Stone for the libelous article – shows that author Sabrina Rubin Erdely second guessed the victim’s testimony shortly after the original article was published in November, 2014.

After first confirming in an e-mail to Paul Farhi from The Washington Post on December 1st, 2014 that both her and The Rolling Stone were “confident” with the story, it was only a few days removed from that admission of confidence that author Sabrina Rubin Erdely sent an e-mail in the twilight hours of December 5th, 2014 to Rolling Stone editors Will Dana and Sean Woods; it was anything but confident. The e-mail was rife with doubt, second guessing, and a new kind of admission… that the alleged victim may have lied to her.

Erdely started off in the letter, writing…

“Will and Sean – we can’t run the statement tomorrow. In fact, we’re goin to have to run a retraction. I just got off the phone with Jackie and her friend Alex; neither I nor Alex find Jackie credible any longer.”

This should have been enough to at least back away from the story, to at least second guess or question the motivations, the witnesses, go back and examine the evidence. Right?

Erdely wasn’t done, though, she broke down a few of the inconsistencies of the so-called victim’s story and even went as far as to write that the testimony from the victim wasn’t “credible”…

“I’ve been trying to verify the identiy of her assailant, and when I asked her for help, it spiraled into confusion. By the time we ended our conversation, I felt nearly certain that she was not being truthful.”

 

“[…] I’m not saying saying that Jackie wasn’t raped in that house, or on that night. However, Jackie isn’t credible.”

Later that morning on December 5th, 2014, Paul Farhi published his piece on The Washington Post calling into question a number of facts and details missing from The Rolling Stone piece about the alleged UVA rape. Astonishingly, this was not enough to get The Rolling Stone or the involved authors to retract the article nor pull away from the false narrative that even the original author was no longer confident was the actual truth.

They had listened and believed, and they were standing by the piece even if it was all a lie.

It wasn’t until the Columbia Journalism Review broke down the piece and discredited it did they finally retract the article on April 5th, 2015 last year.

The retraction and outing that the whole thing was fake prompted for a surprisingly mum response from  many left-wing media outlets and proclaimed Social Justice Activists.

The UVA decided to sue for $10 million. The Washington Post quoted the filing from the Charlottesville Circuit Court, which stated…

“The [defamatory and false statements] were the result of a wanton journalist who was more concerned with writing an article that fulfilled her preconceived narrative about the victimization of women on American college campuses, and a malicious publisher who was more concerned about selling magazines to boost the economic bottom line for its faltering magazine, than they were about discovering the truth or actual facts.”

Some of the sites reporting on the new e-mails seem to skip out on the parts where even Sabrina Rubin Erdely questions the veracity of the alleged victim’s testimony.

The Washington Post further reported that the so-called victim’s story kept changing and that the details were not staying consistent even before Erdely published the piece; but they went ahead with it anyway. Worse yet is that they even kept with the story even after Erdely was hit with a guilt-ridden conscientious epiphany, which spurred her into action to e-mail The Rolling Stone editors suggesting for a retraction of the story.

Reason.com did a report on the recent court filings, some of which revealed that the supposed victim had an obsession with Law and Order: SVU. Yes, the exact same Law and Order that based an episode around #GamerGate and Anita Sarkeesian.

Reason writes…

“Jackie told [Sabrina Ruben Erdely] that her assault called to mind a specific episode in which a female college student is gang raped by fraternity members. No one believes the girl, and she eventually commits suicide.

 

“Jackie also said that some time after her assault, she re-watched the episode with her father. This prompted her to tell him, for the first time, that what happened to the girl on the show had also happened to her.”

Reason notes that it’s plausible that the entire hoax was based on that particular episode of Law and Order: SVU.

Ultimately, the more that’s revealed the scarier it becomes knowing that such a large publication – even with all the telltale signs that the story did not hold up under scrutiny – was willing to completely destroy the lives of all of those in the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, using a fake story in order to push the agenda about “rape culture” on college campuses.