Police: No evidence of fraternity rape

Charlottesville, Virginia, police announced Monday that they could find no evidence that a rape happened at a University of Virginia fraternity as described in a Rolling Stone article and said they were suspending their investigation.

Charlottesville police Chief Timothy Longo, in a televised news conference, said the college student who reported the rape, identified in the article only as Jackie, declined to cooperate with police and that investigators found inconsistencies in the stories she previously told to Rolling Stone and to campus officials.

“That’s really the extent of this investigation,” Longo said. “Unfortunately, we’re not able to conclude to any substantive degree that an incident consistent with the facts in that article (occurred at the fraternity house named in the Rolling Stone story) or any other fraternity house, for that matter.”

Longo added: “That doesn’t mean that something terrible did not happen to Jackie. … I can’t prove that something didn’t happen.”

An attorney representing Jackie, Palma E. Pustilnik of the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society, told the Los Angeles Times in an email Monday, “We have no comment at this time.”

The police investigation centered on an incident described in an explosive Rolling Stone magazine story, published in November, that said a woman identified as Jackie had been gang-raped in 2012 at a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.

After critics raised questions about the accuracy of the account, Rolling Stone issued an apology that said the magazine no longer trusted the story told by Jackie.

The saga rocked the University of Virginia, which the story accused of having a rampant culture of sexual violence, as well as the world of journalism, in which observers criticized the story’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, for what they saw as lax and flawed reporting techniques.

Concerns also mounted that the story would damage the credibility of rape survivors elsewhere, whom advocates say are often not taken seriously by law enforcement officials and the public.

Erdely did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Monday. Investigators said she had cooperated “as best as she could” with police without compromising her sources for the story.

University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan, who had asked law enforcement to look into the alleged assault shortly after the publication of the Rolling Stone story, said in a statement Monday that the police finding “confirms what federal privacy law prohibited the University from sharing last fall: that the University provided support and care to a student in need, including assistance in reporting potential criminal conduct to law enforcement.”

Sullivan added, “There is important work ahead as the University continues to implement substantive reforms to improve its culture, prevent violence and respond to incidents of violence when they occur.”

Charlottesville police had already cleared Phi Kappa Psi of involvement in the alleged rape, announcing in January that they found “no basis to believe that an incident occurred at that fraternity.”

In a statement released Monday through a public relations agency, Phi Kappa Psi criticized Rolling Stone for “recklessly and prejudicially” featuring the fraternity in its story and for leaving the story on its website, where it is preceded by a lengthy editor’s note that details some of the discrepancies in Jackie’s account.