While trolls continue to criticize a UVA student known as Jackie over her controversial account of being gang raped in a recent article for Rolling Stone, the young woman's father has come out with a strong defense of his daughter, saying that he believes she was telling the truth about the attack. Jackie's story, already under fire by critics, was questioned by the magazine itself last week, and has prompted Rolling Stone to distance itself from the survivor over alleged "discrepancies" in her account.
But according to Jackie's father, those discrepancies resulted from Rolling Stone's misrepresentation of her story. In an interview with the Daily Mail, the father said Jackie wrongly identified the fraternity where she claimed to have been raped, but that she told Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely that she wasn't sure about the location of the attack:
"She told the truth. She did not know the details [of the fraternity] because she had been there for two weeks and she was 18 years old."
The father condemned the intense media scrutiny his daughter had been put under after it emerged details of the Rolling Stone article on university campus rape, published last month, had been wrong.
Speaking on the steps of his smart detached home in an affluent housing development in Northern Virginia where the family lives with their pet dogs he said: "[The media] crushed my daughter when she is an innocent girl. [The media] crucified her." [...]
Her father's comment that she did not know the fraternity name come after Jackie herself told the Washington Post that she had not known the name of the fraternity and had not told Rolling Stone that she did.
In fact, she said, "I know it was Phi Psi, because a year afterward, my friend pointed out the building to me and said that’s where it happened."
Others close to Jackie have come forward in her defense as well, asserting that discrepancies in her account should not and do not automatically discredit it. On Monday, one of Jackie's former suite mates, who lived with her in the months after the alleged rape, published an Op-Ed in UVA's Cavalier Daily maintaining her belief that Jackie was attacked.
"Whether the details are correct or not, and whether the reporting was faulty, or the hazy memories of a traumatizing night got skewed … the blame should never fall on the victim’s shoulders," Jackie's friend, Emily Clark, wrote. "Jackie is a victim, as are so many others, men and women, young and old. So many stories have gone untold and so many perpetrators have been allowed to walk free."
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