UVa student unravels Rolling Stone rape story
By Katie Brinn
On April 5, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism will release its review of the discredited Rolling Stone article, "A Rape on Campus."
This follows the March 23 announcement by Charlottesville, Va., Police Chief Timothy Longo, stating that there was no evidence to support the shocking story of an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia, published by the magazine last fall. Ryan Duffin, a UVA student featured in the article under the alias “Randall” said he was not surprised, because he already knew the blockbuster article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely did not reflect the truth, as he experienced it firsthand.
The Nov. 19 article focused on an alleged victim, identified only by her first name, “Jackie,” and her harrowing tale of a violent gang rape by seven men at a University of Virginia fraternity house. But in the days after the story broke, the details began to unravel.
Duffin, whom Jackie called to come to her aid in the moments after the alleged attack, was one of the first to raise a red flag. The article portrayed him as dismissive of Jackie’s horrific experience, but in an interview with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric, Duffin says that account is far from the truth.
“The first response that I had when she told me [about the attack] was that I wanted to go to the police immediately with it,” he says. But Jackie wasn’t ready to alert the authorities, or go to the hospital, yet.
Duffin and Jackie had met shortly after they both arrived at the UVA campus their freshman year. He says Jackie expressed interest in him, but those feelings were not mutual, “I also made it clear that it was not reciprocated,” he said, “but I was still happy being friends with her.”
Duffin says it wasn’t long after that Jackie told him about a student in her chemistry class, Haven Monahan, who had shown interest in her. She asked Duffin and another friend to vet Haven. Jackie provided them with phone numbers that she said belonged to the third-year student and asked them to text him. Duffin later discovered that those numbers were tied to an anonymous online texting service and were not linked to anyone named Haven Monahan.
“The conversation for both me and the mutual friend, when we were speaking to Haven, very quickly turned into a conversation about how much Haven cared about Jackie,” Duffin recalls, so he and the friend gave Jackie their blessing to go on the date.
It was on that date, Jackie would later claim, that Monahan orchestrated a vicious sexual assault that left her physically and emotionally scarred.
But for Duffin, the story took an even more bizarre turn five days after the alleged attack, when he received an email from someone claiming to be Monahan. “The subject line said ‘About You,’” Duffin says, “And the text of the email said, ‘You really should read this. I’ve never read anything nicer in my life.’”
It was a letter that Jackie had allegedly written, gushing about Duffin and revealing her deep feelings for him.
“I decided to search online on UVA’s people directory to see if I got any hits for Haven Monahan,” Duffin recounts. There was no Haven Monahan in UVA’s records. But it wasn’t until the Rolling Stone article put Jackie’s story under a microscope that investigators discovered that Haven Monahan never existed at all.
Now, more than three years after the alleged attack, there are still unanswered questions about that night. “It’s still so convincing, the emotional response that she had,” Duffin says, “that it’s difficult to think that nothing happened.”
Watch Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric's full interview with Ryan Duffin, Alex Pinkleton, Liz Seccuro, and Police Chief Timothy Longo.
