If you’ve been following coverage of this story since 2014 you already know that Jackie’s friends at UVA have a different recollection of events than the one related in the Rolling Stone story. Today, two of those former friends testified in the defamation trial of UVA administrator Nicole Eramo. Both seemed to blame Jackie for lying about the incident and expressed some sympathy for Sabrina Erdely. The Daily Progress reports:
On Tuesday, Eramo’s attorneys played the separate deposition videos of [Ryan] Duffin and [Kathryn] Hendley, each of whom spoke about the night in which they found their then-friend Jackie “shaken” by what she relayed to have been a sexual assault. The majority of the details expressed in the article, however, differed completely from their experiences that night.
In the first of the two videos, Hendley disavowed all of the quotes attributed to her in Erdely’s story. While reading portions of the article where she was named “Cindy,” Hendley said it was “like a fictionalized version of [her] life.”
Specifically, she scoffed at a line in the article that said she was a “self-described hookup queen” and that she warned Jackie against reporting her rape out of fear that she would be “the girl who cried rape.”
In actuality, Jackie didn’t tell Hendley on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, that she had been assaulted at all.
When author Sabrina Erdely finally contacted Hendley after the story was retracted, Hendley testified she felt sorry for the author saying, “I understood what it’s like to be lied to by Jackie.”
As for Ryan Duffin he confirmed being called one night to meet Jackie but says she seemed shaken but otherwise unharmed. When Jackie told him the story about being forced to perform oral sex on 5 men at a frat house, Duffin encouraged her to report the incident. That’s not how it was portrayed in the Rolling Stone story. Erdely’s version of events involved a gang-rape by multiple men in which “Jackie” was smashed through a glass table and left with multiple cuts. The RS story also suggested that it was Jackie’s friends who discouraged her from reporting the incident. But the Daily Progress reports Duffin also expressed some sympathy for Erdely saying the seemed “genuinely apologetic” when he finally spoke to her.
As Jazz pointed out yesterday, Jackie’s deposition blamed everything on Erdely and included the convenient claim that she is suffering from PTSD and can’t remember details of the incident. I’m still wondering at what point the media will stop shielding the adult woman who invented this story and start using her real name.
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