After a long investigation, the Charlottesville Police Department said it is unable to substantiate many of the claims made in an explosive November Rolling Stone article, which alleged that a gang rape occurred on the University of Virginia campus and that the school’s administration looked the other way.
Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo said on Monday that there was no evidence to back up many of the assertions in the Rolling Stone account, sourced to a young woman known as “Jackie,” but he declined to formally close the investigation.
RELATED: University of Virginia president addresses sexual assault
Longo said he was suspending the investigation in case more information emerged. Despite his investigators finding a series of major discrepancies in what Jackie told Rolling Stone and what other interviewees say, Longo said, “I’m not convinced that something terrible didn’t happen to that young lady that night.”
%22I%E2%80%99m%20not%20convinced%20that%20something%20terrible%20didn%E2%80%99t%20happen%20to%20that%20young%20lady%20that%20night.%22′
He asked that anyone with any knowledge of sexual assaults at a University of Virginia fraternity or elsewhere “please cooperate with the police and bring that to our attention.”
Jackie herself declined to make a statement to the police, though she and her Legal Aid attorney did visit the police station, Longo said, and the two investigators assigned to the case spoke to roughly 70 people. With no specific criminal charges to make, the police were unable to compel anyone’s testimony.
Longo said that what Jackie’s friends remember her saying on the night in question differed from what was in the article, which the friends have also told the press in recent months. He also said that what Jackie reported to university Dean Nicole Eramo in the spring of 2014 “was not consistent with the facts and circumstances as they were described in the article,” and that the police were first involved after Jackie told the dean she had a bottle thrown at her in retaliation for her anti-rape activism. But Jackie declined to speak with the police about either incident in the spring, before opting to tell a story to Erdely.
“The last contact we had with her was on Dec. 10 and we were very distinctly told that she would not talk to us, that we were not to talk to her again,” Longo said.
The most recent Charlottesville investigation also looked at the bottle incident. Longo added that Jackie’s roommate, a nursing student, said the mark on Jackie’s face was an abrasion, not the result of blunt force. He also said that the roommate denied having removed glass from the wound, as Jackie had claimed.
RELATED: UVA official blasts Rolling Stone over rape article
The investigators also interviewed Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author of the Rolling Stone story. How the story came to be – with errors such as there being no evidence the fraternity named in the piece even had a party on the named night – will be the subject of a Columbia Graduate School of Journalism investigation the magazine itself will soon publish.
The Charlottesville Police Department had already signaled that at least some part of the Rolling Stone story was either unsubstantiated or didn’t rise to the level of prosecution when it told the university that “their investigation has not revealed any substantive basis to confirm that the allegations raised in the Rolling Stone article occurred at Phi Kappa Psi,” according to a university press release in January. Phi Kappa Psi was subsequently reinstated.
Though she has begun implementing reforms around university life, including a new Fraternal Organization Agreement Addendum, University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan said in January that the Rolling Stone story had “unfairly maligned UVa and many members of our community.”








