From UVA's Rugby Road, a national wakeup call

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"From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill, we’re gonna get drunk tonight/ The faculty’s afraid of us; they know we’re in the right/ So fill your cups, your loving cups, as full as full can be/ For as long as love and liquor last, we’ll drink to the U. of V.

“All you girls from Mary Washington/ And RMWC, never let a Cavalier an inch above your knee/ He’ll take you to his fraternity house and fill you full of beer/ And soon you’ll be the mother of a bastard Cavalier!”


Thus begins “Rugby Road,” one of many University of Virginia fight songs, played by the school’s marching band at football games and sung by the men’s glee club at more gentlemanly affairs.

In Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s 8,300-word Rolling Stone exposé, “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA” (Nov. 19), the contributing editor interspersed the song’s lurid verses with her own hauntingly descriptive text.

In horrifying detail, the article described an alleged gang rape of an 18-year-old UVA freshman in 2012 by seven members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, which occupies a redbrick, plantation-style mansion on Rugby Road, where UVA’s fraternity row is located.

The article identified the victim and her alleged attackers by first-name pseudonyms only, calling her Jackie. It left nothing else to the imagination.

Media pundits picked apart Erdely’s piece last week, with some asking whether the story might be a hoax. At the victim’s request, the writer never attempted to contact the alleged perpetrators for comment. Calling the accused is standard journalistic practice. Erdely said she believed that abiding by the alleged victim’s wishes was most important, and no one was named, so no one was defamed.

On Friday, Rolling Stone issued a statement that the magazine had lost faith in the story because, on closer examination, the details didn’t add up.

If Jackie’s story is true in any way, how horrible must it be for her to see the magazine backtrack? If, on the other hand, it is a fabrication, how horrible must that be not only for UVA’s victims of sexual assault, but also for all college-age women who have been attacked? We know there are many –– U.S. Department of Justice statistics tell us that 1 in 4 women in college have been raped or sexually assaulted since age 14.

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