For anyone interested in a whole range of issues, from women’s rights to collegiate culture to the state of American journalism, the story at the heart of Calamity West‘s Rolling was a big deal. The November 19, 2014, issue of Rolling Stone magazine featured “A Rape on Campus,” Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s report on allegations made to her by a University of Virginia student called “Jackie,” who said she’d been lured into an upstairs room at the local Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house and gang-raped as part of an initiation rite. Erdely’s piece caused a furor, first, because of the misogynistic savagery of the crime—then, only days later, because it had become apparent that no crime had taken place. Turns out Jackie made the whole thing up. Rolling Stone repudiated “A Rape on Campus,” the Columbia School of Journalism issued a damning study of editorial lapses at the magazine, and various victims filed suit.
Molly’s married nebbish, Danny, has his own reportorial ambitions, which lead Valerie into a subplot seemingly designed to prove the dictum, delivered by Janet Malcolm in her 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer, that “every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” But that thread is as weak as it is predictable, dependent as it is on yet more misfeasance from a major publication. As bad as the media may look in light of Erdely’s folly and the continuing attrition of staffs, there really are editors who know enough to confirm a story.
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