At the chapter house party, Jackie alleged in the article, her date led her to a bedroom where she was gang raped by several fraternity members as part of their initiation ritual.

In September 2013, Eramo connected Jackie with Emily Renda, a UVA staff member, recent graduate and leader in the college's sexual assault support group One Less.

[24] A few days later, hundreds of people participated in a protest and march organized by UVA faculty as "part of a series of responses to the recently published Rolling Stone article".

[28] Community members offered suggestions for immediate steps administration could take to implement preventive measures and address safety concerns regarding sexual assault.

"[27] Four participants who were sitting on the steps to the Phi Kappa Psi house were arrested on trespassing charges for refusing to move when police officers asked them to leave.

[38] Bruce Shapiro of Columbia University said that an engaged and empathetic reporter will be concerned about inflicting new trauma on the victim: "I do think that when the emotional valence of a story is this high, you really have to verify it."

[39] The two friends confirmed to the Post that they remembered meeting Jackie on the night of the incident, that she was distraught but not visibly injured or bloodied, and that details she provided then were different from those in the Rolling Stone article.

"[51] "Haven Monahan", as reported by T. Rees Shapiro, "ultimately appeared to be a combination of names belonging to people Jackie interacted with while in high school in Northern Virginia.

A number of commentators accused the magazine of setting rape victims "back decades", while The Washington Post described the Rolling Stone story as a "catastrophe for journalism".

"[80] An editorial in the Boston Herald declared: "a fifth-grader would've done some basic fact-checking before potentially ruining men's lives" before repeating the call for the firing of Rolling Stone staff involved in the story.

"[82] Writing for Time, columnist Cathy Young said that the unraveling of Erdely's article "exposed the troubling zealotry of advocates for whom believing rape claims is somewhat akin to a matter of religious faith".

... What distinguished the UVA story from anything else ever reported was that the assault did not involve drugs or alcohol, required elaborate planning, and involved so many people that the perps could not have reasonably expected to get away with it—a confluence of factors that caused the allegations to have substantially more in common with ones that ultimately proved to be false, like the Duke lacrosse case and Tawana Brawley incident.Students at the University of Virginia expressed "bewilderment and anger" following Rolling Stone's apology for its story, with one female student declaring "Rolling Stone threw a bomb at us."

"[88] Emily Renda, the university's project coordinator for sexual misconduct, policy and prevention, declared that "Rolling Stone played adjudicator, investigator and advocate and did a slipshod job at that.

"[90] Writing in Politico two days after the "story fell apart", Julia Horowitz, deputy editor of the university's campus newspaper, described the feeling among students: "The campus—relatively oversaturated with emotion after a semester of significant trauma—feels as if it is on stand-by, poised in anticipation of where the next torrent of news will take us.

[46] Slate reported that the Post account strongly implied Jackie's tale of rape had been fabricated in an attempt to win over "Randall," who had previously rebuffed her romantic advances.

However, that statement seemed to contradict an earlier assertion the accuser had made to The Washington Post, in which she stated: "I know it was Phi [Kappa] Psi, because a year afterward, my friend pointed out the building to me.

[18] Inquirer media columnist Michael Smerconish recounted that when he interviewed Erdely about the story on Sirius XM radio, she told him: "I talked to all of her friends, all the people that she confided in along the way."

[109][110] After the details in "A Rape on Campus" began to unravel, Rolling Stone's publisher Jann Wenner commissioned Columbia University's School of Journalism to investigate the failures behind the publication of the article.

[113][116] Ultimately, the report determined that Rolling Stone had exhibited confirmation bias and failed to perform basic fact checking by relying excessively on the accuser's account without verifying it through other means.

"[116] Jill Geisler in the Columbia Journalism Review reacted to Dana's statement by saying, "At a time when humility should guide a leader's comments, that quote carries the aroma of arrogance.

"[126][127] Phi Kappa Psi's national headquarters released the following statement: "That Rolling Stone sought to turn fiction into fact is shameful...The discredited article has done significant damage to the ability of the chapter's members to succeed in their educational pursuits and besmirched the character of undergraduate students at the University of Virginia who did not deserve the spotlight of the media."

[128] Phi Kappa Psi's national president Scott Noble stated that they were "now pursuing serious legal action toward Rolling Stone, the author and editor, and even Jackie".

[citation needed] After both the Charlottesville Police press conference and Columbia University's investigative report, UVA President Teresa Sullivan released the following statement: Rolling Stone's story, 'A Rape on Campus', did nothing to combat sexual violence, and it damaged serious efforts to address the issue.

[129]The Washington Post reported that the members of Phi Kappa Psi "went into hiding for weeks after their home was vandalized with spray paint calling them rapists and bricks that broke their windows", and had to escape to hotels.

In her remarks, she said, "Before the Rolling Stone story was discredited, it seemed to resonate with some people simply because it confirmed their darkest suspicions about universities—that administrations are corrupt; that today's students are reckless and irresponsible; that fraternities are hot-beds of deviant behavior.

[140] Due to increased social skepticism about the prevalence of sexual assault created by the unraveling of Erdely's Rolling Stone report, the Military Justice Improvement Act would be "much harder" to enact, according to Margaret Carlson,[141] and ultimately did not pass in that congressional session.

"[145] The North American Interfraternity Conference and the National Panhellenic Council, meanwhile, announced that they had retained the services of Squire Patton Boggs to lobby the U.S. Congress to take action to ensure that Greek-letter organizations are protected from future accusations of the kind leveled in Erdely's article.

[146] Media sources and commentators discussed the allegations in the context of the reported "rape culture" or a rampant sexual assault epidemic that activists had claimed existed on U.S. college campuses.

[147][148][149] Harvey A. Silverglate in The Boston Globe referenced the Rolling Stone article in opining that the college sexual assault "scare" follows a long tradition of runaway, exaggerated social epidemics that "have ruined innocent lives and corrupted justice.

[158] On May 12, 2015, UVA associate dean Nicole Eramo, chief administrator for handling sexual assault issues at the school, filed a $7.5 million defamation lawsuit in Charlottesville Circuit Court against Rolling Stone and Erdely, claiming damage to her reputation and emotional distress.