In November of 2014, Rolling Stone magazine published a bombshell of a piece on rape at college campuses. It began with a vivid, memorable lede, which took place at the historic, genteel University of Virginia (UVA). A freshman student had gone on a date with a handsome junior, returned with him to party at his frat house, and been brutally gang-raped by a group of seven of his frat brothers while her date choreographed.

[You can read the article, which has an editor’s note on the top, by clicking on this link. (The article is not available online; Rolling Stone pulled it from its archives.) WARNING: The material is disturbing, graphic, profane, violent and sexual in nature. You are not required to read it, but we offer it because we believe you should have access to the primary source material covered in this essay.

Sexual assault on campus was (and remains) a heated national issue, and UVA, under federal compliance review at the time to investigate its response to the problem generally, had plenty of horror stories. But the details of this case were particularly shocking. The victim, given the pseudonym “Jackie,” had been thrown through a coffee table and onto a bed of shattered glass, been gang raped by several fraternity members, and then stumbled bloody into the night. She was encouraged by friends not to do anything about it so as to protect her and their reputations, and ultimately met with a bureaucracy that, Rolling Stone suggested, nudged her away from reporting the incident to the authorities.

The story generated more web traffic than any non-celebrity feature the magazine had ever published, with 2.7 million page views at final count. There was just one problem: the story, it appears, was not true.

Things began to unravel within a couple of days of the story coming online. Slate interviewers soon challenged the author, Sabrina Erdely, about her reporting in a podcast. The Washington Post highlighted Erdely’s decision not to speak with the accused, and offered exonerating evidence presented by Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity in question. By December 4, two weeks after the story was published, Rolling Stone lost faith in Jackie’s information, and published what amounted to a retraction of the story. In the ensuing fallout, Rolling Stone and Erdely paid millions in damages to a UVA dean portrayed in the story and to Phi Kappa Psi. Both the journalist’s and publication’s reputations took enormous hits.

What happened? Reporting on sexual assault is an especially sensitive subject. Prying too aggressively can dredge up the trauma of a survivor’s initial experience. Jackie told Erdely point blank that she did not want her rapist, pseudonymously called “Drew” in the story, contacted, and Erdely honored her request.

Difficult as it may have been, Erdely needed to do more to confirm Jackie’s account by contacting other relevant sources, particularly the accused and friends of Jackie who played a prominent role in the story but were not contacted for interviews of their own. Jackie had offered to put those friends in touch, but never followed through. "Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim; we honored too many of her requests in our reporting," Sean Woods, the story’s principal editor, said afterward. "We should have been much tougher, and in not doing that, we maybe did her a disservice." If Erdely did want to maintain her more gentle approach to Jackie, she could simply have refocused the narrative on a different, adjudicated—and therefore more robustly documented—case at the school, of which there were plenty.

“If this story was going to be about Jackie, I can't think of many things that we would have been able to do differently,” Erdely said afterward, in a nod of sensitivity toward her subject. “Maybe the discussion should not have been so much about how to accommodate her but should have been about whether she would be in this story at all.”

There was plenty in the story besides Jackie that was of interest: the institution had a well-known problem with sexual assault. The week before the story was published, an eighteen-year-old freshman girl was abducted by a UVA hospital worker and later found dead. Erdely spoke with other sexual assault survivors who found the institutional response lacking. None of their stories, however, were as gripping as Jackie’s account.

Erdely’s story may have been hurt by confirmation bias—the tendency to interpret new information in a way that conforms to a preconceived narrative. She wrote to campus activists at UVA initially asking after a case that might highlight the institution’s failures to deal adequately with sexual assault. That idea of institutional failure manifested in her cold assessment of the dean charged with sexual assault response at the school, Nicole Eramo, who Erdely characterized as more focused on the school’s reputation than on helping aggrieved victims of assault. In the aftermath, the school explained that it was difficult to make Eramo available for interviews because of privacy concerns with regard to student information. Erdely, though, thought that the secrecy indicated dark doings, and wondered, “What are they hiding?”

Sensitivity, then, and perhaps undue determination that the story would turn out in a particular way, meant that typical journalistic practice went unobserved, with disastrous results. Important details were not fact-checked, so far as they might have been. In a post hoc search for who the perpetrator might have been, nobody matched the description given by Jackie—of frat affiliation and place of employment—and it turned out a name she mentioned to friends did not correspond with any student on campus. Important characters in the story, moreover—Phi Kappa Psi, Dean Eramo’s office and the university—were not given the opportunity to hear the charges against them in detail to have the opportunity to rebut them.

Erdely did reach out to the chapter president of Phi Psi, writing, "I've become aware of allegations of gang rape that have been made against the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi. Can you comment on those allegations?" Had she been more explicit, she would have learned that there was no fraternity party there on the night in question—a detail that came out afterwards, in a blow to the story’s credibility. That revelation might have encouraged the sort of skepticism that emerged only after the story was published. Likewise for the conflicting accounts given by the friends of Jackie’s mentioned in the story, later contacted by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in a post-mortem of what had gone wrong.

Activists on campus worry that the story’s fallout encourages the view that victims of sexual assault cannot be trusted in their accounts of their ordeals. That is exactly the opposite of what Erdely hoped her story would do. Despite the main narrative’s collapse, Erdely’s story raises provocative points about sexual assault on campus, and institutions’ failures to deal adequately with the issue. But those points were lost as the story lost its trustworthiness.

Rolling Stone commissioned a report on the incident and a thorough account of the journalistic errors that led to the fiasco was published months later. It called Erdely’s story a “failure of journalism,” and characterized it as “another shock to journalism’s credibility amid head-swiveling change in the media industry.” Since the story’s publication, distrust of the media has only worsened, as the United States enters the age of #fakenews.

The unglamorous work of making sure a story is true is essential in earning the public’s trust. Difficult as it may be, journalists must never let a good story get in the way of the facts.