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By Ralph Cipriano
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BeforeRolling Stone ran with Jackie's story they bought Billy's.
"Jackie" is the first name of the freshman at the University of Virginia who claimed she was gang-raped at a frat house by seven men.
"Billy Doe" is the pseudonym for a former altar boy from Philadelphia who claimed he was raped at St. Jerome Parish by two priests and a Catholic schoolteacher.
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Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, wrote both stories.
Will Dana, the managing editor of Rolling Stone, has already apologized for the November 19 story about a gang rape at the frat house by saying the magazine's trust in Jackie was "misplaced." Dana also said the factual discrepancies in Jackie's story were "deeply unsettling."
But the factual discrepancies in Jackie's story are dwarfed by the factual discrepancies in Billy's story that was published in the September 15, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. I know, because I'm a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Philadelphia Inquirer who's been documenting Billy's astonishing lack of credibility for the past two years on bigtrial.net.
The holes in Jackie's story began with the frat house not having any event scheduled the night of the alleged attack. Then, Jackie claimed the alleged ringleader of the attack was a frat member who worked as a lifeguard at the campus pool. But when the fraternity checked the employee roster at the campus pool, no member of the frat worked there. In addition, another alleged attacker accused by Jackie turned out to belong to a different frat.
Billy Doe can rack up three factual discrepancies on his way to the bathroom.
Erdely's problems with the Billy Doe story began when she accepted as gospel, as did other reporters, a 2011 Philadelphia grand jury report that claimed Billy was raped as a 10-year-old altar boy by two priests, who passed him around like a piñata, and then a year later, by his sixth-grade homeroom teacher at his parish school.
The Philadelphia district attorney, Seth Williams, also ran with Billy's story without doing any investigating.
Rolling Stone can run a correction. But what do you do about sending four men to jail for a sexual crime spree that may have only taken place in the imagination of a junkie criminal scheming to get out of jail? That's the problem we have here in Philadelphia.
Erdely's Billy Doe story was published under the headline, "The Catholic Church's Secret Sex-Crime Files."
It may not have been Erdely's fault that the grand jury report was subsequently found by this reporter to be intellectually dishonest and contain more than 20 factual errors. But Erdely did write a one-sided story that Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, ripped at the time as yellow journalism for "the factual errors, the stereotypes, the grand omissions and the melodramatic language."
Erdely had an undisclosed conflict of interest, first noticed by reporter Paul Farhi of The Washington Post, as the wife of an assistant district attorney, Peter Erdely, in the Philadelphia D.A.'s office. She only interviewed people who ripped the church, such as a couple of former prosecutors, two critical former priests, a sex abuse victim and a former seminarian kicked out for disciplinary reasons.
But Billy Doe had an arrest record; six busts as an adult for theft and drugs, including one bust with intent to distribute 56 bags of heroin. He'd been in and out of 23 different drug rehabs. And every time he told his story the details kept changing.
What Erdely didn't know was that, before the district attorney ran with Billy's claims in the grand jury report, Billy's story had already drastically changed, as revealed in formerly confidential police records and grand jury transcripts.
When he first reported his claim of abuse on January 30, 2009, Billy told two social workers for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia that he had allegedly been:
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