This Washington Post article is everywhere today, and with good reason. I just want to catch up anyone who may have missed it.

It appears that the fakery we’ve been discussing in the Rolling Stone / U-Va rape case is worse than we thought, and may have come from both “Jackie” (the alleged rape victim) and Sabrina Rubin Erdely (the Rolling Stone writer who turns out to be a past writing associate of the infamous fabulist, Stephen Glass).

First, a bit about Jackie’s seeming fakery. Going by the WaPo article, it’s possible that she invented her admirer “Drew”, whom Rolling Stone identified as her rapist:

Jackie told her three friends that she accepted the upperclassman’s invitation for a dinner date on Friday, Sept. 28, 2012.

Curious about Jackie’s date, the friends said that they tried to find the student on a U-Va. database and social media but couldn’t. Andy, Cindy and Randall all said they never met the student in person. Before Jackie’s date, the friends became suspicious that perhaps they hadn’t really been in contact with the chemistry student [via text messages to “his” number which Jackie had given the friends] at all, they said.

U-Va. officials told The Post that no student with the name Jackie provided to her friends as her date and attacker in 2012 had ever enrolled at the university.

Randall provided The Post with pictures that Jackie’s purported date had sent of himself by text message in 2012. The Post identified the person in the pictures and learned that his name does not match the one Jackie gave friends in 2012. In an interview, the man said he was Jackie’s high school classmate but “never really spoke to her.”

The man said he was never a U-Va. student and is not a member of any fraternity. Additionally, he said that he had not visited Charlottesville in at least six years and that he was in another state participating in an athletic event during the weekend of Sept. 28, 2012.

“I have nothing to do with it,” he said. He said it appears that the circulated photos were pulled from social media Web sites.

The WaPo article covers much other ground, including tidbits such as Erdely having painted Jackie’s friends as callous and as having refused Erdely’s interview requests, while the friends say that they had always encouraged Jackie to report her rape story to the police and that Erdely never made the slightest effort to interview any of them.

It looks as though 2 troubled women, acting somewhat separately (or deceiving each other), managed between them to cook up a fraternity-blaming hoax that liberals rushed to believe because it fit liberals’ prejudices. Or as V says, because it fit The Narrative that liberals are out to push. Get this:

U-Va. President Teresa A. Sullivan…wants the university community to focus on prevention of sexual assault.

That may be good, but perhaps Sullivan should have the U-Va. community also focus on *prevention of hoaxes and/or witch hunts* that only punish scads of innocent U-Va. students.

UPDATE: A link to Erdely putting down Stephen Glass. Your daily dose of irony.