If the Rolling Stone-Nicole Eramo trial is the Iran-Iraq war of academic due process (in that both sides are extremely unappealing), the 150-minute conversation between Sabrina Rubin Erdely and the hoaxer Jackie is something of a modern-day version of the Monica Lewinsky-Linda Tripp tapes–a long conversation between two people who enjoyed talking about themselves, with the older person pressing for information and the younger person alternating between imagined trauma and mundane gossip.
I’ll have a writeup on the tape, made public by CBS-19, at Minding the Campus. But below are some of the most pertinent brief excerpts. The two had their extremely lengthy conversation in a loud restaurant; the audio quality is mediocre.
At several points, Erdely made clear–despite later suggestions in response to the Phi Kappa Psi lawsuit against Rolling Stone–that her article would target the fraternity.
The incident, she suggested, was a gang rape fraternity initiation ritual:
The fraternity, Erdely believed, might well have a “culture of gang rape”:
Erdely said that she wanted to “get these guys”:
Phi Kappa Psi members, Erdely maintained, personified the “banality of evil”:
And Erdely presses Jackie to recognize how confronting her purported attackers would show that she had power over them:
Jackie, meanwhile, comes across as a fanatic.
After Erdely presses her to name Phi Kappa Psi to identify the initiation ritual, Jackie suggests she wants all fraternities to be subjected to a comprehensive investigation, on grounds that if they had done nothing wrong, they’d have nothing to hide:
Jackie also makes clear that she and her allies in the accusers’ rights movement welcomed bad publicity against UVA:
Both Jackie and Erdely see a non-existent campus, dominated by rape culture, in which people are terrified even to mention sexual assault. For good measure, Jackie talks about an imagined conversation with her catfish target, Ryan Duffin:
Erdely, meanwhile, imagines a campus in which students actively discourage victims from reporting:
The two have highly negative views of fraternities:
This clip, in which Jackie passes along allegedly negative information about Eramo, will be helpful to Erdely in the libel trial:
Finally, this clip, in which Jackie talks about why she stopped seeing a campus counselor, captures her me-centered, unappealing personality:
Academic Wonderland 
“Like, like, like, I feel like, it’s just gonna like be this like system that just like keeps perpetuating”
OMG. People in college talk like this?
Remember Folks, somebody actually married her after all of this.
As the hoax was unravelling, UVa President Teresa Sullivan cracked down on fraternities and sororities. She failed to address how the university would prevent future acts of vandalism against their houses, the only attack that was actually real. The rules themselves are not indefensible, but the use of strong-arm tactics in forcing their adoption is questionable.
The conversation sounds like two political activists discussing strategy to win power for themselves.
This is when the decision not to sue Jackie might play. Jackie made the defaming statements, hence Eramo’s attorney comments that she’s not a credible witness, so much so that believing her is akin to malice again Eramo. Not sure that a jury will go for that. They may. The journalistic collapse is epic. But could go either way.
There is more evidence (foreign DNA) that Crystal Magnum was raped than that Jackie was raped. Just to be clear, I doubt either one was.
MaryQ, that is about right regarding the like, like, like. (I have a 17-year-old daughter and, like, she like, likes to, like, say, “like” alot. Like alot!