YEAH, THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE A BUNCH OF LYING LIARS: Megan McArdle: Rolling Stone Fails A Police Fact Check.

I called for the Charlottesville Police Department to investigate the case forthwith.

Well, they did. And today, at a press conference, they shared the results of that information. To summarize: “Jackie,” the alleged victim, refused to cooperate with police. The fraternity, however, did, and extensive attempts to corroborate her story failed.

There wasn’t much new here for people who have followed this case closely, and know about the various problems with Jackie’s story. They already knew that the guy she told friends raped her, with whom her friends had actually exchanged text messages with prior to their date that night, was a character named “Haven Monahan” who supposedly worked with her at the University’s Aquatic Center. Earlier reporting indicated that this is not the name of a UVA student, and the number they were texting belonged to a web-based service that allows people to send texts. Fraternity records do not show an event that night.

Mostly the police provided a few extra details here and there, which they were able to do because, well, they’re the law. For example, the story also includes a later incident where Jackie was attacked by people who threw a beer bottle at her, which broke on her eye. After that incident, Jackie told police that her nursing student roommate had had to take glass out of her skin from the thrown beer bottle; the roommate apparently denies this, and the police, who saw her wound about a week after the incident allegedly happened, said that while she did have an abrasion near her eye, appears to be more of an abrasion rather than a blunt trauma injury. . . .

Meanwhile, they said they actually found a timestamped photograph of the accused fraternity’s side entrance, taken at 11:30 pm on the evening of the rape, and it shows a guy standing there alone, with two chairs, which is not consistent with the sort of party described in the article, since the side entrance is right near the main staircase.

The police were at pains to say that they don’t know that nothing happened on the evening of Sept. 28, 2012, and that they are not closing the investigation, just “suspending” it, since they have no evidence with which to prosecute a crime. But what I took away from their press conference is that whatever happened on that night, it is almost certainly not what Sabrina Rubin Erdely wrote in Rolling Stone.

Well, that’s because what she wrote was a hoax, and she and the Rolling Stone either knew or should have known that it was false.