The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek

A 2016 Newsweek cover story by Ralph Cipriano exposed how a Catholic sex abuse fraud made Fr Charles Engelhardt a martyr, and con man Daniel Gallagher a millionaire.

November 14, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: It is very rare that we have two posts in a week. I first wrote this story in 2016. Fr. Charles Engelhardt died chained to a Pennsylvania prison medical unit gurney on November 15, 2014. I wanted to honor him with the truth, but in the years since this post was first written, so much more of this truth has come to light. In the time since his death, his Philadelphia prosecutor, Seth Williams, was the subject of a 23-count federal indictment for fraud, bribery and other charges. He took a plea deal and went to federal prison. Fr. Charles Engelhardt refused a plea deal and died in prison.

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This post has a most urgent preface, one that arrived in the mail just as I sat down to type. It was a single page sent to me by BTSW reader Helen, a frequent commenter from Pennsylvania who wrote across the top of the page, “Father Gordon, your face could be on this print.” No, Helen, it could not! The face on that printed page is someone I once met at a pivotal time in my life as a priest, but the sender could not have known that. Helen simply stumbled upon a quote she thought I ought to see, and she was right. The face and the quote on that page belong to the late Father John Hardon, SJ (1914–2000), an American Jesuit priest whose cause for beatification has begun with a recognition in Rome that he is held to be a Servant of God.

Father Hardon and I met in 1989 by “coincidence,” if you still believe in such things. I don’t, but how and why we met is another post for another day. Suffice it for now to say that it was an encounter I could not forget, and when I saw his face on that printed page, and read the words attributed to him, it seemed as though he once again stood next to me with a firm grip upon my shoulder. The quote expresses perfectly why I must write this post, why you must read it, and why together we must share it boldly, and as far and wide as we can make it travel. I took Father Hardon’s words to be a directive, and so should you. Here is the quote:

“Our duty as Catholics is to know the truth; to live the truth; to defend the truth; to share the truth with others; and to suffer for the truth.”

— Father John Hardon

I have long hoped, during the years of media coverage of Catholic scandal, that someone else in the news media might join the ranks of Dorothy Rabinowitz among journalists with a spinal column. It seems I had overlooked Ralph Cipriano. For some time now, he has been covering events in Philadelphia for BigTrial.net, his outstanding Philadelphia Trial Blog. Some time ago, Mr. Cipriano published a major media event in a Newsweek cover story entitled “Catholic Guilt? The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy Behind a Lurid Rape Case” (Jan. 20, 2016).

This is a dark story, and a painful one, and for any number of reasons you might be tempted to click it away at this point, please don’t, for it became a matter not only of justice, but of life and death. Ralph Cipriano’s Newsweek article arrived in my mail on the same day as the above quote from Servant of God, Father John Hardon, and I knew instantly that I had to write about this.

Reading through the Newsweek piece was a vivid experience of déjà vu because I have written of some aspects of this story in a post entitled, “The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone.” It was an account of how a good, kind and much loved Pennsylvania priest, Father Charles Engelhardt, was martyred in prison as a result of greed, false witness and prosecutor misconduct. It is this same story that Ralph Cipriano covered in Newsweek, and both are to be commended for some courageous against-the-tide reporting. The Church and priesthood are indebted to Newsweek for presenting this story so boldly in a leading secular media venue while so much of the Catholic press crossed to the other side on the road to Jericho.

Father Charles Engelhardt died in a prison medical unit on November 15, 2014, and the full telling of this story is all that will bring meaning and purpose to his death.

So be brave, please, and read this post to the end, then share it every way you can. Do this, please, to honor the Servant of God who just told us that our duty as Catholics is to know, defend, and share the truth. Do this, please, to honor Father Charles Engelhardt who suffered for the truth and for his priesthood, a suffering that cost him his life.

Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely

A Rolling Stone Gathers No Facts, Just Dirt

I’d like to think that I have approached this story as Ralph Cipriano did, with cool journalistic detachment, but I now admit that’s very hard to do when the story has a Kafkaesque ring that is all too familiar to me. I was admittedly angry and not at all detached when I wrote the heading for this section, “A Rolling Stone Gathers No Facts, Just Dirt,” a fact conveyed in my Search Engine summary for the post linked in the section above:

“A federal jury found Rolling Stone liable for defamation, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely for actual malice, but their earlier malice cost the life of an innocent priest.”

Today, I find myself no less angry revisiting it. It told the tale of how Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s infamous November 19, 2014 Rolling Stone article, “A Rape on Campus” came unraveled as her account of serial rape at the University of Virginia was debunked and widely exposed as grossly inaccurate and misinformed. Ms. Erdely fell for the story of “Jackie,” took it at face value, and ran with it — doing much damage not only to UVA and its students, but to the field of journalism itself.

Since I first wrote of this, the University of Virginia and its Phi Kappa Psi fraternity have filed multi-million dollar libel and slander lawsuits naming Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone magazine as defendants. Both have since suffered serious losses in journalistic credibility. Rolling Stone magazine has since retracted Ms. Erdely’s account of a lurid frat house serial rape case at UVA. Her Rolling Stone article, “A Rape on Campus,” is today widely seen as grossly irresponsible and agenda-driven slander masked as journalism.

However, Mr. Cipriano’s bold Newsweek cover story is the first hint of media clamor to revisit Ms. Erdely’s other Rolling Stone fraud, “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex Crime Files” in which she introduced “Billy Doe,” a purported victim of violent and horrific sexual abuse by several Pennsylvania Catholic priests. Billy Doe, granted anonymity by Rolling Stone and everyone else in the news media, was described by Ms. Erdely as “a sweet, gentle kid with boyish good looks” who had been callously “passed around” from predator to predator in the Philadelphia Archdiocese. The story eventually resulted in $5 million in settlements for Billy Doe while landing three innocent Catholic priests in prison.

One of those priests was Father Charles Engelhardt whose decision to stand by the truth against Billy Doe’s $5 million fraud cost this good priest his life. As journalist Ralph Cipriano reveals in Newsweek, Father Engelhardt refused pre-trial plea deals including one deal on the eve of trial that would have resulted in no time in prison and a sentence of simple “community service.” Father Engelhardt chose the truth, and he chose to suffer for the truth. He instead was sentenced to a term of six to twelve years in prison “because he would not perjure himself by pleading guilty ‘to make a deal,’ to admit to a crime he did not commit.” In “Handcuffs and a Hospital Bed,” a November 17, 2014 posting at his “Big Trial” blog, Cipriano wrote:

“For Father Charles Engelhardt, the ordeal is finally over. The 67-year-old priest died at 8:30 PM Saturday night [November 15, 2014] an inmate at the State Correctional Institution in Coal Township [PA] where he served nearly two years of a 6-to-12 year sentence.”

Daniel Gallagher after his $5 million fraud took the life of Father Charles Engelhardt.

Daniel in the Liars’ Den

The man dubbed “Billy Doe” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone magazine — while shielding his true identity and character from view in all this — is Daniel Gallagher. Today he is a free man living in Florida where he settled into a lifestyle bankrolled by $5 million in settlements from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and, in part, its insurers. Gallagher lives free from scrutiny and the long arm of the law because the DA, judge, and news media in Philadelphia all got behind this case, but remain unable to surrender enough of their hubris to stop covering for him, to admit to their pursuit of “trophy justice,” and to allow the facts to invade their field of vision. Sometimes the meting out of justice comes down, not to facts, but to mere ego.

In his riveting Newsweek article, and in “Newsweek’s Cover Boy Makes a Media Splash” on his BigTrial.net blog (Jan. 28, 2016) Ralph Cipriano pursued the truth about who and what Daniel Gallagher is. From his claims of serial victimhood to his ever changing accounts of abuse, to his vague and amorphous facts and stories, to his most recent (and most troubling) psychiatric profile, Daniel Gallagher is exposed as

“chronically maladjusted, immature, self-indulgent, manipulating others to his own ends, refusing to accept responsibility for his own problems, exaggerating, grandiose, hedonistic, impulsive, manipulative and self-serving, paranoid, delusional…”

And the list doesn’t stop there. Gallagher pulled off a con man’s dream when he got a DA and judge to agree that his 23 failed stints in drug treatment were all someone else’s fault. In a Linkedin article, “A Weapon of Mass Destruction,” I quoted a prison inmate who reacted to the flood of decades-old claims against priests with a dose of brutal self-honesty about his own proclivities and enablers:

“So let me get this straight. If I say that some priest touched me funny all those years ago, I’ll be seen as a victim, I’ll be paid for it, and my life will be his fault instead of mine? Do you have any idea how tempting this is?”

— A prison inmate

Daniel Gallagher’s claim of having passed polygraph tests also now appears to be no more truthful than his claim of being passed from priest to priest. No one but his contingency lawyer claims to have seen polygraph results, and efforts to obtain them have been met with silence. Meanwhile, Father Charles Engelhardt DID take polygraph tests, and passed them conclusively, as did other priests in Daniel Gallagher/Billy Doe’s sights. (And for what it is worth, so did I).

Readers of Beyond These Stone Walls should find a loud and clear ring of the familiar in all this. Everything now said of Daniel Gallagher in these reports has been said of Thomas Grover, my accuser trial. And it has all been said of Shamont Lyle Sapp, a con man who landed settlements from accusing four priests in four different states until he was exposed by a U.S. attorney and a journalist with integrity. I take no credit, but he was also exposed by me in my Linkedin article cited above.

This particular rolling stone about Daniel Gallagher and Father Charles Engelhardt, was sent downhill by Sabrina Rubin Erdely who has since been found liable for “actual malice” and “disregard for truth” by a judge in the University of Virginia story. The rolling stone about Father Engelhardt had a long path. It rolled all the way Down Under to Australia where elements of the story were duplicated and reused by prosecutors and the media in Australia to condemn an even greater trophy, Cardinal George Pell. I wrote of the glaring similarities in the two cases in “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” It turned out that indeed he was, and Australia’s highest court exonerated him after 400 days in prison.

Thanks to Ralph Cipriano and Newsweek magazine, some honest media has taken notice of the Daniel Gallagher scam, but not in time to save the life of Father Charles Engelhardt. Still, these revelations of truth bring immense comfort to those still charged with clearing this good priest’s good name. But there’s more than that at stake here. You have been duped. Our Church has been duped, and cast aside in the public square in the process. The truth is a value in its own right, and we owe it to ourselves to learn it and share it.

I can only thank Ralph Cipriano and Newsweek for taking this on, and for telling a truth most in the news media have shunned. Take a little time, please, and read the Newsweek article and Mr. Cipriano’s BigTrial.net blog, and share a link to this post with others. I know one Servant of God who will smile upon you for it.

Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?

Striking similarities exist between claims of Cardinal George Pell’s accuser and those in a discredited case hyped by Sabrina Rubin Erdely in Rolling Stone magazine.

Back in 2016, before the American presidential election that shook our politics, Catholic League President Bill Donohue was quoted in a NewsMax article entitled “Trump Taps into Mass Distrust.” Dr. Donohue, who happens to be a well-published sociologist, cited a poll by the Media Insight Project and the American Press Institute that measured the confidence voters have in American institutions.

Topping the list of those earning the public’s trust were, in order: The U.S. military, the scientific community, the U.S. Supreme Court, organized religion (yes, even still!), and America’s financial institutions. At the bottom of the list were the institutions Americans trust least. The last two came as no surprise. Only six percent of Americans reported having trust in the news media. Only four percent reported having trust in members of Congress.

Bill Donohue also cited another study. In 1985, a Pew Research Center poll revealed that 55 percent of Americans trust the news media to report facts truthfully. By 2011, that figure dropped to 25 percent. In the same poll in 1985, 45 percent of Americans thought the media was biased. By 2011, it jumped to 63 percent.

Bill Donohue gleaned from the fine print of these polls that the two most cited reasons for wide-spread mistrust of news media were inaccurate reporting and media bias. There is another reason, but it may not be so evident to casual consumers of the news. The media has abandoned skepticism in favor of quick and easy “gotcha” news.

The most articulate analysis of media bias comes from journalist JoAnn Wypijewski in a news-busting CounterPunch article about the Catholic priesthood scandal. Her against-the-tide article is “Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film” (For full disclosure my own charges are examined therein).

“I don’t believe the personal injury lawyers … I don’t believe the prosecutors who pursued tainted cases, or the therapists who revived junk science or the juries that sided with them or the judges who failed to act justly or the people who made money off any of this …

“I don’t believe the claims of all who say they are victims or who prefer the tough-minded label, survivor — because ready belief is not part of a journalist’s mental kit, but also because what happened in 2002 makes it difficult to distinguish real claims from fraudulent or opportunistic ones without independent research.”

This article would never win recognition for public service from the news media because it goes so vividly against the current tide of political correctness. The news media has abandoned the necessary skepticism that was once “part of a journalist’s mental kit.” To be merely accused today is to be guilty.

Manipulating the Court of Public Opinion

This, says JoAnn Wypijewski, is “the legacy of the courtroom of panic that made ‘the pedophile priest’ a cultural bogeyman, a devil, who need not be real but only named to light the fires of wrath.” I became a target of that courtroom of panic and those fires of wrath, and so, it now seems, did Cardinal George Pell.

In a time of moral panic, convictions happen in the public eye long before they happen in a court of law. For many prosecutors, arriving at the truth is now less important than winning. The necessary “independent research” cited by Ms. Wypijewski happens only when the smoke of an unjust trial clears, if at all.

The case against Cardinal Pell had already raised concerns for real justice even before it ended in a courtroom. One of the best commentaries on this has come from David F. Pierre, Jr., host of The Media Report, in “The Witch Hunt Against Australia’s Cardinal George Pell: Five Facts You Need to Know.” The five facts summarized by David Pierre are these:

• The Australian government began investigating Cardinal Pell over five years ago even though there had been no crime reported against him.

• Pell’s publicly known accusers include career criminals, admitted drug addicts, and others who have lodged similar complaints before.

• Even secular observers have admitted that Pell was not treated fairly.

• Accusations against Pell were widely circulated in a 2017 book that has been thoroughly discredited.

• Cardinal Pell vehemently and consistently denies the accusations against him.

Before the trial, some of the charges were withdrawn by prosecutors. Now there is a new source of grave doubt about the justice meted out to Cardinal Pell. An alert reader of These Stone Walls  first spotted this story in an account at LifeSite News by Dorothy Cummings McLean entitled, “Cardinal Pell’s Accuser Copied Testimony from Old Rolling Stone Report, Journalist Claims.”

The writer who first uncovered this is Keith Windschuttle, an Australian journalist and historian. He used the professional skepticism and deep-sourcing that were once mainstays of the news media but have sadly been abandoned in favor of quick sound bites and the strip-mining of news.

Mr. Windschuttle discovered some eerie similarities between the claims brought against Cardinal Pell and a lurid story of abuse by American Catholic priests that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in 2011. His findings listed a series of identical, sometimes verbatim, allegations seemingly lifted from the pages of Rolling Stone.

The magazine and that article would have been readily available to Pell’s accuser when he first described his “abuse” to police in 2015. The LifeSite News  summary of the article lists the similarities, and they leave little doubt, according to Windschuttle:

“What is the difference between this account of child sex abuse in a Catholic church in Philadelphia and the evidence given by a sole accuser in the Victorian [AU] court case that convicted Cardinal George Pell? … Not much. The two stories were so close to being identical that the likelihood of the Australian version being original is most implausible. There were too many similarities for the likeness to be dismissed as ‘coincidence.’”

Sabrina Rubin Erdely & the Predatory News Media

You may read for yourselves in the LifeSite News  article the striking similarities that raise a specter of plagiarism in the charges against Cardinal Pell. The 2011 Rolling Stone article from which Pell’s accuser seems to have copied his claims was “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex Crime Files” written by a now disgraced and discredited former journalist, Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Readers may remember that name from “A Rape on Campus,” an explosive story in the November 2014 issue of Rolling Stone. Sabrina Rubin Erdely profiled the story of “Jackie,” a student at the University of Virginia who claimed to be a victim of gang rape at a UVA fraternity party in 2012.  Rolling Stone’s front page cried out:

“A RAPE ON CAMPUS: Jackie was just starting her freshman year at the University of Virginia when she was brutally assaulted by seven men at a frat party. When she tried to hold them accountable, a whole new kind of abuse began.”

Erdely’s account depicted UVA administrators as having callous disregard for the pain and suffering of the anonymous “Jackie” and, by extension, for the plight of other victims of sexual assault on campus. The story helped launch a national debate about rape on college campuses across the nation.

It contributed to a moral panic that went all the way to the Obama White House where legislation was promoted to drastically curtail the due process rights of accused college students. In the fallout from the story, UVA administrators called for resignations and expulsions even before all the facts were in. Like most such media events, the story was accepted as Gospel truth once it appeared in print.

But then someone began to do some of the independent research that journalist JoAnn Wypijewski calls for above. “Jackie’s” account turned out to be a massive lie, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s coverage of it a massive betrayal of journalistic standards. No one could corroborate any of “Jackie’s” story and Erdely never even bothered to try. She did no fact checking. She just ran with the story, riding a wave of public hysteria about sexual assault and abuse.

A civil trial took place just before the 2016 presidential election. From the witness stand, Sabrina Rubin Erdely cited the same tactic that countless contingency lawyers have used against the Catholic Church: “It takes trauma victims some time to come forward with all the details,” she testified to excuse her disregard for journalistic standards.

“It is not unusual,” Erdely testified to explain away “Jackie’s” ever-changing details of her story. In the end, with streaming tears, Erdely blamed it all on “Jackie,” saying, “It was a mistake to rely on someone whose intent was to deceive me.”

The bar for proving defamation and negligence against a journalist is steep. A jury must conclude, as it did in this case, that a journalist or media venue published what it knew to be false, or did so with reckless disregard for truth. In the end, when the entire account was heard, a jury found Rolling Stone  guilty of negligence and defamation, and imposed a $7.5 million dollar jury award to the falsely accused fraternity students.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely was found liable for actual malice in the writing and publication of this story. By the December 2016 edition of Rolling Stone, her name was removed from the masthead of contributing editors, and she disappeared from the world of journalism.

That Lying Scheming Altar Boy Again!

But there is another reason readers of these pages may recall Ms Erdely and Rolling Stone. A news media in pursuit of the whole truth instead of its own agenda would have scoured Ms Erdely’s previous work, but they did not. They did not because doing so would have required delving into another story by Ms Erdely that raises the same hard questions. It is a story that I have written about in multiple posts, including “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek.”

Three years before “A Rape on Campus,” Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone  launched another moral panic by exploding a story of a Pennsylvania Catholic sex-abuse ring among priests in “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex-Crime Files.” It is a story, as I have written elsewhere in These Stone Walls, that turned Father Charles Engelhardt into a martyr and Daniel Gallagher into a millionaire.

And lest you have questions about media influence on judges, Father Engelhardt’s judge, Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge M. Teresa Sarmina, objected to a defense question posed to jurors:

“Anybody that doesn’t think there is widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is living on another planet.”

Before falling for “Jackie’s” fraud, Ms. Erdely fell for a much larger one brought by Daniel Gallagher, assured anonymity by Ms. Erdely as “Billy Doe” in the pages of Rolling Stone. It is this story, and Rolling Stone’s presentation of it, that is now the apparent source of copycat testimony in the case against Cardinal George Pell.

But, like Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus,” this story was also a fraud. It was written with the same malice and disregard for truth as Erdely’s other story, but it nonetheless launched a witch hunt in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania with tentacles extending into the present day. Now it seems that some of those tentacles washed up in Australia as well.

The facts in this story are staggering, and though I have written extensively of them, the best source for a succinct summary is by journalist Ralph Cipriano writing for the January-February issue of the Catholic League journal, Catalyst in “The Legacy of Billy Doe.”

It is ironic that Cardinal Pell’s accuser picked this story to serve as a model to concoct false charges. Of course, this happened long before the story of Daniel Gallagher was exposed as a fraud. Up until last year it was a great success for the newly minted millionaire, Daniel Gallagher, who is yet to be brought to justice because it would be greatly embarrassing for Pennsylvania justice officials to do so.

I highly recommend Ralph Cipriano’s “The Legacy of Billy Doe.” In only two pages, he blew apart the narrative that has prevailed in the media to date. It is a narrative that now raises questions about the character of the case against Cardinal Pell as well. We owe it to him to make this known. There is a reason why no other news media figure has taken up this story as Mr. Cipriano has, and as I have here at These Stone Walls.

And it is a frightening reason, frightening for anyone concerned with the integrity of our news media and the tyranny it can create through false witness. No one has articulated this better than The Wall Street Journal' s Pulitzer Prize-winning expositor of truth in justice, Dorothy Rabinowitz, in her 2005 book, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times:

“Arguing for due process on behalf of a person charged with child sex abuse violated the progressive views held by many toward crimes involving special categories of victims like women and children. [T]here [is] a school of advanced political opinion of the view that to take up for those falsely accused of sex abuse charges was to undermine the battle. It was to betray all other victims of sexual predators. Where advanced reasoning of this sort prevailed, the facts of a case were simply irrelevant.”

— No Crueler Tyrannies, p. 17-18

And that, my friends — for anyone who has counted on the news media to champion truth and justice — may be the cruelest tyranny of all.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please help share this story with others. I believe we owe that much to Cardinal Pell.

The Path of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone

A federal jury found Rolling Stone liable for defamation, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely for actual malice, but their earlier malice cost the life of an innocent priest.

At some point before or after reading this post, pay a visit to Ralph Cipriano’s “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy Behind a Lurid Rape Case” in Newsweek Magazine, published in February, 2016. My post about it is one of the most widely read and shared posts on Beyond These Stone Walls. Some readers found it infuriating. Others enlightening. But nearly all readers were shocked to learn of this story from only one humble little “new media” blog while all the once trustworthy “old media” (with the striking exception of Newsweek) blatantly ignored it.

I’ll explain why they ignored it in a moment, but I warn you in advance, the answer isn’t pretty. I reveal this true account only on a “need to know” basis — as in, “You need to know.” Before you spend another dime on a news media subscription under the guise of being kept informed, you need to know.

In an article for Newsmax magazine (“Trump Taps Into Mass Distrust,” April 22, 2016), Catholic League President Bill Donohue cited a new poll by the Media Insight Project. It was a joint effort by the Associated Press and the American Press Institute, and the results did not go well for the political and media elite.

Respondents in the survey were asked to comment on how much confidence they have in various sectors of society. I found the results fascinating. The top five sources of public trust in America are the military, the scientific community, the U.S. Supreme Court, organized religion, and financial institutions.

At rock bottom on the barometer of public trust were the very news media platforms that launched the survey. Only six percent of Americans responded that they had a great deal of confidence in the press. Members of Congress followed close behind with an embarrassing four percent.

Bill Donohue, whose academic background includes a doctorate in sociology, reported that the two most common reasons cited for widespread public mistrust of the news media are inaccurate reporting and media bias. Donohue also cited other sources that give perspective to the media survey results. In 1985, a Pew Research Center poll found that 55 percent of Americans trust the news media to “get the facts straight.” By 2011, that figure dropped by more than half to only 25 percent. In the 1985 Pew survey, 45 percent of Americans judged the media to be biased. In 2011, that figure jumped to 63 percent.

The Crocodile Tears of a Predatory Media

One of the clearest examples of why the media is no longer trusted can be found in an important story that became buried under all the recent election coverage. A few weeks before the election, Journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, testified under oath as a defendant in a $7.5 million lawsuit charging her with actual malice, and Rolling Stone with defamation. The lawsuit was filed by University of Virginia Administrator Nicole Eramo.

Two years earlier, Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone defamed Ms. Eramo and U-VA in “A Rape on Campus,” a notorious November, 2014, story. It was the shocking account of “Jackie” who claimed to be a victim of gang rape at a U-VA fraternity in 2012. The story helped launch a national debate about sexual assault on college campuses across the nation, and contributed to an atmosphere of moral panic. Draconian measures to limit the due process rights of any student so accused were set in place in response to the high profile account.

Erdely’s Rolling Stone account depicted U-VA administrators as having callous disregard for the pain and suffering of Jackie and, by extension, other victims of sexual assault. But when Erdely’s rolling stones gathered up their dirt and the dust settled on this story, a major problem slowly came to light.

Jackie’s story turned out to be a massive lie, and Erdely’s coverage of it a massive betrayal of journalistic standards. Erdely did no fact checking of her own. She just ran with the lurid and sensational account with no attempt at corroboration. In the defamation trial, Erdely drew upon the same script used by contingency lawyers against Catholic priests and bishops for two decades.

“It takes trauma victims some time to come forward with all the details,” said Erdely in dismissal of her callous disregard for the journalistic skepticism so many in the media have abandoned in favor of political correctness. It is the same necessary skepticism that journalist Joan Wypijewski described in “Oscar Hangover Special: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film.”

I am haunted by the familiar ring of this story’s aftermath. Reading about Ms. Erdely’s agenda masked as journalism brought a loud and clear echo from my own trial as Judge Arthur Brennan instructed jurors to “disregard inconsistencies” in accuser Thomas Grover’s testimony.

And it recalled Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin’s shady and unexplained coaching of accusers. [In 2022 McLaughlin was exposed on a New Hampshire Attorney General’s previously secret list of dishonest police. McLaughlin’s offense was the fabrication of records and evidence.] In a 1994 police report, he described his response to my accusers’ inconsistencies and multiple versions of the story: “I gave them a copy of MacRae’s resume to help them with their dates.” Dates that repeatedly changed, and were off by years, not days or weeks or months.

“It’s not unusual,” Erdely explained when confronted on the witness stand about her response to the ever changing details and versions of Jackie’s account detailed in the Rolling Stone lawsuit. When Jackie changed aspects of her story, Erdely never questioned her credibility, never confronted her about the discrepancies. With streaming tears, the story and the wreckage left in its wake were all Jackie’s fault. “It was a mistake to rely on someone whose intent was to deceive me.”

The jury saw this differently. Rolling Stone was found to be liable for defamation, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely for actual malice. The bar for proving defamation and malice against a journalist is steep. A jury must conclude, as it did in this case, that a media venue published what it knew to be false, or did so with reckless disregard for the truth. It was only after a multi-million dollar judgment was rendered against Rolling Stone that Erdely was removed from its Contributing Editors listing in the December 2016 issue.

Former journalist, Sabrina Rubin Erdely; the late Fr. Charles Engelhardt, who died in prison; newly minted millionaire Daniel Gallagher, aka “Billy Doe.”

A Media Double Standard: When Erdely’s Jackie Was Billy

One can easily detect between the lines the rest of the news media’s discomfort with this story. Moriah Balingit took it on for The Washington Post in “Rolling Stone reporter says ‘Jackie deceived her about U-VA gang rape’” (October 20, 2016).

I commend Ms. Balingit for her truthful treatment of the story, but it’s a truth reported with carefully drawn limits. My strong suspicion is that the limits on truth were not those of the writer, but of The Washington Post. The focus of the account was on this one story, and not the standards and ethics of Sabrina Rubin Erdely. There is no reason to conclude that her compromised journalistic standards began with Jackie at U-VA.

A news media in pursuit of the whole truth instead of an agenda would look at Ms. Erdely’s past work as well, but they won’t. They won’t because doing so would require delving into another Rolling Stone debacle by Ms. Erdely. It’s a story that I have suggested at the top of this post: “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy Behind a Lurid Rape Case.”

In that story, Ms. Erdely applied her “reckless disregard for truth” to the wildly inconsistent account of “Billy Doe” told in Rolling Stone on September 15, 2011 with the title, “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex-Crime Files.” It was a clear example of a writer’s preference for shock value over truth.

This time Ms. Erdely’s disregard for journalistic standards cost Father Charles Engelhardt — a good man and good priest — his life. He died chained to a bed in the hospital wing of a Pennsylvania prison because the news media failed in its once honored pursuit of truth. There is an explanation for why most in the news business cower from revisiting this story to look under the rolling stones cast by Ms. Erdely. The Wall Street Journal’ s Dorothy Rabinowitz, a rare and courageous “old media” voice of journalistic integrity, explained why:

“Arguing for due process on behalf of a person charged with child sex abuse violated the progressive views held by many toward crimes involving special categories of victims like women and children… [T]here [is] a school of advanced political opinion of the view that to take up for those falsely accused of sex abuse charges was to undermine the battle… It was to betray all other victims of sexual predators … Where advanced reasoning of this sort prevailed, the facts of a case were simply irrelevant.”

Dorothy Rabinowitz, No Crueler Tyrannies, p. 17-18

“The Story Was Killed Higher Up”

And it’s not just the press. Broadcast news is driven by the same agendas. Last year I was contacted by a correspondent for a popular cable news venue. This is a news figure with obvious integrity whose positions I trusted and still do. She had been reading Beyond These Stone Walls and invested some time in researching the story described on our “About” page. The news correspondent wrote to me asking if I would agree to an on-camera interview for what was described to me as “a few hard questions.”

I agreed, and then waited. And waited. And waited… But the hard questions were never asked. They were never asked because someone did not want them publicly answered. An acquaintance of the news correspondent told me of her disappointment that “the story was killed higher up.”

The story was killed for the same reasons The Washington Post or The New York Times will not look into Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s prior work for Rolling Stone. Hard questions will be asked, and it would be a politically incorrect affront to the media’s progressive agenda if those hard questions were answered. This would require a legitimate inquiry into the story of Daniel Gallagher — Erdely’s “Billy Doe” in the pages of Rolling Stone. It would require some integrity reborn in an “old media” venue such as The Washington Post. For too many in the news business a progressive agenda requires the suppression of truth. As I wrote earlier, you need to know.

You need to know this too. The presiding judge in the case profiled by Ms. Erdely in Rolling Stone in 2011 was by no means immune from the bias Erdely helped to shape. During the process of vetting jurors for the trial of two priests accused in that case, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina objected to a question posed to prospective jurors saying,

“Anybody that doesn’t think there is widespread sexual abuse within the Catholic Church is living on another planet.”

Survivors and Liars

A recent issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture has an article by Penn State University professor Philip Jenkins entitled “Survivors and Liars” (August 2016). It’s an analysis of the story of Lauren Stratford. Her shocking tale of childhood sexual abuse and Satanic Ritual Abuse became a fixture of 1980s tabloid journalism “including a legendary Geraldo Rivera special broadcast near Halloween in 1988” in a “Geraldo” installment called “Satanic Breeders.” The story helped launch a moral panic giving unquestioned credence to the claims of adult “survivors” of sexual and Satanic Ritual Abuse that emerge without evidence, often with claims of “repressed and recovered” memory.

Just two weeks later, Geraldo Rivera helped launch the birth pangs of another moral panic with the November 1988 airing of “The Church’s Sexual Watergate.” It featured the early wave of contingency lawyers and the nascent voices of SNAP eager to harness the news media’s developing scent for Catholic scandal.

Ryan MacDonald found a transcript of that 1988 Geraldo Show among the first documents obtained by Keene, NH Detective James McLaughlin to help defraud the Church out of a lot of money. Ryan produced a rather shocking report of his own about how that Geraldo Rivera show influenced the case against me in “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court.”

As for Geraldo’s Lauren Stratford story, it was later exposed as a fraud thanks to a report of Bob and Gretchen Passantino entitled “Satan’s Sideshow” — described by Philip Jenkins as “a superb piece of investigative journalism.” Lauren Stratford’s shocking tale hyped on “Geraldo” was just a massive lie told by a delusional narcissist. In its wake, Philip Jenkins asks,

“Might other adult ‘survivors’ of child abuse be telling the literal truth? Certainly. But the case of Lauren Stratford should be a ringing reminder that, absent evidence, to the contrary, any one of them could be making up every word.”