Jane told me by phone that the breaking point in her friendship with Clougherty came when Stanford began the second investigation of Lonsdale. Jane says she thought the investigation was not warranted and told Clougherty that she would not talk to Pope. Clougherty sent her three texts in April 2014: “Hey, all the investigators need to know is that you witnessed my escape from Joe and saw him pounding on the steering wheel.” “Did you really decline to speak with them?” “I don’t understand, I thought you’d support me.” On the night of the break up, Anne and Jane were sitting in the wine bar waiting for Clougherty. They saw Lonsdale drive up with Clougherty. In Anne’s account, she and Jane could see Lonsdale pounding on the steering wheel. Jane jumped up and went outside to knock on the window of the car and make sure Clougherty was O.K.

Jane, though, told me that “the conversation in the car looked completely normal.” She added: “I didn’t go outside. She came in, and I thought, Great! She’s fine, and it’s over.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “They asked me to lie, and I said no. Ellie yelled at me over the phone.” She gave another short laugh. “She hung up on me after five years of helping her through all her life issues and crises, all the calls from Anne, ‘Will you look after Ellie?’ All of that, only to be put to the side when I won’t do what they want me to do.” She paused. “In retrospect, I understand. I was used.” Clougherty said she never asked Jane to lie: “I didn’t know she was mad at me. We just wanted her to say she was a witness to me breaking up with him.”

Jane, who works in tech, says she got in touch with Lonsdale late last summer. “I thought, He needs to know what I know,” she said. I asked whether she considered that helping Lonsdale might benefit her professionally. “I don’t want to sound like a hero, but I don’t need Joe’s help,” she said. “My job is going great.”

In her sworn statement, Jane wrote, “If I sensed, even remotely, that the relationship was in any way abusive, I would have talked to Ellie’s mom about it.” I asked her about the texts she wrote to Anne two years ago, which conveyed just this sort of distrust of Lonsdale and fear for Clougherty, reading them to her over the phone.

At first, Jane said she didn’t remember writing the messages. She later said she recalled them and the concern she felt then, but said that her fears, which were based on Clougherty’s account, seem exaggerated now that she was older and more experienced herself. She and Clougherty haven’t spoken since their phone call nine months ago.

Clougherty is currently a student at the University of Virginia, enrolled in a master’s program in data science and living with her brother, also a student, in a Charlottesville apartment their mother found them. After Rolling Stone published its story of a lurid fraternity gang rape in November, Clougherty and Anne arranged a meeting with the university president, Teresa Sullivan. On the day before Thanksgiving, they spent a couple of hours sitting in front of a fire at Sullivan’s home, drinking hot chocolate and talking about the effects of trauma. Clougherty gave Sullivan a beaded bracelet she had made and was thrilled when Sullivan mentioned the gift in a major speech on campus the following week, calling Clougherty the survivor of a “brutal assault inflicted on her at another university.”

Rolling Stone soon apologized for its gang-rape story after key facts were discredited. Clougherty and her mother were rattled but undeterred about speaking out. “It’s not an easy decision, but I just see it as a moral obligation,” Clougherty said. “I really want to help other women.” In January, Clougherty filed a civil suit against Lonsdale, accusing him of sexual abuse. She called his behavior “violent and deviant,” saying he employed “psychological manipulation and coercion” including “isolation, sleep deprivation, food deprivation.” She also accused him of “strangling her, slapping her, scratching her, yanking her by the hair so hard that he would lift her torso off the bed and slamming her body against the walls and bed boards.” In addition, she sued Formation 8 for being negligent in its supervision during the summer she was doing the project with Rachel. The lawsuit states that she “wrote him numerous emails and love letters to let him know how much she cared about him in the hope that it would end the abuse.”