“Andy,” “Cindy,” and “Randall” were the names given to three of the characters in Rolling Stone’s “A Rape on Campus,” by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. The three represented, at a minimum, the failure of collegiate bystanders to support a woman (their friend “Jackie”) who had just been sexually assaulted. The story is now deeply and irretrievably compromised: Rolling Stone has acknowledged “discrepancies” in Jackie’s account of the attack, and, in a note appended to the story, the magazine has said it was “mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters.” There is, indeed, no sign in the piece of an attempt to contact the men who Jackie said raped her, but Erdely does write that Jackie’s “now-former friend Randall . . . citing his loyalty to his own frat, declined to be interviewed.” On Wednesday, though, Andy, Cindy, and Randall (using those pseudonyms) told the Washington Post that Rolling Stone did not contact them at all. They also said that, while something seemed to have happened to Jackie that night, as Andy put it, “It didn’t happen that way at all.”

In the Rolling Stone account, Andy, Cindy, and Randall found Jackie outside of the Phi Kappa Psi house on the night of September 28, 2012. She was, according to the magazine, beaten and bruised, stumbling away from a gang rape in which seven men took turns with her, one using a beer bottle. Andy, Cindy, and Randall are “her three best friends.” At first, they are taken aback, but they quickly turn cold—awful, really. When Randall briefly wonders about going to the hospital, the others dissuade him: “ ‘Is that such a good idea?’ [Jackie] recalls Cindy asking. ‘Her reputation will be shot for the next four years.’ ” Jackie listens, “mute in her bloody dress,” as Cindy, now playing the mean girl, “prevailed over the group: ‘She’s gonna be the girl who cried “rape,” and we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.’ ”

Not only is Cindy portrayed as the instigator of Jackie’s abandonment; her cruelty is given a particular social and sexual character. One traumatic aspect of the aftermath of the rape, according to Rolling Stone, was that “her pals were now impatient for Jackie to rejoin the merriment.” And here is Cindy again, in what would be one of the worst passages in the article even if everything Jackie said were true:

Cindy, a self-declared hookup queen, said she didn’t see why Jackie was so bent out of shape. “Why didn’t you have fun with it?” Cindy asked. “A bunch of hot Phi Psi guys?”

Cindy’s supposed tolerance for rape, in other words, is attributed to her own supposed promiscuity. She thought that being gang-raped could be “fun”—she was that kind of girl. Deliberately or not, the passage plays to the notion that a young woman like Cindy couldn’t really be raped if the perpetrators were “hot Phi Psi guys.” But of course she could be.

So did Rolling Stone contact Cindy at all? (I e-mailed the magazine to ask, but haven’t heard back. The Post said that Rolling Stone wouldn’t comment, because of an internal inquiry.) If the magazine did get in touch with her, did it make it clear that it was interested not only in checking her account of what happened that night but also in presenting her sexual history to a national audience in a certain way? The piece calls Cindy a “self-declared hookup queen”—declared to whom? Did the magazine rely on Jackie’s word, or on someone else’s? (The magazine’s note refers to “a friend of Jackie’s who we were told would not speak to Rolling Stone.”) Cindy is not her real name, but she was surely identifiable, not only to herself but to an entire circle of people at UVA. At the time of the alleged rape, she was a first-year student—presumably an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old. She’d be only about twenty or twenty-one now.

She and Andy and Randall might have given Rolling Stone an account of what they remember seeing and doing that night. They told the Post that “they found their friend in tears. Jackie appeared traumatized, saying her date ended horrifically, with the older student parking his car at his fraternity, asking her to come inside and then forcing her to perform oral sex on five men.” The Post account goes on:

Although they did not notice any blood or visible injuries, they said they immediately urged Jackie to speak to police and insisted that they find her help. Instead, they said, Jackie declined and asked to be taken back to her dorm room. They went with her—two said they spent the night—seeking to comfort Jackie in what appeared to be a moment of extreme turmoil.

The three friends stand by their belief that something happened to her: “She had very clearly just experienced a horrific trauma,” Randall said. “I had never seen anybody acting like she was on that night before, and I really hope I never have to again. . . . If she was acting on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, then she deserves an Oscar.” But they also introduce more troubling discrepancies, to borrow Rolling Stone’s phrase—Jackie offered different names for the person who was supposedly her date that evening and contradictory details about him. And photos that were supposedly of the date turned out to be of a high-school acquaintance of Jackie’s who wasn’t even in the state at the time. The three friends seem to have supplied the Post with texts and other communications that back up their story. Given the impact the _Rolling Stone _article has had, this needs to be sorted out. The magazine’s clumsiness has left women who have been sexually assaulted on campus—and there are many of them—more vulnerable and isolated.

There has been much talk about how the Rolling Stone debacle is a result of a tendency to believe accusations of sexual assault too quickly. But, really, the opposite may be true. Hanna Rosin—who, along with the Post’s T. Rees Shapiro, with the team of Nick Anderson, Paul Farhi, Jennifer Jenkins, and Julie Tate, has been doing truly thoughtful work on this story—notes that, when she asked Erderly, on a podcast, why she chose to report on UVA, “Erdely said she called several universities but kept hearing typical stories about sexual violence. Then she called some activists and heard this sensational story about Jackie and gang rape.” Maybe the typical stories were boring, or judged to be too ambiguous—open to doubt. In the podcast, Erderly doesn’t use the word typical, but says that she first heard about Jackie when talking to an activist about how story after story had an element of “self-blame.” She found this especially remarkable in the case of Jackie, who said that she was violently attacked by a group of men, at least some of whom were strangers, on a night when she said she was wearing “a tasteful red dress with a high neckline” and “discreetly spilled her spiked punch onto the sludgy fraternity-house floor,” not being a drinker herself. Somehow, and for whatever reason, the other women’s stories (which could be found in great numbers) weren’t what Rolling Stone was looking for. Maybe the magazine worried that those women would be seen as just a bunch of Cindys.

*Update, 12/15/14: Andy, Cindy, and Randall have now come forward under their own names: Alexander Stock, Kathryn Hendley, and Ryan Duffin. Erdely has now, belatedly, contacted them, according to the AP; Hendley, or Cindy, also “told the AP Erdely apologized to her for portraying her the way she did.”