Police in Charlottesville have suspended their investigation into an alleged gang rape of a University of Virginia student who was the subject of a high-profile Rolling Stone article last year after the woman refused to cooperate with investigators.

Police chief Timothy Longo said during a news conference on Monday that police could not confirm that a rape occurred at any fraternity house at the university.

The Rolling Stone article described the gang rape of a student identified only as “Jackie” at a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in 2012.

Longo said the fact investigators could not find evidence of the rape does not mean it did not happen.

“Unfortunately, we’re not able to conclude to any substantive degree that an incident that is consistent with the facts in the article occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, or any other fraternity house for that matter,” Longo said. “I want to be clear: that doesn’t mean that something terrible didn’t happen to Jackie on the evening of September 28, 2012.”

He said that it just meant that investigators had not collected sufficient information to determine what may have happened that night. “So this case is not closed – it’s not closed by any stretch of the imagination,” Longo said.



Weeks after the article was published in November 2014, the magazine distanced itself from its claims that Jackie had been raped by seven men at the university’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in 2012.



Rolling Stone’s managing editor, Will Dana, apologized for running the story – Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s ‘A rape on campus’ – and said: “There now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account.”

In December, Rolling Stone announced that it had asked Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism to independently review the story. Rolling Stone’s publisher, Jann Wenner, told CNN Money on Sunday that the university’s review would be shared in early April.

Longo said that the UVA president, Teresa Sullivan, contacted the department immediately after the Rolling Stone article was released so that they could open a criminal investigation into the claims.

Police said the last time they spoke with Jackie was 10 December 2014, weeks after the article was published.

“We were very distinctly told that she would not talk to us, that she would not file a report, that she did not want an investigation and that we were not to talk to her again,” police said.



Through counsel, Jackie also refused to provide a statement, answer questions or give consent to police to access school records protected by federal privacy laws.



What police do know, is that on 20 May 2013, Jackie met with a UVA dean whom she had been referred to for academic issues. In that meeting, Jackie spoke of a sexual assault that occurred in September 2012, the details of which are inconsistent with what is described in the Rolling Stone article, police said.

At a second meeting with the same dean on 21 April 2014, Jackie spoke about an alleged physical assault involving four men that occurred on a corner near the school earlier that month. She also said that the September sexual assault that she had disclosed earlier had happened at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house.



Jackie had also told the dean that sexual assaults that she was not the victim of had occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in 2010 and 2014.



She then met with the dean, Charlottesville police and school police. In that meeting, she described the April 2014 physical assault, which she said involved four men following her, one calling her name and then someone striking her with a bottle. Jackie’s nursing student roommate told police the injury looked more like an abrasion than a blunt force injury and investigators concluded the same thing when presented with photographic evidence.



At a 1 May 2014 meeting with a Charlottesville detective and the dean, Jackie again refused to disclose details of the sexual assault and said she did not want to pursue an investigation into the physical assault.



Once the Rolling Stone article was published, however, a police department employee suspected that the Jackie in the article was the woman they had met with before and contacted her just before the school’s Thanksgiving holiday break. She went to the department on 2 December 2014 with another dean and legal counsel and refused to cooperate with the investigation.



Police believe that Phi Kappa Psi did not host any social events on 28 September 2012. So, police turned to two of Jackie’s best friends, who knew that Jackie was supposed to be going on a date that evening.

Details of that evening are murky and police are still trying to determine whether a person with the name Jackie’s friends gave even exists.

“They [Jackie’s friends] don’t recall any physical injuries. They do feel like something occurred, but they don’t recall any physical injuries,” Longo said. “So, there are some inconsistencies with what they recall and what’s described in the article.”

He said that police did not want to close the case and encouraged anyone with information about sexual assaults at any fraternity house at those times to come forward. He also emphasized the need to contact police as soon as possible because evidence can be lost quickly as time passes.



The article raised questions of a rape culture at UVA, but Longo said that police could find “no information that would corroborate such an assertion”.

