“No evidence” of a rape does not mean that a rape didn’t happen. But try telling that to any one of a number of media outlets who, when the Charlottesville Police Department released their findings on “Jackie” (the University of Virginia student whose alleged rape was at the center of a widely-disputed Rolling Stone article) essentially indicated to their readers that nothing happened to her.

But at a press conference, even Police Chief Timothy Long refused to go that far. He told reporters that the police found inconsistencies in the story Jackie told a UVA dean and what she told to Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely and that they could not find any evidence to support the story as reported in the magazine. (Jackie declined to speak to the police for this investigation.)

Longo also told reporters that the police findings “[don’t] mean that something terrible didn’t happen to Jackie in 2012.”

“We are just not able to gather sufficient facts as to what that something might have been,” he said.

Longo echoed what anti-rape experts have been saying all along: while holes in Jackie story could mean that she lied about some things, either to the reporter or the dean to whom she originally spoke, it doesn’t necessarily mean she lied about being raped.

To sexual assault experts, “false reporting” is frequently recognized not as an indication that the victim is lying about being raped, but that she may be changing the circumstances of her attack in an effort to make her story more empathetic in a culture that largely disbelieves victims.

According to research from The National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women, a program of the National District Attorneys Association, there are numerous reasons that real victims of sexual assault may “omit, exaggerate or even fabricate aspects of their report.”

For example, we already know that trauma victims often misremember details of their attack – but they also might give incomplete information because they are nervous that the full story will mean being blamed or disbelieved.

The center’s research showed that even when a woman has been raped, it’s “quite common” for victims to change the details of the attack: they may say they were assaulted vaginally because talking about oral or anal rape is too embarrassing; they may blame the attack on a stranger because the actual perpetrator is their partner; they may lie about drinking alcohol, taking drugs or other behaviors they think might undermine their credibility.

And it’s not hard to understand why they’d be afraid of just that. Rape victims are still frequently blamed for drinking, dressing in particular ways or being in spaces deemed unsafe. So the cause for these omissions, exaggerations – and yes, even lies – fall at the feet of a culture that fundamentally distrusts women. They fall at our feet.

The truth is that we don’t know what happened to Jackie, and likely never will. She never wanted to make a police report – and apparently still doesn’t – and, given how she was thrown under the bus by Rolling Stone, it’s extremely unlikely that she’ll ever trust the media. But here’s what we do know: it’s much more likely for a rape victim to lie about the details of her attack than for a woman to fabricate a sexual assault whole cloth. Until we stop blaming women for being raped and start to build a culture where women feel safe telling their whole stories, we’ll never know the full truth of sexual assault.