Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone reporter and author, did a sit-down interview last Wednesday that focused mostly on his latest report for the magazine about our corrupt policing systems, racism, and state violence. Near the end, HuffPost Live host Alyona Minkovski took about three minutes to ask Taibbi about the biggest Rolling Stone story in the last year or so: the since-retracted November 2014 investigative feature about sexual assault at a University of Virginia (UVA) fraternity. In early April, the Columbia Journalism Review published a lengthy report about what went wrong in the feature’s reporting and fact-checking. Finally, in May, a UVA dean featured in the piece sued both the magazine and the journalist who wrote the story, Sabrina Rose Erdely, for defamation. Through all of this, Rolling Stone and Erdely have mainly said what they have about what happened via statements.

During the interview, Taibbi expressed the requisite regret about his employer’s embarrassment. When Minkovski asked him if he thought that rape victims had been damage by the fallout, Taibbi responded, “Absolutely. Because what's going to happen going forward is now anyone who tries to do a story about this is going to look at what happened with the Rolling Stone UVA story and that’s unfortunate. I know people at the magazine feel terrible about that most of all. Hopefully, it won’t set things back too far.”

Then Taibbi, without being asked, offered some advice on how to report on sexual assault. “One way around that, you know, would be for people to cover cases that have already been adjudicated... so that the reporters don't have to go out on a limb to say that this or that happened. They can rely on something that happened, that's already been proven in court,” he said.

That was a weird thing to hear from a reporter known for exposing how terrible the criminal justice system can be. The failures of the Rolling Stone piece are not about a lack of verifiable evidence. In fact, I would argue that for the public, there is almost no bulletproof sexual assault case. Given that the vast majority of sexual assault cases are not “cases that have already been adjudicated,” reserving our reporting for those that have been decided in court would be a grave mistake.

As the UVA story was falling apart in late November and early December, I was working on a 6,000-word article for Vice Sports about a campus sexual assault. It centered on a single survivor. While the woman in my story had never reported to the police, my report differed from the Rolling Stone feature because the university had done a disciplinary hearing and I had access to those documents. I was not relying solely on the story of a survivor, but it was her account that did the heavy lifting. Beyond that, I have spoken to multiple survivors of sexual assault, on campus and otherwise, who want nothing more than to tell their stories to a journalist who will listen with compassion. I have listened to women who struggle through post-traumatic stress disorder to tell their stories.