Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Tolentino begins her examination of rape culture at the University of Virginia, her alma mater, by discussing what appealed to her about the school. She writes that its image was "a sort of honeyed Eden, a college town with Dixie ease and gracefulness but liberal intellectual ideals" (197). Moving to Charlottesville at 16, Tolentino remarks that she loved time there, graduating in 2009. Then, a 2014 magazine story made her reconsider her relationship to the school.

This story, "A Rape on Campus" by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, appeared in Rolling Stone and described the rape of a woman, Jackie, at the Phi Kappa Psi frat at UVA. According to the article, seven men at the frat beat and raped her over the course of three hours. Later, she told Dean Nicole Eramo. When Eramo presented Jackie with options, Jackie decided not to pursue a case against the men.

Tolentino notes that there was precedent for this attack. In 1984, student Liz Seccuro had been raped at Phi Psi. While her attack had been minimized by the dean at the time, Seccuro received a letter of apology from one of her attackers, who was going through treatment in Alcoholics' Anonymous, in 2005. In the school's history, only 14 people had ever been found guilty of sexual misconduct, and nobody had ever been expelled.