"Actual malice" is the high bar required for lawsuits made by "public figures" after NYT v. Sullivan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan), which the Dean was inexplicitly declared to be by the trial judge. Which make the resulting verdict all the more impressive.

Just because she gave a wrong name, you can't deduce that the entirety of her story is false. That doesn't follow logically. It can be littered with inconsistencies, that doesn't prove the absence of a rape.

She could be (and probably is) a pathological liar. That doesn't mean she is incapable of being raped. It only means her accounts shouldn't be published and she's not a reliable criminal witness.

No, the story is false because it consists of fictional events. Nothing in it adds up: not the people (Haven Monahan, the frat), not the timeline. The events (sex on broken glass) are prima facie unbelievable.

It was torn to pieces by WaPo, CJR, and the Charlottesville police. There is no doubt that it was a hoax. If she has ever been raped, it was a completely different event from the one described by the Rolling Stone.

On the other hand, I don't think that Jackie is a pathological liar. She tried to catfish a guy[1] and get a little sympathy from college admins. She started off like a fairly reasonable liar (for a teenager) and got caught up in the whole thing. She's definitely at fault but much less than the Rolling Stone which went on a rampage defaming people left and right and instigating a mob[2].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/01/0...

[2] http://www.nbc29.com/story/27439468/uva-fraternity-house-van...

Why does the presence of fictional events mean that there are zero factual events? Couldn't it be a mixture of both?

The comments to [2] are quite sad.