That feels like 20/20 hindsight. There were certainly plenty of males who did believe it. I'll fess up, I was one of them. I believed it for 2 main reasons:

1. The story was outlandish, but I thought "you'd have to be insane to lie about this, with this much detail". Well, yeah, in retrospect, insane people exist.

2. Since there was so much detail, I thought there was plenty of stuff that could have been easily vetted, and given Rolling Stone's reputation, thought "for sure they have researched this." I honestly didn't realize at the time about the story being "too good to vet" phenomenon.

Yes, I learned a valuable lesson about consuming information with a more critical eye, and mea culpa. But I know I definitely wasn't the only male who originally believed the story.

This article dances around these “gangs” being deputy cliques with allegedly violent tendencies, not actual infiltration by LA street gangs. That smudging makes the lack of evidence for those violent tendencies or refusal to provide back-up easier to digest.