You may have noticed the front page of The Daily Evergreen looks a little different today. As an editorial staff, we felt it was worthwhile to our community to find out what really happened with the fake assaults that occurred at the beginning of the semester.

Those assaults took campus by storm. People were scared to walk home at night. The WSU Alert texts kept coming in, reporting what seemed to be an almost nightly violation of campus safety. Then, we found out that the assaults never happened. Two women were involved. They were unrelated. No charges were filed. Everything was fine.

But questions lingered. No one knew why or how this happened. No one knew who was involved.

As soon as the cases were closed, the Evergreen requested the police reports and related documents for each case. These documents are a matter of public record.

We could have pursued getting the women’s names. That was a serious decision to make. In the end, we felt their names were not of value to the community. What could be gained? Certainly, the women involved have deep emotional and legal issues and are likely ostracized and humiliated. What they did was extraordinarily wrong. Wrong to victims. Wrong to police. And wrong to the WSU community. It’s not our place to hold them up to the general public for shaming. That’s already been done.

Names aside, we felt like we owed it to our community and our readers to find out exactly what happened. We know that the assaults were reported nearly two months ago, but the public records process takes weeks. After getting the records last week, we had to vet them through phone calls and interviews with various sources. We had to try to give everyone their say. So, according to police records, today’s front-page story is what went down at the tail-end of a peaceful Pullman summer. We’re happy to see our community recovering from this blow, and we hope everyone can feel a little better, knowing why everything happened the way that it did.

If you have any questions or concerns about this story, please feel free to visit us in Murrow East 122 or e-mail me at editor@dailyevergreen.com.

Best, Rikki King Evergreen editor-in-chief