This is what happened to Erdely, then still Rubin:
Sabrina Rubin, who says she and the rest of the editorial board “adored” him, puts it another way: “There are reporters who get ahead because they're great schmoozers, and I think Steve was definitely one of them.” When he became the paper's executive editor, the editorial board hailed him as a “man of principle,” and in her Philadelphia magazine piece, Rubin describes how Glass threw a righteous fit when she and a colleague concocted a funny and obviously made-up travel story for 34th Street — going so far as to call an emergency session of the DP's Alumni Association board to apprise them of the transgression. (Rubin also acknowledges that she felt “terrible” about writing a fairly dishy article about someone she had once liked and admired.[Sabrina Erdely Was Once Disciplined By Stephen Glass For Fabrication, By Sean Davis, December 12, 2014 ]The Federalist has also raised questions about Erdely’s “Main Line Madam” piece in Philadelphia Magazine [November 1998]. That story followed the adventures of prostitute and madam who pulls down $300,000 a year (sometimes $6,000 a night) peddling flesh, but who has a well-to-do husband, lives in a ritzy neighborhood, sends her daughter to a private school, belongs to the PTA and attends Catholic Mass twice weekly.
As Mollie Hemingway wrote for The Federalist in an earlier piece on Erdely, here is the run-down of improbable details in that story: