Retired colonel awarded $8.4M in defamation suit

Blogger had accused him of sexual assault

Col. David “Wil” Riggins was on the verge of promotion to brigadier general in July 2013 when he got a phone call at the Pentagon from the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division to come in for a meeting. Once there, he learned that a blogger in Washington state had just accused him of raping her, when both were cadets at West Point in 1986. An investigation was underway.

Riggins waived his right to an attorney and immediately gave a statement denying any sexual assault of the woman, Susan Shannon of Everett, Washington. Shannon also cooperated with the CID investigation, which could not “prove or disprove Ms. Shannon’s allegation she was raped,” the CID report concluded. But in the spring of 2014, with the armed forces facing heavy criticism for their handling of sexual assault cases, Secretary of the Army John Mchugh recommended removing Riggins from the list for promotion to general. Riggins promptly retired.

Riggins sued Shannon for defamation, claiming that every aspect of her rape claim on the West Point campus was “provably false.” During a six-day trial that ended Aug. 1, a jury in Fairfax County, Virginia, heard from both Riggins and Shannon at length. And after 2 1/2 hours of deliberation, they sided emphatically with Riggins, awarding him $8.4 million in damages, an extraordinary amount for a defamation case between two private citizens.

The jury ordered Shannon to pay $3.4 million in compensatory damages for injury to his reputation and lost wages, and $5 million in punitive damages.

Shannon, 52, said she was devastated by the verdict and fearful for her family’s future.“i told the truth in my article and at trial,”she said. She and her lawyer, Benjamin Trichilo, said in an interview that they felt Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Daniel Ortiz wrongly prevented them from presenting witnesses and evidence about Riggins’ past and the Army CID investigation findings, and they plan to appeal.

Riggins, 52, felt the jury took the right steps toward restoring his life. “This journey we’ve been on the last four years,” said Riggins, “it’s been a nightmare…the large dollar amount is meaningless. “All I was looking for was the opportunity to be vindicated,” he said. , to set the record straight, to take every action to get my reputation back to where it was before the 15th of July [2013], when she published that false accusation.”

The scope and speed of the Internet can compound the damage for the subject of a false story, and the liability for the author, according to Tom Clare, a defamation lawyer who represented University of Virginia assistant dean Nicole Eramo in her lawsuit against Rolling Stone. “People really understand the value that a reputation has,” Clare said.

Shannon wrote in a court filing that “the demons from the rape haunted (me) for years” and that a “decade of suicidal depression led me to Christ.”