Rolling Stone sued for rape story
The article about the University of Virginia was a ‘monumental hoax,’ an official says.
A University of Virginia official vowed to hold Rolling Stone accountable for its discredited article about a supposed campus rape, filing a multimillion-dollar defamation suit Tuesday against the magazine and one of its writers.
The November 2014 article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely — “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA” — portrayed a lackadaisical response by the university to the alleged rape, particularly by Nicole Eramo, associate dean of students. The magazine retracted the article in April and removed it from its website after an independent report by Columbia University called its veracity into question and its reporting slipshod.
“The Rolling Stone article has caused so much damage and reputational harm, both to me and also to so many others,” Eramo said in a statement. “I am filing this defamation lawsuit to set the record straight — and to hold the magazine and the author of the article accountable for their actions in a way they have refused to do themselves.”
Eramo’s 76-page lawsuit calls Rolling Stone’s story a “monumental hoax” and accuses the magazine of “actual malice” in running a story by “a wanton journalist who was more concerned with writing an article that fulfilled her preconceived narrative about the victimization of women on American college campuses and a malicious publisher who was more concerned about selling magazines to boost the economic bottom line for its faltering magazine.”
Eramo’s suit takes particular aim at Erdely’s history of writing about sexual assault and victimized women, accusing her of habitual inaccuracy in “sensationalist narrative journalism.”
Eramo also contends that Erdely defamed her in interviews the writer gave after the story’s publication. Eramo is asking for more than $7.5 million in damages, including attorney’s fees.
A Rolling Stone spokeswoman declined to comment on the lawsuit. A representative of Erdely also refused to comment, as did an attorney for the student featured in the article. The student is not being sued.
Rolling Stone’s discredited article said that the student, identified only as “Jackie,” had been gangraped at a fraternity for hours and that university officials had brushed off her claims. The article sent shock waves through the University of Virginia and became the magazine’s most widely read noncelebrity story in its online history, attracting 2.7 million page views.
Investigators and other journalists soon discovered multiple inconsistencies in Jackie’s account. The furor culminated in the retraction of the story after Columbia University’s independent investigation, which was commissioned by Rolling Stone and published by Rolling Stone and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Columbia’s investigation cited faulty reporting and fact-checking lapses by Erdely and the magazine. It found that Erdely and Rolling Stone’s editors had not fabricated information in the article, but had relied on Jackie’s account to the point that they failed to interview other witnesses or confirm key details that would have cast doubt on her story before publication.
The Rolling Stone article said the university had refused to allow Eramo to give an interview to Erdely, but said Eramo was “beloved” by campus rape survivors.
It also alleged, however, that Eramo had alluded to the University of Virginia as “the rape school” and had failed to act on Jackie’s report that other women had been raped at the fraternity.
In her lawsuit, Eramo accuses the magazine of selecting her to be the “chief villain” of the story and calls Rolling Stone’s claims “categorically false.” She says that she never referred to the university as “the rape school” and that the student chose not to go to police with her rape allegations.
“As a woman who has dedicated her life to assisting victims of sexual assault and domestic abuse, Dean Eramo ... received a wave of emails and letters from people across the country attacking her as, among other things, ‘evil,’ a ‘wretched rape apologist,’ and a ‘disgusting, worthless piece of trash,’” the lawsuit says.
Police and the Columbia University deans who reviewed the gang-rape allegations in the Rolling Stone article said the student did not cooperate with their investigations.
Both Eramo and the fraternity named in the article had indicated they might sue. Eramo’s suit, filed in the circuit court of the city of Charlottesville, is the first legal salvo in the case.