After the Rolling Stone frat rape story was thoroughly and embarrassingly debunked, a Dean from the University of Virginia is taking legal action.

From our parent site, Legal Insurrection:

UVA Dean Sues Rolling Stone for Defamation

The smoke may have cleared, but the Rolling Stone retraction disaster isn’t over yet. UVA associate dean of students Nicole Eramo has filed a multimillion dollar defamation lawsuit against Rolling Stone, its parent company Wenner Media, and journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely for their portrayal of Eramo in the now-retracted and forever infamous “A Rape on Campus.”

One of Eramo’s chief responsibilities at UVA was to handle allegations of sexual assault. In the complaint, she argues that Rolling Stone and Erdely used her to personify the “campus indifferent to sexual assault” narrative and as a result caused her emotional and physical distress, and damaged her reputation.

The complaint itself is a parade of horrors. It lays out the allegations Rolling Stone and Erdely made one by one—that Eramo coddled Jackie, that she was indifferent to Jackie’s allegations, that she pressured Jackie to not report a rape, that she abused Jackie, and that she attempted to suppress Jackie’s rape—and lays out the case that Rolling Stone’s own subsequent statements to the media prove that those allegations weren’t only untrue, but “categorically false” and defamatory per se.

Eramo’s attorneys argue that Rolling Stone and Erdely acted with “actual malice”—they knew Jackie was unreliable, they had serious doubts about the story, and yet they ran with it anyway because they were desperate to fulfill their own narrative and sell magazines.

To their great credit, the higher-ups at the university are supporting Eramo in her battle against Rolling Stone.


 
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