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12/02/2016

5 takeaways from the Rolling Stone defamation verdict

From The Columbia Journalism Review

The verdict came down in the first defamation case stemming from Rolling Stone’s famously flawed investigation about college rape on the Friday before Election Day. 

Now that the electoral shock has ebbed, it’s time to give the results a second look.

In this case, a former associate dean at the University of Virginia, Nicole Eramo, charged that the magazine and reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely had defamed her in its much-noted 2014 article, “A Rape on Campus.” That story began with a hard-to-read scene—now acknowledged to have been invented—of a first-year student being violently gang-raped for three hours by seven men at a UVA fraternity in 2012. The remainder of the article took a harsh look at how the university responded to sexual-assault allegations in general and Jackie’s own story in particular. (“A whole new kind of abuse,” as the article’s subhead put it.)  

The story was challenged almost immediately after it was published—in The Washington Post, Slate, and elsewhere. Rolling Stone requested, and got, an independent report overseen by the Columbia Journalism School. This damning document found that the magazine’s editing processes were woefully faulty in publishing the piece. Most crucially, the writer and the magazine’s editors went too far in respecting the wishes of a woman they felt had been traumatized by the experience, and did too little to verify her tale.

Writer Erdely didn’t interview Eramo, either—the administrator was prevented from discussing the personal affairs of students—but Eramo loomed large in the latter part of the story anyway. Settlement talks went nowhere. In the end, the jury awarded Eramo $3 million in damages: $1 million from Rolling Stone and $2 million from Erdely. A second lawsuit, from the fraternity itself, is scheduled for trial in Virginia state court next fall.

Here are some takeaways from the Eramo decision, based on insights from lawyers who followed the case.

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