Rolling Stone Sued for Campus Rape Story
The dueling pistols are out.
As Jonathan Peters noted at the Columbia Journalism Review: For hundreds of years, those who felt that their reputation was smeared and dishonored would restore it with a duel. But in today’s less overtly violent culture, the butthurt victim has to resort to suing for everything their alleged slanderer has got. On Monday, the fraternity that was the subject of the infamously debunked Rolling Stone story about a phony college rape threw down the gauntlet. Its dueling pistols are out, as the fraternity filed a defamation lawsuit against the Leftmedia rag and the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, for $25 million. “Rolling Stone and Erdely had an agenda,” read the lawsuit, “and they were recklessly oblivious to the harm they would cause innocent victims in their ruthless pursuit of that agenda.” CBS News reported the publication had no comment about the suit. This is the third lawsuit to stem from the article Rolling Stone published last November accusing a fraternity at the University of Virginia of gang raping a female student at a party. After local police investigated the incident, they determined the story the magazine painted in blood-splattered detail probably didn’t occur. Usually, it’s devilishly hard to prove a defamation lawsuit, but it appears Rolling Stone went too far trying to illustrate the liberal narrative about campus rape.