UVA Fraternity Files $25 Million Defamation Lawsuit Against Rolling Stone Magazine
The University of Virginia fraternity profiled in a Rolling Stone campus rape story published in last year that proved to be untrue filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against the magazine on Monday.
Back in November 2014, Rolling Stone published a sensational article that accused seven members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter at the school of brutally gang-raping a freshman student in 2012.
However, a number of facts in the story, titled "A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA," were called into question. Eventually, the entire article was debunked and retracted from the magazine in April 2015.
Nonetheless, the fraternity and a school official who says she was vilified in the article argue that the damage to their reputations have already been done. Now, three frat members and recent graduates of the University of Virginia are suing for at least $225,000 each, while a university associate dean is suing the magazine for more than $7.5 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
"The reputation that Phi Kappa Psi and its alumni spend decades building was destroyed overnight," the lawsuit said. "The formerly respected fraternity is now known colloquially in the University of Virginia community as 'the rape frat.'"
The suit also states that the story made the frat and its members "the object of an avalanche of condemnation worldwide."
"In characterizing Jackie's gang-rape as a Phi Kappa Psi initiation ritual, the Article associated the fraternity brand and reputation even more closely with gang-rape. The concept of gang-rape as initiation inexorably leads the reader to conclude that being a brother at Phi Kappa Psi means being a gang-rapist," reads the complaint.
The suit also faults the publication for failing to meet a basic standard in fact-checking Erdely's article before it was published.
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