Rolling Stone Magazine’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit by three former members of the fraternity maligned by the publication in a now-retracted article alleging a gang rape.
The three former members of the University of Virginia chapter of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity claim in their lawsuit that they were easily identified as potential rapists in Rolling Stone’s expose. The students claim their names and hometowns were listed online following the article, and that their “names will forever be associated with the alleged gang rape.”
Attorneys for Rolling Stone dispute this, writing “No reasonable reader would understand from the article and the proffered extrinsic evidence that plaintiffs are identified as the perpetrators.”
The article didn’t provide the real names of any of the alleged attackers (the main perpetrator turned out to not even exist). But the fraternity members allege that enough identifiable information was provided that friends, family members and other students were able to figure out who might have been the rapists.
One of the suing students had the bedroom at the top of the first flight of stairs at the fraternity house, which was deemed “the mostly likely scene of the alleged crime,” according to the lawsuit. The three students say they were interrogated and harassed by the people they knew (as well as reporters and online commenters) after they were identified.
The article at the center of the lawsuit involved an accusation that members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity gang-raped a college freshman as part of an initiation party. The story fell apart when it was determined that no party took place at the fraternity the night of the alleged attack and that prospective members pledged in the spring and not the fall.
Further complicating the accusation was the discovery that the man who brought the accuser to the non-existent party didn’t exist either. The accuser gave multiple names and backstories for the man, and used a photo of an old high school acquaintance as evidence that he existed. She also used a text messaging service to fake texts between him and her friends.
Her friends also disputed her account after being accused of apathy toward her claims of rape. They said they tried to get the accuser to go to the hospital, and stayed with her all night when she refused. She told Rolling Stone that her friends debated the social implications of coming forward with a rape accusation and persuaded her to avoid the hospital and the police.
Barely a month after the article was published, it was retracted with an editor’s note. In April 2015, the Columbia Journalism Review released its findings into what went wrong in the reporting.
Since then, three lawsuits have been filed against the magazine. One from the three fraternity members, one from a U.Va. dean who was named in the article and one from the Phi Kappa Psi chapter as a whole. The fraternity house was vandalized in the wake of the article.
