“Jackie,” the woman whose fake gang-rape accusation made it to the pages of Rolling Stone Magazine, does not have to turn over additional communications, a judge ruled.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel C. Hoppe ruled Tuesday that Jackie’s lawyers “exhausted all known areas of inquiry for responsive communications currently in Jackie’s possession.”
Jackie had claimed that she was gang-raped as part of a fraternity initiation at the University of Virginia. She also claimed that the dean responsible for investigating her claim, Nicole Eramo, was indifferent to her accusation and tried to sweep it under the rug to protect the school’s reputation.
Eramo is suing Rolling Stone for defamation, arguing that the magazine knew Jackie was an unreliable source but published her story anyway. Eramo’s lawyers have argued (and evidence has shown) that Jackie invented the man she claimed she had a date with the night of the alleged incident and who orchestrated the gang-rape. A few weeks ago, Jackie’s lawyers tacitly admitted as much.
Jackie had shown friends a photo of the man she claimed was either a college classmate or a coworker (she couldn’t keep her story straight over the years), but the photo turned out to be of a former high school classmate who barely knew her. She also used a fake text messaging service to send her friends texts from her alleged assailant in an attempt to make another man jealous (it did not work). Jackie even created a fake email account for the fake rapist and used it to send a love letter to the man she had a crush on after the alleged rape. No one with the name Haven Monahan — the name Jackie gave of her alleged rapist— had ever been a student at U.Va.
Eramo’s lawyers claim that Jackie has more documents relating to the fake accusation, but Judge Hoppe seemed to disagree. Still, her attorneys remain confident they will win the defamation lawsuit against Rolling Stone.
“We feel confident that a jury will see that Jackie was not a reliable source of information and that Rolling Stone knew it when they published the false and defamatory article,” Eramo’s lawyer, Libby Lock, told the Washington Post.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
