Lawyers in Rolling Stone Lawsuit - "Jackie" Tied to Fake Person

The Lawn at UVA

As a double alumni of the University of Virginia myself with many family members who are also alumni, I continue to be livid over Rolling Stone's utterly false campus rape story from 2014.   The story always seemed far fetched to those of us who attended UVA and frequented the fraternity row party scene (one family member had friends in wrongly slandered Phi Kappa Psi).  Thankfully, Rolling Stone is being sued for its fabricated story and as more and more information comes out, "Jackie's" entire story was a lie.   When this lying woman will be expelled from the University for an Honor Code violation remains to be scene.  The Washington Post has the latest details on the sick lies made up by this truth and veracity challenged woman which Rolling Stone ran with even though nothing was ever properly substantiated.  Here are excerpts:

Lawyers representing a University of Virginia student at the center of a debunked gang-rape allegation have acknowledged in court papers that the student has ties to a fake persona she once named as the ringleader of the alleged attack.

Filed in federal court Tuesday, the papers are part of an ongoing lawsuit a U-Va. associate dean filed against Rolling Stone magazine, arguing that the magazine published a defamatory account of how the Charlottesville school handles sexual assaults. The legal team representing “Jackie” acknowledged that they had recently accessed a Yahoo e-mail account for “Haven Monahan,” who the U-Va. student alleged had taken her on a date before leading her into a brutal gang rape in September 2012.

Lawyers representing U-Va. associate dean Nicole Eramo have described Monahan as a fictitious U-Va. junior created by Jackie to lure the romantic interest of another student, a practice known as “catfishing.”

Eramo’s lawyer, Libby Locke, told The Washington Post that the filing shows that “they admit accessing it, which means Jackie is Haven, a point they’ve refused to answer all along.”

Eramo’s legal team filed the $10 million defamation lawsuit against Rolling Stone in response to a sensational account of Jackie’s alleged sexual assault detailed in a lengthy expose published by the magazine in November 2014. An investigation by The Post eventually showed significant inconsistencies in the Rolling Stone account, and the Charlottesville Police Department and a Columbia University inquiry could not substantiate the allegations; the magazine subsequently retracted the story.

Eramo then sued Rolling Stone claiming that the account protrayed Eramo as callous and indifferent to Jackie’s gang rape allegations.

Eramo’s lawyers assert that the new evidence finally proves that Jackie created Monahan and his e-mail account as part of an elaborate ruse to lure another U-Va. student into a romantic relationship. In a series of text messages, Jackie wrote to friends at U-Va. that Monahan was a junior in her chemistry class who had invited her on a date. Then one night in September of her freshman year she alleged that Monahan and a group of men sexually assaulted her after the date.

U-Va. Fraternity Files $25 Million Lawsuit Against Rolling Stone

(AP Photo/The Daily Progress, Ryan M. Kelly)

Rolling Stone's utterly irresponsible story from last year that alleged that a brutal rape and abuse took place at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity on the University of Virginia's fraternity row continues to rightly bite Rolling Stone in the ass.  I often complain about lazy journalists not ferreting out the truth, but the Rolling Stone piece was a piece of pure fiction.   Now, Phi Kappa Psi has filed a $25 million lawsuit against both Rolling Stone and worthless journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely who never bothered to check behind the wild and easily refuted claims of "Jackie," the alleged rape victim.  Not only did the fraternity have no party on the night of the alleged rape, but no one with the name of supposed date/rapist was ever a member of the fraternity.  The Washington Post looks at the new lawsuit.  Here are highlights:

The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter at the University of Virginia filed a $25 million lawsuit Monday against Rolling Stone magazine, which published an article in 2014 that alleged a freshman was gang raped at the house during a party.

The lawsuit focuses on a Rolling Stone article titled “A Rape on Campus,” which detailed a harrowing attack on a freshman named Jackie at the Phi Psi house on Sept. 28, 2012. The article, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, described how Jackie was raped by seven men while two others watched in a second floor bedroom while a fraternity party raged downstairs. The article alleged that the attack was part of a hazing ritual at the long-time U-Va. fraternity.

The Washington Post found significant discrepancies in the Rolling Stone account, including that the fraternity did not host a party that night in 2012 and that a student identified by Jackie as her main attacker was never a member of the fraternity and did not attend U-Va.

Two investigations — by the Columbia University journalism school and the Charlottesville Police Department — later confirmed that there was no gang rape at the fraternity.

“The fraternity chapter and its student and alumni members suffered extreme damage to their reputations in the aftermath of the article’s publication and continue to suffer despite the ultimate unraveling of the story,” the Phi Psi chapter said in a statement Monday. “The article also subjected the student members and their families to danger and immense stress while jeopardizing the future existence of the chapter.”

Rolling Stone retracted the story in April, and the magazine’s editor, Will Dana, later resigned.

In the wake of the Rolling Stone article’s publication, the Phi Psi house was vandalized, windows were broken and anonymous activists scrawled “UVA Center for Rape Studies,” on the building.

“In the most scurrilous traditions of yellow tabloid journalism, Rolling Stone published a devastating story it knowingly failed to verify, in reckless disregard for truth or falsity, or the essential safety, dignity, and welfare of the organization or of those lives it was willing to crush with its defamatory article,” the fraternity contends in the lawsuit. “The story was simply too tempting, too sensational, to let facts get in the way.”

In the complaint, filed in state court in Charlottesville, the 54 undergraduate members of the fraternity describe living through the backlash of the article’s publication in November 2014.

The fraternity brothers say they faced vicious threats online, taunts in classrooms and suffered in recruiting new prospects to join the house.

Many alumni removed their affiliation with the fraternity from their résumés out of concern that Phi Psi membership could hurt their job prospects.

According to the fraternity’s complaint filed in state court: “This defamation action is brought to seek redress for the wanton destruction caused to Phi Kappa Psi by Rolling Stone’s intentional, reckless, and unethical behavior.”

I hope Phi Kappa Psi wins the lawsuit. One of my daughters had friends in the house while at UVA and many years ago as I student I attended parties at Phi Kappa Psi as well as at my own fraternity.

Quote of the Day: Andrew Sullivan on Apparent UVA Rape Hoax

At a family gathering yesterday - my granddaughter's birthday - with a number of UVA alumni in attendance, not surprisingly the Rolling Stone hit piece on UVA came up.  Equally unsurprising was the anger at Rolling Stone's irresponsible (and apparently false) story and horrific journalism - if one can even call the piece journalism.  The question was how did such a terribly wrong story get published.  Andrew Sullivan perhaps sums it up:

So why did an inflammatory, lurid, and apparently fallacious story get into print – with only one source and no corroboration – breaking most basic journalistic rules in a serious publication? Rich Bradley is surely right: it was a too-good-to-check story that echoed what many truly wanted to hear. It managed to suggest that the “rape culture” we are now told is endemic is even worse than you could possibly imagine, and ignored in plain sight. It implicated individuals in various stigmatized groups (among many journalists and activists) – i.e. the dreaded evil trifecta of “white”, “men” and “Southern”. Its details – from the shattered glass and the beer bottle sodomy – had an irresistible allure. Questioning it was like questioning whether Saddam Hussein actually did have WMDs – it seems as if you are excusing an evil figure, or being terminally naïve, or minimizing the danger. We believe what we want to believe – and, in our public debates, we also keep searching for the perfect anecdote or fact or story to refute our opponents for good and all.

Rolling Stone vs. UVA

The seemingly much deserved trashing of Rolling Stone continues after its story of an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity began to unravel and headed toward being categorized as either a fabricate lie or the fantasy of a emotionally disturbed young woman who has admitted that she never wanted to attend UVA.  Now, Politico joins the fray and beings its piece by calling the Rolling Stone story "journalistic malpractice."  Meanwhile, as noted before, the would be heroines of women's rights have done huge harm to the cause they claim to support.  The lesson is that just because you'd like a story to be true because it furthers one's agenda, doesn't mean you don't still have to diligently fact check it.  Here are excerpts from Politico:

The Rolling Stone story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia has, in the eyes of many in the media, gone from bombshell reporting to journalistic malpractice in the bat of an eye.

The details of this crime are practically unspeakable. The shock of it led many people to recoil in horror upon the article’s release and ask, “How could this have happened at such a respectable school?” Upon further reflection, and after a skeptical blog post by Worth Editor Richard Bradley, people began to ask, “Could this really have happened?”

First, there’s the scale of the crime. No one doubts the existence of sociopaths on campus, but nine of them conspiring together at one fraternity in an act so depraved it could be something out of a West African civil war?

Then, there are the details. If the gang rape was premeditated, why did the fraternity brothers leave a glass table in the room, which Jackie was smashed through in the initial attack, with the subsequent assaults taking place on the shards?

Would Jackie’s friends, seeing her bruised, cut and traumatized, really have stood around debating how it would affect their social status if she dared report the crime?

In fact, even the writer of the article doesn’t seem to know if the story is true.  Sabrina Rubin Erdely has said she found Jackie credible. But she didn’t talk to the accused students. She explained in a Slate podcast that she couldn’t get in touch with the alleged perpetrators “because [the fraternity’s] contact page was pretty outdated.” She wouldn’t tell the Washington Post whether she even knew their names, and retreated to the argument that the real point of the story wasn’t the violent incident itself, but the culture of UVA.

Almost as shocking as the original incident is the fact that Jackie never reported it to the police. If Rolling Stone is to be believed, the UVA administration didn’t really encourage her to do so, and even as she was talking to the magazine for a report that would make national waves, she still hadn’t reported her tormentors to law enforcement.

Even considering her trauma and fragile psychological state, this is an extraordinary lapse. By her account, Phi Kappa Psi isn’t a fraternity so much as a criminal gang committed to sexual violence.

Bizarrely, prosecution of rapists isn’t particularly high on the list of priorities of many of the same feminists who reflexively credit the UVA story. The feminist agenda on campus rape has two elements. It aims to define ambiguous sexual encounters as rape at the same time it seeks to empower college administrations, instead of the criminal justice system, to handle sexual assault allegations.

In a compelling piece for the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School explained why both ends of this equation are wrong. The new standard for sexual consent — spelled out in elaborate campus rules governing every step of a sexual encounter — “encourages people to think of themselves as sexual assault victims when there was no assault.”

Schools should be encouraging victims to go to the police, as befits any other crime. No one would ever think to handle an armed robbery with a campus hearing and a disciplinary slap on the wrist. Rapists are violent criminals, and if victims are understandably reluctant to report them to the police, colleges and local police forces should be doing everything they reasonably can to make it easier for them to do so.

The other campus imperative should be better controlling the alcohol-fueled party scene that has become an entitlement of young adulthood in America. Much of what feminists call rape culture is what Heather Mac Donald, in a characteristically brilliant essay for The Weekly Standard, deems “a squalid hook-up scene, the result of jettisoning all normative checks on promiscuous behavior.”

At UVA, the priority should be getting to the truth of Jackie’s story, and either holding accountable the guilty parties, or debunking a calumny.

For the record and in the interest of full disclosure, I was in a fraternity at UVA (pictured below) and had many friends at the nearby Kappa Sigma house.

My former fraternity at UVA - across Rugby Road from Phi Kappa Psi