Nicole Eramo says her credibility was lost.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: A few months after a rape scandal that was reported by Rolling Stone embroiled the University of Virginia in controversy and was subsequently discredited and retracted, an associate dean of students has filed a multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuit against the magazine, claiming it portrayed her as callous and indifferent to allegations of sexual assault.
According to The Washington Post, Nicole Eramo is seeking more than $7.5 million in damages from Rolling Stone; its parent company, Wenner Media; and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the investigative journalist who broke the sordid, mortifying story of a hapless college student who was gang-raped at a fraternity party.
The exposé, pointedly titled “A Rape on Campus,” caused nationwide, if not worldwide uproar when it was published in November of 2014. In frighteningly vivid fashion, it chronicled a brutal sexual assault at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house in September 2012. The victim, who was identified solely by her first name — Jackie — alleged that as a freshman she was ambushed at a party after which seven different men took turns raping her while two others voyeuristically looked on.
Eramo is the university’s chief administrator for dealing with sexual assaults and the lawsuit alleges the article ruined her credibility, irreversibly tarnished her reputation, and caused her undue emotional distress.
“Rolling Stone and Erdely’s highly defamatory and false statements about Dean Eramo were not the result of an innocent mistake,” claimed the lawsuit, which was filed in Charlottesville Circuit Court. “They were the result of a wanton journalist who was more concerned with writing an article that fulfilled her preconceived narrative about the victimization of women on American college campuses, and a malicious publisher who was more concerned about selling magazines to boost the economic bottom line for its faltering magazine, than they were about discovering the truth or actual facts.”
Following reports in The Washington Post in December highlighting disparities in Rolling Stone’s account of Jackie’s assault, the Charlottesville Police Department later concluded that Jackie’s accusations could not be substantiated.
Authorities also noted that Eramo swiftly moved to help Jackie and arranged for her to meet with detectives about her alleged sexual assault almost immediately after the dean learned of the allegations. Police Chief Timothy J. Longo told The Post that Jackie refused to cooperate with his department’s investigators on multiple occasions.
The one-two punch that doomed Jackie’s claims was executed to completion when the Columbia University School of Journalism published an independent review of the magazine’s reporting and found that the article was “deeply flawed.”
The Columbia report faulted failures in reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking. In a note that accompanied the report’s release, Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana called it an “individual failure” and a “procedural failure, an institutional failure … Every single person at every level of this thing had opportunities to pull the strings a little harder, to question things a little more deeply, and that was not done.”
Still, the Post revealed that Eramo received hundreds of rabid e-mails that included not only rape and death threats, but also messages that described Eramo as a “wretched rape apologist” and “disgusting, worthless piece of trash” who should “burn in hell forever,” as explicitly detailed in the litigation’s language.
The lawsuit further claims that Eramo is misquoted in Rolling Stone and that she also never told Jackie that the administration does not publicize sexual-assault statistics “because nobody wants to send their daughter to the rape school,” as the Rolling Stone account reported.
Eramo’s lawyers allege that Jackie informed Rolling Stone prior to the article’s publication that Eramo’s quotes were false and that the victim “never told Erdely that Dean Eramo made these statements.”
The complaint also indicates that Jackie told the magazine that she disagreed with its depiction of Eramo. After the Rolling Stone article was published, Jackie joined other sexual assault prevention advocates and survivors in a letter of support that lauded Eramo.
“Dean Eramo has truly saved my life,” Jackie wrote, as detailed by The Washington Post. “She listened attentively to my story and provided me with several resources. … I can’t imagine what my life would be like now if it were not for Nicole Eramo.”
After Columbia conducted its investigation into the veracity of her reporting, Sabrina Erdely offered the following statement, as reported by Time:
“I want to offer my deepest apologies: to Rolling Stone’s readers, to my Rolling Stone editors and colleagues, to the UVA community, and to any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article … Reporting on rape has unique challenges, but the journalist still has the responsibility to get it right. I hope that my mistakes in reporting this story do not silence the voices of victims that need to be heard.”