Campus Sexual Assault Tag

The drama swirling around Rolling Stone, staff writer Sabrina Erdely, and the University of Virginia continued today when Phi Kappa Psi's UVA chapter filed a $25 million dollar lawsuit against the magazine over a (now-retracted) story claiming that a freshman girl was gang raped during a house party. Erdely's "A Rape on Campus" story published in November of last year, and immediately ignited a firestorm of debate over campus "rape culture." The fraternity's image was trashed, their house vandalized, and both the university and fraternity national chapter suffered a major hit to their reputations. By December, however, Erdely's account of the attack on "Jackie" began to unravel. Following investigations by law enforcement, the university, and an increasingly skeptical media, Rolling Stone published a frantic retraction---and then the lawsuits started. More via Reuters:

For years, we have heard that that 1-in-4 or 1-in-5 college women are victims of rape or sexual assault. The studies behind the statistic tended to be agenda-driven and unscientific, but now according to hundreds of news stories, there’s a new, more comprehensive survey that confirms epidemic levels of sexual predation on campus. Could these researchers be right?

Here at Legal Insurrection, we devoted a lot of (virtual) ink to the Rolling Stone campus rape story debacle. Sabrina Erdely's now-retracted article on "Jackie's" traumatic gang rape---and its relation to the campus sexual assault problem Erdely so desperately wanted to prove exists---serves as a textbook example of how not to conduct an investigation, and may end up costing Rolling Stone more than its reputation (or at least, whatever is left of it.) Back in May, University of Virginia associate dean of students Nicole Eramo filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Rolling Stone, its parent company Wenner Media, and journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely for their portrayal of Eramo in Erdely's story. Eramo argues that Erdely and Rolling Stone knew Jackie was unreliable, had serious doubts about the story, and yet ran with it anyway because they were desperate to fulfill their own narrative and sell magazines. As I said in May, the benefits of attempting to salvage Eramo's reputation via the courts must outweigh the risk that opposing counsel and the MSM could find something that causes further damage; her attorneys likely would not have filed the suit had they not performed that analysis. Still, Rolling Stone has decided to answer the complaint by claiming that UVA actually contributed to the faulty report. Via WaPo:

We've discussed extensively the problems and scandals surrounding the campus sexual assault investigation process. Procedures that favor the accuser, and offer no protection to the accused, have led to lost academic careers, ruined reputations, and high-profile lawsuits brought by the accused against the institutions that allegedly threw them under the bus. One such lawsuit has risen out of sexual assault allegations brought against "John Doe" by another female student at Amherst College. John Doe was expelled after Amherst's kangaroo court decided with 50.01% certainty that he may have raped "AS." After the expulsion, John Doe's attorney dug deeper into the case, and discovered a series of text messages that eviscerated AS's testimony:

In fact, as Doe’s attorneys later would discover, AS had texted two people after the hookup—a friend, and a possible paramour. Even before hooking up with Doe, AS had texted the other male student, telling him, “I mean I happen to have my room to myself this weekend, if you wanted to come over and entertain me.” After she finished with Doe, AS resumed flirtatious texting with the male student, who came to her room and spent the night with her. He found her “friendly, flirtatious, and spirited,” and not “anxious, stressed, depressed, or otherwise in distress.”...