Last week saw one lawsuit against Rolling Stone dismissed, while Sabrina Rubin Erdely filed an 86-page statement about how she reported the UVA-rocking article “A Rape on Campus,” and plaintiff Nicole Eramo asked for several issues to be determined in advance of her October defamation trial against the magazine and Erdely.
On June 29 a judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by Phi Kappa Psi brothers George Elias IV, Stephen Hadford and Ross Fowler, who were not named in the article.
A dozen documents were filed July 1, including Eramo’s request for a partial summary judgment on issues such as whether she was a public figure, whether the depiction that she discouraged Jackie from reporting her alleged assault is defamatory and whether Rolling Stone acted with malice when it republished the article online December 5, 2014, after Erdely sent an e-mail at 1:54am with her realization Jackie was not credible and the story should be retracted.
Until those early morning hours, wrote Erdely, she had complete faith in Jackie’s credibility and the accuracy of her story. “I never would have written or published an article in which I did not have complete confidence,” she said.