haven monahan – C-VILLE Weekly

UPDATED: Judge denies Eramo’s request for Jackie’s e-mails

A judge denied Nicole Eramo’s request for additional documentation from Jackie in Eramo’s lawsuit against Rolling Stone.

The 46-minute hearing was conducted June 20 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel C. Hoppe, who released his verdict the next day. Hoppe ruled that “the steps taken by Jackie’s counsel were relatively straight forward and appear to have exhausted all known areas of inquiry for responsive communications currently in Jackie’s possession.”

In court, Andrew Phillips, representing Eramo, expressed frustration at Jackie’s failure to respond to Eramo’s subpoena ordering Jackie to produce all documents and electronically stored communications between herself and Ryan Duffin and between herself and Haven Monahan.

To provide a refresher, the 2014 Rolling Stone article detailed Jackie’s alleged rape on September 28, 2012. After the rape, Jackie claims she emerged from the fraternity house Phi Kappa Psi disheveled and battered after the incident and contacted three friends. The friends immediately met with her, but were depicted within the article as callous and self-absorbed.

Jackie’s friend “Randall” in the story is Ryan Duffin, a young man with whom Jackie was not only friends, but was also enamoured. The romantic feelings, however, were not reciprocated. Eramo’s lawyers claim that, in response, Jackie created the alias of Haven Monahan and set up a ploy to engage communication between Monahan and Duffin, using texting services such as Text Free, an application that allows users to use different phone numbers for anonymous texting.

A subpoena was served on Yahoo to investigate the e-mail address of Monahan. Yahoo complied, and said the e-mail account was created one day prior to the day that Duffin received an e-mail from Monahan titled “about u.” The e-mail’s content included a flattering short essay that Jackie wrote about Duffin, according to Eramo’s attorney.

The e-mail starts off with commentary from Monahan: “you should read this. iv never read anything nicer in my life.” The e-mail goes on about Duffin: “He’s gorgeous, but gorgeous is an understatement. More like you’re startled every time you see him because you notice something new in a Where’s Waldo sort of way.” This e-mail from Monahan was sent to Duffin days after Jackie claimed she was raped at Monahan’s fraternity.

“The ‘about u’ message was one of the first things that made me particularly skeptical of Haven Monahan’s identity,” Duffin tells C-VILLE. “It seemed strange to be contacted directly by Jackie’s alleged assailant so soon after the attack. After I received that email, I started trying to find out if Haven was actually a student at the school. My search turned up nothing, but that wasn’t enough proof. It wasn’t shown definitively until the media was able to start making inquiries.”

Phillips told the court that there was heavy underlying evidence based on two known e-mail exchanges between Duffin and Monahan, along with hundreds of texts, that Jackie had orchestrated this communication and authored the messages. Phillips demanded an explanation.

Jackie’s counsel, Philip O’Beirne, retorted that these requests are unnecessary and have been deemed so in the past by a previous judge’s ruling. O’Beirne further said that a forensic investigation was completed on all of Jackie’s electronic devices and accounts and nothing was found that met Eramo’s demands.

The attorney went on to say that Eramo was attacking Jackie with attempts to obtain these documents and that it was inappropriate to include details of the assault that weren’t mentioned in the original interviews conducted by Rolling Stone. “Rolling Stone doesn’t think there’s any merit,” O’Beirne said.

Hoppe concluded in his order that any further explanation of Jackie’s search process was “unnecessary and not calculated to lead to a stone unturned.”

Updated: June 22 with judge’s decision

UVA Associate Dean Nicole Eramo seeks Jackie’s text messages

The University of Virginia dean suing Rolling Stone for more than $7.5 million after a now-discredited story about a university gang rape at a fraternity house, which she said painted her as the “chief villain” in the case, is asking for access to the alleged rape victim’s text messages and other communications.

Associate Dean Nicole Eramo’s legal team filed documents January 6 that say Jackie, the alleged victim in the 2012 story titled “A Rape on Campus,” should not be protected from having to reveal her texts because there’s no evidence that a rape actually took place.

“What Jackie is refusing to produce is not evidence of a sexual assault, but evidence that she lied,” Eramo’s lawyers wrote in a submitted document, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.

The associate dean’s attorneys call Jackie a “serial liar” in the filings and seek documents related to Haven Monahan, the student Jackie says she was on a date with the night of the alleged rape and whom officials later learned was never a student at UVA. A person by the name of Haven Monahan has never been found or linked to the case.

A January 8 Washington Post article, “‘Catfishing’ over love interest might have spurred U-Va. gang-rape debacle,” suggests that Jackie created Monahan, a fake suitor, to spark love between herself and fellow university student Ryan Duffin. She encouraged Duffin to text Monahan, whom she said was in her chemistry class, and Duffin told the Post that Monahan seemed “infatuated” with Jackie. In a later investigation, photos of Monahan, which he purportedly sent to Duffin, were determined to be photos of a person from Jackie’s high school, who was not Monahan.

Monahan once told Duffin in a text message that he should have more sympathy for Jackie because she had a terminal illness. Duffin says he asked Jackie about the illness and she confirmed to him that she was dying.

Jackie has not been named as the defendant in any of the three lawsuits the retracted story has spawned. Along with Eramo’s suit, one has been filed by the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi, where the rape allegedly took place, and by a smaller group of men from the fraternity who say they were alluded to in the story.