UVA Fraternity Hits Rolling Stone With $25 Million Lawsuit

The lawsuit also named the article’s author, Sabrina Erdely, as a defendant.

The claim, filed by the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter at UVA, seeks $25 million from the magazine of pop culture and current events for “presumed damages, compensatory damages and actual damages for harm and injury to its reputation”.

The Phi Kappa Psi chapter at the University of Virginia filed the complaint on Monday at Charlottesville Circuit Court.

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In a press statement released in March, the fraternity called for Rolling Stone to retract the article.

It states the magazine ignored facts and potential leads that would have shown that the allegations of the alleged gang rape were fabricated.

The article roiled the U.Va. community, sparking protests at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house and a wrenching period of soul-searching by the university. Three individual fraternity members and recent graduates of the University of Virginia are suing for at least $225,000 each, and a university associate dean who claims she was portrayed as the “chief villain” is suing the magazine for more than $7.5 million.

The lawsuit contends that Rolling Stone and Erdely wanted to advance a narrative of college campus sexual violence by depicting a rape, whether it was true or not, the statement said.

The magazine faces two other lawsuits in relation to the story.

The fraternity was at the center of a now debunked RS article, “A Rape on Campus” by Erdley.

The story ignited a national firestorm both over the graphic nature of the alleged assault and what appeared to be a callous response from the university.

Rolling Stone commissioned Columbia Journalism School to conduct an investigation of the story, a probe that uncovered numerous flaws in Erdely’s reporting and the magazine’s editing process.

The story told of a University of Virginia freshman named “Jackie” who purportedly went to a “date function” at Phi Kappa Psi, where seven men brutally raped her in a bedroom.