Rolling Stone Asks Judge To Overturn Jury Verdict

Rolling Stone has asked a federal judge to overrule a jury’s $3 million defamation verdict issued last month. A 10-member jury found that Rolling Stone journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely defamed former University of Virginia dean Nicole Eramo in a Nov. 2014 article about campus sexual assault that has since been retracted. The article relied on the account of one student, called Jackie in the article, who relayed the story of a brutal gang-rape that took place in a U. Va. fraternity. A Washington Post investigation after the fact called that account into question, and the article was formally retracted. In this week’s filing, Rolling Stone lawyers argued that the jury was wrong to find that the magazine published the article a second time, in December 2014, when an editor’s note was placed on top of the online version of the story. “It defies logic for a jury to find that by placing a prominent disclaimer on the article notifying readers that Rolling Stone no longer stood behind Jackie as a source, apologizing, and promising a full investigation, Rolling Stone was actually trying to recruit a new audience and spread now-discredited information from Jackie,” the lawyers wrote.

The lawyers argued that, if allowed to stand, the jury’s ruling could set a precedent that would discourage news organizations from acknowledging mistakes in a timely manner. “Publishers will find a perverse incentive in this result: if you do the right thing by appending a contraction, retraction, or apology to an online article as soon as you are aware that it may have problems, you risk ‘republishing’ the content and facing a seven-figure liability,” the filing reads.