Jury Begins Deliberating in Rolling Stone Defamation Suit
The jury has heard from a dozen witnesses in the $7.5 million suit.
— -- Jurors began deliberating this morning in a $7.5 million defamation suit against Rolling Stone magazine for its retracted story “A Rape on Campus,” written by journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely.
The 10 jurors have to agree unanimously on whether statements in the article damaged University of Virginia administrator Nicole Eramo by not just being “insulting, offensive, unpleasant or inappropriate,” but by harming her “reputation rendering her contemptible or ridiculous in the public’s estimation,” according to the jury instructions. If they vote yes, the jury must also unanimously agree on whether the statements were made with actual malice.
U.S. District Judge Glen Conrad defined “actual malice” as statements that were knowingly false or made with reckless disregard for truth.
But “failure to investigate is not actual malice,” he added.
The defendants in the case are Erdely, Rolling Stone magazine and the magazine's publisher, Wenner Media. Judge Conrad read instructions to jurors for over an hour, and they were instructed to assess each defendant's actions independently of one another.
Eramo says the magazine portrayed her as a villain who discouraged the woman identified only as “Jackie” in the article from reporting her alleged brutal gang rape to police.
Jackie’s haunting tale as the alleged victim of a vicious sexual assault that was depicted in the magazine stunned the nation and prompted a widespread discussion about sexual assault on college campuses.
The 9,000-word Rolling Stone article published in 2014 captured in graphic details the night Jackie says she was allegedly brutally gang raped by several men when she was a freshman at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The plaintiff attorneys alleged that the article also described her as supposedly facing callous indifference from college authorities.
But after publication, police said they had no reason to believe a rape as Jackie had described it had taken place. A Columbia University Journalism School report found the story to be "a journalistic failure," citing one issue as being that Erdely did not interview any of the alleged perpetrators of the crime.
Rolling Stone ultimately retracted the story after the Columbia University report.
In her suit, Eramo claims she was unfairly portrayed as trying to sweep Jackie's sexual assault under the rug to protect the university and is seeking $7.5 million from the magazine.
There were three statements about Eramo in the article in question, including one in which she is quoted — through Jackie — as saying the university doesn't publish all its statistics about sexual assault because "nobody wants to send their daughter to the rape school."
Eramo also claims that Erdely defamed her in statements she made on a radio program and podcast after the article was published. Eramo also claims that the magazine re-published the story on Dec. 5, 2014, when they added an editor's note to the story that the magazine had made some mistakes and was investigating the events of the evening of the alleged gang-rape.
The jury was instructed to decide whether the republishing of the story was intended to reach a new audience of readers with false and inflammatory content.
"The timeline of the case is important," Judge Conrad said.
Earlier in the week, Conrad dismissed Eramo's claim that the story, when taken as a whole, implied that she was a "false friend" to Jackie, which Rolling Stone called a "critical element" of her case.
"The judge dismissed a critical element of Plaintiff's case -- her claim that the Article's overall implication defamed her. We are pleased that the judge recognizes the limitations of Plaintiff's lawsuit and we trust the jury will find that her remaining claims also have no merit," Rolling Stone said in a statement to ABC News.
Over the course of the more than two-week trial, the 10 jurors have watched 11 hours of video testimony, heard from a dozen live witnesses and have examined nearly 300 exhibits. Jurors will first decide whether the statements in the article defamed Eramo before, if warranted, they consider monetary damages.
Rolling Stone has agreed to pay all Erdely's legal costs and any penalties that may be levied against her.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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