A Rape On Campus: A Brutal Assault On Campus

On November 19, 2014, the publication of an arIt was on November 19, 2014 that the publication of an article in the Rolling Stone magazine concerning sexual assault on campus led to two long and complex court cases.The article titled “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA” was describing the gang rape of a University of Virginia freshmen identified as “Jackie” perpetrated by fraternity members of the UVA Phi Kappa Psi house. The article also identifies the existence of a certain UVA junior named“Drew” who happens to be the member that invited “Jackie’ at the house. While the two court cases Elias et al v. Rolling Stone LLC and Eramo v. Rolling Stone LLC were linked to this same article and had the same defendants,

Regarding the defendants, both cases were filed against Rolling Stone LLC and Wenner Media LLC, two privately held Delaware limited liability companies located in New York, New York. Both companies are working in conjunction and are being collectively referred as Rolling Stone. The third defendant is Sabrina Rubin Elderly, a journalist and magazine reporter that was a contributing editor for the Rolling Stone magazine at the time. She was as well the author and publisher of the defamatory article. For the first case, the plaintiff(s) are three fraternity members of Phi Kappa Psi who graduated from UVA in 2013. Their names are George Elias, Stephen Hadford and Ross Fowler. All of them brought defamation claims against the plaintiff and article’s author Elderly as well as the publishers of Rolling Stone. Their claims were based on the statement that the article was “of and concerning” them, giving that the article contained details identifying them as the attackers of the gang rape to the eyes of their friends and relatives. The complaint also states that they were “easily identified and established as the alleged rapists” through internet search engines and social media profiles. The plaintiffs filed three defamation claims; count one was for the online edition of the article dated to Nov 19, 2014; count two was for the print edition of the article; count three was for the comments made by Elderly in a podcast interview and the last count for negligent infliction of emotional distress. For the second case, the plaintiff is the University of Virginia Associate Dean Nicole Eramo. The articles states Eramo was put in touch with Jackie after the supposedly event happened. At this time, Eramo was very involved with the school concerning the support brought to sexual assault victims. She was in charge of taking sexual assault complaints as well as helping victims in their recovery. She was also part