The University of Virginia fraternity at the center of a retracted article by Rolling Stone magazine that detailed a purported gang rape by its members on Monday said that it planned “to pursue all available legal action against the magazine.”
The fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, issued a statement after the release of a damning report that the magazine commissioned from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which described how Rolling Stone’s journalistic process failed at every step before the article’s publication in November last year.
Despite the public criticism of the article, and its retraction, legal experts said the path to a successful defamation lawsuit by the fraternity was not straightforward.
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The report, which was released on Sunday night, “demonstrates the reckless nature in which Rolling Stone researched and failed to verify facts in its article that erroneously accused Phi Kappa Psi of crimes its members did not commit,” Stephen Scipione, the president of the Virginia fraternity chapter, said in the statement.
The fraternity has retained a lawyer, but has not yet taken any formal action, a spokesman said.
The fraternity would have to allow a public examination of its social activities, said Charles Tobin, who heads the national media practice for the law firm Holland & Knight, which might include potentially embarrassing details from parties it has held. It would also be required to show that the claims made in the article were “of and concerning it” as an entity.
And if the fraternity was deemed legally to be a public entity instead of a private one, as legal experts said was likely, Tobin said it would have to “establish actual malice — not that Rolling Stone committed bad journalism, but that it knowingly committed a falsehood.”
Tobin said: “It would be colossally difficult for them to make a successful claim.”
Rolling Stone declined to comment on any potential legal action against the magazine.
After the report, and the article’s retraction, Rolling Stone was criticized by the University of Virginia and by the governor and the attorney general of the state. On social media, some railed against the decision to allow the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely; its editor, Sean Woods; and Rolling Stone managing editor, Will Dana, to keep their jobs.
On Monday, at a news conference to discuss the report, two of the report’s authors — Steve Coll, the Columbia journalism school’s dean, and Sheila Coronel, dean of academic affairs — said that Rolling Stone commissioned the report, in part as an attempt to allow others to learn from its mistakes.
They also rejected the notion that story source “Jackie” was to blame for the article’s issues.
The magazine’s reporting was at fault and they stood by their recommendations for more robust newsroom practices, they said.
“This failure was not the subject’s or the source’s fault,” Coll said. “It was the product of failed methodology.”
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