NEW YORK — A defamation lawsuit against Rolling Stone over the magazine’s debunked article about a University of Virginia gang rape was reinstated Tuesday by an appeals court in a manner that one judge says would allow any member of a school fraternity to join the lawsuit.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said three former students can sue, in part because the November 2014 article could enable a reader to conclude that many or all members of a fraternity participated in gang rapes as an initiation ritual and that all members knowingly ignored the brutal crimes.
An investigation by Charlottesville, Virginia, police found no evidence to back up the claims of the woman identified in the article as “Jackie,” who told the magazine she had been raped by seven men at a fraternity house in September 2012.
Rolling Stone later retracted the article and apologized.
A lower-court judge had thrown out the lawsuit by three Phi Kappa Psi members who graduated in 2013.
In a statement Tuesday, Rolling Stone said it was disappointed by the 2nd Circuit ruling but was “confident that this case has no merit.”
In restoring the lawsuit, the appeals court noted that the article stated that two other female students reported to Jackie that they had been gang-raped at the fraternity and that a decades-long “trail” of sexual violence included a gang rape committed at the fraternity in 1984.
