The US publisher of music magazine Rolling Stone has had to pay $US1.65 million ($A2.19 million) to a fraternity at the University of Virginia after a 2014 article it published falsely accused a group of men from the campus of being involved in a gang rape.
Rolling Stone had since retracted the article, however, it didn’t stop the fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, from lodging a lawsuit seeking an initial $US25 million in damages.
The article did not appear in the Australian edition.
The original article centred around claims a woman had been raped on campus in 2012 by as many as seven men from Phi Kappa Psi.
Phi Kappa Psi said it would donate a large portion of the settlement to groups providing services to combat sexual assault on US college campuses. The source of the allegations came from a student named “Jackie” and later proved to be utterly false. None of the seven men accused of the rape were interviewed for the article.
The two parties reached an out-of-court settlement before the magazine and the article’s author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, were due in court in October.
“It has been nearly three years since we and the entire University of Virginia community were shocked by the now infamous article,” the fraternity said in a statement, “and we are pleased to be able to close the book on that trying ordeal and its aftermath.”
The magazine itself and the author of the piece have so far declined to comment.
