Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana Resigns, Magazine Fields Another Lawsuit
ByRolling Stone continues to feel the backlash from their retracted story about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia (UVA) fraternity house, as their managing editor announced his resignation and three graduates filed a defamation lawsuit.
According to the New York Times, Will Dana announced his resignation as Rolling Stone's managing editor without naming a successor and without lining up another job. Jann S. Wenner, the magazine's publisher, told the newspaper via a spokeswoman "many factors" led to Dana's resignation.
The defamation suit the three UVA graduates and Phi Kappa Psi members filed against Rolling Stone is the third the magazine has fielded as a result of the retracted story. The three fraternity members all graduated in 2013, Reuters reported, and one claimed Rolling Stone implied the alleged gang rape occurred in his room.
George Elias IV, Stephen Hadford, and Ross Fowler each claim to have suffered "emotional turmoil" as a result of the article.
"Upon release of the article, family, friends, acquaintances, coworkers and reporters easily matched Plaintiff as one of the alleged attackers and, among other things, interrogated him, humiliated him, and scolded him," their lawsuit states.
Rolling Stone was already facing a defamation suit from the Phi Kappa Psi national office and from Nicole Eramo, a UVA associate dean of students who claims to have been vilified in the article.
But before retracting the article and issuing an apology, Rolling Stone commissioned the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to conduct a review of the article and the editorial process that led to its publication. Steve Coll, the school's dean, and his colleagues deemed the article a "journalistic failure."
Still, Wenner accused the alleged victim, who detailed the gang rape and what came after under the pseudonym "Jackie" to Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the article's author, of lying throughout the entire process. So far, Dana is the only person to lose their job in the wake of the article's retraction, but Wenner has yet to fire anyone on the editorial staff.