Lawyers for a University of Virginia official suing Rolling Stone for defamation over a story about an alleged campus rape filed evidence that the student involved made up the person she identified as her main attacker,
The Washington Post reports.
U-Va. associate dean Nicole Eramo's lawsuit seeks more than $7.5 million in damages over the
story — since retracted — that indicated Eramo didn't take the rape claims of the student, identified as "Jackie," seriously.
"Jackie" told Rolling Stone she was gang-raped as part of a fraternity initiation in 2012, and that a student named "Haven Monahan" was the ringleader. Ryan Duffin, who was friends with "Jackie" at U-Va., told the Post he thinks "Jackie" made up "Haven Monahan" and his Yahoo email account to let her know about her romantic interest in him.
Eramo's legal team is filing notes that no student named Haven Monahan ever attended the university and that the email address linked to him was created on October 2, 2012 at a computer linked to U-Va.'s system. One day later, Duffin received an email from Monahan's account that forwarded a letter from "Jackie" in which she expresses her love for Duffin.
Eramo's lawyers have previously asked for all correspondence between "Jackie" and Monahan, and were told by one of "Jackie's" lawyers, Rebecca Anzidei of the Stein Mitchell Muse Cipollone & Beato law firm, that all such correspondence had been supplied.
But the new filing by Eramo's lawyers cites records from Yahoo that someone in the Stein Mitchell law accessed Haven Monahan's address on March 18, 2016. Four days after that, "Jackie’s" lawyers said in a letter "that Jackie was not in possession of these emails," according to the filing.
The "only one logical conclusion: Jackie is 'Haven Monahan,'" Eramo's lawyers say.
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