Maybe not. The pain and suffering experienced by the fraternity members was probably quite significant, considering they were the targets of death threats, vandalism, lost their living quarters, were subject to university and police investigations, and the story was widely disseminated via the internet. They may have had spent money to retain attorneys, they may have dropped out of classes or had their classwork suffer as a result, they probably lived in constant fear until the results of the police investigation were revealed. All of these damages are real and have nothing to do with their reputations.
I agree with Bay. Windows were broken in their house…windows…criminal vandals threw stuff through their windows. I’m sure no one felt “safe”…the irony about Title IX and feeling safe has escaped no one with simple cognitive skills just look at the comments to this weeks Wapo, NYT etc. and to top it off RS apologized to everyone but the frat guys. For that alone it’s worth suing, for being so devalued as humans that you don’t even get an apology… it’s worth suing.
They did get an apology.
I still think the fraternity should sue, but if you care about accuracy in Rolling Stone’s articles you should also care about accuracy in what you post, @momofthreeboys.
CF, the magazine apologized to the fraternity, but the reporter, Ms. Erdsley, did not. Perhaps on legal advice?
Does the fraternity have a legal case against Erdely personally? I’m not asking whether she was at fault, because she obviously was, but doesn’t the legal liability reside with the publisher?
ETA: I don’t think much of Erdely’s apology, either. Her first sentence is whiny: “The past few months, since my Rolling Stone article A Rape on Campus was first called into question, have been among the most painful of my life.” Yeah, yeah, get out the world’s tiniest violin. We don’t want to hear how much she suffered for her monumental screwup.
Then she apologizes, but as @zoosermom notices, she doesn’t apologize to the fraternity she smeared. And then the entire second paragraph of the apology is about how hard it is to do her job.
The four elements of an apology are admitting you did it, admitting you shouldn’t have done it, expressing remorse, and resolving not to do it again. Hers has too little of the four elements and too much of her excuses.
You are right, Bay! I underestimated the damages. Could they upper the nominal amount to 12 kegs
?
To be clear, I do not hold the media or RS close to my heart, and support a more objective and less sensationalist media. I think people like the writer and her editors do not deserve credit or free passes at ruining the life of people through careless articles.
As far as victims, I happen to think they are still the countless ones that did not make the news. As far as the frats, aren’t we back to that collateral damage calculation. A few frats boys who were scared among 300,000 or more … does it matter more than a couple of deaths every year?
Twisting the simple facts is not hard!
@xiggi, So it’s Sentence first, Verdict afterwards?
I’m not following you xiggi. You are saying that negligent infliction of material and emotional damages to these young men should be discredited because some students accidentally die each year in a fraternity-related way?
I’d kindly suggest you stop posting about fraternity men, because your obvious bias is taking your logic over a cliff.
The sentiment is mutual, Bay! And I also suggest it with kindness. This said, why would either of us stop posting according to our obvious biases. I have no problem in expressing my continuing distaste for all that is Greek and admitting my bias. On the other hand, I tend to rely on facts!
As far as my logic, please note that I did not follow yours either when you consider the annual death(s) at the hand of fraternities to be within a low (and I assume) acceptable range. Isn’t it what you professed? Thus, why would the same logic not apply when an extremely rare case of injustice and an extremely case of (external) vandalism impacting one fraternity in a blue moon.
If you care about justice so much, why do you dismiss the deaths through a statistical analysis?
Xiggi
You know very well I didn’t say any number of deaths is acceptable. That is a ridiculous idea. I was citing a real poster’s “evidence” that fraternities are evil and dangerous, that evidence being that there was one accidental death per year. Which turns out to be a very low number for 350,000 college-aged men. It would be odd not to acknowledge what that could mean.
That doesn’t mean I think any deaths at all are okay. But I’m a realist and I accept that people die every year in accidents. We are never going to be able to prevent them all.
I am with Hunt on this. The frat is going to get very little. The frat should be compensated for physical damage to the living quarters.
Pain and suffering?
Not going to get much.
Adding that I fully support the families of wrongful death victims taking legal action, just as I support these young men doing so.
Absolutely. So they don’t get much, they deserve whatever it cost in damage to the house minimal and they deserve to see the vandals brought to honor court.
Title IX is being interpreted by universities on a regular basis to mean that it’s OK for one person to be scared and if that one person is scared and considers the environment hostile the college needs to do something…like expel the person that the one person is accusing of creating a hostile environment. So what you are saying is that it is OK for an entire house full of males to be in a hostile environment and that’s OK. In my book what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If having bricks thrown through your bedroom window by other students isn’t a hostile environment I don’t know what is.
It is the guys’ own fault. They drink.
For once dstark you made me chuckle!
The damage to the fraternity and to the University was/is troubling. It is easy to dismiss some of this if you or your child had no connection to UVa. That was quite obvious in the original rush to judgment in the media and on these boards.
UVA will be fine. My school survived a visit from Jane Fonda.
It had to be very damaging to the UVA community. It unnecessarily pitted students against students. Several administrators probably feared for the loss of their jobs. Taxpayer dollars were wasted investigating a crime that never occurred. I even feel bad for the vandals who may have been expelled for actions they believed were righteous at the time. I don’t see how it can all be “just fine.”
Of course UVa will be “just fine” but it has been a stressful time , especially for the students who were already reeling from the murder of Hannah. Rolling Stone/Erdeley capitalized on that and I think she was in the middle of looking for a story so she hit the jackpot. I don’t think she seriously considered looking at her school- Penn, or other Ivy League schools but I could be mistaken on that.
Thank you Bay. People outside of this have no clue.