Nicole Eramo (Photo: Marshall Bronfin) 
 
 A defamation lawsuit filed by a former University of Virginia dean against Rolling Stone magazine for its botched article about an alleged gang rape at the Charlottesville school is set for trial starting Monday. 
 
 Nicole Eramo was the associate dean of students who counseled "Jackie," an otherwise unidentified student whose tale of sexual brutality in a fraternity house set off a nationwide firestorm when the magazine published the article in November 2014. Eramo is suing the magazine for almost $8 million, saying A Rape on Campus cast her as the "chief villain." 
 
 Lawyers for Eramo have included Jackie on their witness list. 
 
 The gripping article detailed Jackie's claim that she was at a fraternity party on Sept. 28, 2012, when she was lured upstairs, raped and beaten by several men over a three-hour period. The fraternity immediately challenged the article's claims, which quickly drew intense media scrutiny followed by skepticism. 
 
 Charlottesville police investigated and found no evidence of rape. The magazine commissioned the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to study the way the article was handled. That 13,000-word report — 4,000 words longer than the article itself — found a systematic failure by the magazine, starting with relying too heavily on a single source: Jackie. The report also said the magazine, not Jackie, was to blame for the botched piece. 
 
 The magazine issued an apology in December 2014 for its failures in reporting and editing. The story was fully retracted four months later. 
 
 Eramo's lawsuit claims writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely and the magazine sought "to weave a narrative that depicted the University of Virginia as an institution that is indifferent to rape on campus, and more concerned with protecting its reputation than with assisting victims of sexual assault." 
 
 The lawsuit says Rolling Stone falsely accused Eramo of being instrumental in persuading Jackie not to report the rape and discouraging Jackie from sharing her story with others or telling police. 
 
 Eramo still works for the university, but no longer as a dean of students. She spoke with ABC News last week, saying Rolling Stone depicted her as insensitive to students who were sexual assault victims. 
 
 “They made it look like I used the trust of, yeah, women to cover up rapes,” Eramo said. “And that was so far from anything I would ever do. It was just unbelievable to me.” 
 
 The magazine issued a statement accusing Eramo's lawyers of "attempting to shift the focus of her lawsuit in the media to Rolling Stone’s reporting errors." The statement pointed to a U.S. Education Department investigation of the university's practices — an investigation that found a "mixed record of responding to reports of sexual harassment and sexual violence." 
 
 Rolling Stone said the depiction of Eramo in its ill-fated article "was balanced and described the challenges of her role.” 
 
 Eramo's lawsuit also has drawn the ire of the National Organization for Women. In an open letter to university President Teresa Sullivan in January, NOW said demands made by Eramo's lawyers for detailed information from Jackie amounted to "re-victimization." 
 
 "It is exactly this kind of victim blaming and shaming that fosters rape culture, re-victimizes those brave enough to have come forward, and silences countless other victims," the letter said. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2eGsQFu ||||| Steve Helber / AP ID: 9801032 
 
 Attorneys defending Rolling Stone in a libel case will be allowed to use a controversial interview between a student journalist and Nicole Eramo, the University of Virginia administrator who is suing the magazine over a retracted article about campus rape. 
 
 The trial in Eramo’s $7.8 million defamation suit against Rolling Stone and reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely begins Monday in Charlottesville and refocuses attention on the story of an alleged gang rape of a woman identified in the article as Jackie. The story rocked the campus, but the circumstances of the assault as described in Erdely’s November 2014 story “A Rape on Campus” were discredited by other media outlets and by local police. Rolling Stone retracted the 9,000-word article in April 2015. 
 
 US District Judge Glen E. Conrad issued several rulings Thursday about what evidence he’s permitting in the trial. In a boon to Eramo, Conrad will allow a report by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism highlighting the story’s failures, and a letter signed by dozens of students defending Eramo after Rolling Stone’s article was published. He will also permit witnesses to refer to the results of the Charlottesville police investigation. 
 
 In a decision sought by Rolling Stone, Conrad will let witnesses bring up the findings of a federal investigation that found the university violated Title IX when dealing with sexual assault cases, and he’ll allow testimony about Eramo’s interview with student news station WUVA. 
 
 The WUVA interview attracted widespread attention before the article unraveled. In it, Eramo, then an associate dean of students, defended a school practice of not expelling students who admitted to committing sexual assault. While many news outlets wrote about it after the Rolling Stone article, portions of the interview came out more than a month before “A Rape on Campus” was published. The magazine will use the interview to try to show that Erdely had reason to believe Jackie’s claims that Eramo was callous toward her when she reported that she had been raped. 
 
 Rolling Stone’s reporting drew condemnation throughout the journalism world after reports showed that Erdely had failed to contact Jackie’s alleged assailants, her friends, or “Drew,” the supposed ringleader of the attack, who didn’t actually exist. In fact, details of Jackie’s gang rape story are similar to the plotline of a 2013 episode of Law & Order: SVU — which the judge ruled will not be allowed in the trial. 
 
 Despite the evidence showing Rolling Stone’s failures of journalism’s best practices, the judge has ruled that Eramo is a “limited-purpose public figure,” which means she must convince the jury that Erdely acted with “actual malice” and intentionally ignored doubts about her sourcing. 
 
 “If she is a limited public figure, then you look for evidence of whether this was a convincing-enough source, or were there red flags that required more inquiry,” John Diamond, a University of California, Hastings, law professor, told BuzzFeed News. 
 
 Eramo’s lawyers will try to show that Erdely “went so far down the road with this story, she was never going to let the facts get in the way of a good story,” Stuart Karle, former general counsel to the Wall Street Journal, told BuzzFeed News. “They’ll try to say to the jury, this woman — the dean — never had a chance of being covered fairly.” 
 
 But Rolling Stone will use the WUVA interview as evidence that its staff had reason to believe Jackie’s accusations that Eramo may have been indifferent to sexual assault reports. 
 
 “I feel like this litigation is somewhat of a challenge of the full [WUVA interview], frankly,” Eramo said in a deposition cited in court documents. She told Rolling Stone’s lawyers that she agreed to do the interview with Catherine Valentine, then a UVA student, because she thought it was a class project. She did not request a correction or retraction of the interview, Eramo said, but she considered pursuing disciplinary action against the students involved because they did not warn her that it would be published. 
 
 The Full WUVA Interview With Nicole Eramo youtube.com ID: 9801047 
 
 “I strongly considered filing honor charges against one of the students, against Catherine in particular, but I felt like maybe I was being petty, and I didn’t really think it was that — a serious enough offense to be expelled from the university, so I didn’t feel like I should do that,” Eramo said in a May deposition. 
 
 The interview was later cited in the 2015 findings of a Department of Education investigation of how UVA handles sexual assault cases. Eramo’s statements in the interview, federal officials said, caused students to believe the school would not impose serious sanctions on offenders, and so fewer victims would report assaults. 
 
 Lawyers for Eramo said in court filings they did not want the WUVA interview cited because it had nothing to do with Jackie, and they did not want to let Rolling Stone turn the trial “into a referendum on UVA’s sexual assault policies.” 
 
 Reached this week by BuzzFeed News, Libby Locke, Eramo’s attorney, said her team aren’t worried about the WUVA interview or the Department of Education findings because evidence will show her client encouraged Jackie to pursue criminal charges against the alleged assailants. 
 
 “Rolling Stone knew these facts, but they didn’t allow these inconvenient truths to get in the way of the narrative that they sought to tell about Ms. Eramo’s supposed indifference to Jackie’s claims,” Locke told BuzzFeed News in an email. 
 
 Eramo’s suit against Rolling Stone argues that the magazine piece damaged her reputation and harmed her health. The judge ruled that her lawyers will be allowed to question a medical expert about whether stress from the story affected Eramo’s recovery from a surgery. 
 
 Eramo no longer handles sexual assault cases at UVA and now works in the vice president for student affairs’ office, dealing with administrative planning for various campus initiatives. 
 
 The trial in federal court is expected to last at least two weeks. ||||| Photo: Jay Paul/Getty Images 
 
 Two months after Rolling Stone published a female student’s account of being gang-raped at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, the story began to unravel. Sabrina Erdely, who wrote the story, eventually admitted she had not interviewed the men whom her primary source, “Jackie,” accused of gang rape, and the magazine officially retracted the story in April 2015. A month later, University of Virginia associate dean of students Nicole Eramo filed a defamation lawsuit against Rolling Stone. 
 
 Eramo’s suit claims Erdely deliberately depicted her as an unsympathetic administrator more concerned with protecting the school’s reputation than with encouraging “Jackie” to report the incident. The trial, which begins on Monday, will focus heavily on whether Erdely and Rolling Stone acted with actual malice when reporting the story. In other words, to win the case, Eramo’s lawyers will have to prove that Erdely knew what she was writing about Eramo was false or inaccurate but chose to print it anyway. 
 
 According to a statement made to ABC, Eramo’s legal team will present “overwhelming evidence showing that Sabrina Erdely and Rolling Stone knew that what they published about Ms. Eramo was false and defamatory.” But lawyers for Rolling Stone argued the magazine’s depiction of Eramo was nuanced and accurate. 
 
 “Dean Eramo’s lawyers are attempting to shift the focus of her lawsuit in the media to Rolling Stone’s reporting errors surrounding Jackie,” Kathryn Brenner, a spokeswoman for the magazine, said in an email. “The depiction of Dean Eramo in the article was balanced and described the challenges of her role. We now look forward to the jury’s decision in this case.” 
 
 The trial will begin on Monday and is set to include testimony from “Jackie,” which, ABC reports, could be presented in video form.
– A defamation case against Rolling Stone magazine over a botched article on campus rape at the University of Virginia gets underway Monday. Some related developments: "Jackie," the student who claimed to have been gang-raped at a frat party, is expected to testify as a live witness during the two-week trial, reports the Charlottesville Daily Progress. (The magazine retracted the article after Jackie's claims began unraveling and police found no evidence it happened.) Former UVa dean of students Nicole Eramo is suing for $8 million because she says writer Sabrina Erdely portrayed her as uncaring toward students and willing to sweep allegations under the rug. "To win the case, Eramo’s lawyers will have to prove that Erdely knew what she was writing about Eramo was false or inaccurate but chose to print it anyway," notes New York magazine. The judge will allow witnesses to discuss a federal report that previously faulted UVa for its investigation of sex assault cases, as well as interviews given by Eramo defending the school's policy. See BuzzFeed. The National Organization for Women hates that Jackie must testify. "It is exactly this kind of victim blaming and shaming that fosters rape culture, re-victimizes those brave enough to have come forward, and silences countless other victims," it says in a letter, per USA Today. This isn't the only lawsuit Rolling Stone faces over the story; a second, from the accused frat, seeks $25 million. But legal experts don't think the magazine is headed toward a Gawker-like fate even if it loses them. See the New York Times. For reporter Erdely, this has been her "worst nightmare."