In one of many lawsuits that have followed Rolling Stone's retracted report on an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia, new evidence shows that Jackie — a UVA student and the alleged survivor of the assault — may have created her chief attacker's persona.
The findings, which support various discrepancies found in Jackie's story, were filed Monday by the legal team of UVA assistant dean Nicole Eramo, who sued Rolling Stone last year for depicting her as the "chief villain" who "did nothing" in its 2014 article. As reported by the Washington Post, the filing presents new data from the Yahoo email account of "Haven Monahan," an upperclassman who allegedly took Jackie on a date during her freshman year and later to his fraternity house, where she claimed he and other fraternity members raped her in September 2012.
Evidence from Eramo's legal team shows Haven's email account was created on October 2, 2012, while connected to UVA's computer network. The next day, Ryan Duffin, a student who knew Jackie at UVA, received an email from Haven forwarding a letter Jackie had written to him, confessing her love for Duffin.
Charlottesville police earlier revealed that no one named Haven Monahan had ever been a student at UVA. Photographs of Haven that were texted to one of Jackie's friends were found to picture one of Jackie's high school classmates who attends college in another state.
Eramo’s lawyers claimed Jackie is “a serial liar who invented” her story, and that the Yahoo data presents “only one logical conclusion: Jackie is ‘Haven Monahan.'”
As this extremely rare legal battle continues, it's worth remembering an important point made by Duffin: "Whether [or not] this one incident is true, there’s still a huge problem with sexual assault in the United States."