He absolutely knew about this before it was going to run, he just doesn’t care ‘because the point was the same’ or some crappola.
“We had some internal discussion about whether the flaws in the [Rolling Stone] reporting mattered here, and we concluded they didn’t,” Trudeau says.”
“For any newspaper editors who might have balked at the campus-rape “Doonesbury” comic, a substitute strip was at the ready. The syndicate tells Comic Riffs that it received replacement requests from the Chicago Tribune, the Bergen Record, the Providence Journal and the Evansville Courier.”
FReegards
OMG, it’s worse than I thought. He just couldn’t resist the opportunity to perpetuate the slander. Some commentators said that when the dust settled, the public would remember lie, not that it was a hoax.
Might UVA have a cause of action against Mr. Trudeau?
Just can’t let the inconvenient truth get in the way of the desired narrative, eh?
I’m guessing that his acknowlegement that the “flaws” in the Rolling Stone article didn’t matter open him up to libel charges.
Not that UVA will pursue them, or that the modern court system would permit the plaintiffs to win ... but the point of lawfare is to create messy, public and expensive to defend lawsuits where winning is a secondary consideration.