Atlantic Settles Writer’s Suit Over Article It Retracted

Media|Atlantic Settles Writer’s Suit Over Article It Retracted

The Atlantic quietly agreed to pay more than $1 million early this summer to settle a lawsuit by the writer Ruth Shalit Barrett, who had accused the magazine of defamation after it took the rare step of retracting an article she had written and replacing it with an editor’s note, according to a person with knowledge of the settlement.

Ms. Barrett, who wrote an article about youth sports in wealthy areas as a freelancer for The Atlantic in 2020, sued the publication and one of its editors in January 2022. She said the outlet had smeared her reputation and asked for $1 million in damages.

Both sides agreed to resolve their dispute in mediation in April and asked for the suit to be voluntarily dismissed on June 27 when they reached a settlement, according to court documents. The Atlantic made updates to the editor’s note on the online version of the article on June 26.

Ms. Barrett declined to comment on the settlement. She said in a statement that she was pleased that The Atlantic had updated its editor’s note but said she still believed it had errors and hoped for “further revisions of the note and a reversal of the retraction.”

An Atlantic spokeswoman, Anna Bross, said in a statement, “The story remains retracted, and that will not change, nor will the editor’s note be updated further.”

The lengthy article, “The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports,” published online in October 2020 and in the November 2020 print issue, explored how wealthy parents were pushing their children into extreme training in sports like fencing and lacrosse as a pathway into Ivy League colleges.

The article was published under the byline Ruth S. Barrett. In the 1990s, while writing for The New Republic as Ruth Shalit before she married and was becoming known as a rising star in the journalistic world, the writer was accused of two instances of plagiarism. She said both were inadvertent and apologized. She left the magazine several years later.

Within days of The Atlantic’s article publishing, Erik Wemple, then a media critic at The Washington Post, began raising concerns about the article, including the veracity of some details and whether the different byline misled readers. (Mr. Wemple was recently hired as a reporter by The New York Times and will start this month.)

The Atlantic began looking into his accusations and retracted the entire article on Nov. 1, 2020. In an editor’s note in place of the article online, The Atlantic said: “We cannot attest to the trustworthiness and credibility of the author, and therefore we cannot attest to the veracity of the article.”

The note said the fact-checking department had revisited the article and found that Ms. Barrett deceived the magazine. It said she had encouraged an anonymous source, named “Sloane” in the article, to lie to a fact-checker about having a son so that the source would be more difficult to identify. Ms. Barrett, the note added, first denied the allegations to the magazine but then “admitted that she was ‘complicit’ in ‘compounding the deception.’” The note went on to say that Ms. Barrett’s byline had been updated to Ruth Shalit Barrett.

Before filing her lawsuit, Ms. Barrett’s lawyers told The Atlantic that the publication could avoid litigation if it agreed to put a correction on the editor’s note, pay legal fees and hand over the intellectual property rights to the article, while warning that any post-suit settlement “would require monetary compensation,” according to a December 2021 legal letter.

No such actions were taken, and Ms. Barrett filed her suit in January 2022. She argued that she was punished much too harshly for minor factual inaccuracies and what she saw as her attempt to uphold her agreement to shield her source’s identity.

She also took issue with how The Atlantic characterized her past and its implication that she had been forced out at The New Republic in the 1990s and was attempting to hide her history with a different byline. She said that the byline on proofs of the article was originally Ruth Barrett, and that she had suggested Ruth S. Barrett and a link to her author website, which included articles written under the name Ruth Shalit.

The publication said her case was without merit and asked a court to dismiss it.

In September 2024, Judge Loren L. AliKhan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed three counts from Ms. Barrett’s complaint, finding that The Atlantic’s statements about Ms. Barrett’s conduct in regard to the article were “protected opinion and not actionable as defamation” and that she had not proved a breach of contract.

The judge allowed four counts to move forward, finding that other statements made about Ms. Barrett could be considered defamatory. “A reasonable juror could infer that the full cadre of statements paints a picture of a serial liar who maliciously set out to deceive editors and readers,” the judge said.

The two sides met in mediation on April 4 and agreed to reach a settlement, according to court documents.

The updated editor’s note has an addendum at the bottom saying that the note had been modified to “clarify that: ‘Sloane’ was an anonymous source; Ms. Barrett says that she elected to leave The New Republic; and Ms. Barrett did not ask The Atlantic to use a novel byline.”

The accusation that Ms. Barrett had induced “at least one source” to lie to the fact-checking department was changed to “a source.”

“The Atlantic investigated this article thoroughly and found that there was no pattern of material factual inaccuracies,” Ms. Barrett said in her statement, adding: “Every substantial claim I made was empirically verifiable and supported by documents and witnesses.”