The Atlantic settled a defamation lawsuit with writer Ruth Shalit Barrett, it confirmed in a legal filing, more than three years after she accused the storied magazine of defaming her over a 2020 article she wrote that was later affixed with an editor’s note and retracted.
Attorneys for Barrett and the Laurene Powell Jobs-owned magazine sought to dismiss the case in late June after it reached the settlement, according to a legal filing in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. The Atlantic paid her more than $1 million, according to the New York Times.
“The story remains retracted,” Atlantic spokesperson Anna Bross said. “We do not have further comment.”
Lawyers for Barrett did not respond to a request for comment.
Barrett sued the magazine in early 2022 after she wrote an article in 2020 about wealthy parents who sought to leverage youth sports as a means of giving their children an advantage in the college-admissions process. But the Atlantic later retracted the article after it said it found that Barrett urged a source to lie to a fact-checker about having a son to make her more difficult to identify, misled an editor about doing so and then came clean about “compounding the deception.”
The update came after then-Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple took issue with some of the story’s facts and the magazine’s decision to run it under the byline “Ruth S. Barrett,” which clouded her history as a New Republic writer by the name of Ruth Shalit, where she admitted to two instances of plagiarism.
Barrett accused the Atlantic of smearing her reputation, saying in her suit the only “falsehood” in the story was the claim of a nonexistent son. She also said the magazine improperly characterized her past, saying she never sought to hide her name and suggested the use of the middle initial and a link to her author page, which included stories written under Ruth Shalit.
Some counts were dismissed in September last year, but others were allowed to proceed. The Atlantic and Barrett then met in mediation in April before the June settlement.
