From the N.Y. Times (Katie Robertson), published Friday:
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….
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 article's 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….
There's more in the Times article; here's a post of mine from a year ago excerpting a court decision that allowed the claim to go forward (in part).
