A pro-abortion Notre Dame professor is suing the student newspaper for its reporting. The former editor-in-chief of The Irish Rover joined Liz Collin Reports to talk about the controversy at the Catholic University.
W. Joseph DeReuil is also a St. Paul, Minn., native who will be a senior at Notre Dame in the fall.
The lawsuit was filed by Notre Dame professor Tamara Kay in May. It names DeReuil and another student journalist, Luke Thompson.
“The case involves two articles that we wrote in The Irish Rover … one in the fall in October, I wrote a piece that was covering this professor, Tamara Kay’s abortion advocacy,” DeReuil explained.
“She’d been … writing public op-eds in support of abortion rights or talking about the harms of abortion restrictions. It really accelerated through the fall when Indiana passed Senate Bill 1, which was banning most abortion operations in the state of Indiana where Notre Dame is located,” he said.
DeReuil said she then started promoting on her social media ways that students or others could gain access to abortion pills online. He also said she put a sign on her door offering to help students obtain abortions.
“It said something along the lines of, ‘If you need help with any or all health care needs, contact me,’” he said.
“This is an issue,” he explained. “We have a professor on our campus who’s being so explicitly pro-abortion and seeming like she’s also offering help to people in the campus community for obtaining abortion access.”
Kay talked to the newspaper for the stories the paper published.
“Most of the article is just documenting her public messaging through her Twitter. Then she also spoke at a panel last fall that was titled, ‘Making Intersectional Feminist Sense of Abortion Bans,’” DeReuil said.
DeReuil attended that panel and recorded it. Then, he interviewed the professor for about 20 minutes after the panel and identified himself as a journalist with The Rover.
“I wanted to understand her side of the issue and didn’t want to just come at it from an outsider perspective,” he said.
That article was published Oct. 12. He said he then watched the professor backtrack her statements.
In January, a GoFundMe was started on her behalf and it said it was for legal fees, he explained.
In April, New York Magazine published a sympathetic story, saying the professor was subjected to harassment after the articles.
“Six weeks later, I got the actual lawsuit in the mail,” DeReuil said.
Last week, the law firm representing the student journalists filed an order to dismiss the case.
“ … The suit is clearly targeted to shut down reporting not because it was false, but because it brought a reaction against that professor and amplified that message to a different audience,” he said.
The Irish Rover released a statement entitled “We Will Not Be Silenced” in the wake of the lawsuit.
“I was never tempted to bow out because I believe what I wrote. What I wrote is true,” DeReuil said.
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Liz Collin
Liz Collin has been a truth-teller for 20 years as a multi-Emmy-Award-winning reporter and anchor. Liz is a Worthington, Minnesota native who lives in the suburbs with her husband, son and loyal lab.
