There is a news account here; I have not seen the opinion, so am only going on this account (though it strikes me as plausible, given what I know about the local judiciary). The result is a case study in what is wrong with American defamation law, and helps explain why our media, including our cyber-media, are such cesspools of falsehoods and garbage.
Consider: a student accuses Jon of groping her breasts and buttocks; Jon's behavior is both wrongful and illegal--it is both tortious and criminal. The newspapers, however, report that Jon is accused of "rape," which is defined in most jurisdictions as non-consensual penetration of the vagina or anus of another person, or non-consensual contact between the genitals of one person and the mouth, vagina or anus of another (this is not, however, the precise definition in Illinois, which probably helped the defendants here). Legal definitions aside, everyone knows that being accused of non-consensual groping is not as heinous as being accused of rape. Even the defendants know that, since they revised their original misdescription of the allegations and removed the word "rape"!
So what really explains this outcome? Two things: first, American libel law provides enormous cover for egregious misrepresentations of any topic that might be deemed of "public" interest" (in almost every other Western democracy whose libel law I am familiar with, Ludlow's case against the newspaper would have been a slam dunk); and second, and this is really crucial, the local judges in the Chicago state courts are, I have been told, mostly graduates of non-elite law schools and have contempt for elite academics. Judge Flanagan, who handed down this decision, graduated from John Marshall here in Chicago, a regional school that ranks well behind other very good regional schools in Chicago like Loyola/Chicago, Chicago-Kent and DePaul. I do not know Judge Flanagan, but I am familiar with the general problem. A couple of years ago, I was considering bringing a defamation action that would have to be filed in the local state courts in Chicago (rather than the federal courts), but I was advised by a Chicago lawyer with considerable experience in these matters that the local Chicago judges would view with skepticism and contempt any such lawsuit by a University of Chicago professor. I am, like any experienced lawyer, a legal realist, that is, I know that non-legal factors have a significant influence on outcomes in the court. This is yet another case in point.
I should emphasize, given the general level of insanity surrounding this whole issue, that everything I have written above about Ludlow's lawsuit against the newspapers is correct even if every actual allegation against Ludlow by the student is correct.
UPDATE: I respect the important work philosopher Heidi Lockwood has done to assist victims of sexual assault and sexual harassment, and have benefitted in the past from her knowledge of Title IX. Her intervention on this particular issue is, however, confused and irrelevant. Rape is always a kind of sexual assault, but not all sexual assaults are a kind of rape, and this is true even in jurisdictions that do not use the term "rape" but define sexual assault in terms of degree, with rape always being first-degree (i.e., not all sexual assaults are first-degree sexual assault). The latter is the only issue here, not the former. More to the point, Illinois defines rape as "criminal sexual assault" involving "sexual penetration," the latter defined as follows:
Means any contact, however slight, between the sex organ or anus of one person and an object or the sex organ, mouth, or anus of another person, or any intrusion, however slight, of any part of the body of one person or of any animal or object into the sex organ or anus of another person, including, but not limited to, cunnilingus, fellatio, or anal penetration. Evidence of emission of semen is not required to prove sexual penetration.
There was never an allegation of sexual penetration against Ludlow by the undergraduate student, so there was never an allegation of criminal sexual assault, i.e., rape. Defendant Sun-Times recognized this once contacted by Ludlow's attorney: that is why they revised their headline, removing the word "rape" and replacing it with "sexual assault." In other words, defendant newspaper recognized the meanings were different. Judge Flanagan, according to the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, found that the "the defamation and false light claim...fail on the basis of the fair-report privilege":
That privilege protects a publisher of defamatory matter when the matter fairly and accurately summarizes statements in public documents or proceedings at official public meetings, such as court documents or hearings.
“There is a fair abridgment of a proceeding where the sting of the defamatory statement in the proceeding is the same as a sting of the defamatory report,” Flanagan wrote. “The hallmark of the privilege is the accuracy of the summary, not the truth or falsity of the information being summarized.”
The only question, in other words, is whether the "sting" of being accused of rape is the same as the "sting" of being accused of sexual assault (not criminal sexual assault). The Sun-Times did not think so, but the Judge did. The most plausible explanation I can think of for so finding is bias against the plaintiff on the part of the judge--a bias consistent with what I have been told by a lawyer with twenty years of experience of litigating defamation cases in Cook County courts (where Judge Flanagan sits). More generally, American libel law tends to err on the side of sacrificing the plaintiff's reputation in the alleged interest of the "public"--the fair-report privilege, as applied in this instance, is an example. That line of law began with New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964, but it was Sullivan's progeny that adopted the foolishly capacious approach to "public figures" and "public interest." (Interestingly, when I ran a poll of law faculty on the 50th anniversary of Sullivan, the vast majority thought Sullivan itself rightly decided, but a majority thought its legacy had not been a good one, which is my own view as well.)
ANOTHER: Prof. Lockwood's additional reply. Most of the latter is non-responsive, so I will keep it brief. That some victims of sexual assault experience it as being as bad as rape (undoubtedly true) is irrelevant to Ludlow's defamation action, unless it were the case that the population generally shares that view (undoubtedly false). For unless both kinds of sex crimes are viewed as equally heinous generally, being falsely accused of rape will still constitute per se libel. In addition, as pointed out here, Prof. Lockwood has misrepresented one of her central examples, the law in Ohio.
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