Rolling Stone magazine paid the legal price on Friday for its journalistic failings in a 2014 article about a supposed gang rape at the University of Virginia that it had already retracted in the face of widespread criticism.

A federal jury in Charlottesville, Va., found that the magazine; its parent company, Wenner Media; and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author of the article, are all liable in a defamation suit filed by Nicole P. Eramo, a former associate dean of students at the university, who said the article depicted her as the “chief villain” of the story.

With gruesome details and its portrayal of an indifferent university administration, the 9,000-word article, “A Rape on Campus,” intensified a national conversation about college sexual assaults. But the article, published in November 2014, was soon called into question for its reliance on a single source, identified only as Jackie, in describing what she said was her brutal rape by multiple men at a fraternity party. In March 2015, police in Charlottesville said that they had found “no substantive basis” to conclude that the incident described in the article had occurred.

Rolling Stone commissioned a review of the article by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and the school’s report, issued in April 2015, found that the magazine had failed to engage in “basic, even routine journalistic practice” to verify details from Jackie. Rolling Stone retracted its story and removed it from its website.