Here is the complaint: Download 1 Complaint and Jury Demand - filed 05.16.17
Here is the press release form the plaintiff's law firm: Download Press Release_Doe v. HarperCollins et al 05.16.17
I haven't read the materials yet, but will and have more to say in a couple of hours.
UPDATE: I'll say more about the law later. Anyone who reads the factual allegations in the complaint and has read the Kipnis book will have to agree they both can't be true on many important points. If plaintiff can substantiate the factual allegations in the course of discovery (and trial, if one results), then the Kipnis book does, indeed, give a highly misleading portrait of what transpired. That the plaintiff has opened herself to discovery on all these matters leads me to think that some or all of her actual allegations may well be true: it would be reckless to the point of foolhardiness for the plaintiff to litigate these matters without the evidence to establish this very different narrative (since after all it is her privacy and reputation that are at stake). None of the preceding means all the legal claims will succeed (that the book may turn out to be highly misleading doesn't necessarily mean the plaintiff's legal rights have been violated), but I'll say more about the legal claims later.
UPDATE #2: I do not see how this case can settle, The complaint notes that Prof. Kipnis has received "written notice from Plaintiff's counsel that the allegations about Plaintiff are false and should be retracted" (Paragraph 73), but there have been no retractions and Prof. Kipnis has continued to lecture widely about the book and its claims. Moreover, the required retractions, if the plaintiff's allegations are true, would require a complete rewriting of the book, since it is the central case study. So Kipnis and HarperCollins can not agree to such retractions, and the plaintiff, as far as I can see, must insist upon them. One possibility, though almost as bad for the defendants, is to compensate plaintiff for the misrepresentations and leave the book as it is, though plaintiff would have to insist on publicity for that fact, otherwise the damage to her reputation and the invasion of privacy remains effectively intact. So that seems, again, an unlikely outcome, unless a trial is going very badly for the defendants. I am going to assume, though I do not know, that Laura Kipnis is not indemnifying HarperCollins, and that HarperCollins, as a sophisticated New York publisher, vetted the book with their lawyers and that therefore they are prepared to defend it. That means they will move to dismiss the complaint, for grounds I'll discuss later this evening, and, failing that, will make discovery as unpleasant as possible for plaintiff as to dissuade plaintiff from trial, and failing that prove that her account is false and Prof. Kipnis's account correct. (Litigation is the land of Realpolitik, and I think the only value I may be able to add here is some context about the law and litigation strategy. I do want to reiterate that filing the lawsuit itself is, in my book, prima facie (though defeasible) evidence that there are serious problems with Prof. Kipnis's account in the book.)
UPDATE #3: I am not going to rehearse the details from the complaint; it is available for anyone to read. But here, in summary, is the plaintiff's account: Peter Ludlow began pursuing her from the moment she was a prospective student; at first it was intellectual and non-sexually social attention, but the attention and interest was, shall we say, excessive. Yet Ludlow clearly had a "supervisory" or "evaluative" role vis-a-vis the student, notwithstanding the fact that he was not her "official" supervisor of record. They became socially and emotionally intimate, but never sexually intimate according to plaintiff until the alleged case of nonconsensual sex. She broke things off not long thereafter, but only came forward with what happened two years later--but only after an undergraduate filed a lawsuit, and she did so unwillingly. The short version: attractive female graduate student targeted for special attention by famous male professor, who gradually made it plain he wanted not just Platonic intimacy but sexual intimacy, she rejected it given that he was a teacher and intellectual mentor, the relationship ended, and after learning of an unrelated lawsuit about sexual misconduct by Ludlow involving an undergraduate, she reported earlier events to faculty (who had a legal obligation to report it to the university), and then agreed to tell the university about her experience. If that account is mostly or even partly correct, then the Kipnis book misrepresents what happened. Does that mean plaintiff's legal rights are violated? Maybe.
Apel was, as your readers may know, an influential voice in bringing American Pragmatism, especially Peirce's ideas, into the German philosophical discourse. Furthermore, he created a unique conversation between the ideas of Peirce, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. He was a proponent of Transzendentalpragmatik and Discourse Ethics which was analog to and for many years in conversation with the version of Habermas, yet also distinctly different, e.g. in Apel's consideration of the possibility of a "first philosophy". Apel remained an active writer, his most recent papers published just earlier this year in German by the respected publisher Suhrkamp, where a majority of his works has appeared, including the the two-volume collection of essays Transformation der Philosophie from 1973, which many consider his finest and most influential work. (Also, the English Wikipedia site, which many may consult now, is, erhhh, quite embarrassing).
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