U.S. scholars are sending statements of rebuttal to an academic journal that published a controversial thesis by Harvard University law professor John Mark Ramseyer who claimed that victims of Japan's wartime sexual slavery were willing prostitutes.

University of Connecticut professor Alexis Dudden announced Friday that she wrote an article refuting Ramseyer's claims to the editorial staff of the International Review of Law and Economics(IRLE), at its request.

Dudden said that as far as she knows, the IRLE has requested similar essays from several scholars.

In her rebuttal to the journal, Dudden said Ramseyer's paper was poorly resourced and evidentially fatuous and that it's important to hold accountable those who turn fake news into facts.

Two Harvard professors Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert also released a joint statement saying they were "appalled" by Ramseyer's "elision of the larger political and economic contexts of colonialism and gender in which the comfort women system was conceived and implemented."   

The pair also said Ramseyer "offers virtually no documented third-party statements, oral or written, about contracts with Korean women."