Was the Story of Beruryah's Demise Fabricated and Inserted into Rashi to Stop Women from Learning Torah? (fixed)

I found a fascinating comment about Beruryah buried in Dovid's answers to his 'innocent' question to women: "How does it feel to be discriminated against by your own religion?"

The background on Beruryah from Encyclopedic entry by Tzvee Zahavy (coincidental, I know):

Beruryah's contemporary importance lies in her prominence as a rare woman-scholar in the male-dominated rabbinic culture. [...] The drama of her life climaxes in the so-called Beruryah Incident. She is said in an eleventh century tradition preserved by the French rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi commentary to Talmud Babli Avodah Zarah 18b) to have mocked a mysogynistic rabbinic tradition which labelled women as flighty. Meir is said to have sent a student to tempt her to prove her actions were wrong. Tragically, she is thought to have committed suicide after submitting to the advances of her husband's disciple.

humanist comments...

by the gemara where it says that 'nashan daatan kalos', there is a very bizarre rashi.

rashi says that the famous Beruriah, scholarly wife of r' meir, scoffed at this maamer chazal that nashim daatan kalos.

r' meir asked one of his students to try to seduce his wife, in an attempt to prove that the maamer chazal had a point. the student succeeded, and beruriah, overcome with shame, killed herself.

this is in avodah zara somewhere. this rashi is hotly contested. it is strange that a story of this magnitude makes no appearance in any earlier source, and it is only brought in this rashi in the 11th century, almost 1000 yrs after it would have supposedly happened.

therefore, there is a common view accepted that rashi never actually wrote this, and that in the middle ages there were women with notions that they could learn torah, and they were trying to break out etc. they used beruriah as their role model. in order to besmirch beruriah and show that she had gone too far, and that women shouldnt learn, and that beruriah should not be looked up to, this farbicated story was inserted, and the womens movement was expected to lose steam.

[...]

i dont know the source for the fabrication, but i do know that it seems to be a very plausible explanation for an otherwise very bizarre incident.it wouldnt be blasphemous to say that something was inserted into rashi posthumously; there are precendents for that idea in jewish literature (i cant bring specfic examples right now).

Whoa! Could this be true? An anonymous comment with no sources obviously leaves me skeptical, but if this comment has any truth to it, I would like to know. Was there a movement for women's scholarship in Torah in the middle ages? Did Rashi's role in writing down and canonizing the legend of Beruryah's fall (thereby discouraging admiration of Beruryah) have anything to do with his daughter's involvement a the masculine religious domain? I assume de facto that Rashi is the author, but is there room for questioning the authenticity of Rashi's commentary? Are there other examples where Rashi is contested? Or is this a classic conspiracy theory?

UPDATE: mystery solved.