The New York Times reporters who wrote a controversial article that included accusations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh said Monday they believe editors at the paper cut out details they included, which said friends of the woman in question had indicated she didn't recall anything happening.
A deputy editorial page editor, meanwhile, said the claims against Kavanaugh were included in the story because they were corroborated "with two government officials," the Times reports.
The writers, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, told MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell their draft essay regarding the book they wrote about Kavanaugh's early years included the details, but they believe the information was taken out when the editors went to remove the woman's name from their story.
The article ran on the Times' editorial page, rather than in news, and deputy editorial page editor James Dao said that editors believed the claim of sexual impropriety should have remained in the story because "the authors corroborated his story with two government officials, who said they found it credible. Based on that corroboration, we felt mentioning the claim as one part of a broader essay was warranted."
He further said that the article ran in the Opinion section because longer essays and book excerpts often go there, and a "news analysis" label was attached to show that the writers are not part of the paper's opinion pages.
Dao did not, however, explain why the unnamed woman's failure to remember the incident or that she had refused comment was not part of the published article.
The Times has since added a sentence in its Kavanaugh article to say the woman did not recall allegations that during a drunken party at Yale University in the 1983-84 school year, Kavanaugh exposed himself and "friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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