New York Times admits mistake on rape allegation against Trump
New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet admitted on Monday that his newspaper didn’t proceed aggressively enough in response to a new sexual-assault allegation against President Donald Trump. “We were overly cautious,” Baquet told the New York Times Reader Center.
The admission relates to the story of E. Jean Carroll. In a New York magazine excerpt from her book “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal,” Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle, alleges that Trump sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a department store in New York 23 years ago. Before getting into the horrific details, Carroll, as though mimicking the considerations of an investigative journalist, cycles through various questions about the event and its aftermath. For example: “Did I report it to the police? “No.
“Did I tell anyone about it? “Yes. I told two close friends. The first, a journalist, magazine writer, correspondent on the TV morning shows, author of many books, etc., begged me to go to the police.
“‘He raped you,’ she kept repeating when I called her. ‘He raped you. Go to the police! I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.’
“My second friend is also a journalist, a New York anchorwoman. She grew very quiet when I told her, then she grasped both my hands in her own and said, ‘Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.’ (Two decades later, both still remember the incident clearly and confirmed their accounts to New York.)”
Trump has responded by saying, in part, “She is trying to sell a new book - that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.” He also said that he has never met Carroll.
As George Conway wrote in The Washington Post, Carroll’s assertions deserve to be taken seriously. Just as Trump said in his famous “Access Hollywood” tape - that he would simply “grab” women by their genitals - Carroll describes a sudden and brazen attack by Trump in the high-end Manhattan department store. “The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips,” writes Carroll. “I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.”
Another data point is that Trump has denied ever meeting Carroll, a denial contradicted by a photo, republished in the article itself, of them at a party in the 1980s. “By making the absurd and mendacious assertion that he never even met Carroll, Trump utterly annihilates the credibility of his claim that he didn’t assault her,” writes Conway.
The Times published an 800word piece on the same day of the New York magazine piece, though it “did not promote the story on its home page until late Saturday morning and did not run a print story until Sunday,” as the paper’s Reader Center piece acknowledges.