The New York Times handling of the new allegations seemed to confirm the view of supporters of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that he had been railroaded by the news media. | Ramin Talaie/Getty Images Media Times’ handling of Kavanaugh story draws widespread criticism Editors won't explain why an explosive allegation appeared in Sunday Review, lacked a key fact and was promoted with an offensive tweet.

The New York Times’ bungled handling of revelations from a book on Brett Kavanaugh managed to draw fire from both conservatives who long defended the Supreme Court justice and feminists who fought against his confirmation, both of whom expressed consternation over the paper’s decisions.

The Times revealed a fresh allegation of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh while a student at Yale University in a Sunday Review piece by reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, who are co-authors of the new book, rather than through a traditional news story. In addition, the authors omitted a key piece of information — the fact that the alleged victim of the incident didn’t remember it — and the Times promoted the piece with a shockingly tone-deaf tweet.


All three missteps prompted condemnation across political boundaries on Monday, while the fallout from the piece in the Times’ Sunday Review has overshadowed the release Tuesday over the hotly anticipated book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.”

President Donald Trump on Monday seized on an editor’s note attached to the piece by Pogrebin and Kelly to claim it’s actually Kavanaugh “being assaulted” by “lies and “Fake News!”

By Monday evening, he was calling for “the Resignation of everybody at The New York Times involved in the Kavanaugh SMEAR story.”

“They’ve taken the Old Grey Lady and broken her down, destroyed her virtue and ruined her reputation," Trump tweeted. "She can never recover, and will never return to Greatness, under current Management. The Times is DEAD, long live The New York Times!”

During a campaign rally in New Mexico, he repeated many of those attacks, and embellished on them some.

Meanwhile, New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister, a leading voice on women’s issues, wrote that it was “flabbergasting” how the Times mishandled the new Kavanaugh reporting. “I’m sure someone at the Times still thinks that by some both-sides bullshit-objectivity meter it’s a victory to make both conservatives and feminists livid,” she tweeted. “It’s actually coming across as truly bizarre ineptitude.”

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Top Times editors and the book’s authors have so far kept silent. Executive Editor Dean Baquet, editorial page editor James Bennet and Kelly did not respond to requests for comment. Pogrebin and Jim Dao, the op-ed editor who edited the Sunday Review piece, referred requests to the paper’s public relations team.

The Times’ PR team responded to a couple issues Sunday on Twitter, including a now-deleted tweet from the Opinion section promoting the piece. “Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun,” it read. “But when Brett Kavanaugh did it to her, Deborah Ramirez says, it confirmed that she didn’t belong at Yale in the first place.”

“A tweet that went out from the @NYTOpinion account yesterday was clearly inappropriate and offensive,” the Times said. “We apologize for it and are reviewing the decision-making with those involved.”

According to a Times insider familiar with the matter, Pogrebin wrote the offensive tweet, which should have been vetted before it was posted.

“It was really neglectful,” the insider said of the paper’s overall handling. “There were serious errors made along the way.”

The Times’ PR team also responded to questions about why a piece featuring new reporting about a controversial, national issue didn’t run as a news story, but rather a “news analysis.” The Sunday Review section, the Times said, “frequently runs excerpts of books produced by Times reporters.”

There appears to be no hard and fast rule at the Times when it comes to its reporters’ books.

Last week, reporter Alexandra Alter wrote a news story on revelations from “She Said,” a book by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the Times reporters who helped ignite the #MeToo movement with their reporting allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Last month, the Times Sunday business section ran an excerpt of “Super Pumped,” a book on Uber by Times reporter Mike Isaac.

Then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh during his tempestuous Senate confirmation. | Jim Bourg/Getty Images

The piece by Pogrebin and Kelly — “Brett Kavanaugh Fit In With the Privileged Kids. She Did Not.” — ran on the second page of Sunday Review and it took about 10 paragraphs before getting to potentially explosive revelations.

Pogrebin and Kelly reported that at least seven people had heard about an incident in which Kavanaugh put his penis in the face of Ramirez, a former Yale classmate. (The New Yorker first reported in September 2018 on allegations from Ramirez, who was the second woman to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct after Christine Blasey Ford).

“We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation,” Pogrebin and Kelly wrote. “A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.”

Stier, the CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, notified senators and the FBI, but the agency declined to investigate, they reported.

Several Democratic presidential candidates responded to the Times story with renewed criticism of the Kavanaugh confirmation, with some calling for him to be impeached. The Sunday Review piece came under scrutiny from others, including the author of a more favorable Kavauagh book who got an advanced look at the Times reporters’ account.

“NYT Reporters’ essay about a supposed second Yale incident omitted their own book reporting that completely undercuts it: alleged victim denies any memory of it,” tweeted Mollie Hemingway, a senior editor at conservative news and opinion site The Federalist and co-author of “Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court.”

“Journalistically indefensible,” she added, “though gullible additional reporters are spreading it of course.”

The Times later affixed an editor’s note to Pogrebin and Kelly’s piece to note that their “book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident.”

The paper’s mishandling of the new allegations seemed to confirm the view of Kavanaugh supporters that he had been railroaded by the news media. National Review Editor Rich Lowry accused the Times of trying to “smear” Kavanaugh.

“After more than a year of digging, the Democrats and their media allies still have no supported allegations of sexual misconduct,” he wrote.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted that “it’s almost as if the reporters, editors, publishers have a political agenda.”

Some do find that the book advanced the public’s understanding of the Kavanaugh controversy.

New York magazine’s Sarah Jones, who read the book in advance, wrote that Pogrebin and Kelly’s “reporting lends credence to many of the most serious concerns raised about Kavanaugh’s suitability to serve a lifetime term on the nation’s highest court.” Still, Jones admitted being “truly mystified by how badly the NYT botched this book excerpt.”