How do you think about the timing with a story like this? The story broke at a time when Bernie Sanders was deciding whether or not to drop out of the race. Do you feel some obligation to him or to his supporters to try to figure out what’s going on?

At that time, we didn’t know he was about to drop out of the race. I guess everybody knew he was thinking about it. But I thought the biggest obligation we had, frankly, was to the story and to having multiple conversations with Tara Reade. And to be honest at that point it wasn’t like we were in a heated race with the clock ticking. The main obligation was to get a really sensitive story as close to right as we could.

What about Twitter? You have people on Twitter asking, “Where’s The New York Times?” and a narrative developing that The Times’s decision not to cover it represents a political stance. And you and your team are silent through that. You don’t think to say, “Hey, we’re working on it”?

So this is a tricky question. You wish you could say to the world, “Hey, we’re working on this.” But you don’t actually know what you’re going to end up writing. Let’s say for some reason we found out something that made us not want to write a story. Then what do we say to readers? “We looked at this hard and we found a reason. We found out something that made us not want to write. But we’re not going to tell you about it.” So it felt to me like that wasn’t quite the right alternative either.

Once the story came in, did you have any hesitation about publishing it at all? It doesn’t have some of the features that much of The Times’s #MeToo reporting has: In particular, the people to whom she gave the contemporaneous accounts are not on the record. There’s no iron law that you have to get those people on the record?

There are no iron laws. I started the O’Reilly story. We’ve done about 20 of these. [The Times’s political editor] Pat Healy has edited half a dozen of them. There can’t be any iron laws. The iron laws are you try to find everything you can to corroborate the story. There’s a lot of reporting that’s not in the story.

But it was pretty clear to me that we were going to write a story. He also stands an X percent chance of being the next president of the United States. And at that point, that’s a pretty powerful reason to write and to publish.