In 1969, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then in her sixth year of teaching at Rutgers Law School, in Newark, was promoted to full professor and her son, James, entered nursery school. These “rites of passage,” as Jill Lepore wrote, in her account of Ginsburg’s rise to the Supreme Court, “freed her to explore a new interest: she began volunteering for the A.C.L.U.” At the time, Ginsburg said a few weeks ago, during a public interview at the 92nd Street Y, in Manhattan, “new complaints were coming in to the New Jersey affiliate of the A.C.L.U. Complaints of the kind the A.C.L.U. had not seen before. One group of complainants were public-school teachers, who were put on so-called maternity leave when their pregnancy began to show. Because the school district worried: ‘We don’t want the little children to think that their teacher swallowed a watermelon.’ These women—the leave was unpaid, and there was no guaranteed right to return.”

Around the same time, Elizabeth Warren, fresh out of the University of Houston, was hired as a speech pathologist at an elementary school fifty miles north of Rutgers, in Riverdale, New Jersey. Many times this year, at Presidential-campaign rallies and town halls and meet-and-greets, Warren has described how that job ended, in 1971. “I finished the first year visibly pregnant,” she told an audience in a warehouse in Queens in March. “And back in those days, that meant you didn’t get invited back. That’s how it was.” That’s how it was, too, for the women who Ginsburg recalled showing up at the offices of the A.C.L.U.

On Monday, the Washington Free Beacon published documents that it said “contradict” Warren’s story. The Free Beacon, a conservative Web site largely funded by the billionaire hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, was previously best known for being the outlet that, in 2015, initially hired the firm Fusion GPS to research several Republican Presidential candidates, including Donald Trump, setting in motion the work that would eventually produce the Steele dossier. (Singer supported Senator Marco Rubio.) The documents that the Web site published this week were minutes of Riverdale Board of Education meetings. One was from April, 1971, showing that the board had voted to approve a second-year contract for Warren. Another was from June, 1971, showing that Warren’s resignation had been received by the board and “accepted with regret.”

The documents prompted reporters to ask Warren for a response, which led to a number of “Warren Stands by,” “Warren Defends,” and “Warren Details” headlines. But what did the documents really prove? In its article, the Free Beacon gave a nod to Meagan Day, a writer for the socialist magazine Jacobin, who recently tweeted about an interview Warren gave in 2007, in which she said that she didn’t return to the Riverdale job because she didn’t have time to complete the graduate courses needed for her teaching certificate. But, otherwise, the Free Beacon made no effort to put the documents in context or test the implication it read in them. It quoted no one who worked in Riverdale at the time, or who served on the school board, or who could comment on the general treatment of pregnant teachers in New Jersey at that time or on why the paper record of a teacher’s departure might differ from what actually happened. The Free Beacon didn’t have a scoop; it had an innuendo. And it chose to publish that innuendo because it knew how the rest of the media would respond: pick it up, make it a thing, and generate all those “Warren Defends” headlines.

Some news outlets did work to understand the full picture. CBS News tracked down a retired Riverdale teacher who remembered that, at the time Warren worked there, “The rule was at five months you had to leave when you were pregnant.” Warren, speaking to CBS, said that the difference between the April contract renewal and her June departure was easy to explain. In April, her pregnancy wasn’t yet visible. In June, it was. The 2007 interview? “After becoming a public figure I opened up more about different pieces in my life and this was one of them,” Warren said. That she did not open up her veins in a twelve-year-old interview about the exact and painful details of how she lost a job in the early nineteen-seventies does not mean that she has “changed her story.” And the skepticism that she has faced for her credible, depressingly familiar account of pregnancy discrimination is a clue as to why she wouldn’t have wanted to tell the story in the first place.

What makes this all particularly ludicrous is the idea that Warren is somehow making too much of her own story. The Free Beacon tried to tie its story to Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry, and her release, last October, of a DNA test showing that she had a distant Native American ancestor. That episode ended with Warren issuing a public apology. But since then, the country has seen a year of Warren campaigning, during which time she has released plans on taxing wealth, funding early child care, fighting climate change, and so on.

As candidates do, she has also pitched herself to voters by telling her own story. What she’s chosen to foreground is not the fact that she became a law professor by her early thirties and went on to revolutionize the legal understanding of bankruptcy in America and design an entire federal agency devoted to consumer protection. What she’s foregrounded are the struggles she’s lived and seen. She talks often of the dress that her mother wore to a job interview at Sears when her family’s house was on the line. Of her aunt coming to help her with the kids when she had too many things to juggle in law school. Of being shown the door in Riverdale, New Jersey. She is running not as the phenom—though she could—but as a kind of thoughtful everywoman. There’s a long history of American politicians lying about their careers, their war records, their achievements. But Warren hasn’t been inflating her résumé. If anything, she’s been downplaying it.