New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet has admitted that the newspaper was “overly cautious” in how it handled a new rape accusation last week against President Donald Trump by writer E. Jean Carroll.

The Times “should have played it bigger,” he conceded in an interview in the newspaper Monday as he responded to complaints about the tepid coverage.

Carroll, a well-known advice columnist, detailed the alleged assault in the mid-1990s in New York Magazine last week. Carroll said that she and Trump struck up a conversation in Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman department store before he pinned her against a wall in a dressing room and raped her. With Carroll’s allegation, 23 women have now accused Trump of sexual misconduct.

Trump has denied the allegation and claims he has never met Carroll — though she provided a photo that included the two of them for the magazine piece.

Carroll’s accusation was reported in the Times’ Book section because her account was an excerpt in the writer’s upcoming book.

Times readers wondered why “we didn’t give the allegations more attention,” Reader Center staff editor Lara Takenaga noted in the newspaper Monday. “Some questioned whether the lack of prominence showed too much deference to the president’s denials.”

Baquet conceded to Takenaga that the critics were “right that The Times had underplayed the article — though he said it had not been because of deference to the president,“ she wrote.