‘No evidence it was fiction’: Ex-New York Times editor defends botched Kavanaugh story – Washington Examiner

Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson defended the newspaper’s story on a sexual misconduct allegation against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, even after an editor’s note acknowledged it left out key details.

“I think my move would have been the moves that the Times has made. I mean, no one has challenged the basic accuracy of the story that they published, or of what is in the book,” Abramson said when Fox News host Harris Faulkner asked her how she would have handled the situation. “It’s true that a material fact was left out, and the Times ran the editor’s note explaining that, which is what you do when you leave something out. But it was no conspiracy to leave out that fact. It was unfortunately cut from the piece, as I understand it.”

Faulkner then pressed Abramson for what she meant by “no one has challenged” the story, saying, “How can you challenge if the alleged victim and the one witness they talk about, who actually didn’t witness anything, he did talk to senators and the FBI about what he thinks he saw, but people may have been too drunk to remember? The alleged victim didn’t remember any assault. It’s hard to take on something that even the victim doesn’t say happened.”

“Well, it’s friends of the victim who say she doesn’t remember it. She has chosen not to talk to the press, one assumes,” Abramson said, adding, “There is no evidence it was fiction.”

In the editor’s note added almost a day later, the Times said they “did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident.”

Abramson was accused earlier this year of committing plagiarism, or not properly attributing the original source material, in her book, Merchants of Truth. Abramson said she had stayed up “all night going through my book” because she took the accusations seriously. In some instances, parts of the book had been copied word-for-word from articles without attribution.