New York Times reporter Robin Pogrebin seems determined to humiliate her newsroom at every turn — and all for the sake of selling her new book.
First, she published a hilariously ill-advised tweet from one of the Times’ main social media accounts this weekend, promoting an excerpt from her upcoming book. Pogrebin then threw her editors under the bus after the excerpt placed in the paper’s Sunday Review section was found to have excluded relevant exculpatory details regarding allegations that Justice Brett Kavanaugh, as an undergraduate at Yale University, once dropped his trousers during a party and that friends then “pushed his penis into the hand of” an unidentified female victim.
The problem is that the alleged victim of this treatment is telling friends she doesn’t remember any such thing. And so Pogrebin has responded by claiming that the woman was probably too drunk at the time to say whether it did or did not happen.
The alleged victim was “incredibly drunk at that party, as was everyone,” Pogrebin said Tuesday in a radio interview.
The unidentified woman declined to be interviewed by the Times, according to the Times. Pogrebin has not interviewed this woman and cannot possibly know how many drinks the woman supposedly had that evening. Yet Pogrebin is perfectly comfortable accusing the alleged victim of being drunk that evening, possibly too drunk to say whether she had someone’s penis placed into her hand.
What could motivate a journalist to attack a victim in this way? Why, a desire to downplay concerns that the alleged victim of Kavanaugh’s alleged depredations featured in Pogrebin’s upcoming book reportedly does not at all recall the thing being alleged. The sole source of the allegation, Democratic consultant Max Stier, talked to investigators but refuses to speak publicly about what he claims he saw all those years ago. The only reason anyone even knows about Stier’s allegation is because two unnamed government “officials” who claim to “have communicated with Mr. Stier” passed the story along to Pogrebin and her co-author, Katy Kelly.
But never mind all that, Pogrebin said Tuesday in a radio interview. Stier, who first brought his story privately to the Senate and the FBI during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, is a serious man. Very serious! So serious that you cannot put too much weight on what the alleged victim says she does or does not remember. Remember, the Times journalist said, the alleged victim was intoxicated at the time and probably cannot be trusted to remember.
“And so I think we’re talking about memory here. It’s, you know, a really kind of a questionable issue,” Pogrebin said Tuesday. “There are plenty of things that, you know, that are conceivable that could happen when people are too drunk to remember them.”
Stier, on the other hand, he was surely not drunk. The warning about memory and alcohol applies only to those who dispute Pogrebin’s reporting.
The excerpt published this weekend by the Times originally included the following passage:
This is the full extent of what the Times reports regarding the Stier allegation. He told officials privately last year that he saw Kavanaugh with his pants down at a party when they were all students at Yale. Stier also said he saw Kavanaugh’s friends push Kavanaugh’s penis into a woman’s hand (I am not even sure how that works, logistically speaking). That’s it. That is all there is to this allegation. Stier has declined to go public, and the alleged victim herself turned down the Times’ interview requests. That this allegation made it to print at all is nothing short of shocking. That it made it to print without originally including details about how the alleged victim does not recall the alleged incident is inexcusable.
The Times amended the published excerpt later so that it now includes an editor’s note that reads [emphasis added]:
Even before the Times updated the op-ed with these exculpatory details, Pogrebin had already called a social media firestorm down on her newsroom by tweeting from the New York Times’ opinion section Twitter account: “Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun. But when Brett Kavanaugh did it to her, Deborah Ramirez says, it confirmed that she didn’t belong at Yale in the first place.”
Since then, Pogrebin has gone on to blame her editors for omitting the fact that Stier’s alleged victim apparently does not recall what he claims he saw. Now, as to why Stier won’t go public or talk to the Times about his allegation, Pogrebin has some interesting ideas there as well.
“My sense is that he feels as if he did his duty, which was he brought the information that he had to the Senate — to senators and to the FBI. He made them all very aware that he had this experience that he had witnessed firsthand in a dorm room during his freshman year at Yale. What they did with the information was up to them. It never materialized and became part of the process,” she said Monday in an MSNBC interview.
She added, “Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed and [Stier] was done. His work had been done. He had done his part. And he had no interest in revisiting it.”
If this were a baseball game and Pogrebin a pitcher, we all would be screaming at the dugout to pull her. That the Times has not sent the manager to the mound yet is nearly as unbelievable as the paper’s assertion that it was an honest editing mistake that omitted the exculpatory evidence from their Kavanaugh essay.
