New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet said he believed the publication was “overly cautious” with allegations by writer E. Jean Carroll that President Trump raped her in the mid-1990s.
The New York Times Reader Center, a section of the publication that gives behind-the-scenes information on the site’s reporting, confronted top editors with reader concerns that the site’s coverage of Carroll’s accusations “showed too much deference to the president’s denials.”
Baquet denied that Trump had anything to do with the publication’s coverage but said they were “overly cautious” with how they handled the story. He said the New York Times should have prominently displayed the story on the home page with a headline.
Baquet said the fact that the allegation was made against a sitting president “should’ve compelled us to play it bigger.”
Carroll claimed Friday that Trump had sexually assaulted her in 1995 or 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. The allegation was part of an excerpt from her new book What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, which is being released on July 2.
