The New York Times Magazine just slandered a young judicial clerk without acknowledging she was cleared by an official judicial inquiry.
The smear of Crystal Clanton came in the course of a long hit piece the magazine did in the past week against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia. In the course of the article, the Times repeated a debunked report from the New Yorker that Clanton once wrote in a text: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like [expletive] them all. … I hate blacks. End of story.”
Only within parenthesis did the Times report that Justice Thomas “called the allegations under Clanton unfounded, helped her get a federal clerkship and wrote in a letter of support that he would consider her for a Supreme Court clerkship.” The impression was that Thomas had weirdly embraced a raging racist. The Times report outrageously left out the judicial inquiry that exonerated her. A news story by Bill Rankin of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, hardly an obscure source, tells the tale.
Several Democratic congressmen had demanded an investigation of 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Bill Pryor for hiring Clanton as a clerk, alleging in effect that Pryor grossly violated his judicial duty by hiring without due diligence a law clerk “with a history of nakedly racist and hateful conduct.” The congressmen’s complaint was referred for official review to Judge Debra Ann Livingston of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Both Livingston and, later, that circuit’s unanimous judicial panel, absolved Pryor.
“The ‘undisputed record,’” Livingston wrote, showed that Pryor “performed all the due diligence that a responsible judge would undertake.” The judicial council found “nothing in the record” to contradict what that due diligence found.
Clanton had worked for a conservative group called Turning Point USA. While there, she got crosswise with “a group of former employees,” one of whom “was fired after the organization learned that this person had created fake text messages to be used against co-workers, to make it appear that those co-workers had engaged in misconduct when they had not.”
Clanton had not written the over-the-top racist message in question. Rather, she had been the victim of somebody trying to frame her. The executives at Turning Point USA confirmed this, with one of them vouching that Clanton treated everyone with “kindness, respect and fairness.”
After that horrid experience, the Thomases “took in the distraught Clanton,” who lived in their home for nearly a year. It’s not likely that someone who truly “hate[s]” all “black people” would move into the house of a black Supreme Court justice for a full year.
“I know Crystal Clanton and I know bigotry,” Thomas wrote. “Bigotry is antithetical to her nature and character.”
All of this information was readily available to the Times Magazine, had anyone bothered to do a simple five-second Google search. The information was contained in a credible publication, and it was all on the record for more than a month before the story was published. To fail, or refuse, to report that a unanimous judicial panel completely absolved Pryor — and, by direct and obvious extension, Clanton — of the noxious charges, was to commit inexcusable journalistic malpractice against a young lady obviously innocent of the charges against her.
Entire careers can be ruined by such charges published without refutation by the most prominent newspaper in the land. Clanton does not deserve to have the misimpression stand. She does deserve, from the Times Magazine, a correction and a fulsome apology.
