Politico reports that, just as model Emily Ratajkowski had first revealed on Twitter, a New York Times reporter had indeed commented to her at a fashion event Sunday night that first lady Melania Trump was “a hooker.” The Times’ editors have acknowledged that it happened and “talked to” the reporter in question.
If President Barack Obama was still in office and his wife the target of this sort of disgraceful comment, this reporter would have rightly been named, shamed and fired retroactively, of course. Congressional staffers, who are not required to be fair to all parties, have been fired for much less.
But what caught Federalist editor Sean Davis’ eye — and subsequently my own — was the fact that the smear is referred to in the headline, in quotation marks, as an “unfounded rumor.” That’s because it comes directly from the Times’ statement on the matter:
“At a party last night, a Times reporter who does not cover Washington or politics, referred to an unfounded rumor regarding Melania Trump,” a Times spokesperson said in a statement to Politico. “The comment was not intended to be public, but it was nonetheless completely inappropriate and should not have occurred. Editors have talked to the reporter in question about the lapse.”
As it turns out, Politico used the same phrase further down to refer to what this reporter had said. It’s quite something to see newspapers refer to this defamatory statement as an “unfounded rumor.” Sure, technically you could call it that, just like you could call birtherism a misunderstanding of Hawaiian vital records law. But it isn’t really the most accurate way to refer to it.
That alligators live in New York’s sewers is an unfounded rumor. That the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. was removed from the Oval Office was an unfounded rumor. This assertion about Melania Trump is more than that. It’s a malicious lie — a sexist smear created to assassinate the first lady’s character.
