What the hell, New York Times?!?!
By now you’ve probably read about the newly surfaced allegations against Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh. In a report published on Saturday, the Times shared additional evidence that appears to further validate allegations by Deborah Ramirez that Kavanaugh sexually harassed her at a college dorm party when the two were freshmen at Yale.
Additionally, the report contains another allegation about a separate incident at the university that demonstrates the same type of predatory behavior by Kavanaugh. A classmate of Kavanaugh’s, Max Stier, said he witnessed Kavanaugh with his pants down at another dorm party, shoving his dick into the hand of a female student, according to the report. (Kavanaugh did not answer questions from the newspaper about this incident.)
Stier told the FBI and senators about this last year during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, but nothing came of it.
All of this is very disturbing and confirms once again that Kavanaugh has no business being on the Supreme Court regardless of his denials.
Nevertheless, in promoting this major story to the world on Twitter, the New York Times opinion section somehow found a way to make the situation even worse, and the result is both baffling and unbelievably offensive.
“Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun,” some brainless fool at the Times tweeted. “But when Brett Kavanaugh did it to her, Deborah Ramirez says, it confirmed that she didn’t belong at Yale in the first place.”
After facing well-deserved backlash over this idiotic tweet, the Times announced it had deleted it, saying it was “poorly phrased,” which perhaps is the understatement of the year and equally offensive. That prompted more deserved criticism.
Later on Saturday evening, the newspaper deleted that tweet, too, and issued an apology.
“We deleted a previous tweet regarding this article. It was offensive, and we apologize,” the Times’ opinion section wrote on Twitter.
My god.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the newspaper also is being criticized for burying the lead in the original story, which offers more details that appear to confirm Ramirez’s account. The other important revelation is that another witness had come forward to the FBI and lawmakers about a second incident involving Kavanaugh at Yale.
The story was tagged as a “news analysis” and framed as a feature piece describing Ramirez’s struggles to socialize at Yale rather than straight news. The headline makes that clear: “Brett Kavanaugh Fit In With the Privileged Kids. She Did Not.”
To which I repeat: What the hell, New York Times?!