After The New York Times published a “bombshell” report that supposedly nailed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh for sexual misconduct, Mollie Hemingway was among the first to question the story.
In a new book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” two New York Times reporters write about Max Stier, who worked with lawyers of Bill Clinton handling the accusation that Clinton had exposed himself to a woman in a hotel room. Stier told the writers he saw fellow Yale student Kavanaugh drop his pants and other people at a college party put Kavanaugh’s penis into the hands of a classmate.
Hemingway, an editor at The Federalist, wrote that day on Twitter: “The book notes, quietly, that the woman Max Stier named as having been supposedly victimized by Kavanaugh and friends denies any memory of the alleged event. Seems, I don’t know, significant.”
The author of “Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court,” Hemingway appeared Tuesday on Fox News, where she once again shredded the problematic New York Times story.
“I recently wrote a book on the Kavanaugh confirmation… we interviewed more than 100 people. We got all of our facts right,” she said on “Fox & Friends.” “We didn’t traffic in gossip. And we told the accurate story of what happened. So I know it can be done. And there’s no excuse for how they did this.”
After outrage over the omission, The Times was forced to print a correction. “An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party,” the Times explains in the correction. “The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.”
But Hemingway said the “error” should never have occurred.
“I knew that they had left out the most important piece of information and they should’ve included it in their story,” Hemingway told Fox News. “There’s no defense for not including the fact that their supposed allegation against Kavanaugh was based on a false premise. The woman involved said she had no recollection of it.”
The two writers of the new book, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, appeared on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” on Monday and claimed that they included the fact that the alleged victim does not remember the incident in the article, but that Times’ editors removed it.
Pogrebin said that editors removed the woman’s name, and “in removing her name, they removed the other reference to the fact that she didn’t remember it.”
But Hemingway said the reporters have continued to talk about the allegation without mentioning that the alleged victim remembers nothing.
“I do agree that the editors are also responsible. It shouldn’t just be the reporters. But really, the entire institution is to blame,” Hemingway said. “Having said that, in an NPR interview that aired yesterday, these reporters did the exact same thing. They made it sound like they had a credible story about a woman and they hid the fact that the woman denied it ever happened.”
“You cannot blame that on editors,” she continued. “It’s an hour-long interview — plenty of time to discuss it.”
Hemingway also said people need to demand a stop to what she called a “smear” campaign.
“The media keep being allowed to continue in this smear campaign. I think decent people, regardless of their politics, are just looking at this and saying ‘Is there no end to this? When will they stop?'” she said.
Related: NYT Tries To Answer Questions On Kavanaugh Report Debacle, Raises More Questions