New York Times: we didn’t damage Donald Trump’s reputation. It was garbage anyway.
Updated by Dylan Matthews Oct 13, 2016, 1:54p
Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images
When the New York Times published its blockbuster story chronicling two women’s on-the-record accounts of being sexually assaulted by Donald Trump, they basically guaranteed the Trump campaign, and Trump himself, would go to war. Trump's campaign lawyer sent a letter to Times executive editor Dean Baquet that very night threatening a lawsuit if the paper did not retract the story, accusing the paper of being "willing to provide a platform to anyone wishing to smear Mr. Trump’s name and reputation.”
Michael Calderone ? @mlcalderone
NYT declines to remove story, per letter from general counsel to Trump lawyer 10:34 AM - 13 Oct 2016
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The Times’ own general counsel David E. McCraw has now responded, saying, in effect, that Trump's reputation was already too horrible for anything the paper writes to possibly worsen it.
"The essence of a libel claim, of course, is the protection of one's reputation,” he writes. “Mr. Trump has bragged about his non-consensual sexual touching of women … Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself."
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