Donald Trump Jr. blasted the mainstream media on Monday after the New York Times revised its piece on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, having initially reported a new allegation from an “eyewitness” that friends of Kavanaugh had “pushed his penis into the hand of female student.”
The paper later updated the piece with key facts it had omitted — such as that the alleged victim had declined to be interviewed and that friends said she did not recall the incident — along with an “Editor’s note” explaining the update at the bottom:
Editors’ Note: Sept. 15, 2019
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 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.
The allegation was from “eyewitness” Max Stier, a then-classmate of Kavanaugh. The Times piece also did not mention that Stier worked opposite Kavanaugh during the Clinton impeachment trial. Stier defended Clinton, while Kavanaugh served on the independent counsel’s team.
Trump Jr. tweeted:
This is the problem with main stream media today. They say whatever they want to sell narrative & clicks with no accountability when they’re wrong. The retraction is buried & the original tweets usually aren’t deleted. They get their narrative out & sticks even if it’s false!
Indeed, Ronan Farrow never retracted his claim in a tweet that there was “another serious claim of misconduct with an eyewitness.” That tweet got more than 24,000 retweets and 55,200 likes:
The Times was forced to update its piece after the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, who got an advance copy of the book, and other conservative journalists asked why the piece omitted that the book itself said the victim did not recall the incident.
The paper had to apologize for another controversy regarding the piece. Someone on the paper’s opinion section social media team had tweeted out, “Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun.”
The paper’s communications team tweeted: “We apologize for it and are reviewing the decision-making with those involved.”
Follow Breitbart News’s @Kristina_Wong.