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      Scott Stringer Sues for Defamation Over Sexual Assault Claim

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      Mr. Stringer, the former New York City comptroller, said that a woman’s claims of sexual assault were lies and caused “irreparable harm” as he ran for mayor.Nearly 20 months after allegations of unwanted sexual advances derailed his campaign for New York City mayor, Scott M. Stringer sued one of his accusers for defamation on Monday, arguing that she smeared his reputation with falsehoods and misrepresentations.In a lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Stringer said that the woman, Jean Kim, had done “irreparable harm to him and his political future” by portraying what he called an “on-and-off” consensual relationship as predatory. He demanded that Ms. Kim retract her accusations and pay damages.“These defamatory statements have caused Mr. Stringer emotional pain and suffering, as well as injury to his reputation, honor and dignity,” lawyers for Mr. Stinger, a longtime Democratic politician and former New York City comptroller, wrote in the 12-page complaint.The legal action appears to be a calculated risk for Mr. Stringer, 62. If successful, it could help clear up his public image as he contemplates a political comeback. But it also serves to resurface Ms. Kim’s decades-old claims of misconduct, while posing the risk of an embarrassing legal defeat and reopening scrutiny into an earlier chapter in his life.Defamation cases are notoriously hard to prove, especially for public figures. To even get his case heard in court, Mr. Stringer must get around New York’s statute of limitations for defamation, and his lawyers are relying on a relatively novel legal theory to do so.They wrote in the suit that the matter was reopened legally in August 2022, when they assert — with scant detail — that Ms. Kim caused Representative Carolyn Maloney to resurface her defamatory statement against Mr. Stringer.The factual and legal issues are particularly relevant at a moment when New York and the country are still grappling with balancing the claims of women propelled by the #MeToo movement against the right to due process, and appraising what should happen to public figures like Mr. Stringer who are accused of misconduct decades after the fact.Ms. Kim and a lawyer who had represented her during the mayoral campaign did not comment on Monday morning, after the suit was filed.In an interview on Friday, Mr. Stringer said that he decided to take legal action now, after a needed “cooling-off period” for his family, to salvage his reputation. He acknowledged that waiting so long after the initial statements may have constrained his options legally.“There are times you could just walk away,” Mr. Stringer said. “But it was a lie. It was just a total lie. And I can’t live with myself if I did not do everything in my power to expose it.”Ms. Kim came forward in April 2021, in the heat of the Democratic primary for mayor. At the time, Mr. Stringer, a liberal who had slowly risen through the ranks of city politics, was considered a top-tier candidate for the nomination, though he seldom led early public polls.In a news conference and media interviews, Ms. Kim said that Mr. Stringer sexually assaulted her in 2001 when she was working as an unpaid intern on his unsuccessful campaign for public advocate. She said Mr. Stringer, then a state assemblyman whom she viewed as an older mentor figure, repeatedly groped her without consent, put his hands down the back of her pants, pressured her to have sex — and then warned her not to tell anyone.“He constantly reminded me of his power by saying things like, ‘You want me to make a phone call for you to change your life,’ ‘You want me to make you the first Asian district leader,’” Ms. Kim later told The New York Times. Many prominent supporters quickly backed away from his campaign. Mr. Stringer stayed in the race, but ultimately finished fifth in a primary election won by Eric Adams, who went on to become mayor.Mr. Stringer disputed Ms. Kim’s account, saying they were peers and that their relationship had been consensual and public within the tight circles of Upper West Side Democratic politics. His campaign also presented documents that showed that Ms. Kim, who has worked as a political lobbyist, might have helped one of Mr. Stringer’s rivals, Andrew Yang, which she disputed.Monday’s lawsuit largely repeats the conflicting stories without new evidence, and seeks to highlight factual errors or inconsistencies in Ms. Kim’s claims.It remains unclear if Ms. Kim’s version of events can be independently corroborated; she has not provided any records, nor has she mentioned associates with whom she discussed the allegations at the time.Defamation, particularly cases involving public figures like Mr. Stringer, can be difficult to prove, and the contradictory claims by Ms. Kim and Mr. Stringer — involving shifting sexual and romantic mores, political power and few hard pieces of evidence — only add to that burden.Mr. Stringer appears to have even more pressing legal burdens, with Ms. Kim likely to argue for dismissal because her original statements fall outside New York’s statute of limitations.His argument that the timeline was restarted in August rests on photos on social media that apparently show Ms. Kim at a campaign event with Ms. Maloney, who was running in a primary contest against Representative Jerrold Nadler, a longtime mentor of Mr. Stringer’s.Two weeks later, the congresswoman attacked Mr. Nadler in The New York Post for supporting “a man accused of sexual assault.” The lawsuit argues that it should have been “reasonably foreseeable” for Ms. Kim that Ms. Maloney would “republish” her claims after their meeting.Some allies of Mr. Stringer, left, believe he should be considered a potential heir to his mentor, Representative Jerrold Nadler, right, if he decides to retire.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesLegal experts briefed on the issues raised by the case, though, said that the application of the theory known as “republication” would be ripe for challenge on multiple grounds. Though the suit insinuates that Ms. Kim somehow prompted Ms. Maloney’s statement, Mr. Stringer’s lawyers never actually state what, if anything, she told the congresswoman to encourage or direct her to reference Mr. Stringer. “If there’s no clear evidence that the defendant directed the third party to make the statement, it’s fairly likely the case would be dismissed,” said Lee Levine, a retired media lawyer with decades of experience litigating defamation cases, including some for The Times.Though The Times reviewed a draft of the complaint before it was filed, it agreed with Mr. Stringer not to share details of the case with Mr. Levine or anyone else ahead of time.Mr. Stringer and his lawyers were clearly aware of the statutory limits. The suit filed on Monday made no mention of a second woman, Teresa Logan, who followed Ms. Kim’s allegations by accusing Mr. Stringer of kissing and groping her at a bar he helped found in the 1990s. That instance, Mr. Stringer conceded, was clearly outside the statute of limitations.Mr. Stringer said in 2021 that he had “no memory” of the woman but added that if they had met, he was sorry to have made her uncomfortable.If the case proceeds, Mr. Stringer and his allies believe the discovery process will turn up new and relevant information related to Ms. Kim’s actions and whether she coordinated her public statements with any of his political rivals.Mr. Stringer is represented in the suit by Milton L. Williams Jr., a former federal prosecutor and white-collar criminal defense lawyer who currently serves as the chair of the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board.After his loss, Mr. Stringer finished out his term as comptroller last December and began a consulting practice. But he almost immediately began discussing a political comeback.He went as far as to briefly campaign for a State Senate seat in Manhattan this spring, but he never actually entered the race. Allies still believe he should be considered a potential heir to Mr. Nadler should the congressman decide to retire.Still, the accusations of misconduct would almost certainly complicate any effort to return to public office.“Right now, I don’t have any plans to run for office. It’s something I’m not ruling out someday,” Mr. Stringer said. “This lawsuit is what’s in front of me at the moment.” More

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      As G.O.P. Candidates Face Accusations, Rivals Tread Carefully

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      In several states, Republican candidates are contending with allegations of domestic violence and sexual assault. Few of their primary rivals want to talk about it.WASHINGTON — When fresh allegations of domestic violence were lodged against former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens last month, one of his Republican rivals for the state’s open Senate seat, Representative Vicky Hartzler, stepped up and called for him to end his campaign.Then she moved on to an issue perhaps more resonant with Republican primary voters: transgender women in sports.“Eric Greitens is a toxic candidate unfit to hold office,” Michael Hafner, a spokesman for Ms. Hartzler’s Senate campaign, said, before declaring the central message of her campaign: “Missouri family values, freedom, and taking back our country.”In Missouri, Georgia, Ohio and now Nebraska, Republican men running for high office face significant allegations of domestic violence, stalking, even sexual assault — accusations that once would have derailed any run for office. But in an era of Republican politics when Donald J. Trump could survive and thrive amid accusations of sexual assault, opposing candidates are finding little traction in dwelling on the issues.Political scientists who have studied Republican voting since the rise of Trumpism are not surprised that accused candidates have soldiered on — and that their primary rivals have approached the accusations tepidly. In this fiercely partisan moment, concerns about personal behavior are dwarfed by the struggle between Republicans and Democrats, which Republican men and women see as life-or-death. Increasingly, Republicans cast accusations of sexual misconduct as an attempt by liberals to silence conservatives.The candidates who do speak of their opponents’ domestic violence and assault allegations often raise them not as disqualifications in looming Republican primaries, but as matters ripe for exploitation by Democrats in the fall.“It’s a horrible problem; he’ll never be elected, and that’s the educational process we’re going through right now,” Gary Black, Georgia’s agriculture commissioner, said of domestic violence and assault allegations leveled at Herschel Walker, his Trump-backed Republican rival to take on Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in November. “There’s a great desire for Republicans to get their seat back. Electability is going to be the issue over the next six weeks.”Herschel Walker, a Trump-backed Senate candidate in Georgia, has owned up to accusations of violence against his wife but has denied the accusations of violent threats against two other women.Audra Melton for The New York TimesEric Greitens resigned as Missouri’s governor after a sexual misconduct scandal, and is facing domestic violence allegations amid his current Senate campaign.Jeff Roberson/Associated PressDemocrats, including President Biden and Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, have weathered their own accusations of misconduct in the past — and where such charges have proven difficult to discount, the party has shown itself more willing to jettison its candidates.The accusations facing some Republican men are so stark that they raise the question: What would disqualify a candidate in a Republican primary? Mr. Greitens resigned as Missouri’s governor after a hairdresser testified under oath in 2018 that he had taped her hands to pull-up rings in his basement, blindfolded her, stripped her clothes off and taken a photo of her, which he threatened to release if she revealed their affair.Amid his current Senate campaign, Mr. Greitens was accused last month in a sworn affidavit from his former wife that he had violently abused her and had hit one of their sons as his governorship unraveled. Still, a poll taken after the accusations came to light showed Mr. Greitens neck and neck with Ms. Hartzler and Eric Schmitt, Missouri’s attorney general.Mr. Walker, a former college and pro football star who has the backing not only of Mr. Trump but also much of the Republican establishment, has been accused by his ex-wife of attacking her in bed, choking her and threatening to kill her. Mr. Walker doesn’t deny the assault and has said he was suffering from mental illness.Mallory Blount, a spokeswoman for Mr. Walker’s campaign, said he “emphatically denies” the “false claims” from another woman who said he had been her longtime boyfriend and that when she broke up with him, he had threatened to kill her and himself. Ms. Blount also said he has denied a violent stalking charge by a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.Mr. Walker “has owned up to his mistakes, sought forgiveness, gotten treatment, and dedicated his life to helping others who are struggling,” Ms. Blount said, condemning the media for surfacing past allegations.Max Miller, another Trump-backed candidate and a former White House aide running for an Ohio House seat, was accused by one of Mr. Trump’s press secretaries, Stephanie Grisham, of hitting her the day they broke up. Mr. Miller denied the allegation, then sued Ms. Grisham for defamation, accusing her of making “libelous and defamatory false statements.” His campaign did not respond to requests for comment.“It used to be that being accused of domestic violence was an automatic disqualifier, regardless of party,” Ms. Grisham’s lawyer, Adam VanHo, said. “And to turn around and sue to silence your accuser was even more abhorrent.”Max Miller, a Trump-backed candidate for an Ohio House seat, was accused by a former White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, above, of hitting her after they broke up. He then sued her for defamation.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn Thursday, a Republican state senator in Nebraska, Julie Slama, accused a leading Republican candidate for governor in that state, Charles Herbster, of sexually assaulting her three years ago when she was 22, saying in a statement that she had “prayed I would never have to relive this trauma.” Mr. Herbster denied the charges, claiming he was being targeted by political rivals. He linked himself to others who have beaten back similar accusations.“They did it with Brett Kavanaugh. They certainly did it with Donald J. Trump and now they’re trying to do it with Charles W. Herbster,” he told a local radio station.In Missouri, Mr. Greitens’s defiance spurred Rene Artman, who chairs the Republican central committee of St. Louis County, to organize other Republican women to pressure the party chairman, Nick Myers, to demand Mr. Greitens withdraw.“We’ve heard not a thing, not a thing,” she said on Friday. “This is the breakdown of society. When you take morals and God out of country, this is what happens. I don’t think you can blame this on Trump whatsoever.”Republican candidates, by and large, have remained defiant. One exception is Sean Parnell, Mr. Trump’s pick for an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania, who suspended his campaign after his estranged wife testified that he had repeatedly abused her and their children.Political scientists are not surprised by Republicans’ tolerance for accusations. Charges of misogyny, sexual harassment and even domestic abuse have “become deeply partisan in terms of beliefs about what is acceptable and what is appropriate,” said Kelly Dittmar, a professor at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “And now it’s fallen into the talk of ‘cancel culture’ in the broader society.”It was widely believed that Mr. Trump’s own confession, caught on an infamous video recorded for “Access Hollywood,” that he routinely grabbed women by the genitals — and the plethora of accusations that followed — would drive away women voters.But in 2016, 88 percent of Republican women voted for Mr. Trump, just a percentage point below the share of Republican men who did. Even in 2018, when women were widely seen as having delivered the House to Democrats in response to the Trump presidency, Republican women were no more likely to vote for Democrats than they had been two years before, said Erin C. Cassese, a professor of political science at the University of Delaware who studies women’s voting patterns.The #MeToo movement and the current debate over transgender rights and education are only widening the gap between Republican women and women who identify as Democrats and independents, Prof. Cassese said. For female candidates, appeals to gender solidarity or attacks on misogyny do not seem to work in Republican primaries.“It’s very hard to make those appeals, even for women candidates appealing to women,” she said. “We don’t have any sense of what messages might work.”Jane Timken, the only woman in the Republican primary for a Senate seat in Ohio, chided her male rivals in an advertisement. Andrew Spear/Getty ImagesJane Timken, the only woman in the Republican Senate primary in Ohio, has injected gender into the race — though delicately. In February, she released an advertisement chiding her male rivals: “We all know guys who overcompensate for their inadequacies, and that description fits the guys in the Senate race to a T.”But in an interview on Friday, she explicitly dismissed the issue of gender. “They’re not bad male candidates. They’re just bad candidates,” she said of her opponents, adding that the mistreatment of women is “not an issue that I’m campaigning on. I’m campaigning on the Biden failed policies of border security, inflation and jobs.”In the Trump era, the men who are accused of wrongdoing have become adept at framing themselves as the victims of a broader conspiracy or an intolerant society. Mr. Greitens has blamed George W. Bush’s former political aide, Karl Rove; the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell; even the liberal philanthropist George Soros for the release of his ex-wife’s abuse allegations. His campaign did not respond to requests for comment.Republicans running against those accused say they do see an opening, as long as it’s navigated carefully. Representative Billy Long, who is running in the Missouri Republican Senate primary, emphasized the “$400,000 or so in costs, fines and penalties” that state taxpayers have already shouldered for investigations into Mr. Greitens’s activities. Then there’s the ongoing child custody fight between Mr. Greitens and his ex-wife.“If domestic violence is proven true, he’s toast,” Mr. Long said.Jazmine Ulloa More

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      How Éric Zemmour Is Turning French Politics Upside Down

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      Éric Zemmour, an anti-immigrant writer and TV commentator, is surging in opinion polls before presidential elections next year — and he is not yet a candidate.PARIS — He is the anti-immigration son of parents from Algeria. He styles himself as the great defender of France’s Christian civilization, though he himself is Jewish. He channels Donald J. Trump in an anti-establishment campaign. And he is now scrambling the battle lines before France’s presidential election in April.The meteoric rise of Éric Zemmour, a far-right author and TV pundit, has turned France’spolitics upside down.Until a few weeks ago, most had expected France’s next presidential elections to be a predictable rematch between President Emmanuel Macron and the far-right Marine Le Pen that, polls showed, left voters who wanted alternatives deeply dissatisfied.Though still not a declared candidate, Mr. Zemmour, 63, shot to No. 2 in a poll of likely voters last week, disrupting campaign strategies across the board, even beyond those of Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen.“The French want to upset a political order that hasn’t won them over, and Éric Zemmour appears to be the bowling ball that’s going to knock down all the pins,” said Pascal Perrineau, a political scientist at Sciences Po University specializing in elections and the right.Mr. Perrineau warned that voters were not seriously focused yet on the elections and that polls could be volatile.Yet candidates are not taking any chances.Mr. Macron’s campaign has focused on winning support on the right and forcing a showdown with Ms. Le Pen, in the belief that the French would reject her party in the second round of voting, as they have for decades.Now it is far less clear whom he would meet in a runoff: A strong showing in the first round could propel Mr. Zemmour into the second one, or it could split the far-right electorate to allow a center-right candidate to qualify for the finals.After weeks of ignoring Mr. Zemmour, Mr. Macron is now criticizing him, though not by name, while government ministers and other Macron allies have unleashed a barrage of attacks.Mr. Zemmour is the author of several books, and a star on the right-wing CNews network. Nicolas Tucat/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Zemmour’s rise has been most unsettling for Ms. Le Pen, who is plummeting in the polls — so much so that her own father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party founder, said that he would support Mr. Zemmour if the writer were in a stronger position.Ms. Le Pen has for years tried to broaden her base with a so-called un-demonizing strategy of moving her nationalist, anti-immigrant party from the most extreme xenophobic positions that it was known for under her father. Now she finds herself in the unusual position of being outflanked on the right.Mr. Zemmour became one of France’s best-selling authors in the past decade by writing books on the nation’s decline — fueled, he said, by the loss of traditional French and Christian values, the immigration of Muslim Africans bent on a reverse colonization of France, the rise of feminism and the loss of virility, and a “great replacement” of white people, a conspiracy theory that has been cited by gunmen in multiple mass shootings.As the child of Algerians who settled in metropolitan France, he has presented himself as the embodiment of France’s successful system of assimilation. He has said that the failure to integrate recent generations of Muslim immigrants lies with the new arrivals, who hate France, and not with a system that others say has not kept up with the times.Mr. Zemmour’s influence rose to an entirely new level in the past two years after he became the star of CNews, a new Fox-style news network that gave him a platform to expound on his views every evening.His supporters include voters most deeply shaken by the social forces that have roiled French society more recently and that they now lump into “wokisme” — a #MeToo movement that has led to the fall of powerful men; a racial awakening challenging France’s image of itself as a colorblind society; the emergence of a new generation questioning the principles of the French Republic; and the perceived growing threat of an American-inspired vision of society.“In its history, France has always had a strong cultural identity, but now there’s deep anxiety about that identity,” Mr. Perrineau said. “People feel that their culture, their way of life and their political system, all is being changed. It’s enough.”Mr. Zemmour at a book promotion event in Nice last month.Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Éric Zemmour plays on that very well, on this nostalgia for the past, and this fear of no longer being a great power, of dissolving in a conglomerate that we don’t understand, whether it’s Europe or globalization or the Americanization of culture,” he added.In the 2017 election, Mr. Macron was the new face who overturned the existing political order. But during his presidency, “the new world of Emmanuel Macron has come to look a lot like the old world,” disillusioning voters, Mr. Perrineau said.Philippe Olivier, a close aide to Ms. Le Pen and a member of the European Parliament, said that French voters seek a larger-than-life figure in their president.“In the United States, a president could be a movie actor like Reagan or a carnival performer like Trump,” said Mr. Olivier, who is also Ms. Le Pen’s brother-in-law. “In France, we elect the king.”But the two-round system compels much of the electorate to vote in the runoffs against candidates — and not for someone of their liking.“In the second round, the point is who is more repulsive,” Mr. Olivier said. “I believe Macron would be more rejected than Marine, but Zemmour would be much more rejected than Macron.”As France has grown more conservative in recent years, Mr. Macron has tacked right on many issues to try to grab a bigger electoral slice, especially among voters in the traditional center-right Republicans party.The Republicans, who have yet to select their presidential candidate, are now facing a new threat themselves, because Mr. Zemmour draws support from them as well as from the far right.In their own bid to attract far-right voters, many leaders on the traditional right have flirted with Mr. Zemmour in recent years, excusing or overlooking the fact that the writer has been sanctioned for inciting racial hatred.“The traditional right made a serious mistake that is now exploding in their face,” said Jean-Yves Camus, director of the Observatory of Radical Politics. “Because it’s long been in competition against the far right on issues like national identity, immigration and sovereignty, it kept winking at Zemmour.”A fan taking a photo with Mr. Zemmour at a book signing in Toulon last month.Eric Gaillard/ReutersNow the traditional right is looking for ways to distance itself from the TV star without alienating his supporters.Patrick Stefanini, a Republican who ran President Jacques Chirac’s successful 1995 campaign, said Mr. Zemmour was benefiting from divisions within the traditional right on issues like immigration.“Mr. Zemmour has turned immigration into the single key to understanding the difficulties facing French society,” said Mr. Stefanini, who is now leading the presidential bid of Valérie Pécresse, the head of the Paris region. “The Republicans are having a little trouble positioning themselves because the tendencies aren’t the same within the Republicans.”Mr. Stefanini attributed Mr. Zemmour’s rise partly to the traditional right’s failure to quickly decide on a candidate, and said he felt confident that the TV star’s ratings would peter out.But for now, many voters appear to be taking a look at Mr. Zemmour, who has been attracting huge crowds at campaign-like events across France as he promotes his latest book, “France Has Not Said Its Last Word Yet.”Last week, three residents of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a wealthy suburb of Paris, came together to attend an event with Mr. Zemmour in the capital.Françoise Torneberg, who said she was in her 70s, said she liked Mr. Zemmour because “he gives a kick in the anthill,” she said.Her friend Andrée Chalmandrier, 69, said, “We love France but not the France of today.”“We’re not at home,” Ms. Chalmandrier said, adding that often when she shops in her suburb, “I’m the only French representative. There are four or five veiled women around me, who furthermore are extremely arrogant.”“And yet it’s a good neighborhood,” Ms. Torneberg said. “It’s not at all a working-class neighborhood.”Léontine Gallois contributed reporting. More

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      A Tabloid Ally of Trump and Weinstein Reboots Himself

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      Dylan Howard, known for the “catch and kill” deals during the #MeToo reckoning, teams up with an Italian publisher for a publication aimed at the Hamptons crowd.In late May, the luxury brand Ferragamo threw a launch party to celebrate the Grazia Gazette: The Hamptons — the latest free publication in one of the country’s wealthiest enclaves.Most guests did not know that they were also celebrating a comeback.Grazia’s American operation, Grazia USA, is run by Dylan Howard, the disgraced National Enquirer editor who played a key role in suppressing stories about Donald Trump’s affairs during his presidential campaign, helped Harvey Weinstein dig up dirt on his accusers and, in Jeff Bezos’s telling, threatened the Amazon owner with blackmail.At the party for Mr. Howard’s new venture, young stars and social media influencers mingled while sipping a custom rosé. Some sang along to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License.”They knew the lyrics, but not much about the man behind the event.“I have never heard of him,” said Isaac Hindin-Miller, the DJ, in a phone call afterward.“I was more there as a guest of Ferragamo,” said Jenné Lombardo, a marketing consultant who went with her husband, Harvey Newton-Haydon, a model.“I don’t know Howard or anything about him,” Julia Moshy, one of the “Rich Kids of Instagram,” wrote in an email.A Dylan Howard primer: During his time as the top editor of The Enquirer, a job he held for more than five years, Mr. Howard used his position to help suppress coverage of Mr. Trump’s reported extramarital affairs, including buying one woman’s story and then burying it in a journalistic maneuver known as “catch and kill.” The company later admitted that the payment amounted to an illegal campaign contribution, and Mr. Howard emerged unscathed after cooperating with federal prosecutors.Mr. Howard also dispatched a reporter to help collect hostile information on the actress Rose McGowan, who had made veiled references to misconduct by Mr. Weinstein. (Ms. McGowan later said the producer had raped her in a hotel room in 1997 — Mr. Weinstein has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex.)Soon after leaving American Media last year, Mr. Howard started a new company, Pantheon Media Group. Pantheon later struck a licensing agreement with the Mondadori Group, the biggest publisher in Italy and the backer of the Grazia fashion magazine franchise, to publish Grazia in the United States. The Grazia Gazette: The Hamptons is among the first projects.Madelyn Cline on the cover of the first issue of Grazia Gazette: The Hamptons.Grazia GazetteThe model Ambra Battilana, who had been invited to the party, was aware of Mr. Howard’s background. She said she was relieved she had not attended.Ms. Battilana has accused Mr. Weinstein of sexually assaulting her during a meeting in his TriBeCa office. The next day she recorded Mr. Weinstein apologizing to her. The Enquirer unsuccessfully tried to buy Ms. Battilana’s story at the time. (Mr. Weinstein was found guilty of sex crimes against two women last year and sentenced to 23 years in prison.)Given all that, Mr. Howard’s involvement in the Surf Lodge party did not sit well with Ms. Battilana, who spends most summer weekends in the Hamptons and goes to the Surf Lodge frequently. (Mr. Howard also has a home in Springs, a hamlet in the Hamptons, which he bought for $1.1 million at the end of 2017, according to public records.)“I think this is completely horrendous,” she said. “I will be asking who is connected, because I really want to get to the bottom of understanding who was the person who would allow such a person to get in.”In a statement, a spokeswoman for Ferragamo said: “Salvatore Ferragamo has a longstanding relationship with Grazia titles globally and recently expanded that to partner on the launch issue of the Gazette with a dinner co-hosted by editor in chief David Thielebeule and cover star Madelyn Cline, not Dylan Howard.” (Ms. Cline is an actress and one of the stars of Netflix’s “Outer Banks.”Grazia Gazette: The Hamptons is just one part of Mr. Howard’s reinvention plan. He is trying to raise money to “buy the entire Grazia brand worldwide,” according to a copy of his financing proposal reviewed by The New York Times, with whom Mr. Howard did not wish to discuss his new business ventures. He initially agreed to clarify his future plans over lunch, only to cancel through a publicist, Howard Bragman, several days later.“Mr. Howard would of course like to grow his business, including his successful collaboration with Grazia,” Mr. Bragman said in an email. In a separate email, Mr. Howard’s lawyer, Mitchell Schuster, called The Times’s characterization of Mr. Howard’s fund-raising efforts “not correct as stated and misleading.”Maer Roshan, the editor of Los Angeles Magazine and the former editor of Radar, which Mr. Howard took over in 2009 and transformed into something more akin to the gossip site TMZ, was among those in the media who were incredulous at Mr. Howard’s attempted comeback.How “does this dude come back with this glossy magazine and roster of A-list advertisers?” he wondered.Since leaving American Media when his contract expired on March 31, 2020, Mr. Howard has acquired the website for OK Magazine, as well as Radar Online. Both were formerly owned by American Media.Mr. Howard has also continued a sideline he started in 2018 as an author of true-crime books for Skyhorse, which is distributed by Simon & Schuster. Working in collaboration with other authors, but with his name receiving top billing, he has come out with more than half a dozen books, including, “Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales,” “Covid-19: The Greatest Cover-Up in History” and “Diana: Case Solved.”In an email, Tony Lyons, Skyhorse’s president and publisher, called Mr. Howard a “dogged investigator and a talented storyteller.”There is also podcasting. This month, PodcastOne, the producer of “The Adam Carolla Show,” “The Dan Abrams Podcast” and more than 200 other audio series, announced that it had reached a deal with Mr. Howard’s Empire Media to create six limited series and eight weekly programs.One company that won’t do business with Mr. Howard is the dating app Bumble, which removed his profile earlier this year after a woman complained about his work for Mr. Weinstein, according to two people with knowledge of the matter (Mr. Schuster, the lawyer, said Mr. Howard chose to remove his profile for “unrelated reasons” and said he did not “work for” Mr. Weinstein).Mr. Howard grew up in Geelong, Australia, a city southwest of Melbourne, and started his career at a local paper. From there he became a sports reporter for Channel 7 in Melbourne before coming to the United States in 2009.After a stint as a producer at Reuters in New York, he joined American Media, which owned a number of celebrity gossip sites and publications, including the supermarket tabloid Star and RadarOnline. Under Mr. Howard, RadarOnline turned into a celebrity scoop machine, posting audio recordings of Mel Gibson’s vitriolic tirades and other Hollywood dirt.In 2011, he tied for entertainment Journalist of the Year at the annual Los Angeles Press Club awards. “In the world of celebrity and entertainment news, even mainstream media couldn’t ignore exclusive stories broken under Dylan Howard’s tenure as senior executive editor of RadarOnline,” the judges wrote.Mr. Howard left American Media in 2012. The Associated Press reported that his departure came after an external investigation into his workplace behavior. (The company said he was cleared of any wrongdoing.) The next year he returned to American Media, whose chief executive was David Pecker, a friend of Donald J. Trump, and he soon became the company’s chief content officer. That job gave him oversight of The Enquirer as well as Us Weekly, Globe and OK!, among other publications.Mr. Howard in 2014, when he was the editor in chief of Radar Online.Ilya S. Savenok/Getty ImagesDuring the 2016 presidential campaign, headlines in The Enquirer lionized Mr. Trump and belittled his political rivals. In addition, as The Wall Street Journal was first to report, American Media made a $150,000 payment to the former Playboy model Karen McDougal in return for the rights to her story of an affair with Mr. Trump. The Enquirer never ran that story.Mr. Howard also worked with Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, on a deal that silenced another woman, Stormy Daniels, who also said she had sex with Mr. Trump, who has denied having sex with either woman.In an email, Mr. Bragman added that Mr. Howard had been “ORDERED BY MANAGEMENT” to help suppress coverage of Mr. Trump’s affairs. But in a follow-up email, Mr. Schuster, Mr. Howard’s lawyer, said that Mr. Bragman’s comment was not authorized by Mr. Howard.“Please disregard Mr. Bragman’s comment and confirm that it will not be included in your article,” he wrote. “Thank you.”American Media ultimately admitted that its payment to Ms. McDougal violated campaign finance law. Mr. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison. Mr. Howard, along with Mr. Pecker, entered into a nonprosecution agreement with the government and cooperated with its investigation.The agreement remained in effect only if American Media did nothing to break the law for three years. In 2019, Mr. Bezos, the Amazon founder, accused the company of blackmail after it had published an 11-page exposé of his extramarital affair with the former TV personality Lauren Sanchez headlined “Bezos’ Divorce! The Cheating Photos That Ended His Marriage.”The story led to a public spat in which Mr. Bezos accused the tabloid’s leaders of “extortion and blackmail” in a lengthy post on Medium. The multibillionaire quoted from a letter sent to him by Mr. Howard. In the letter, as quoted by Mr. Bezos, Mr. Howard described the supposedly compromising photographs The Enquirer had in its possession, including a “below-the-belt selfie.”No one was charged in the matter. Mr. Schuster called Mr. Bezos’ post on Medium “self-serving and inaccurate,” and said that Mr. Howard’s reporting was “fair and accurate.”Now, a little more than a year since Mr. Howard made his exit from American Media, Grazia Gazette: The Hamptons appeared in stacks along Main Street in East Hampton. Distributed free, it has a lot of competition in a place where there is no shortage of gratis publications aimed at wealthy readers, a boomlet fueled by ad dollars from real estate agencies promoting multimillion-dollar listings.“Most of them are thrown in the garbage,” said the author Steven Gaines, a resident of East Hampton who has written extensively on the area’s history. “Some people pick them up and look at them, but there’s really nothing interesting.”The lucky ones have a rack under an awning, or a place on an indoor windowsill. The unlucky ones get tossed on doorsteps, rained on and thrown away.Lynn A. Scotti, a president and group publisher at Modern Luxury Media, which publishes Hamptons Magazine, is aware of the new entrant in the field. She said she had seen the Grazia Gazette “out wet,” adding: “We welcome healthy competition and I wish him the best.”The editor and publisher Dan Rattiner, who has run Dan’s Papers, a Hamptons local news publication, for more than 60 years, said of the free glossies: “They come and go. There are so many of them, it’s hard to tell one from another.”Mr. Roshan, the editor, expressed surprise that luxury advertisers would sign on with a publication run by Mr. Howard at a time when “people have been canceled and cast out for far less.”But Joseph Montag, the managing director of the Topping Rose House, a hotel and restaurant and a not infrequent filming location for “The Real Housewives of New York City,” suggested that people in the Hamptons were not likely to be bothered by Mr. Howard’s efforts to bury the accounts of the women who had accused Mr. Weinstein of sexual assault or told of their affairs with Mr. Trump.“People out here are used to those sorts of things,” Mr. Montag said, adding that Matt Lauer, the former NBC anchor who was fired by the network after accusations of sexual assault, was still out and about in the Hamptons.Mr. Gaines, the Hamptons chronicler, seemed to be of two minds.“If he wants to reinvent himself, he should go to Miami,” he said. “They forgive everything down there.”But then again, the Hamptons-specific media market is crowded.“If he took his bad-boy reputation out here and he used that, he exploited that, to make a different type of magazine,” Mr. Gaines continued, “I think people would read that.”Jim Rutenberg, Lauren Hirsch and Michael Rothfeld contributed reporting. Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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      Biden Says Cuomo 'Should Resign' Amid Sexual Harassment Findings

      by

      Investigators said they corroborated the claims of 11 women who accused Mr. Cuomo of inappropriate behavior, from suggestive comments to instances of groping.Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women, including current and former government workers, whose accounts of unwanted touching and inappropriate comments were corroborated in a damning report released on Tuesday by the New York State attorney general, Letitia James.The 165-page report prompted multiple calls for Mr. Cuomo to resign, including from President Biden, a longtime ally of the governor, and it cast doubt on Mr. Cuomo’s political future. The Democratic speaker of the State Assembly said on Tuesday that he intended to quicken the pace of a separate impeachment inquiry, adding that Mr. Cuomo “can no longer remain in office.”The report, the culmination of a five-month investigation, included at least three previously unreported allegations of sexual harassment from women who accused Mr. Cuomo of improperly touching them, including a state trooper assigned to the governor’s security detail. It also highlighted far-reaching efforts by the governor, his staff and close associates to disparage and retaliate against one woman who made her allegations public.All told, the investigators said they corroborated the claims of 11 women, nine of whom are current or former state employees, who accused Mr. Cuomo of a range of inappropriate behavior, from suggestive comments to instances of groping, through interviews with 179 witnesses and tens of thousands of documents.The report described in stunning detail how Mr. Cuomo’s behavior and actions by his top officials violated both state and federal law, offering a look at the inner workings of the governor’s office and how it failed to properly handle some of the women’s allegations. It also shed a light on a sprawling network of associates, including former aides and close allies, enlisted by Mr. Cuomo and his staff to aggressively fight the allegations on behalf of the governor.Investigators said that Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, and his aides fostered a toxic work culture that was rife with fear and intimidation, and helped enable “harassment to occur and created a hostile work environment.”“The independent investigation found that Governor Cuomo harassed multiple women, many of whom were young women, by engaging in unwanted groping, kisses, hugging, and by making inappropriate comments,” Ms. James, a Democrat, said during a news conference in Manhattan, adding, “I believe these women.”Mr. Cuomo responded to the findings in a 14-minute prerecorded statement delivered from Albany. In a sweeping, slightly disjointed soliloquy, the governor denied most of the report’s serious findings, reiterating his contention that he had never touched anyone inappropriately. He suggested the report was politically motivated and declared that “the facts are much different from what has been portrayed.”Mr. Cuomo denied any wrongdoing following the release of a report by the state’s attorney general into allegations of sexual harassment against him. Office of the New York Governor“I never touched anyone inappropriately or made inappropriate sexual advances,” he said. “I am 63 years old. I have lived my entire adult life in public view. That is just not who I am, and that’s not who I have ever been.”In defending his behavior, Mr. Cuomo mentioned that one of his relatives was sexually assaulted in high school and suggested it was sexist to accuse his female supervisors of creating a hostile workplace. His speech was even interlaced with a slide show of photographs of him kissing public officials on the cheek, gestures he said were “meant to convey warmth, nothing more.”The political fallout from the report was swift: It prompted Mr. Biden, a longtime friend of the governor, to call on Mr. Cuomo to resign on Tuesday, months after stopping short of asking the governor to step down because the investigation was ongoing.“What I said was if the investigation by the attorney general concluded that the allegations were correct, back in March, I would recommend he resign,” said Mr. Biden, who had not spoken with Mr. Cuomo. “That is what I’m doing today.”“I think he should resign,” the president said.Representative Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, joined the existing and ever-growing chorus of calls for Mr. Cuomo to resign, as did three House Democrats from New York who originally said they wanted to wait on the report before weighing in on Mr. Cuomo’s fate.Even Mr. Cuomo’s fellow Democratic governors in nearby Northeastern states joined the chorus. In a joint statement, the governors of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and New Jersey said that they were appalled at the investigation’s findings and that Mr. Cuomo should step down.The contents of the report, and the subsequent backlash, would seem to limit Mr. Cuomo’s political future, and serve as a serious obstacle to being re-elected to a fourth term — once regarded as a near certainty for a governor previously hailed a national leader during the coronavirus pandemic.The Democratic-controlled State Assembly, which could impeach Mr. Cuomo with a simple majority vote, has been conducting a broad impeachment investigation into the governor, examining a series of scandals with a common theme:whether or not Mr. Cuomo abused his power while in office.Democrats in the Assembly held a closed-door emergency meeting on Tuesday to discuss whether to draft articles of impeachment based solely on the findings of the attorney general report, a move that appeared to have support among many of the 50 or 60 lawmakers who spoke, according to four people with knowledge of the meeting.After the meeting, Carl E. Heastie, the Assembly speaker, said his chamber would “move expeditiously and look to conclude our impeachment investigation as quickly as possible.” It could take a month to complete the existing inquiry and draw up the articles of impeachment, according to a person familiar with the process.A trial in the State Senate could commence as soon as September or early October, the person said. If Mr. Cuomo were to resign or be removed from office, Kathleen C. Hochul, the state’s lieutenant governor, would succeed him, making her the first woman to become governor in the state’s history.On Tuesday, Ms. Hochul said she believed the governor’s accusers, describing Mr. Cuomo’s documented behavior as “repulsive and unlawful.” She said that it was up to the Assembly to determine the next steps, adding that “it would not be appropriate to comment further on the process at this moment” because she is next in the line of succession.The attorney general’s investigation was spearheaded by two outside lawyers: Joon H. Kim, a former federal prosecutor who once served as acting U.S. attorney of Manhattan, and Anne L. Clark, a well-known employment lawyer.On Tuesday, Mr. Kim said their investigation revealed a pattern of troubling behavior from Mr. Cuomo and found that the culture within the executive chamber “contributed to conditions that allowed the governor’s sexually harassing conduct to occur and to persist.”“It was a culture where you could not say no to the governor, and if you upset him, or his senior staff, you would be written off, cast aside or worse,” Mr. Kim said. “But at the same time, the witnesses described a culture that normalized and overlooked everyday flirtations, physical intimacy and inappropriate comments by the governor.”Ms. Clark said that the governor’s conduct detailed in the report “clearly meets, and far exceeds” the legal standard used to determine gender-based harassment in the workplace.“Women also described to us having the governor seek them out, stare intently at them, look them up and down or gaze at their chest or butt,” she said. “The governor routinely interacted with women in ways that focused on their gender, sometimes in explicitly sexualized manner in ways that women found deeply humiliating and offensive.”Understand the Scandals Challenging Gov. Cuomo’s LeadershipCard 1 of 5Multiple claims of sexual harassment. More

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      An Accusation Blew Up a Campaign. The Media Didn’t Know What to Do.

      by

      Handling a delicate allegation of sexual misconduct is a lot more challenging than covering a horse race.Two days after coming in fifth in the election night count of votes for New York mayor last week, Scott Stringer was sitting in a high-polish diner in TriBeCa, drinking his second bottle of Sprite and trying to figure out what had happened.He held up his iPhone to show me a text message he had received on Election Day from one of the progressive elected officials who had endorsed him and then dropped him after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her more than 20 years ago. In the text was a photograph of the official’s ranked-choice ballot. Mr. Stringer was ranked first.“This profile in courage,” he began, half laughing. “You can’t make this up. Who does that?”Mr. Stringer, the 61-year-old New York City comptroller, isn’t the only one trying to puzzle out what happened over a few days in April in the campaign. Mr. Stringer, a geeky fixture in Manhattan politics, had been among the leading candidates when the woman, Jean Kim, accused him of touching her without her consent in the back of taxis. Suddenly he, the media covering him, his supporters and Ms. Kim were all reckoning with big questions of truth, doubt, politics and corroboration.The allegations against Mr. Stringer did not divide a nation, as Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh did. Nor did his candidacy carry the kind of high national stakes that came with Tara Reade’s allegations against Joseph R. Biden Jr. last spring. But maybe for those reasons, Ms. Kim’s claim that Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001 offers an opportunity to ask how journalists, political actors and, most important, voters are supposed to weigh claims like Ms. Kim’s. They also raise the question of how and whether to draw a line between those claims and the ones that helped ignite the #MeToo movement.As much as the exposure of police brutality has been driven by cellphone video, the #MeToo movement was powered by investigative journalism, and courageous victims who chose to speak to reporters. The movement reached critical mass with articles by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times and Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker on the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, which the Pulitzer Prize committee described as “explosive” revelations of “long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing.” Those stories and other notable sets of revelations — about the financier Jeffrey Epstein, the sports doctor Larry Nassar, the singer R. Kelly, the comedian Bill Cosby — drew power from rigorous reporting that helped develop new standards for covering what had long been dismissed as “he said, she said.”Crucially, reporters honed the craft of corroboration, showing that an accuser had told a friend, a relative or a therapist at the time of the episode and that the accuser wasn’t simply relying on old memories. The reporters also looked for evidence that the accuser’s account was part of a pattern, ruling out a single misunderstanding.Those technical aspects of the stories weren’t always widely understood. But the landmark investigations were, even in this divided moment, unifying. There was no serious partisan division over any of those men’s guilt because the journalistic evidence was simply so overwhelming. But not every allegation — and not every true allegation — can meet that standard. Not every victim is able to talk about it immediately; not every bad act is part of a pattern.In the case of Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim, observers were left simply with his claim their relationship was consensual, and hers that it wasn’t. Ms. Kim’s lawyer had circulated a news release, which didn’t mention Ms. Kim, to reporters the evening of April 27.At her news conference on April 28, Patricia Pastor, Ms. Kim’s lawyer, read a statement based on Ms. Kim’s recollection, which didn’t include contemporaneous corroboration, which Ms. Kim said didn’t exist, or a suggestion of a pattern. And the lawyer angled the statement for maximum impact: The statement referred to Ms. Kim, for instance, as an “intern,” when she had been a 30-year-old volunteer. And Ms. Pastor claimed, incorrectly, that Ms. Kim had been introduced to Mr. Stringer by Eric Schneiderman, who was forced to resign as New York’s attorney general in 2018 after a report that he had physically abused at least four women.Mr. Stringer said he had a passing, consensual relationship with Ms. Kim and was stunned by her claims that they had never had a relationship. But he said that he understood why the media picked up the story, even if it hadn’t been corroborated.“Running for mayor, every part of your life is an open book,” he said. “I didn’t begrudge anybody, including The Times, from writing about the charge. That would be silly.”And victims, of course, have no obligation to tell their stories through skeptical journalists. Ms. Pastor pointed out in an interview that “once the story was out, you still have time” to report it out and check the facts, and said she and her client didn’t object to that fact-checking. The Times’s Katie Glueck did that on May 9 and found Ms. Kim and Mr. Stringer telling very different stories in the absence of definitive evidence.Jean Kim said Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001. He has denied her claim.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesBut by then, the story had jumped out of journalists’ hands and into politicians’. Mr. Stringer had painstakingly assembled a coalition of young progressives, including a cadre of state senators who had partly defined their careers by pressing to extend the statute of limitations in cases of child sexual abuse and telling their own harrowing stories. In a video call the day after Ms. Kim’s news conference, they pressed Mr. Stringer to issue a statement suggesting he and Ms. Kim might have perceived their interaction differently.When he refused, and flatly denied the allegation, 10 progressive officials withdrew their endorsement.That decision got journalists off the hook. Most were covering a simple, political story now — a collapsing campaign — and not weighing or investigating a complex #MeToo allegation.The progressive website The Intercept (which had exposed a trumped-up sexual misconduct claim against a gay Democrat in Massachusetts last year) also looked into Ms. Kim’s accusations, calling former Stringer campaign aides, and found that a series of widely reported details from Ms. Pastor’s statement — though not Ms. Kim’s core allegations — were inaccurate. A longtime New York political hand who had known both Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim at the time, Mike McGuire, also told me he’d been waiting to talk on the record about what he saw as factual errors in Ms. Kim’s lawyer’s account, but that I was only the second reporter to call him, after Ms. Glueck. Ms. Kim, meanwhile, had been open about her motives — she wanted voters to know about the allegation.It’s easy to blame the relative lack of curiosity about the underlying story on the cliché of a hollowed-out local press corps, but that’s not really true in this case. The New York mayor’s race received rich and often ambitious coverage, as good and varied as I’ve seen at least since 2001, often from newer outlets like Politico and The City. The winner of the vote’s first round, Eric Adams, saw reporters investigate his donors and peer into his refrigerator.In an article in Columbia Journalism Review, Andrea Gabor examined coverage of the race and found that the allegations had prompted news organizations to stop covering Mr. Stringer as a top-tier candidate. She suggested that reporters “recalibrate the judgments they make on how to cover candidates such as Stringer in their wake.”In May, Mr. Stringer’s aides told me they were in talks with some former endorsers to return, as well as with the progressive movement’s biggest star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when they learned of an allegation from another woman: that some 30 years ago, Mr. Stringer had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at a bar. The Times reported the account of the second woman, Teresa Logan, with corroboration. The next day, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Maya Wiley, who came in second after the in-person voting ended. She said that time was running out and that progressives had to unite, a suggestion that the second allegation had made up her mind.But when you get beyond the reporters gaming out winners and losers, and beyond politicians weighing endorsements, here’s the strange thing: It’s not clear there’s anything like a consensus among voters on how the decades-old allegations should have affected Mr. Stringer’s support. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, for instance, has weathered far more recent claims from his own aides. And even two of the legislators who dropped their support of Mr. Stringer told me they were still wrestling with the decision and their roles and that of the media. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seemed to signal a similar concern when, on Election Day, she revealed that she had ranked Mr. Stringer second on her ballot.State Senator Alessandra Biaggi said that the moment had been “incredibly painful” but that she’d begun to feel that “my integrity was being compromised” by staying with Mr. Stringer. She also said that if she were a New York City voter, she would have ranked Mr. Stringer among her top choices, and wished there was space for more nuance in public conversations about sexual misconduct allegations.Yuh-Line Niou, a state assemblywoman from Manhattan, told me she thought the media had unfairly “put a lot of pressure on women who are survivors to speak up,” an experience that had been “scary and in a lot of ways violent.” She said she would have backed Mr. Stringer if he’d acknowledged that he’d harmed Ms. Kim, and added that his denial revealed that he had come from “a time when people don’t talk about what it is to be human, that you have to be perfect somehow.”“I ranked him, of course,” she said. “We didn’t have many choices.”Another progressive who had dropped Mr. Stringer, Representative Jamaal Bowman, said two weeks after Ms. Kim’s allegations became public that “I sometimes regret it because I wasn’t more patient and didn’t ask more questions.”Ms. Kim’s lawyer, Ms. Pastor, said she’d been perplexed by the pained progressives. “You ought to stick to your guns,” she said.It can be hard to separate the entangled roles of media and political actors.“The same way it’s obvious that the media didn’t make Adams rise, it should be obvious that the media didn’t make Stringer fall,” the Daily News columnist and Daily Beast senior editor Harry Siegel told me. “The decision by his lefty endorsers to almost immediately walk away, and before the press had time to vet Kim’s claim, did that. Understanding that the press — and media columnists! — like to center themselves, this is a story about the Democratic Party and its factions more than it’s one about his coverage.”Mr. Stringer said that he was resolved not to relive the campaign, but that he was worried about a progressive movement setting a standard that it can’t meet.“When I think about the future, there’s a lot of progressives who under these scenarios can’t run for office,” he said.Before he headed back out onto Church Street, I asked him what he was going to do next.“Probably just run for governor,” he said, at least half seriously. More

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      As Scott Stringer's Campaign Reeled, the Media Was Confounded

      by

      Handling a delicate allegation of sexual misconduct is a lot more challenging than covering a horse race.Two days after coming in fifth in the election night count of votes for New York mayor last week, Scott Stringer was sitting in a high-polish diner in TriBeCa, drinking his second bottle of Sprite and trying to figure out what had happened.He held up his iPhone to show me a text message he had received on Election Day from one of the progressive elected officials who had endorsed him and then dropped him after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her more than 20 years ago. In the text was a photograph of the official’s ranked-choice ballot. Mr. Stringer was ranked first.“This profile in courage,” he began, half laughing. “You can’t make this up. Who does that?”Mr. Stringer, the 61-year-old New York City comptroller, isn’t the only one trying to puzzle out what happened over a few days in April in the campaign. Mr. Stringer, a geeky fixture in Manhattan politics, had been among the leading candidates when the woman, Jean Kim, accused him of touching her without her consent in the back of taxis. Suddenly he, the media covering him, his supporters and Ms. Kim were all reckoning with big questions of truth, doubt, politics and corroboration.The allegations against Mr. Stringer did not divide a nation, as Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh did. Nor did his candidacy carry the kind of high national stakes that came with Tara Reade’s allegations against Joseph R. Biden Jr. last spring. But maybe for those reasons, Ms. Kim’s claim that Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001 offers an opportunity to ask how journalists, political actors and, most important, voters are supposed to weigh claims like Ms. Kim’s. They also raise the question of how and whether to draw a line between those claims and the ones that helped ignite the #MeToo movement.As much as the exposure of police brutality has been driven by cellphone video, the #MeToo movement was powered by investigative journalism, and courageous victims who chose to speak to reporters. The movement reached critical mass with articles by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times and Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker on the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, which the Pulitzer Prize committee described as “explosive” revelations of “long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing.” Those stories and other notable sets of revelations — about the financier Jeffrey Epstein, the sports doctor Larry Nassar, the singer R. Kelly, the comedian Bill Cosby — drew power from rigorous reporting that helped develop new standards for covering what had long been dismissed as “he said, she said.”Crucially, reporters honed the craft of corroboration, showing that an accuser had told a friend, a relative or a therapist at the time of the episode and that the accuser wasn’t simply relying on old memories. The reporters also looked for evidence that the accuser’s account was part of a pattern, ruling out a single misunderstanding.Those technical aspects of the stories weren’t always widely understood. But the landmark investigations were, even in this divided moment, unifying. There was no serious partisan division over any of those men’s guilt because the journalistic evidence was simply so overwhelming. But not every allegation — and not every true allegation — can meet that standard. Not every victim is able to talk about it immediately; not every bad act is part of a pattern.In the case of Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim, observers were left simply with his claim their relationship was consensual, and hers that it wasn’t. Ms. Kim’s lawyer had circulated a news release, which didn’t mention Ms. Kim, to reporters the evening of April 27.At her news conference on April 28, Patricia Pastor, Ms. Kim’s lawyer, read a statement based on Ms. Kim’s recollection, which didn’t include contemporaneous corroboration, which Ms. Kim said didn’t exist, or a suggestion of a pattern. And the lawyer angled the statement for maximum impact: The statement referred to Ms. Kim, for instance, as an “intern,” when she had been a 30-year-old volunteer. And Ms. Pastor claimed, incorrectly, that Ms. Kim had been introduced to Mr. Stringer by Eric Schneiderman, who was forced to resign as New York’s attorney general in 2018 after a report that he had physically abused at least four women.Mr. Stringer said he had a passing, consensual relationship with Ms. Kim and was stunned by her claims that they had never had a relationship. But he said that he understood why the media picked up the story, even if it hadn’t been corroborated.“Running for mayor, every part of your life is an open book,” he said. “I didn’t begrudge anybody, including The Times, from writing about the charge. That would be silly.”And victims, of course, have no obligation to tell their stories through skeptical journalists. Ms. Pastor pointed out in an interview that “once the story was out, you still have time” to report it out and check the facts, and said she and her client didn’t object to that fact-checking. The Times’s Katie Glueck did that on May 9 and found Ms. Kim and Mr. Stringer telling very different stories in the absence of definitive evidence.Jean Kim said Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001. He has denied her claim.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesBut by then, the story had jumped out of journalists’ hands and into politicians’. Mr. Stringer had painstakingly assembled a coalition of young progressives, including a cadre of state senators who had partly defined their careers by pressing to extend the statute of limitations in cases of child sexual abuse and telling their own harrowing stories. In a video call the day after Ms. Kim’s news conference, they pressed Mr. Stringer to issue a statement suggesting he and Ms. Kim might have perceived their interaction differently.When he refused, and flatly denied the allegation, 10 progressive officials withdrew their endorsement.That decision got journalists off the hook. Most were covering a simple, political story now — a collapsing campaign — and not weighing or investigating a complex #MeToo allegation.The progressive website The Intercept (which had exposed a trumped-up sexual misconduct claim against a gay Democrat in Massachusetts last year) also looked into Ms. Kim’s accusations, calling former Stringer campaign aides, and found that a series of widely reported details from Ms. Pastor’s statement — though not Ms. Kim’s core allegations — were inaccurate. A longtime New York political hand who had known both Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim at the time, Mike McGuire, also told me he’d been waiting to talk on the record about what he saw as factual errors in Ms. Kim’s lawyer’s account, but that I was only the second reporter to call him, after Ms. Glueck. Ms. Kim, meanwhile, had been open about her motives — she wanted voters to know about the allegation.It’s easy to blame the relative lack of curiosity about the underlying story on the cliché of a hollowed-out local press corps, but that’s not really true in this case. The New York mayor’s race received rich and often ambitious coverage, as good and varied as I’ve seen at least since 2001, often from newer outlets like Politico and The City. The winner of the vote’s first round, Eric Adams, saw reporters investigate his donors and peer into his refrigerator.In an article in Columbia Journalism Review, Andrea Gabor examined coverage of the race and found that the allegations had prompted news organizations to stop covering Mr. Stringer as a top-tier candidate. She suggested that reporters “recalibrate the judgments they make on how to cover candidates such as Stringer in their wake.”In May, Mr. Stringer’s aides told me they were in talks with some former endorsers to return, as well as with the progressive movement’s biggest star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when they learned of an allegation from another woman: that some 30 years ago, Mr. Stringer had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at a bar. The Times reported the account of the second woman, Teresa Logan, with corroboration. The next day, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Maya Wiley, who came in second after the in-person voting ended. She said that time was running out and that progressives had to unite, a suggestion that the second allegation had made up her mind.But when you get beyond the reporters gaming out winners and losers, and beyond politicians weighing endorsements, here’s the strange thing: It’s not clear there’s anything like a consensus among voters on how the decades-old allegations should have affected Mr. Stringer’s support. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, for instance, has weathered far more recent claims from his own aides. And even two of the legislators who dropped their support of Mr. Stringer told me they were still wrestling with the decision and their roles and that of the media. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seemed to signal a similar concern when, on Election Day, she revealed that she had ranked Mr. Stringer second on her ballot.State Senator Alessandra Biaggi said that the moment had been “incredibly painful” but that she’d begun to feel that “my integrity was being compromised” by staying with Mr. Stringer. She also said that if she were a New York City voter, she would have ranked Mr. Stringer among her top choices, and wished there was space for more nuance in public conversations about sexual misconduct allegations.Yuh-Line Niou, a state assemblywoman from Manhattan, told me she thought the media had unfairly “put a lot of pressure on women who are survivors to speak up,” an experience that had been “scary and in a lot of ways violent.” She said she would have backed Mr. Stringer if he’d acknowledged that he’d harmed Ms. Kim, and added that his denial revealed that he had come from “a time when people don’t talk about what it is to be human, that you have to be perfect somehow.”“I ranked him, of course,” she said. “We didn’t have many choices.”Another progressive who had dropped Mr. Stringer, Representative Jamaal Bowman, said two weeks after Ms. Kim’s allegations became public that “I sometimes regret it because I wasn’t more patient and didn’t ask more questions.”Ms. Kim’s lawyer, Ms. Pastor, said she’d been perplexed by the pained progressives. “You ought to stick to your guns,” she said.It can be hard to separate the entangled roles of media and political actors.“The same way it’s obvious that the media didn’t make Adams rise, it should be obvious that the media didn’t make Stringer fall,” the Daily News columnist and Daily Beast senior editor Harry Siegel told me. “The decision by his lefty endorsers to almost immediately walk away, and before the press had time to vet Kim’s claim, did that. Understanding that the press — and media columnists! — like to center themselves, this is a story about the Democratic Party and its factions more than it’s one about his coverage.”Mr. Stringer said that he was resolved not to relive the campaign, but that he was worried about a progressive movement setting a standard that it can’t meet.“When I think about the future, there’s a lot of progressives who under these scenarios can’t run for office,” he said.Before he headed back out onto Church Street, I asked him what he was going to do next.“Probably just run for governor,” he said, at least half seriously. More