Until this week's handout I hadn't read N.R. Kleinfield's article, "Daughter Says Father's Confessional Book Didn't Confess His Molestation of Her", about Jessica Hendra's allegations against her father, Tony Hendra.
I'm pretty shocked. And I disagree with Okrent, although he makes good points. It was wrong for the Times to run the article.
(I can't link to the article, because the Times makes you pay for it, but we all have it, so that will have to do.)
Okrent outlines the success of Tony Hendra's book, "Father Joe", the story of Hendra's spiritual salvation with the help of a Benedictine monk, and also Jessica Hendra's detailed allegations of sexual abuse that she went public with after the book came out.
Speaking of the Kleinfield article that grew out of Jessica Hendra's allegations, Okrent asks:
Had his success, and the book's theme, made the most intimate details of his life a fair subject for public review? If I were an editor at the Times, would I have published an article containing grave allegations, buttressed by thorough reporting by one of my top people, about a man who had become a public figure specifically because of his assertions of moral growth? I probably would have.
I would not have. And mainly for something Okrent himself states: "assertions linger; denials evaporate."
The paper has a responsibility to understand that fact before running a story like this one. It doesn't matter in this case that Hendra's denial was high up in the story. Like Okrent wrote, it evaporates.
These are unproven allegations and what is most disturbing about the Klienfield article making it to print is that fact that the reporter openly states that he had concluded that Hendra was guilty of the allegations.
"I concluded that she was molested," Kleinfield says.
I don't think it's putting it to strongly to say that that's a fairly unbelievable breach of ethics in this case. Perhaps there are situations in which it would be acceptable to go forward from there, but in this case, based on what the reporter had as evidence, and given where the article was being printed, it's an egregious mistake.
It's also surprising that Jonathan Landman, the culture editor, thought that the success and subject of Hendra's book "were central to the newsworthiness of the daughter's accusation."
They are not. The subject of the book has no bearing on the fact that the Times chose to run an article based on unproven allegations that the writer of the article came to personally believe were true.
Perhaps the better move on the papers part would have been to publish the letter that Jessica Hendra sent to the Op-Ed department. Instead the letter was forwarded to the newsroom and the Kleinfield article began.
If Landman and the Times found these allegations newsworthy, then publishing the letter would have allowed the alleged victim to be heard in the appropriate format, in the appropriate section of the paper.
A (not verified) @ January 10, 2006 - 12:24pm
This is a very judicious view, in my opinion, given the established scientific fact that humans bear witness in a very fallible way, and nothing could be more subjective and possibly misleading than the testimony of a daughter about a topic so emotionally fraught.
The Times had no business investigating private events as if they were facts that could be established on the basis of reliable witnesses and evidence. You are quite right. They should have run it in the letters column if it was a public matter. But this was not, and could not be verified. The only public fact vwas the accusation. The letters column would have reported that fact, and not taken it further into uncheckable territory.
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