It didn’t take long at all for that New York Times front-page “exposé” of Donald Trump’s treatment of women to start falling apart.
The Sunday article opened with a 25-year-old anecdote about Rowanne Brewer Lane. By Monday, she was ripping the Times for distorting what she’d said.
“He never made me feel like I was being demeaned in any way,” Lane told Fox News. “He never offended me in any way. He was very gracious.”
Yet the Times’ Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey described the former model’s first meeting with Trump, during which he offered her the use of a swimsuit at his Florida estate, as “debasing” — a word she never used — and somehow a window on his “private treatment” of women.
Lane says the Times reporters told her “several times . . . that it would not be a hit piece.” But that’s exactly what it was.
A microscopic search of Trump’s private life over decades revealed that he likes beautiful women. Not much to set against his strong record of promoting women in an industry that’s still male-dominated.
Far, far worse has been said for more than two decades about Bill Clinton. But the Times has never seemed much interested in his private life or character. Especially not when he was running for president.
But the self-styled paper of record will bend over backward to smear a Republican candidate.
In 2008, just days after locking up the GOP nomination, John McCain got hit by a 3,200-word Times story suggesting he may have had an “inappropriate relationship” with a female lobbyist.
Both parties denied it — and the Times found no one to confirm that anything untoward had happened. Later, the paper’s public editor said flat-out that the Times was “wrong” and owed its readers “more proof” than it was “able to provide.”
So honest readers will see this latest exposé for what it is: a blatantly partisan — and blatantly unfair — hit job.
By the way, the Times’ star witness, the “debased” Rowanne Brewer Lane? She says she’s voting for Trump.