The New Yorker

The New Yorker is presented as an influential investigative publication whose reporting could alter the course of a national controversy and test the standards of a competing newsroom. Its September 2018 account of Deborah Ramirez’s allegation against Brett Kavanaugh gave the public a second accusation to consider during the Supreme Court nomination fight. The New York Times’s decision not to publish a separate account on the basis of its own reporting reveals the importance—and the limits—of that influence: a rival’s publication could not substitute for the Times’s own verification.

Investigative Reporting and the Kavanaugh Allegation

On September 23, 2018, The New Yorker published Ramirez’s account of an incident she said occurred while she and Kavanaugh were classmates at Yale University. She alleged that he exposed himself at a party. The story brought the allegation into public view at a pivotal moment: the book describes the material as arriving after weeks in which Christine Blasey Ford’s team had wondered whether further allegations would surface. Together with separate accusations that appeared around the same time, the account changed how Kavanaugh was being portrayed in the confirmation fight.

The publication’s interview with Ramirez was a significant reporting distinction. Rebecca Corbett, working from home in Baltimore, had expected the story and initially asked her reporters to prepare a follow: an article summarizing a competing publication’s findings. After Corbett, Dean Baquet, and Matt Purdy read The New Yorker’s story, Corbett told the team to pause. The magazine had secured an interview with Ramirez that the Times did not have. Its account therefore contained material the Times could not simply reproduce from its own reporting, even as it gave the Times a new public claim to assess.

The article also disclosed uncertainties surrounding the account. Ramirez had been reluctant to speak and had gaps in her recollection related to drinking. The New Yorker reported that she spent six days assessing what she remembered before identifying Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty. The account included no eyewitness: an unnamed classmate said he had heard about the incident but had not seen it, while people Ramirez recalled as being at the party denied it had happened or said they did not remember the party. It also offered no example of Ramirez naming Kavanaugh to others before his nomination. These qualifications were part of the published account, not details the Times could disregard when considering whether to produce its own story.

A Rival Story and a Separate Standard of Verification

The Times had interviewed dozens of Kavanaugh’s former classmates and hallmates in the days before the article appeared, but found no one with firsthand knowledge of the alleged incident. It had also learned that Ramirez had told some former Yale classmates she could not be certain Kavanaugh was the person who exposed himself. On that basis, the editors concluded that their reporting did not support publishing the allegation as a stand-alone follow. They were not deciding what had happened at the party; they were judging what the Times’s own reporting could responsibly establish.

This distinction illustrates the book’s account of competitive journalism as a form of checking rather than automatic repetition. For significant stories, rival newsrooms try to report the same material, both to inform their own readers and to seek independent confirmation. The book compares that process to scientific peer review: when separate teams reach the same findings, confidence in the material can increase. But the comparison also clarifies why The New Yorker’s Ramirez account did not settle the Times’s editorial decision. In this case, the Times did not have the same interview or firsthand corroboration, and its own inquiries raised questions about the certainty of Ramirez’s identification.

A second set of allegations surfaced at nearly the same time through Michael Avenatti, a California lawyer representing a new client. His social-media claims described alleged assaults at parties but did not identify the accuser. The book treats these claims as distinct from The New Yorker’s reported account of Ramirez. The Times’s editors had separate concerns about Avenatti’s aims and the basis for his claims; the simultaneous appearance of the two stories did not make them interchangeable. Keeping that separation mattered in a moment when the overall portrayal of Kavanaugh was changing rapidly.

The Weinstein Reporting and Cross-Publication Checks

The book places the Kavanaugh episode against an earlier, different relationship between the two outlets. In their Weinstein investigations, The New Yorker and The New York Times had largely, if not entirely, matched one another’s reporting. The book presents that alignment as an indication of the strength of the underlying material. The comparison is not that the two investigations or their evidence were identical, but that parallel reporting by competing teams could reinforce the reliability of a story.

In October 2017, Ronan Farrow was finishing a further New Yorker report on Harvey Weinstein’s accusers. That reporting appears in the book’s account of the expanding public record around Weinstein. Read alongside the account of the Kavanaugh coverage, it shows the publication’s place in a broader investigative field: its reporting could supply material another newsroom lacked, while its work on a major story could also be tested against reporting undertaken elsewhere. The resulting relationship was neither simple rivalry nor automatic agreement, but a practical contest over access, corroboration, and what each publication could establish for itself.

Significance in the Book

The New Yorker’s role is most visible where its reporting creates both urgency and a demand for caution. Its interview with Ramirez made the allegation available to readers and forced The New York Times to reconsider its planned follow. Yet the Times’s examination of the article’s qualifications, alongside its own interviews, led it to draw a narrower conclusion about what it could publish independently. The episode thus distinguishes the influence of a published account from the evidentiary basis required for a second outlet to affirm it.

Across the two investigations, the publication also represents the value and difficulty of independent scrutiny. Agreement between rival newsrooms could strengthen confidence in the Weinstein reporting; divergence in access and supporting material complicated the Ramirez coverage. The book uses that contrast to show that responsible competition does not mean matching every claim. It means reporting independently, attending to uncertainty, and recognizing that a story’s public importance cannot by itself resolve what the available evidence supports.