'The New York Times,' The Unreliable Source And The Exposé That Missed The Mark
The intriguing tale began in mid-September with an invitation for two New York Times reporters to come to the Midtown Manhattan offices of the legendary lawyer David Boies for an off-the-record session.
The two reporters — Jake Bernstein and Emily Steel — were asked to leave their phones and laptops outside the conference room. No taping.
The guest of honor: a hard-drinking, burly man who promised that he could link powerful politicians and globe-trotting luminaries to the late Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and sexual predator. Boies and another lawyer for Epstein accusers introduced the reporters to the apparent informant.
The man went by a pseudonym, Patrick Kessler, saying he feared retribution. He boasted about damning videos of prominent men at Epstein's properties. And Kessler showed the reporters, as he had the lawyers, blurry stills of what he said were men having sex with women and girls.
He claimed the men were in the top echelons of politics, finance and law. He promised proof.
But the informant appears to have been a fraud. And he has since vanished. Even so, he inspired an investigation by the Times not of Epstein, but of one of the country's most famous lawyers. In a 5,400-word expose published on Nov. 30 and an hourlong television show, the Times placed Boies at the center of a narrative that insinuates deceit and greed inside a morally corrupt legal system.
The story, the result of months of reporting by a team of four Times journalists, promised to reveal how even the lawyers representing alleged victims of sexual predators seek paydays in ways that enable powerful men to avoid accountability.
Boies says the account is terribly unfair. "I didn't do anything deceitful here, and there's no basis for that allegation," Boies tells NPR in
