By Jack Crowe & Tobias Hoonhout
Thursday, October 31, 2019
A reporter who now works for the New York Times
failed to report on public records, which he obtained in April, that cut against
Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D., Mass.) claim that she was fired from a teaching
position in 1971 due to pregnancy discrimination.
Reid Epstein, who was then working for the Wall Street
Journal, filed an open-records request with the Riverdale Board of
Education on April 2 seeking “to inspect or obtain” copies of public records
relating to Warren’s time teaching at Riverdale during the 1970-1971 school
year. In response to his request, Epstein on April 10 received school-board
minutes that challenge Warren’s story, according to documents obtained by National
Review through the New Jersey Open Records Act.
Epstein, who moved to the Times on April 19, never
broke the story. Reached for comment, a Times spokeswoman said that the
“records were inconclusive” and the potential story required further sourcing.
Earlier this month, the Washington Free Beacon
obtained the aforementioned school-board minutes showing that the Riverdale
Board of Education had approved a second-year teaching contract for a young Elizabeth
Warren in April 1971. Rather than accepting the board’s offer of continued
employment, Warren chose to tender her resignation, which was “accepted with
regret,” according to minutes from a school-board meeting held two months after
the offer was extended.
One day after the Free Beacon reported on the
apparent discrepancy, the Times published an article that listed Epstein
as a contributor. The Times’ reporting frames the story around “the
discrimination that many pregnant women have faced on the job” and highlights
Warren’s statement, which dismissed the evidence gathered by the Beacon
as lacking in context.
“I was pregnant, but nobody knew it. And then a couple of
months later when I was six months pregnant and it was pretty obvious, the
principal called me in, wished me luck, and said he was going to hire someone
else for the job,” Warren told CBS News on October 7.
Epstein continued to publish articles at the Journal
until May 4, none of which included reporting on the school-board minutes. His
final byline was published more than three weeks after he received the relevant
documents. He declined to comment when asked why he failed to report the story.
New York Times vice president of communications
Danielle Rhoades Ha explained that the paper did not feel comfortable
publishing the contents of the school-board minutes given that the documents
may not fully explain the circumstances of Warren’s departure.
“As has been reported, the meeting minutes of the Board
of Education showed that Warren’s contract was extended for another school
year. We sought interviews with contemporaneous sources about that contract and
her statements that she was ultimately let go once she was visibly pregnant.
Many of those sources, including fellow teachers, the school principal and
board members, were dead,” her statement read. “Others said they did not
remember. The records were inconclusive about the circumstances under which she
left, and we continued reporting. The Times and others have since
reported about Warren’s statements about her departure as well as the board
minutes.”
Warren has repeatedly described on the campaign trail how
she was “shown the door” after one year because her pregnancy became visible
and routinely claims that the experience informed her commitment to gender
equality and her decision to enter politics.
Questions around Warren’s account first emerged in early
October, when a Jacobin magazine journalist resurfaced a 2007 interview
at the University of California, Berkeley, in which Warren claimed she left
teaching of her own volition in order to care for her child.
“I worked in a public school system with the children
with disabilities. I did that for a year . . . I went back to graduate school
and took a couple of courses in education and said, ‘I don’t think this is
going to work out for me,’” Warren said at the time. “I was pregnant with my
first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years.”
Warren’s 2013 memoir, A Fighting Chance, also
mentions the incident but casts her departure from the school as the result of
sexist discrimination rather than as the personal decision suggested by the
school-board minutes.
“By the end of the school year, I was pretty obviously
pregnant,” Warren writes. “The principal did what I think a lot of principals
did back then—wished me good luck, didn’t ask me back the next school year, and
hired someone else for the job.”
The Wall Street Journal communications departments
failed to respond to a request for comment by press time.
No comments:
Post a Comment