Murdoch-Owned New York Post Appears To Remove Trump Rape Allegation Stories
The New York Post appears to have quietly removed from its website two stories about writer E. Jean Carroll’s rape accusation against President Donald Trump, which was first published Friday in New York magazine and picked up widely in the national news media.
A Trump-supporting adviser to the paper, Col Allan, was behind the directive, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke to CNN Business.
As of early Tuesday evening, the Post did not have any live stories about the rape accusation on its website. The publication did not respond to requests for comment from CNN or HuffPost.
Carroll claims that Trump attacked her, shoving her against a wall and yanking down her tights, inside a Bergdorf Goodman’s dressing room in the 1990s after the two ran into each other at the department store.
Allan, former editor-in-chief of the Post, is known to be a fan of Trump, whose allies have largely remained silent or sided with the president on the new allegation, which the president has denied. Some Post staffers believe Allan arrived earlier this year to make News Corp., the newspaper division of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, more Trump-friendly.
Other Murdoch-owned media outlets have all but ignored Carroll’s allegation.
Fox News covered it for a total of just four minutes and six seconds between Friday afternoon, when the story broke, and noon on Tuesday, according to an analysis from the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America.
At least a quarter of Fox News’ coverage was about Trump’s denial of Carroll’s allegation, in which he incorrectly stated that they had never met, despite a photograph of the two of them featured in the New York magazine story.
As of Wednesday morning, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal had only published one story on Carroll.
It is easy, however, to find traces of the Post’s stories on the unflattering topic. The first one appears to have been published Friday, shortly after the allegation came out, but a link to the article now directs readers to an error page.
The second story appears to have been published Saturday, but the URL now redirects readers to a topic page about cars. An archived version reveals the link originally connected readers to an Associated Press report about Trump’s denial of the rape.
Archived versions of the first story, including one taken on its date of publication, lead to the same error page. CNN said that it was written by Post reporter Joe Tacopino.
Trump initially denied Carroll’s version of events by saying he had never met her. Later he added that she was not his “type.”
Carroll’s story is contained in an excerpt of her memoir published in New York magazine. In it, she explains that she did not wish to come forward with the accusation in the past due to the negative attention it might draw to her and the positive attention she feared it might foster for the president.
By speaking up, Carroll joined more than a dozen other women who have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct.
This story has been updated with more information about other Murdoch-owned media outlets.
Marina Fang contributed reporting.
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Trump On E. Jean Carroll Accusing Him Of Rape: ‘She’s Not My Type’
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
