NYT Reporter on Kavanaugh Smears: ‘I’ve Been Grappling with Colleagues over This for Years Now’

    In February 2025, David Enrich, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, expressed regret for his role in the smearing of Brett Kavanaugh. As was first reported in Chronicles and then picked up by Fox News, Enrich was responding to a question I had sent him about his newspaper’s 2018 Kavanaugh nomination. 

    Enrich responded this way: “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my role in the Kavanaugh coverage, and I would be happy to talk to you about it at some point. For now, I will just say that I have learned some lessons and would probably do certain things differently next time.”

    It was shocking. Journalists never admit when they’re wrong. I asked Enrich to elaborate: What were the lessons learned? What would he do differently? “This is a subject for a longer conversation that I’m not going to have over the holidays,” he wrote. “Sorry.” Then he added this: “I can’t imagine what it was like for you to go thru that.”

    Since then, Enrich has not responded to multiple requests I’ve made for further comment.     

    I was recently going through text messages between me and Enrich from last year. At the one-year anniversary of the first story, I was going to give him one last chance to go into detail about what lesson he learned and what he would do differently. I came across one text Enrich sent me after my story broke in Chronicles. Some context: the original Chronicles piece speculated that Enrich might have been expressing regret to help boost the sales of his book Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful. Enrich takes issue with this. Here’s his full text:

I can’t/wont argue with most of what you wrote. The one thing that really irks me, though, is your insinuation that my “regrets” are related to my forthcoming book. The truth is that I have been grappling with this and talking with colleagues about it for years now. The only reason I even brought this up with you is that you reached out to me, requested a review copy of the book, and then asked me about nyt’s kavanaugh coverage. I answered your question as candidly as I could (and probably much more candidly than the nyt folks would have wanted me to). But you are leaving your readers with the impression that I am trying to increase my book sales with that statement. Which is just not true (and frankly doesn’t make much sense in the first place).

    Enrich’s point about his book is valid. He indicates that his regrets about his Kavanaugh coverage are genuine and not to boost his profile. It’s a valid point – after all, how would apologizing to me help Enrich on the liberal author circuit? 

    Yet then there is the other part of his text, the past that really sticks out: “The truth is that I have been grappling with this and talking with colleagues about it for years now.”

    Who are the colleagues he has been talking to? What are they talking about? 

    Is one of those colleagues Kate Kelly?

    On Sept. 20, 2018, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein publicly released a letter Ford had addressed to her, claiming Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school, “with the assistance of his close friend, Mark G. Judge.”

    The New York Times article co-written by Enrich and Kate Kelly was released four days later, and included the letter’s allegations that Kavanaugh was a heavy drinker and disrespected women in high school. The Times’ article began, “Brett Kavanaugh’s page in his high school yearbook offers a glimpse of the teenage years of the man who is now President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee: lots of football, plenty of drinking, parties at the beach.” Kelly and Enrich’s subsequent article, released on Oct. 4, includes a two-page letter Kavanaugh wrote about a 1983 beach party.

    In Murder the Truth, Enrich explores the 1974 case Gertz v. Robert Welch Inc. The Supreme Court broadened the group of people who could be maligned by the media  to include “limited purpose public figures.” Enrich describes limited-purpose public figures this way: “These were people who weren’t necessarily famous but had injected themselves into a public controversy by, for example, becoming a prominent advocate for or against abortion rights. The five-to-four decision even acknowledged that, in rare cases, someone might fall under this umbrella involuntarily. (Think of an air traffic controller on duty when a plane crashed.) The logic was the same: people needed to be able to investigate and write about those in the public sphere, even if they accidentally got a fact wrong. This was hardly the end of libel.”

    This becoming a public figure “involuntarily” justified, to the media, the madness that I faced in 2018. When reporters were going through my car, hounding my elderly mother and visiting high school girlfriends, I tried to protest that I was not a public figure and was not running for anything. I was told I had, in fact, become a public figure – because the media had Madame one. My “limited purpose” was to help destroy my high school friend.

    When the Enrich story broke at this time last year, a New York Times spokesperson told Fox News, “Mr. Judge’s claims about our reporters’ practices are not accurate. The Times’s reporting on Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination and confirmation process was thorough, independent and fair, and we stand behind it.”

    I don’t think David Enrich does. Or ever will.

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