Bari Weiss is now the editor-in-chief at CBS News. She arrives at CBS after having left The New York Times in 2020 to found The Free Press in 2021.
Weiss is lauded as someone who has shown courage, challenging the assumptions of the liberal media while defending Jews in a time of outright anti-Semitism. Yet Weiss’ courage only goes so far. For several years I’ve asked her to allow me space in The Free Press to correct some comments Weiss made about Brett Kavanaugh in a story that also involves me. Weiss, the champion of free speech and the plight of the little guy against major corporate and political forces, has never responded.
It was September 2018. A woman named Christine Blasey Ford had come out with an accusation of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh, a nominee for the Supreme Court. Ford claimed that in 1982 Kavanaugh had assaulted her at a party—and that I was in the room when it happened.
Bari Weiss, then at the Times, appeared on MSNBC. “I believe that she’s completely sincere in what she believes happened,” Weiss said about Ford. “And maybe it did happen exactly as she said 36 years ago—although we all know memory is capricious. But the idea that it’s not a he said/she said: That’s exactly what it is.”
Then Weiss asked, “Let’s say she did this exactly as she said. Should the fact that a 17-year-old presumably very drunk kid did this, should that be disqualifying?”
It should be. When I was interviewed on Fox News in 2024 about the Kavanaugh episode, I noticed the surprise on the faces of the producers and crew when I was asked if I thought, as some conservative were claiming, that the sexual rumblings of teenagers in the 1980s were not a big deal. “I think it is a big deal,” I replied. “Frightening a 15-year-old girl is a big deal.” It was one of the only times in my adult life that I found myself siding with liberals. I was to the left of Bari Weiss.
My larger point was and has always been that Kavanaugh is innocent, and that the Blasey-Ford attack was an opposition research hit that attempted to use my wild adolescent past as a way to sink a high school friend. A sexual assault is only disqualifying if it actually happened. In Kavanaugh’s case it didn’t.
After her comments, Weiss was blasted by the media. She quickly caved. She “admits that her sound bite came across as ‘glib’ and simplistic,” wrote Evgenia Peretz in Vanity Fair. “For the record, she says Ford’s testimony moved her to tears, and believes Kavanaugh’s rage-filled behavior before the Senate Judiciary Committee should have disqualified him.”
Nice flip-flop. Weiss, who got a reputation for independent thinking and courage in the face of excessive #MeToo madness, couldn’t stand to be ejected from the mainstream. After speculating that Kavanaugh was actually guilty but shouldn’t pay a price for it, Weiss then declared that it wasn’t his assumed guilt but his anger at being accused that should disqualify him. Weiss could’ve cleared this ethical fog by simply stating what everyone knows: Kavanaugh is innocent. This is the same woman who walked away from a job at the Times because of the intolerant and “illiberal” atmosphere at the paper.
When my book about the Kavanaugh nightmare, The Devil’s Triangle, was published in 2022, I heard from a lot of friends and journalists that Weiss’ The Free Press was a perfect outlet for me—that at the very least Weiss would run an excerpt from my book. I reached out to her, but Weiss never replied. I expected more from the person Vanity Fair described this way: “Weiss has approached #MeToo with attention to the gray areas. A piece called ‘The Limits of ‘Believe All Women’ praised those who started #MeToo but cautioned that if we believe women in every instance, it could result in a doozy of a mistake and harm the overarching movement. On the subject of Stephen Elliott—a writer who is suing the creator of the ‘Shitty Media Men’ list, where he was anonymously accused of rape—Weiss was sympathetic to his predicament, but warned that his lawsuit ‘could be used to stifle women’s speech.’”
But maybe Weiss never shook the desire to be a part of the elite media. She may even believe Evgenia Peretz, the reporter who profiled her in Vanity Fair. Peretz is the same writer who profiled Kavanaugh and me in Vanity Fair in 2018. In that ridiculous hit Peretz came up with this description of me:
Judge took the cake. He was the loudest, edgiest, baddest ass. He was also the heartthrob. In Breakfast Club terms, you might say he had the dangerous allure of Judd Nelson’s Bender combined with the popularity of Emilio Estevez’s Andrew Clark. His body couldn’t contain his energy. He would leap onto people’s backs to start games of chicken. He could place his hands on a banister and jettison his body over an entire stairwell. Anyone wanting deep insight into his character can find it in his memoir Wasted, a chronicle of his early alcoholism and sputtering moral compass. He writes about his irritation at having to journal his service experiences. He recounts taking part in ritual toilet-papering of girls’ houses wearing religious robes. He tells of the underground newspaper The Unknown Hoya, which he and others started with the intention “to insult people and to report on… who had what party, who had embarrassed themselves, who had the worst haircuts on campus, who was getting laid, and most important, how much we were drinking.” The Hoya, he says, “was the official journal of the 100-keg quest and everything that happened on the way.”
It would’ve been nice to have been invited by The Free Press to debunk this ridiculous cartoon. If only Weiss had more courage. Maybe she’ll give me a space at CBS News.