Why People magazine can get the Trump rape story right and the Washington press corps can't

I have a theory as to why People magazine continues to provide better coverage of the many rape and assault accusations against Donald J. Trump than most of Washington, D.C.'s reporters can muster. It's not exactly a complex theory, mind you. It does, however, fit the facts better than my backup theory, which is that the management of the New York Damn Times hatched a plan a decade or so back to drive me, personally, insane and that all of America is now suffering because A.G. Sulzberger has a vendetta against me for reasons I can't begin to fathom.

Maybe I took the last scone at some conference he attended, I don't know. Seems a pretty rotten reason to engineer the decay of an entire American institution, but history is littered with pettier vendettas and even worse outcomes.

Oh God, I looked it up and the Times' Board of Directors contains luminaries from GoDaddy, Etsy, Airbnb and Roblox. Boy does that explain a few things.

First, the facts: If you want a breaking report on the new allegation from former Miss Switzerland Beatrice Keul stating that Donald Trump violently assaulted and raped her at a Trump-organized beauty pageant in 1993, you would have to go to People.com for proper coverage.

During a press luncheon at the then-Trump-owned Plaza Hotel, Trump allegedly approached Keul and promised to help her obtain a visa and gain admission to New York University, according to her account in an interview with committee staff cited in the report. [Jeffrey] Epstein allegedly approached Keul shortly afterward and made similar promises, including an invitation to attend a party at Mar-a-Lago.

Later that day, a Trump representative allegedly invited Keul upstairs to meet with him. According to the report, Keul believed the meeting could help advance her career and education. Once inside a suite, Trump allegedly grabbed her from behind and raped her, tearing her dress and causing bleeding and bruising on multiple parts of her body. Keul described the alleged assault as “brutal.”

The rape allegedly happened when Keul attended the Donald J. Trump American Dream Pageant, a Trump-organized competition for "young women ages 16 to 22," and is consistent with accounts from other women who have described being assaulted or raped by the modeling agency slash pageant producer slash private club mogul who was later made president of the United States. It was detailed in a new report released by House Judiciary Committee Democrats—because the committee's Republicans continue to refuse investigations of Trump despite their public demands to "release the Epstein files"—and is one of five rapes or assaults Trump is alleged to have committed in Jeffrey Epstein's "company or direct physical presence." Two of the women were underage when assaulted.

In normal times a flood of allegations from numerous credible sources accusing a United States president of being a serial rapist would be what journalists tend to call a Big Goddamn Deal, and more so when multiple accusers were children at the time, and even more so when the rapes were exposed during the probe of the most well-connected and prolific sex trafficking operation of the last few decades.

But you would not know it had happened, if you instead read The New York Times. The Times instead covered the new report with a terse 400-word story that fully omitted the new allegation while describing the report as "largely cit[ing] allegations that have already been public."

And if it seems to you that the point of "journalism" is to highlight a story's newest developments instead of writing up perfunctory grumbling that most of it is things you already heard, well, that's why you don't work for the New York Times. Or the Washington Post, or the White House Correspondent's association.

Indeed, the resounding conclusion of the political press and their most distinguished outlets is that new allegations directly tying Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein and accusing him of a violent rape that left the pageant contestant "bruised and bleeding" is not, in fact, a significant scandal.

And at some point, as we watch every new rape allegation against Trump dismissed with the same arguments by the same editors of the same media empires, we can only conclude that these journalists and editors simply don't think rape counts as a scandal at all, at least not when the rapist is wealthy or powerful.

We may have been lulled into a false sense of progress, during the MeToo era. Because what we've seen in its aftermath is the very same indifference to wealthy predators that media had in the years beforehand. There was a brief point of time when the whole country pretended to take violence against women seriously, and then came the op-eds from important people grousing that cancelling their rich peers just for assaulting a woman, or two, or five was in fact the real cultural tragedy here. Go. Figure.

My theory as to why it takes People.com to actually describe the substance of these rape allegations while A.G. Sulzberger's paper drop-kicks the story into the official office void—again—is fairly straightforward.

People's journalists have long focused most of their coverage around young, attractive celebrities—people who are frequent targets of the entertainment industry's grotesque and rampant rape culture. That is their wheelhouse.

Reporters for the The New York Times and other political and business-focused outlets tend to focus much of their attention on rich men in positions of political or industry power—the people who tend to do that raping. That is their wheelhouse.

So there you go. In a nutshell, anyone in the entertainment industry has a decades-long understanding that Hollywood, "modeling agencies," and the beauty pageant industry are filled with predators and rapists who use their control over young women's careers to abuse and assault them. Learning that one specific rich beauty pageant sponsor assaulted and raped contestants is something entertainment industry editors immediately and viscerally understand. They don't need it explained to them. Given that the bread and butter of their success comes from interviewing often-young usually-beautiful celebrities who would not agree to interviews with an outfit that publicly dismissed those attacks, People.com knows who to side with.

The New York Times, the White House Correspondents Association, and the rest of political media, however, is embedded eyebrow-deep in a class of people who think nothing of lying extravagantly, who are defined by their ambition and their demands for power and authority, and who are sometimes rich enough to buy their goddamn newspapers out from under them. That is their bread and butter, and the people they are chasing down the halls for interview or are interviewing for soft-focus profiles of the latest Industry Genius would not give them interviews if they went around exposing the crimes of wealthy important peers.

Even if it were not in their vested interests to pretend to be confused by the evidence that the now-sitting president was an active collaborator in a sex trafficking and rape ring premised on luring young women and underage girls with promises of celebrity, the Times and the rest of the political media are so thoroughly entwined with the most ambitious and lyingest class of Americans to exist that it can be hardly be broken apart again. And the principal demand of that class, whether it be corporate heads, omnipresent pundits, U.S. senators, or their attached aides is that everything they say should be taken as gospel and that accusing them of things they quite obviously and demonstrably said or did should not be allowed.

That's who the big names in political journalism have to suck up to; people with enough money to found think tanks and people sociopathic enough to lie to a whole damn country about whatever they think they need to lie about.

It has to be at least a little debilitating, when it comes to trying to maintain your own sorry conscience. It's human nature, as a journalist, to identify with your interview subjects. It's impossible to fully avoid, in most situations, and being embedded with terrible people who lie as easily as they breathe has got to have some damn nasty side effects, as the years wear on. If merely watching Fox News or maintaining an account on not-Twitter can result in so much social devolution, it's hard to imagine what being a member of the White House press corps would do to a person, having a parade of vapid horribles grin at you while saying the most extravagant lies and knowing you don't have the time or research budget to do a damn thing about it.

Maybe even more to the point, political celebrity and media pundit celebrity are, right now, the same profession. The same players flit between one and the other; today's performative political hack is tomorrow's performative CNN panelist, and yesterday's gossipy daytime host is today's appointed head of Medicare and Medicaid. To report on politics is literally to report on your once or present or future peers, and it shows. All the time, it shows.

It would be of course be rude to accuse the Times, the Post, the Journal, and the press corps of being more attuned to the subculture of wealth-protected violent rape than the subculture of not fking wanting that to happen.

But we have been through this many damn times now, with each of these allegations against Trump being cast into a void of half-assed, authority-deferring, perfunctory mentions on page 27 or page Nothing, to not notice that an extravagantly powerful man being accused by numerous women of assault and rape is considered not even half the story that "Secretary of State's email protocols called into question" or "some guy saw a Parkinson's specialist leave the White House" has gotten.

We have seen which stories get covered, and which get breathless updates for days or weeks or months, and which do not. Over, and over, and over.

And there is just no damn question but that the political press, as a class, does not seem to agree that a rich person inside their own social webs being accused of multiple rapes, including of children, amounts to that same level of scandal.

The Times' dismissal of the new rape revelations with an obfuscatory "have already been public" is especially—and incandescently—galling. The point of the 50-plus page Democratic report was not, in fact, a mere reassertion of the numerous allegations of Trump assaulting and raping women while in Jeffrey Epstein's company and/or as a result of Epstein's own trafficking efforts.

The point of the report was to demonstrate that there is a great deal of evidence that Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking and assaults and yet we are to believe that the United States Department of Justice, ordered by law to produce to the Congress all information relevant to Epstein's assaults, was able to find almost none of it.

That is ... ridiculous? It's literally unbelievable. The notion that the nation's most famous sex trafficker, known throughout wealthy circles and by the denizens of Mar-a-Lago in specific for his sexual compulsions and his ever-changing entourage of shockingly young women, the man who somehow convinced numerous wealthy patrons to hand him money for little to nothing in return, the man closely connected to both Trump and to a wider exploitation ring centered on the modeling and pageant industries, was the subject of years of federal investigation which produced no notable evidence of co-conspirators other than his own now-imprisoned partner, even though five women have come forward to accuse Donald Trump of raping or assaulting him while in the company of Epstein, and 11 women able to testify to Trump's involvement in Epstein's crime ring, and over two dozen women directly accusing Trump of rape, assault, or misconduct, all of this now publicly known—the notion that the FBI and Department of Justice have since the 1990's been hapless chucklefucks who dropped the ball on investigating any of it is absurd.

The point of the 50+ page document summarizing both the allegations against Trump already made public and new ones that Congress was able to uncover with minimal probing is that Trump's Justice Department claims to have no substantive documents about any of it. A few phone tips referenced here and there, a few photographs of the two men in close company, but certainly nothing that would merit a closer follow up though 11 witnesses have come forward to report.

That, my dear press friends and colleagues, is obviously bullshit. Somebody is lying through their teeth, and in fact many somebodies, and everyone's money is on Donald Trump's known-crooked lawyers and coup-agnostic allies now running the department, the same allies who scooped up federal prosecutors' Epstein files, went on a retaliatory purge of any prosecutors that accused Donald of any crimes, and have already been caught repeatedly withholding other Epstein documents they were required by law to produce.

The point of the Democratic report was to highlight that there is no damn way that Todd Blanche and the Justice Department doesn't have the same information on Trump's multiple alleged Epstein-connected rapes that Congress has been able to assemble, and that means cover up. A cover up that implicates every one of Trump's appointees in the department; a cover up that either suggests all of them are now committing crimes to hide the evidence of these assaults or that the FBI has been intentionally burying evidence that implicates wealthy American rapists for a long, long time now.

Justice, lowercase, demands that our government determine which of the two is at play here. If a press corps that nearly pees itself in eagerness at even a potential half-scandal is now pointedly uninterested in probing it themselves, well then. It appears we have all learned something important about the current fourth estate as well.

Judiciary Committee Democrats are demanding an independent special prosecutor be appointed to probe whether the department is corrupt or merely inept when it comes to identifying Epstein's co-conspirators. The Justice Department has no remaining credibility; Todd Blanche in particular is so obviously on team cover-up as to disqualify department efforts all on his own.

A dozen of Epstein's victims are demanding that same thing:

We are calling for the appointment of an independent special counsel with the authority to conduct a thorough investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's network, pursue evidence of criminal wrongdoing by his co-conspirators and determine whether public officials or institutions helped enable or conceal his abuse.

Yesterday's reporting makes clear that the current Justice Department leadership cannot credibly oversee an investigation into Epstein's network. Survivors deserve an independent investigation they can trust, free from political interference. The appointment of a special counsel is essential to ensuring that the investigation follows the evidence wherever it leads, regardless of who may be implicated.

Oh look, the people with the most firsthand knowledge of what Jeffrey Epstein did and who conspired with him to do it are suggesting the U.S. Department of Justice is hiding evidence of a much wider rich rapist conspiracy. You might think that counted as Actual Goddamn News, if you weren't A.G. Sulzberger or whichever skeevy sycophant Amazon head Jeff Bezos last tossed into the barrow that once was the Washington Post.

It's arguably even more important news than what self-interested self-indulgent political hacks think about some other politician alluding to The Cheesecake Factory. It's hard to say, though. Thankfully we've got many boards filled primarily with important business people to work it out for us.

I am very done with all of this, obviously, in that I see no reason to pretend that top national editors burying allegations that a sitting president is a serial violent rapist and child predator amounts to anything less than a collective Rich Person Shrug at the notion that the captains-of-industry class should be held accountable for past rapes. We have all seen many decades of what constitutes a Scandal, when editors shove their journalists into producing barrages of articles willing their own theories on that into the wider public consciousness. We know what it looks like. We know, by heart, the names of the big-name journalists most likely to write those stories.

But on whether the President of the United States has a history of raping women and children, despite both a long pattern of his own public admissions, a trial that concluded he committed a rape, and numerous other victims coming forward to accuse him of the same, we get a dismissive have already been public and silence until the next victim comes forward to be dismissed.

So that is my theory, as to why People.com knows that a very powerful man raping a young contestant at his own sponsored beauty pageant is news worth reporting even as the entire Washington, D.C. press corps struggles to find its relevance.

It is because People.com has the institutional memory to know that being a young would-be celebrity in America means having to constantly stand guard against very rich and powerful people who want to rape you, which is a thing that most people would consider to be horrific and want to eliminate.

But the Washington press corps deals primarily with the very rich and powerful, and to them the question of whether or not rich and powerful people deserve exposure for such crimes has subsequently become considerably more nuanced.

And it seems to get more nuanced with every passing year.