N.Y. Times Whitewashes Israeli Sex Predator

An NFL quarterback who was credibly accused of sexual misconduct is getting kid-gloves treatment from some broadcasters, a prominent sports columnist has charged in the New York Times. Yet some of her own colleagues at the Times are guilty of the same thing, in their handling of an Israeli journalist who has admitted to molesting multiple women.

Writing in the New York Times sports section this week, Candace Buckner of The Athletic—which is owned by the Times —decried the way in which some football announcers have referred to the allegations of sex abuse concerning Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson.

In 2021, twenty-seven massage therapists filed lawsuits against Watson, accusing him of sexual misconduct. An internal NFL disciplinary hearing, chaired  by a former federal judge, concluded he was guilty of sexual assault. After being suspended and fined by the NFL, Watson paid millions of dollars in out-of-court settlements to his accusers, and issued a weasely statement that he was “truly sorry to all of the women that I have impacted in this situation.”

In her New York Times column this week, Buckner strongly criticized Thursday Night Football announcers Al Michaels and Tony Gonzalez for gliding over Watson’s past when they covered a recent Browns game. “We don’t have to go through the whole Deshaun Watson thing,” Michaels said. “We all know” what “the issues” were, he added. Gonzalez referred vaguely to “the adversity” and “stuff” that Watson had “gone through.”

Ms. Buckner might want to consider how some of her own colleagues at the Times have been whitewashing the Israeli journalist admitted sex predator Ari Shavit.

Shavit, an outspoken left-of-center critic of the Israeli government, has been quoted in the Timeson many occasions over the years as an expert on Israeli affairs. In 2013, his latest book was lavishly praised in the Times by Leon Wieseltier. (Ironically, Wieseltier later admitted “offenses against some of my colleagues in the past,” after female staff members at The New Republic said he had groped and sexually harassed them for years.)

Shavit was visiting Southern California during his book tour in 2014 when Danielle Berrin, a staff writer for the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, asked to interview him. Shavit insisted that she meet him at his L.A. hotel at 10 o’clock at night. “He told me he was completely booked during the daytime,” Berrin wrote later. “I believed him.”

“Almost as soon as I arrived and placed my recorder on the table between us, he put our interview on hold,” Berrin recalled. “First,” he said, “I want to get to know you better.” When he started asking her “a series of personal questions,” she “figured I was safe” since “the man was married, with children, and a public figure.” But there was no denying “the lecherous look on his face.”

Suddenly, Shavit “lurched at me like a barnyard animal, grabbing the back of my head, pulling me toward him,” Berrin recalled. She resisted his assault and left the hotel; he followed her to her car and forcibly embraced her.

Like many victims of sexual abuse, Berrin was at first too traumatized to write about what happened to her. But two and a half years later—in October 2016—Berrin finally revealed the details of the assault, in an article in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles.

A few days after that, a staff member at the controversial advocacy group J Street revealed that Shavit had sexually harassed her, too, during a speaking tour co-sponsored by her group. Sadly, J Street refrained from sharing that information with the other groups that were hosting and underwriting Shavit’s tour, according to The Forward.

Later, more of Shavit’s victims came forward. As a result of these revelations, Shavit resigned in disgrace from his position as a columnist for the leftwing Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz and he disappeared from public view—but not for long.

Less than two years later, the New York Times resumed presenting Shavit as a respected commentator on Israeli affairs, as if nothing had happened. David M. Halbfinger, chief of the Times’s Jerusalem bureau, quoted Shavit in a front-page news article on March 11, 2019 regarding that year’s Israeli election campaign.

Halbfinger allotted Shavit two full paragraphs and described him merely as “an author and former columnist who has followed [Prime Minister] Netanyahu throughout his career.”

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman soon joined the rehabilitation efforts. In his August 13, 2020 column, Friedman quoted Shavit’s ‘expert’ opinion (which, not surprisingly, concurred with Friedman’s) and described him merely as “Israeli writer Ari Shavit.”

Friedman has quoted Shavit on additional occasions since then, never mentioning his sordid past. In one, Friedman wrote that he asked Shavit “what he feared most today in his country.” One can imagine what Shavit’s victims fear most—that unrepentant sex abusers such as Shavit will be restored as members of respectable society after receiving barely a slap on the wrist.

That seems to be Candace Buckner’s fear, too. In the weeks ahead, she wrote in the Times, Deshaun Watson and the Cleveland Browns may find themselves in a nationally-televised game once again. “Between now and then,” she urged, “whoever’s in that booth to call their games should think long and hard about the appropriate way” to address Watson’s past, because Al Michaels and Tony Gonzalez “took a weak swing at it [last week] and completely missed.”

Buckner’s colleagues at the Times still have not even taken a weak swing at acknowledging Ari Shavit’s sexual misconduct. Instead, they have covered it up, apparently hoping that nobody will notice or remember what he did. But Danielle Berrin remembers. And so do Shavit’s other victims.

Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and the author of more than 20 books about Jewish history, Zionism, and the Holocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news.