Politico’s Unthinkable Outing of a Sexual-Assault Survivor

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we wince at Politico’s outing of a sexual-assault survivor, ask if the proliferation of Catholic hospitals is part of the cure or the disease, and hit more media misses.

The Bare Minimum

For most journalists, it’s not an edge case. If a sexual-assault survivor does not want to have that terrifying and transformative moment in their lives made the subject of public debate and discussion, then that’s that, it shouldn’t be — no questions asked. 

For Adam Wren and his editors at Politico, it appears not to be an edge case either, but in the opposite direction: Because the victim is an office-seeking Republican, it’s fair game. 

Jennifer-Ruth Green is running for Congress in Indiana’s first district. She is an African-American Air Force veteran and National Guardswoman who served in Iraq. She’s also a rock-ribbed conservative running in a district that has long been a reliably safe seat for the Democratic Party. Worst of all, she has a chance to win.

Her punishment for this last and greatest sin is to be outed by Wren, against her will, as a sexual-assault victim.

In reviewing Green’s “mostly stellar” military career, Wren found two examples of her being reprimanded in 2009 — once for loading her weapon in a military building, and once for “wandering away” during a visit to the national training center in Iraq. These mistakes resulted in the less-than-glowing performance review that Wren cites in his reporting.

While Green was checking out a guard tower during this second instance, an Iraqi soldier groped her and exposed himself. Here’s how Wren tells the story:

The second more serious incident occurred in September, according to her military records, when she and a small group of officers visited the national training center. She left the group to climb into a cramped guard tower where Green says an Iraqi serviceman sexually assaulted her by grabbing her breast and exposing himself.

She said she was advised not to report the assault by a staff sergeant, who was also a military equal opportunity representative. He told her that “if American leadership complained to Iraqi leadership, they would continue to see women as liabilities and limit their ability to serve….”

The poor evaluation, which was performed by someone who was not in Iraq with Green, affected her ability to rise in the ranks and in 2012 she was removed from active duty as part of a larger force reduction, according to her records. Green has appealed the evaluation, citing supporting letters from her superiors stationed in Iraq. Her direct supervisor, a senior agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, wrote in her appeal that she “did an outstanding job in her duties; I did not question her leadership, judgment or professional skills.”

Wren writes that the documents detailing Green’s status as a sexual-assault survivor “were obtained by a public records request and provided to Politico by a person outside the [Congressman Frank] Mrvan campaign” — unusual attributional phrasing that suggests that they may very well have been provided by an ally of the Mrvan campaign. 

Green compared Wren’s handling of the situation to the act of violence itself in an interview with Fox News, explaining that she asked the reporter and his editors not to include the detail in their story.

“The reality of it is — like I said at one point in my life to my assailant, ‘No. Please stop. Don’t.’ — and he did what he wanted to do . . . This is the exact same situation all over again, all because there was a man who wanted some sort of gratification,” she said.

“Adam Wren spent time in this article focusing on every single detail down to the skirt I was wearing, down to the color of the skirt I was wearing, down to every single knob I touched, all of those things, but yet he writes clinically about one of the worst days of my life,” continued Green, before accusing Wren of wanting to “reduce it to 50 characters.”

On Twitter, Politico‘s vice president of marketing and communications Brad Dayspring tried to defend Wren by asking one critic “should POLITICO not report on publicly available documents obtained by FOIA request?” 

Dayspring neglected to explain how reporting on Green’s experience while vaguely casting doubt on her story (“where Green says an Iraqi serviceman sexually assaulted her,” wrote Wren) served the public — because, of course, no one possibly could have. It was a gratuitous detail that decency demanded be left out at Green’s request.

Dayspring even had the nerve to lay the story’s focus on the sexual assault at the feet of Green herself, writing that “this story is an incredibly nuanced, deeply reported piece that looks at the totality of Ms. Green’s military career, which her team has placed at the forefront of her campaign.” He dodged questions about the sourcing of the story before making matters even worse for his employer by burning Republican operative Andrew Wagner as a source on other stories.

At Politico, the idea that Republicans are not one of two sides, both of which must be reported on, but the enemy, has been internalized to the point that its writers, editors, and executives will not offer them the respect that they would no doubt extend to anyone else. Politico didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Headline Fail of the Week

At the Washington Post, Frances Stead Sellers and Meena Venkataramanan report that the “Spread of Catholic hospitals limits reproductive care across the U.S.”

“Catholic systems now control about 1 in 7 U.S. hospital beds, requiring religious doctrine to guide treatment, often to the surprise of patients,” assert Sellers and Venkataramanan, who write as if there is a fixed number of hospital beds over which various sectarian armies fight, wielding them in later battles. Catholic hospital systems have, in fact, expanded over the years, and as the reporters acknowledge, “acquisition by a Catholic health system has, at times, kept a town’s only hospital from closing.”

Media Misses

• In a fawning profile of John Fetterman — the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania — for New York Magazine, Rebecca Traister uncritically quotes Fetterman’s “unofficial creative director” as saying that Fetterman’s rule for his campaign is “basically: Be funny, but don’t be mean.” That’s coming from a candidate lobbing unfounded accusations of Nazi-sympathizing at his opponent.

• There’s not a champagne cellar on Earth properly equipped to celebrate Saturday’s anniversary.

• A recent Washington Post column took on the controversies surrounding rapper Kanye West and Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, saying: “If I had my way, I would dismiss these two as clowns. But America just makes them impossible to ignore. This country loves to inundate us with coverage of Black male figures embodying the archetype of the dumb, violent, Black servant eager to please the White masters.”