It shouldn’t still surprise me. But it does.

Marty Baron, the “legendary” editor who ran the Washington Post from 2012 to 2021, writes about me in his 2023 memoir, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post. 

For almost a year, I have been calling Baron out on social media and formally requesting that he give me space in his paper to defend myself against what he wrote. Because Marty Baron is a coward, he will not answer me. 

This surprises me because I grew up the son of a journalist and in the days when my father was in the game, a person was given an opportunity—usually long before publication time—to defend himself when a journalist mentioned him in a negative light. I realize, now, that I’m probably naïve and that these people are scum.

Baron recently came to mind because he just did an interview on NPR—where else? —in which he conjured the bogeyman of President Trump cracking down on the press. “I think [Trump’s] salivating for the opportunity to prosecute and imprison journalists for leaks of national security information—or what they would call national security information,” Baron told Terry Gross.

“I would expect that he would deny funding to public radio … and TV. And that he will seek to exercise control over the Voice of America and its parent company, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, as he did in his previous administration, trying to turn it into a propaganda outlet.”

Oh Marty, get bent. No one is buying the self-aggrandizing bit where you play the victim, the courageous, fourth-estate warrior who defies big government. You’re Stephen Glass with a beard. 

In 2018, I was at the center of a political storm when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford claimed that I had been in the room when she was allegedly sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh in 1982, when Brett and I were 17 and in high school. The accusation inflamed the nation and upended my life. I have written about it a lot in the last six years, but as long as orcs like Marty Baron are going to mention by name in their books and articles, I’m going to respond. You can turn the page or click away, and God knows I’m tired of reliving it. But as long as I have a platform, when a fool like Marty Baron speaks my name I am going to be there to defend it.

Baron spends a good part of Collision of Power writing about the Kavanaugh nomination. He mentions me when he cites a letter that Blasey Ford had written saying that Kavanaugh “with the assistance of a friend, Mark G. Judge,” had been involved in her assault. 

Had Baron read my book or any of the many columns I’ve written about the ordeal, he would know that even something as small as Ford referring to me as “Mark G. Judge” is a tell. Mark G. Judge was a byline I used when I was a younger journalist. Ford’s casual use of it in that letter suggests that someone was doing opposition research about me and Brett, not referring to someone she actually knew. It’s a small detail, maybe lost in the fact that Ford could not remember the “when” or the “where” of the alleged attack, but it is something Woodward and Bernstein would have noticed.

In my book The Devil’s Triangle, I reveal the opposition researchers Ford was working with, how the idea that she was a “reluctant witness” is a lie, and take The Washington Post apart piece by piece. Baron does not have the integrity to mention a single article I have written on the subject. He does not mention my book. He does heap praise on Emma Brown, the Post reporter who broke the Blasey Ford story. Baron writes: “The Post’s reporter, Emma Brown, had focused single-mindedly on getting the facts right and checking out Ford’s account as best she could under the circumstances at the time.”

Wrong. In The Washington Post piece published by Brown on Sept. 16, 2018, there was also no mention of Leland Keyser. Keyser was a close friend of Ford’s, who Ford claimed was present at the party where the alleged assault took place. Brown omitted Keyser from her story. Kimberly Strassel at The Wall Street Journal noticed this and asked: “Why is there no mention of Leland Keyser in the official Post piece? Why didn’t Post reporter Emma Brown mention Keyser, who according to Ford was at the party in question?”

On Sept. 22, almost a week later, The Washington Post answered. From Fox News :

“Ford, the Post acknowledged in an article by reporter Emma Brown on Saturday, had told the paper more than a week ago about Keyser and said ‘she did not think Keyser would remember the party because nothing remarkable had happened there, as far as Keyser was aware.’ But the Post did not mention Keyser specifically or Ford’s preemptive dismissal of her memory in its original recounting of Ford’s allegations, a bombshell story that has threatened to upend Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation. The story mentioned only that ‘Ford named two other teenagers who she said were at the party’ and that [t]hose individuals did not respond to messages on Sunday morning.”

In 2018 Marty Baron’s Washington Post also did a profile of a guy named Mike Sacks. Sacks, a comedy writer, talked to the paper about what it was like growing up outside of Washington, D.C., with Brett and I. There was only one problem. Mike Sacks, by his own admission, has never laid eyes on me, Brett Kavanaugh, or any of our friends.

Yes, The Washington Post ran a story detailing the misadventures of Brett Kavanaugh and me in the 1980s, sourced by a man who had never met either one of us. There was also the ridiculous hit piece about our underground high school newspaper featuring deep dives into pressing matters like which movies we watched  during those years. All of this chatter, of course, was intended to portray Kavanaugh and me as something we were not. We were smeared and set up, and Marty Baron’s paper is largely to blame.

There was a brief media maelstrom before the election when The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, refused to endorse a candidate. Baron got so upset he went on MSNBC to take it to Ali Velshi. After talking nonsense about “the wall between newsstand editorial” at the Post, Baron criticized the paper for not endorsing Harris. He claims that the decision to not endorse “was made by Jeff Bezos and the circumstances are highly suspect.” Nothing about Russiagate was considered suspect. Nothing about Post columnist Jennifer Rubin’s obvious mental health decline is suspect. And nothing about the reporting on me and Brett Kavanaugh allegedly drugging and gang raping girls was suspect. Marty feels that “the practices and principles” of the great paper have suffered as a result of the non-endorsement, not from its inability to do journalism.

“When [Trump] talks about his triumphs during his first term,” Baron told NPR,

“he’s cited the undermining confidence in the mainstream press—he’s called it one of his greatest successes. … It’s not the only reason the confidence in the press has declined. There are a variety of reasons. … But the big factors have been market fragmentation and the fact that people can find any site that affirms their preexisting point of view and any conspiracy theory, no matter how crazy it is, they can find somebody who says that’s true.”

Well, I know this much is true: You’re a coward, Marty. Subscriptions are down, Trump has been elected, Joe Rogan gets 10 times your audience. As Washington Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis bluntly put it, “people aren’t reading your stuff.” It’s over. Even so, my offer stands: have the balls to let me defend myself in your dying newspaper. It’s an honor thing.