Continuation of The Women   

Sappell had told his team to start writing their vignettes during the last weekend in September. When he read them, he felt the story drew its strength from the women's voices. "You could see there was some powerful information and some consistencies between the cases," Sappell says. But he wanted a better sense of these women, of their emotions and thoughts during the incidents they recounted. His team sought further details. By Tuesday, Sappell felt confident that they had a story.

Around 6 p.m. that evening, Cohn, Welkos and Hall called Schwarzenegger's headquarters and talked to campaign spokesman Sean Walsh. "We called them saying this is a story that is imminent, and we need your response quickly," Cohn recalls. "Sean Walsh said, 'What does imminent mean?' and I said it means we need a response by tomorrow." The reporters described each alleged incident. Walsh was "very sensitive and professional," Welkos says. After Walsh finished talking with the reporters, he called Sappell. "He was concerned there might be other kinds of material that we weren't telling him about," Sappell says. "I said, 'You're getting it all. There are no surprises.' "

After giving a rough version of the story to Baquet and Carroll to take home, Sappell and Rick Wartzman, the business editor, worked until almost midnight, polishing and crafting an anecdotal lead in which one of the women shared her account.

Around 9 the next morning, Carroll convened a meeting with Baquet, Sappell, Wartzman and Leo Wolinsky, the deputy managing editor who oversees page one. Do we have a story? Carroll asked each. "Nobody argued that there wasn't a story," Baquet says. "This is a place, to be perfectly frank, where people express hesitation if they're hesitant." Wolinsky recalls saying they were "going to get a lot of crap for this, but we need to go with it." He also remembers commenting, perhaps in that meeting or later that day, that he didn't think the story would change the election's outcome.

The editors talked about the lead. While Sappell and Wartzman had written an anecdotal lead, Carroll and Baquet didn't want to go that route. Carroll said he wanted to lay the story out as straight as possible. "We didn't want to suggest to the reader that the paper witnessed anything or knew for certain that anything the women said was true," Carroll says. They also discussed how explicit to be in describing sensitive incidents. "We had real conversations about words like 'grope,' about words like 'fondle,' " Baquet says. " 'Sexual misconduct' is too broad a word. We wanted it to be as specific as possible."

The reporters sought final details from the women--Where were you standing? What was the expression on Schwarzenegger's face? Sappell closeted himself in his office, nicknamed "the cave," to work on the body of the story. Wartzman sat at the keyboard in Carroll's office with Carroll and Baquet standing over his shoulder, trying to get the language at the top just right. Wartzman and Sappell prefer to work through editing changes with reporters at their side. But there was no time. "It's not habit here for editors to go off and write a story and not have the reporters more involved," Wartzman says. "But we were committed to getting the story in the paper as soon as it was ready, and we knew it was ready."

Marc Duvoisin, an assistant managing editor, read the story and suggested changes. He thought they should make clear that none of the women interviewed had filed legal action against Schwarzenegger. He said the lead had become too sparse and readers needed an idea of the settings where the alleged incidents occurred. "It was very calm. There was none of the natural and normal irascibility," Duvoisin says. "John and Dean had managed to instill the thing with a powerful sense of importance.... Everybody checked their egos and rivalries at the door."

On Wednesday afternoon, Hall walked into Carroll's third-floor office, where he, Baquet and several other senior editors were sitting around a small conference table, intently reading and marking up hard copies of the story. "John said, 'It's going to be really good,' " Hall recalls. "And Dean said, 'We're going to have all of you read it shortly.' " The reporters saw an edited version around 5 p.m., in time to make their own suggestions.

Most of the newsroom knew few details about the story. It never appeared on the budget, which lists stories scheduled for publication the next day. At the daily 3:30 p.m. meeting on October 1 to plan the front page, Baquet leaned over to Wolinsky. When you count up the stories, Baquet whispered, remember there's this other story going on page one.

He and Carroll tried to prepare key staff members for criticism they felt sure would ensue. They invited Jamie Gold, the readers' representative, to Carroll's office in late morning to tell her about the story and let her ask questions she anticipated readers might have. They discussed the timing, an obvious controversy so close to a heated election. Gold asked if readers might wonder if reporters had had enough time. She recalls Carroll saying that if they had more time, the only difference is they probably would have included more women.

Walsh called back Wednesday around 6 p.m. with the campaign's response, saying Schwarzenegger "has not engaged in improper conduct toward women" and describing the allegations as an "escalating political attack." Walsh also put a publicist who had worked extensively with Schwarzenegger on the line to rebut the story shared by Richardson, the British television host. The call lasted about an hour.

Baquet had worried they wouldn't make the 9 p.m. deadline for the Times' national edition delivered in New York, Washington, D.C., and Northern California. They did, but they continued to polish the piece until about 10:30, tweaking language for the home edition, which circulates to about 1 million people in Southern California. Sappell's wife came to the office in case he finished in time to attend a Steely Dan concert. She went home around 11 p.m., the unused tickets still in Sappell's briefcase.

The final lead on the 3,577-word story read: "Six women who came into contact with Arnold Schwarzenegger on movie sets, in studio offices and in other settings over the last three decades say he touched them in a sexual manner without their consent." The story stated that the "Times did not learn of any of the six women from Schwarzenegger's rivals in the recall race. And none of the women approached the newspaper on her own."

Over the next five days, the Times published accounts of 10 more women who accused Schwarzenegger of improprieties. As tips steadily flowed into the newsroom, additional reporters helped probe the emerging claims.

Follow-up stories containing new accusations against Schwarzenegger appeared on page one on October 3, 4 and 5. The October 3 piece primarily dealt with Schwarzenegger's admission that he had "behaved badly" toward women. He derided the Times report as "trash politics," but also offered a general apology. "I always say that wherever there is smoke, there is fire," he told supporters at a San Diego rally. "So I want to say to you, yes, I have behaved badly sometimes. Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets, and I have done things that were not right, which I thought then was playful. But I now recognize that I have offended people. And to those people that I have offended, I want to say to them, I am deeply sorry about that, and I apologize."

On the afternoon of October 2, Hall picked up her ringing phone. Carla, I think you've been looking for me, the voice in the receiver said. I'm the woman who spoke up at the panel discussion. Her name was Tamee Smith.

Smith, who had decided to talk, had gotten Hall's number from the panel organizer. On October 4 Smith faxed Hall the flyer that she and other reporters had searched for unsuccessfully for three weeks. Smith and her corroborator both allowed the paper to publish their names in an October 5 story.

As more women spoke out, reporters generally adhered to standards established for the initial piece, interviewing women and securing independent confirmation from a long-ago confidante. But four of the women came forward in public settings--a campaign event, a news conference, a radio show. In two cases, reporters were unable to confirm the accounts independently and noted that in the article. A story by Hall published on page 26 on October 7--Election Day--described a woman who spoke at a news conference held by Democratic attorney Gloria Allred. It said Allred had declined to make the woman, Rhonda Miller, available to the Times for questions. The Times also reported Schwarzenegger's responses and those of various movie crew members that his campaign put forward to dispute the women's accounts.

In one instance, an imprecise description was given of the women's accusations. The deck on the October 4 story stated, "11 women have said Schwarzenegger touched them without their consent," and the story repeated that description. At that point, however, 10 women had accused Schwarzenegger of groping them; the eleventh woman, Gail Escobar, had claimed that when she was in high school, an acquaintance of Schwarzenegger grabbed her and that Schwarzenegger threatened to rape her. Escobar's account was one of the two shared in public settings that could not be confirmed. Sappell says Escobar was counted in the intensity of deadline reporting because of the severity of her allegation. But in hindsight, he says the Times "should have more precisely excluded her from the count or more precisely described the circumstances of her case in explaining why she was included."

But the total number of women alleging by Election Day that Schwarzenegger had groped them still comes to 16. In the October 5 story about Tamee Smith, her corroborator, Elaine Thompson, alleged that Schwarzenegger had groped her as well. Sappell says the Times did not count Thompson or corroborate her story because "she was not directly complaining about" the incident. In an October 12 commentary, Carroll described the Times' decision to publish the stories of "16 women who said they had been sexually mistreated and humiliated" by Schwarzenegger, and 11 of those 16 were named. That count is accurate if either Escobar or Thompson is included.

The stories ignited an uproar that often focused more on the motivations and supposed machinations of the Times than on the actor's behavior toward women. Schwarzenegger and his supporters lambasted the reports as a political attack engineered by the Davis campaign. Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly said on his syndicated radio show that the Times "is out to get" Schwarzenegger, "to destroy him." Other talk-radio hosts echoed the accusation, and critics claimed that the newspaper had delayed publishing the story to sabotage Schwarzenegger. The candidate charged October 4 that the paper had joined an effort to "derail my campaign, and I think that it's part of the puke campaign that Davis launched now."

Irate readers deluged the Times with calls, e-mails and letters, a development the paper reported on Sunday, October 5: "As of Saturday evening, about 1,000 readers had canceled their subscriptions to protest the handling of the Schwarzenegger story. In addition, the newspaper had received as many as 400 phone calls critical of its coverage--many angry, some profane." One e-mailer rebuked Hall: "You now are the official colostomy bag holder for the Democrats." "Shame, shame, shame on you," another admonished. "I thought the Times could rise above the dirt and smut of negative campaigning, but I guess I was wrong." About 800 people also wrote praising the coverage; many, according to the Times story, were "apparently motivated by a liberal Web site that urged readers to register their support."

Gold, the readers' representative, says many callers presumed a liberal Times bias. Many appeared not to have read the articles and instead echoed secondhand accusations. "So many of them had the exact same comments as the e-mail I read before, or the e-mail I read before that," Gold says. But some readers were genuinely curious why the piece took so long to report and ran so late. They didn't see how reporters could work for seven weeks and find "only" six women.

"They don't understand investigative journalism," Gold says. "A lot of the readers say, 'The rumors were out there all the time, and you just held this.' " Listening to their comments and knowing what went on in the newsroom is "like one of those optical illusions where first you see one shape, and then you see another. It just doesn't look that difficult to someone picking up the paper." Gold thinks readers were right to ask how such an explosive story could run so close to the election. "The thing that makes me sad is they don't listen to the answers. They conclude, 'Oh, it's because you're biased,' not 'Oh, it's because it's news.' "

On October 3, the Times published a scathing commentary by Susan Estrich, a professor of law and political science at the University of Southern California and once the campaign manager for Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. In her piece, headlined "A Deplorable October Surprise," Estrich argued that "these acts do not appear to constitute any crime, such as rape or sodomy or even assault or battery. As for civil law, sexual harassment requires more than a single case of unwelcome touching." She concluded, "What this story accomplishes is less an attack on Schwarzenegger than a smear on the press."

Jill Stewart, a syndicated columnist and former Times reporter, wrote October 4: "It's nothing short of journalistic malpractice when a paper mounts a last-minute attack that can make or break one of the most important elections in California history." She contended that "since at least 1997, the Times has been sitting on information" that Davis "is an 'office batterer' who has attacked female members of his staff."

Over the next few days, Stewart blanketed television and radio talk shows and hurled a variety of accusations at the Times. She said the paper was "acting as an arm of the Democratic Party." She said the Times had finished the story two weeks prior to publication and that everybody "knows that it's been held for a long time." She said the Times' "lawyers begged them not to run it. The lawyers said this is going to hurt the L.A. Times far more than it hurts Arnold Schwarzenegger." Stewart attributed her information to unnamed sources at the Times, telling AJR: "I have had so many calls and so many e-mails from inside the Times. There is a lot of dissension and anger inside the Times that they had enough and could have run the story" earlier.

Many participants in the October 2 story expressed anger and disbelief about Stewart's charges. Karlene Goller, the paper's deputy general counsel, flatly rejects Stewart's claim that the Times' lawyers opposed publication. She says, "I thought the piece was completely solid and something to be proud of." Goller, the newsroom lawyer, checked with the two other Times attorneys, who handle business issues. She says they did not raise objections, either.

Respected journalists and media critics have defended the Times. "My impressions are that the L.A. Times did a professional, thoughtful job of investigating and examining the story, that they seriously vetted the reporting on news judgment and ethical issues and that they made a justifiable decision to publish what they did," says the Poynter Institute's Bob Steele. "The obligation of the journalist is to give the public the information unless there's an overriding, profound reason not to."

Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, says producing such a story in a thorough and accurate manner is time-consuming. "On a piece like that, which is dealing with someone's reputation in such an important way, nobody can fault the L.A. Times for taking as much time as they absolutely needed to nail it," Schell says.

Carroll confronted attacks on his paper's integrity in a blunt, 1,773-word commentary on October 12. To the charge that the Times delayed publication of the story, Carroll retorted, "This critic's accusation was among several lulus cranked out by local journalists." To an allegation that the paper apprised senior Democrats of the probe's particulars, he responded: "Fact: No Democratic officials were apprised." To the accusation that the Times dismissed reports about Davis mistreating women in his office, Carroll countered: "Fact: Virginia Ellis, a recent Pulitzer Prize finalist, and other Times reporters investigated this twice. Their finding both times: The discernible facts didn't support a story."

Carroll is no political crusader. On May 22, he sent a memo to some editors, which was leaked and widely discussed outside the paper, criticizing a front-page story he felt was biased against abortion opponents. "I'm concerned about the perception--and the occasional reality--that the Times is a liberal, 'politically correct' newspaper," Carroll wrote. "Generally speaking, this is an inaccurate view, but occasionally we prove our critics right.... I want everyone to understand how serious I am about purging all political bias from our coverage."

But Carroll does not fear public criticism when he believes his paper is right. In 1985, he oversaw an investigative series at the Lexington Herald-Leader that exposed cash payoffs in the University of Kentucky's basketball program. The report, which won a Pulitzer, sparked public fury at the newspaper.

"We had circulation and advertising boycotts, a shot fired into the press room, a bomb threat that forced us to evacuate the entire building," Carroll says. There was a large rally against the paper, bumper stickers and baseball caps denouncing it and "about three months of nightly rants on the sports talk show in which the subject, often literally, was how can we destroy the newspaper."

At 61, Carroll says he's weathered enough newspaper controversies to recognize certain symptoms. "If a controversial story is false, it will be attacked on the facts," he says. "If it's true, the subject becomes the newspaper's motives. I take it as confirmation that every word we said was true that the concentration of attention has been on our motives."