Debbie Nathan

Updated October 21, 2007

On August 24, 2006, Salon.com posted an opinion piece I wrote titled “Why I Need to See Child Porn.” Almost immediately afterward, New York Times lawyers, a personal lawyer of Eichenwald, and Eichenwald himself contacted Salon. Eichenwald said he had not looked at any material illegally, although my op-ed assumed he had, based on clear implications in an article he’d recently written. Eichenwald threatened to sue me and Salon if Salon didn’t remove my article from its site and issue corrections. Salon complied, and also removed dozens of reader letters responding to the article the day it was posted. Two corrections were run. Readers were not allowed to directly respond to the second one.

A few weeks later, Counterpunch published a statement I wrote, noting that Eichwenwald had threatened to sue, and complaining about how Salon responded. Eichenwald then sent me a private message stating his intention to sue me as an individual.

In March 2007, the New York Times revealed that Eichenwald had given $2,000 to Justin Berry, a teenager who then became the main source for an article Eichenwald wrote in late 2005 about child pornography. Eichenwald, who had since quit the Times, was censured by Times Public Editor Byron Calame.

(Update and amendment, posted October 21, 2007): Eichenwald publicly announced in March 2007 that he was suing me for $10 million. He has not done so as of this writing. He quit his new job at Portfolio in August, after a courtroom hearing revealed he had paid more money to Justin Berry besides the $2,000 revealed earlier.

In September 2007, documents filed in a federal criminal case in Nashville, TN were unsealed after Eichenwald lost a legal battle to keep them from becoming public. The documents reveal that he gave Justin Berry an additional $1,100 in Paypal payments, which were made to buy online images of Berry. Those documents also show that Eichenwald offered Berry and his business partner ideas for how to make more money. In addition, they reveal that, under a pseudonym, Eichenwald was a member of Berry’s porn website, which contained illegal images of at least one minor (a 14 year old). And they show that Eichenwald had administrative privileges to the illegal site, which he used many times to sign on to it. (For more, click here. The documents are publicly available at the federal government’s PACER administrative online website: see filings from June to September 2007 for defendant Timothy Ryan Richards.)

For more on all this, including links to background material, see:

Counterpunch, September 14, 2007: “New York Times Reporter was Member of an Illegal, Underage Porn Site…” by Debbie Nathan

The Child Porn Hoax, by Susie Bright. October 2, 2007 (Alternet)

“More Secret Payments by Former New York Times Reporter to Web Porn Star Surface in Nashville Courtroom,”
Counterpunch July 31, 2007.

Hottype, Chicago Reader, March 12, 2007

Susie Bright’s Blog, June 11, 2007

“I was Disappeared by Salon,” by Debbie Nathan, in Counterpunch

“Perilous Reporting,” by Jessica Wakeman, in Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR)

Also, see my counterpunch-april-20072.pdf article, “The New York Times: Kurt Eichenwald, and the World of Justin Berry: Hysteria, Exploitation and Witch Hunting in the Age of Internet Sex.”

The piece analyzes gross misinformation and mischaracterizations in Eichenwald’s blockbuster, December 2005 article Times about Justin Berry, who became a webcam child porn producer and entrepreneur when he was still a minor.