Newsweek policy states that the “My Turn” reader-submitted essays should not be “framed as a response to a Newsweek story”, but the December 22 issue features precisely such a piece from Linda McDougal. The article includes almost verbatim the half-facts from ATLA’s press packet that we refuted earlier (see Dec. 12).

A final irony: McDougal concludes her essay with “I also know that if all those who want to restrict the legal rights of ordinary citizens have their way, I wouldn’t have waited seven months for an apology from the doctors, which I got only after my story became public. I would have waited forever.” I’ll leave aside the fact that many ordinary citizens are victims of societally harmful tort lawsuits (see, e.g., Feb. 7, 2000). Has McDougal considered that perhaps the reason that the doctors waited to apologize for a mistaken mastectomy until after she went public was because they were afraid that the apology would be used against them in a lawsuit? (Linda McDougal, “My Turn: I Trust Juries?and Americans Like You”, Newsweek, Dec. 22).

The “Civil Wars” author, Stuart Taylor, was confronted with a series of questions pulled from the same ATLA press release McDougal used, and responded to them in an on-line chat. (Stuart S. Taylor, MSNBC on-line chat, Dec. 11).

Sidenote: we covered a lawsuit of a Pennsylvania parents who sued their school board because their 13-year-old daughter was suspended for a consensual sex act on a school bus (see Sep. 19). Newsweek, in its story, mentioned a superficially similar Kentucky case that involved an alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old on a school bus, resulting in criticism from McDougal and ATLA, but also going to show that Newsweek only scratched the surface of the problem by dint of its space-limited selections for the story.

Filed under: AAJ, Stuart Taylor Jr.