Times Lawyer Goes Viral With Trump Response

When attorneys for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump sent a letter to the New York Times, threatening to sue unless it retracted a story in which two women allege Trump sexually assaulted them, Times attorney David McCraw drafted a response fairly quickly. He spent about 45 minutes writing the letter, and three of his colleagues spent 30 minutes reviewing it and making minor tweaks. “I knew of course that this one would be different,” McCraw wrote for the Times Insider. “What I didn’t know was just how different it would be.” More than a million people flocked to the Times website to read it, and the letter quickly rose to the top of the Times’ “most emailed” and “most viewed” lists. McCraw received hundreds of emails from all over the world. “I heard from students I had taught 30 years ago when I was a college professor, former colleagues, law school classmates I hadn’t seen in two decades, my brother’s high school girlfriend, a person who says we met at a wedding 10 years ago, my ex-wife,” McCraw wrote. “The most moving of the emails were from women. Many saw my letter as standing up not just for The Times but for the two women who had come forward to our reporters to tell their stories.”