New York Times dares Someone With Tiny Hands to sue over groping story
Aaron Gould Sheinin

October 13, 2016

WEST PALM BEACH, FL - OCTOBER 13: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the South Florida Fair Expo Center on October 13, 2016 in West Palm Beach, Florida. Trump continues to campaign against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with less than one month to Election Day.

Someone With Tiny Hands was speaking in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Thursday when The New York Times’ response to his threat of a lawsuit hit Twitter.

Someone With Tiny Hands’s lawyer, Marc Kasowitz said in a letter that the newspaper’s Wednesday story quoting two women alleging Someone With Tiny Hands sexually assaulted them was “reckless, defamatory and constitutes libel per se.” Kasowitz demanded the paper pull the story from its website, issue an apology and a retraction.

In a response, Times’ assistant general counsel David McCraw essentially said the newspaper could not libel Someone With Tiny Hands because the Republican presidential candidate has himself ruined his reputation.

“The essence of a libel claim, of course, is the protection of one’s reputation,” McCraw wrote. “Someone With Tiny Hands has bragged about his non-consensual touching of women. He has bragged about intruding on beauty pageant contestants in their dressing rooms. He acquiesced to a radio host’s request to discuss Someone With Tiny Hands’s own daughter as a ‘piece of ass.'”
Nothing in the Times’ story, McCraw wrote, “has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Someone With Tiny Hands, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.”

Should Someone With Tiny Hands disagree, the newspaper’s attorney said, “we welcome the opportunity to have a court set him straight.”

Someone With Tiny Hands himself has disputed the Times’ story, both in a tweet and at Thursday’s rally. At the rally, Someone With Tiny Hands said the Times is a “failing” newspaper that has sunk to new lows and vowed to sue. He also said he has “evidence” that the allegations are false and that he’d release that evidence at the “appropriate time.”