"No, I wasn’t contacted or interviewed or given any opportunity to opine on any of it, including having my seven-year-old daughter’s picture in the paper."

"The primary story here is not that interesting... People lie and cheat and steal all the time. That’s a fact of life. But rarely does a national news organization give them an unverified megaphone to whitewash it."

Forbes interviews the husband of that woman who had her wedding story told in the New York Times. We talked about the NYT story yesterday, and (my husband) Meade, in the comments there, draws attention to the quotes that I'm using here.

[Bob Ennis, former husband of TV reporter Carol Anne Riddell], now head of the digital media practice at the investment bank Petsky Prunier, did not have a high opinion of the Times even before this incident. “I’m happy if they spell all the headlines on the front page correctly,” he says. “The idea that they’d fact-check a style story — I don’t think that’s incumbent on them. But there’s a difference between that and publishing a choreographed, self-serving piece of revisionist history for two people who are both members of the media industry.”

Oh! I love how this is turning into a Forbes vs. NYT journalism showdown — with the help of the jilted husband, who's got the help of Forbes now, getting his side of the marriage breakdown into the national press. 

Although his ex-wife said she and her new husband volunteered to tell their story to the “Vows” column partly “for our kids’ sakes,” Ennis says he is angry primarily because of the effect he sees this episode having on those same kids. 

Right. Don't forget the kids. Everyone is premising his/her self-serving statements on the kids now.

“These folks are well within their rights to tell whatever version of reality they want to tell, and if The New York Times is gullible enough to print it, that mostly reflects poorly on the Times,” he says. “The picture of my daughter is another matter. I sure as hell would have objected if they had told me they were going to print it.”

Which one is his daughter? Is it the sad-faced girl with the bow in her hair in profile at the right-hand side of the photograph? Look at her and think about how she might feel as she gazes at the brown wedding-cake about to be put asunder by the gleaming knife gripped by her outreaching mother whose hand is overclasped  by the (diamond?) ring-wearing paw of her new husband, the erst-while friend of her parents, whom she's long known as the dad of her kid-friends, who are now strangely intruded into the confusing, ever-changing zone that bears the label "family."

Or is his daughter the sweet little child in the husband's arms? Imagine how her father's heart aches to see that man with one hand grasping his daughter's rear and the other hand grasping his ex-wife's hand and, inside that, a knife. The new husband and wife are performing wedding theater for the NYT photographer, and they don't know that the frame the Times will select is the one where their smiles look like predatory grimaces and everyone else in the photograph looks like they belong at a funeral.

“Maybe The New York Times has forgotten, but New York can still be a dangerous town for children of wealthy people. I want to find out from the Times how that occurred and I will expect some sort of response and if I don’t get one I’ll take further measures to achieve one.”

Ugh, the stink of a threatened lawsuit drifts into the room. But don't worry: It's for the children.

***

And don't miss the extra photograph at the original NYT story. The woman's long-clawed hand drapes over the shoulder of her conquered beast, who seems drained of life force. His ring-wearing hand lies limply on the table next to a drained bottle of beer. In the original story, when he told her he loved her, she knocked a beer "into his lap" — that is, onto his genitals. The liquids have all spilled out, and the phallic symbols are empty.