What did the Charlie Hebdo terrorists say to Sigolène Vinson, the woman whose life they spared?

Jim Treacher, at The Daily Caller, has a piece titled "New York Times Reports On Muslim Proselytizing During Charlie Hebdo Attack, Then Deletes It." He notes that earlier the Times had quoted Vinson saying she was told "I’m not going to kill you because you’re a woman, we don’t kill women, but you must convert to Islam, read the Quran and cover yourself." And now the article only has her saying "Don’t be afraid, calm down, I won’t kill you... You are a woman. But think about what you’re doing. It’s not right."

I go over to the NYT site and search for the name Sigolène Vinson. It appears only in one article, apparently the same article that Treacher is talking about, "Recounting a Bustling Office at Charlie Hebdo, Then a ‘Vision of Horror.'" What it says now is:

Sigolène Vinson...  disputed a quotation attributed to her and carried on the website of the French radio service RFI stating that the gunman had told her she should convert to Islam, read the Quran and cover herself. Instead, she told The New York Times in an interview, the gunman told her: “Don’t be afraid, calm down, I won’t kill you.” He spoke in a steady voice, she said, with a calm look in his eyes, saying: “ ‘You are a woman. But think about what you’re doing. It’s not right.’ ” Then she said he turned to his partner, who was still shooting, and shouted: “We don’t shoot women! We don’t shoot women! We don’t shoot women!”

So is this a case of NYT censorship of something deemed unfit to print? In the current version, it certainly looks as though what happened was: 1. The NYT relied on the French radio report, 2. The NYT sought its own interview and deleted the disputed quote immediately while rewriting the paragraph, and 3. The NYT published an improved paragraph that included the French radio version, the fact that Vinson denies saying that, and the original reporting of a new attempt by Vinson to say what she was told.

Now, what do you do with that — criticize the NYT for suppressing the Islam-related material? I don't think that's the right focus, at least once the third version of the text has appeared. The proper focus is the mind of Sigolène Vinson, who went through an unfathomably traumatic experience, and who has been telling her story while the murderers she faced remain at large and while the terrorist mission — of unknown dimension and ferocity — rages on, without perceptible end. She must feel like a marked woman. I suspect — and the NYT gives me all the material I need to suspect — that the quote from the French radio was accurate, but that after seeing it made public, she got very scared and desperate to censor the part about religion. The new quote is stripped of references to Islam and to the subordination of women and refurbished into a quote stating the widely shared traditional value against killing women in a military operation.

Treacher's attack on the NYT is extremely harsh, by the way. He assumes he knows the motive of the editor who changed the text:

Because you’re one of America’s moral, ethical, and intellectual betters, and you don’t want it to be true. Your reporter hastily left that inconvenient truth in her story by accident, so you airbrushed it out, without any acknowledgment, to preserve the narrative. You turned it into, “Hey, maybe these guys aren’t so bad after all. They didn’t kill the women, right? Let’s not be too hasty.”

Because that’s your job.

The New York Times is garbage. 

UPDATE: Jim Treacher responds in the comments to this post and has a new post at The Daily Caller acknowledging the new version of the story in the NYT. This is too complicated to respond to in an update to this post, so I'm working on a new post.

ADDED: Here's the new post: "The proper focus is the truth."