"She said she and another Star reporter were in the newsroom... when Ayers, then the newspaper’s publisher... told her she’d 'been a bad girl' and needed to be spanked."

"'I started laughing, because I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard,' she said. [Veronica Pike] Kennedy said [H. Brandt] Ayers picked up a pica pole – a metal ruler used to measure the size of printed type – and tried to pull Kennedy out of her chair. I was literally holding on to the chair,' Kennedy said. 'He picked me and the chair up, and wrestled the chair out of my hands. And he started spanking me.' Kennedy was 22 at the time of the alleged spanking. Ayers turned 40 the same year."

From an article in the Anniston [Alabama] Star, linked in the NYT article "Alabama Newspaper Executive Resigns After Admitting He Once Spanked a Reporter." The incident took place in 1975. Ayers now says (quoted in the Star): "As a very young man with more authority than judgment, I did some things I regret. At my advanced age I wish I could relive those days again, knowing the seriousness of my position and with the accumulated judgment that goes with age." Again, he was 40.