I edited the People writer who says Trump groped her. Here’s why she didn’t speak out.

In the hours after People magazine correspondent Natasha Stoynoff said she had been sexually assaulted in 2005 by Donald Trump, while she was interviewing him about his wedding anniversary at his Mar-a-Lago estate, I had the chance to wonder what I, as the magazine’s then-deputy editor, would have done had she told me about Trump’s predation.

For a second there, I imagined a scene of Ben Bradlee-esque outrage, calling out the swine for his behavior and striking a blow for reporters everywhere. But in reality, I would probably have simply killed the story that Stoynoff had gone to Palm Beach to report. I would have then called Trump’s public relations operatives, told them about their boss’s bad behavior and agreed to a truce of mutual silence. In the end, few people would have learned of the event, we’d have had to fill a few more pages in the next issue, and Trump would have avoided any public embarrassment.

News organizations are devoted to the idea that unless something truly gruesome happens during the course of reporting, the subjects, not the reporters, are the real story. They instinctively feel pressure to absent themselves from the narrative. It’s the right instinct, but in the case of sexual assault, whose violations are not always visible, reporters face a terrible choice. No wonder Stoynoff didn’t feel able to confide in me or her other editors in 2005.