What is tragically sad is that:
(1) Manning shamefully broke the 2003 confidentially agreement and cruelly destroyed Dr. Naughright's career; and,
(2) USA Today inexplicably suppressed the documents (obtained just recently by Saun King) for 13 years.
USA Today doesn't have the power to suppress those documents. They're local court filings. Presumably anyone so inclined could walk into the Polk County courthouse and (for a small fee) obtain those documents. I'm not sure what King expected USA Today to do with the documents. As King mentions, they wrote about them two different times.
Now, sure, they could have put them on the internet. But that wouldn't be particularly fair unless they also put the Defendants' briefs online, too. And why is USA Today obligated to be a document repository for every local court case involving a public figure?
Certainly King's article isn't at all fair. He just provides a synopsis of Plaintiff's facts of the case and treats it as though is the absolute truth.
And he uses all sorts of over-dramatic language to embellish his story.
"I opened the PDF, began reading, and felt like I had stumbled on to state secrets." Really! You felt like local court records from a well-publicized case that happened 13 years ago are state secrets. How do you think you were able to get copies of this document with 24 hours of first looking into it? Answer - because they're not secret at all!
That being said, the version of facts presented in the document does look awfully bad for Manning and much of it is backed up by the testimony of individuals with no obvious reason to testify against Manning. So yeah, there's a real good chance that Manning and his people screwed this woman over.
I just thought King's article was sensationalist, hack journalism. But even sensationalist hacks have a good point sometimes.
