While the media ran far and wide with this narrative, wrongly ascribing motive to us, James O’Keefe in fact never intended to discredit the alleged rape victims of Judge Roy Moore during our undercover investigation into the Washington Post. As a matter of fact, in an interview with Mediaite, O’Keefe stated that he personally believes Moore’s victims. O’Keefe said:
“We use a variety of aliases to get meetings with people. We’ve posed as pimps, as child abusers, as victims of abuse, as telephone technicians. Undercover journalists have done this throughout the 20th century. We use the alias in order to gain trust and to get a meeting.”
If you carefully watch the Washington Post’s own video of the encounter, you can see that our undercover reporter did not want to talk about Roy Moore or justify her rape alias. We wanted to talk about politics to see if that Post journalist carried an editorial bias, which is consistent with similar investigations we conducted into CNN and The New York Times.