A shareholder of The New York Times is demanding a full inspection of The New York Times’ Board and Audit Committee records, giving the outlet five days to respond or face court.
The National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), a beneficial shareholder of the NYT Company, is requesting an inspection of certain books and records following the controversial May 11, 2026, Nicholas Kristof column, titled “The silence that meets the rape of Palestinians.”
The Kristof article claimed to report widespread sexual violence by Israeli prison guards against Palestinian prisoners, including the allegation that Israeli prison guards trained dogs to commit rape. Following publication, the Israeli government announced its intention to pursue a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times and Kristof.
NCPPR is being represented by the National Jewish Advocacy Center (NJAC), and the request is being made pursuant to New York Business Law and shareholder common law.
The purpose of the demand is to investigate whether the company’s board of directors and senior management have upheld their fiduciary duties with regard to material legal, reputational, and financial risks arising from the publication of “factually unsupported content.” This includes the NYT’s design and operation of legal review programs, source verification programs and corrections procedures, among others.
Demand is meant to determine if legal programs were followed
The purpose of the demand is also to determine whether these programs were followed or bypassed with respect to the Kristof article.
For example, following the publication, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who was named as an on-the-record source, said that his statements were misrepresented.
“When a columnist’s own quoted source publicly accuses the columnist of misrepresentation after publication, that is not a detail the company can wave away by noting the editors found no errors,” NJAC said.
It is worth noting that NJAC is not seeking reporter notes, unpublished drafts, confidential source identities, or attorney work. It is also not asking the NYT to justify its viewpoint (this is protected by the First Amendment). It is instead seeking to investigate possible corporate mismanagement, inadequate oversight, and incomplete public discourse.
“The NYT said their biggest asset is trust. You can’t tell shareholders [that] credibility is your core asset and then hide records about your processes. We are just asking the board whether it did its job,” Mark Goldfeder, CEO of NJAC, told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.
In its most recent annual Form 10-K filing for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2025, submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), The New York Times Company said, “Our brand and reputation are key assets; negative perceptions or publicity could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.”
“We want to see what systems they have in place for defamation, corruption, verification, and whether those processes were waived or bypassed for this article,” Goldfeder told the Post.
“We want to know if senior management properly oversaw this. We want to see how this article impacted subscribers; we want to see employee complaints.”
Goldfeder explained that defamation risk is not just a journalism problem, but also an enterprise risk which can lead to direct financial exposure (legal fees, insurance issues, corporate costs).
He cited Fox News Network’s reported $787.5 million Dominion Voting Systems settlement as an example of how publication-related failure can “create catastrophic enterprise risk for major media companies.” Fox News agreed to pay the massive defamation settlement following a lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems in 2023, regarding the network’s on-air promotion of false claims after the 2020 United States election.
“The public has a right to know what’s going on,” Goldfeder told the Post.
Mostly, the inspection of the processes is of great shareholder concern, especially for financial reasons. Since the request was made, Goldfeder said, another shareholder has reached out to NJAC.
Transparency will also be a key focus of Israel’s intended defamation case against the NYT.
Goldfeder argues that Israel is not aiming to win a traditional defamation lawsuit, but instead to shed light on the NYT verification processes and essentially force the paper to reveal whether it has evidence to back its claims.
In fact, a straightforward defamation claim would likely fail, especially because governments generally can’t easily sue for reputational harm in US courts.
“Publishing that Israeli soldiers laughed while a dog raped a prisoner is not reporting on prison conditions. It is a factual claim that either happened or did not. If the Times has the evidence, production will vindicate them. If they do not, that is the story,” Goldfeder explained in a recent piece in the National Review, to which he directed the Post.
An interested person can apply in the Southern District of New York (where The New York Times is headquartered) to compel evidence production from a US entity for use in foreign litigation. This process – a Section 1782 application – asks the court to order the Times to produce the factual basis for one published allegation.
“The Times printed that Israeli soldiers summoned a dog, encouraged it in Hebrew, and used it to rape a bound prisoner while their colleagues took pictures. They called it corroborated. They called it fact-checked. So show us the facts. Produce the date, the location, the unit, the handler, the photographs, the medical records, the witnesses. All of it. Because if it exists, producing it ends this. And if it does not exist, then The New York Times published one of the vilest accusations ever leveled at a soldier, with nothing behind it, and called that reporting,” Goldfeder concluded.