Shayma Bakht's claims were "inaccurate", "mistaken" and "wrong": The Times finally backs down and publishes retractions of Bakht's sperm donor article

Above are screenshots of two retractions that The Times have published over the last 24 hours. One is from the online edition, and the other is from the Scottish version of the print edition, which is where Shayma Bakht's wildly inaccurate article originally appeared. In them, the newspaper admits that several of Bakht's claims were false. 

Firstly, The Times admits Bakht was "wrong" to claim that I "refused women non-physical methods of insemination in 2017". This was one of the most bizarrely-worded lies I've ever seen in a British newspaper. 

Secondly, The Times admits that Bakht made other "inaccurate" statements about my activities as a donor, which have now been deleted from the online version of the article. 

Thirdly, The Times admits that Bakht was "wrong" and "mistaken" in claiming that it is illegal for donors to charge money over and above travel expenses. (This was an allegation that was not specifically directed against me, but against donors in general.) 

Incredibly, this is the second time in four years that I've been left with no choice but to get involved in a lengthy complaints process against a national newspaper. In 2018, the press regulator upheld my complaint against the Daily Record, and forced them to print a front page correction of their lies about me. On this occasion, The Times have voluntarily accepted that Shayma Bakht's claims were false, but it's taken far, far too long to get to this point (well over a month). I know some journalists would argue that the fact that I was able to get the lies retracted on both occasions proves the complaints/regulation process is somehow "working", but the bottom line is that people like me shouldn't be forced to go through an enormously stressful and time-consuming complaints process. Newspapers simply shouldn't be publishing lies in the first place. In a way this system suits the newspaper industry down to the ground, because they can print any old cobblers they like, and then as long as they print a microscopic correction in the bottom corner of page 34 several weeks later, we're supposed to think that's absolutely fine. 

I want to briefly explain how this incident came about. Way back in July, Shayma Bakht contacted me, introduced herself as a reporter for The Times, and said she wanted to ask me about the allegations women have made against the American "Joe Donor". She went on to ask a number of extremely generalised questions about the Facebook donation community, which I gave equally generalised answers to. She thanked me and said she would be back in touch with follow-up questions. That never happened, and I didn't hear from her again. I was completely stunned when, more than a month later, Kyle Gordy tipped me off that she had written an article for the Scottish edition of The Times in which she had practically portrayed me as some kind of monster. 

My guess is that what happened is this. She probably wasn't aware of the fact that the Sunday Times already had an article in the works that was going to expose the wrongdoing of Joe Donor and Simon Watson. So she was told that she couldn't have an article about Joe in the UK-wide edition of The Times, but as she had already done an interview with a Scottish donor, it was suggested to her that she could have an article in the Scottish edition instead. She then asked around to find out if any Scottish recipients were willing to talk about bad experiences with donors. Sure enough, she discovered that there are two donors in Scotland who are notorious for treating women badly and for making unwanted sexual advances. I know exactly who those donors are - I won't give their full names, but their initials are CA and RD, and they've been banned from all of my groups for many years. But Bakht was then presumably informed by The Times legal department that they couldn't allow her to name CA or RD, which left her with a major problem, because she obviously wanted a named bogeyman for her article. So instead she went back to the interview she had done with me, quoted me selectively and wildly out of context, and used innuendo to try to tie me into the pattern of behaviour exhibited by CA and RD. I have no doubt whatever that some people who read that article wrongly formed the impression that CA and RD were me - and I also have no doubt that Shayma Bakht fully intended people to form that false impression. It was an appallingly cynical and unscrupulous piece of journalism. 

To anyone from outside the donation community who may have found this post after searching for Shayma Bakht's name, perhaps because she's asked you for an interview about some other subject and you want to find out if she's trustworthy, all I can tell you is that she breached my trust in the most appalling way imaginable. If you do speak to her, I'd suggest that you insist upon a written, binding undertaking from her that you will be given advance sight of any article she mentions you in, and that it will not be published until you have signed it off as accurate. 

And to journalists in general I'd say this. If you randomly decide to trample all over someone, you'd better find someone else to trample all over. Because if you print lies about me, I will pursue the matter relentlessly until those lies are fully retracted - and that will include legal action if necessary.