Those salvos proved mild, however, compared to the fusillade unleashed, ironically, when The Times Sunday Opinion section published a column by a woman.
In the Feb. 13 piece, conservative author Charlotte Allen argued that few female "public intellectuals" remained in America, after the death of writer Susan Sontag. The headline on the piece -- "Where are the great women thinkers? Thinking so much about women has shrunk their minds" -- infuriated Estrich and her allies.
She immediately e-mailed Kinsley to say she had grown tired of his failure to acknowledge her or the issue. She gave him "ONE MORE CHANCE" to hire more women writers. Four days later, still unsatisfied, she wrote a letter to the editor, demanding more action and saying that a failure to cooperate would lead her to report the newspaper's shortcomings on her new website, latimesbias.org.
Several dozen local women -- including Nancy Daly Riordan, education activist and wife of state education secretary and former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan; women's rights lawyer Abby J. Leibman; and Peg Yorkin, chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation -- signed the letter.
Kinsley responded that The Times did not run letters naming that many authors, adding: "And we don't succumb to blackmail."
He offered, instead, to let the situation cool for a few weeks and then to publish an Estrich column expressing the same views.
Estrich chose, instead, to push the fight into the public eye. She copied her next e-mail to a Washington-based newspaper reporter and the online journalism tip sheet the Drudge Report, among others. That missive called Kinsley's blackmail claims "offensive and insulting" and added the comments about the op-ed editor's mental capabilities.
A long veteran of public scraps, Kinsley distributed his response to the same people, saying he was withdrawing his column offer to Estrich because of her comments about his health. Carroll, The Times' top editor, added his own retort, which accused Estrich of "extravagant malice" in her dealings with the opinion editor.
That, in turn, prompted Estrich to hire celebrity attorney Bert Fields. He wrote to Carroll demanding a retraction for what he called "false, defamatory and highly damaging assertions" -- a request the editor rejected.
Internet postings made the tit-for-tat a preoccupation, for a day or two, of the nation's chattering class. One conservative columnist, Heather Mac Donald, accused Estrich of "insane ravings" and having a "hissy fit." Feminists wrote her in solidarity.
