H. Brandt Ayers (Courtesy of the Anniston Star) 
 
 A prominent newspaper executive in Alabama accused of spanking multiple female employees during the 1970s has resigned. 
 
 H. Brandt Ayers, 82, on Thursday stepped down as chairman of the board of Consolidated Publishing Co., which owns the Anniston Star and five other newspapers. 
 
 “It is of utmost importance to me that this newspaper continue to serve its role of reporting on matters of concern to the Anniston community and that nothing stand in the way of preserving the newspaper as an independently owned publication serving this community,” Ayers wrote in a statement to the Anniston Star. “I feel my resignation at this time is in the best interests of the paper and its mission.” 
 
 On Tuesday, Ayers admitted to the Anniston Star that he spanked at least one female reporter in her home decades ago, claiming he was simply following a doctor’s advice. 
 
 He claimed the woman, who worked at the Star between 1973 and 1974, had been psychologically ill, and a doctor had suggested he “calm her down,” Ayers told the Star. When Ayers asked the doctor if spanking would work, the doctor said it would, Ayers said. Ayers told the Star he could not recall the name of the physician. 
 
 The Star named the woman who was spanked, saying she may now be deceased. The Washington Post does not name victims of sexual assault who have not gone public with their stories. 
 
 Ayers also acknowledged allegations from Star reporter Veronica Pike Kennedy, who spoke publicly to the Star, the Montgomery Advertiser and the Alabama Political Reporter, that the publisher spanked her 18 times with a ruler in the Star newsroom in 1975. When asked about the alleged assault, Ayers told the Anniston Star: “Let the accusation stand.” 
 
 “As a very young man with more authority than judgment, I did some things I regret,” Ayers told the Anniston Star. “At my advanced age I wish I could relive those days again, knowing the seriousness of my position and with the accumulated judgment that goes with age.” 
 
 Earlier in the week, Ayers said he had no intention of resigning. “Of course not,” Ayers told the Star. “I am the third generation of a family that has served honorably, even courageously, in the public interest.” 
 
 Ayers, who owns part of Consolidated Publishing, said Thursday he will no longer serve as a director, chairman or employee of the company. His wife, Josephine Ayers, who had served as the board’s vice chairwoman, will replace him as chairman. 
 
 The allegations against Ayers were first reported on the website Alabama Political Reporter and later described in articles in the Anniston Star and Montgomery Advertiser. 
 
 Kennedy told the three publications Ayers spanked her on a Saturday morning in February 1975, when the two of them were among a few employees in the Star newsroom. Kennedy was 22 at the time, and Ayers, then publisher, turned 40 that same year. 
 
 Ayers asked her to read an article he had written. After reading it, she told him it “really is a good piece of writing,” Kennedy recounted to the Montgomery Advertiser. Though she knew he had written the piece for an editorial, she joked, “Can you tell me who wrote it?” 
 
 “And he said, ‘Oh, you are being a bad girl,’ ” Kennedy told the Advertiser. “’You know what I do to bad girls? I spank them.’” 
 
 Kennedy said she then held onto her chair as Ayers “picked me and the chair up” and then “bent me across the desk behind me.” 
 
 He allegedly spanked her forcefully 18 times with a metal pica pole, a type of ruler used by newspaper designers and editors at the time. 
 
 “I was fighting him the whole time. Trying to kick him. Bite him. Scratch him. Whatever I could do,” Kennedy told Alabama Political Reporter. Then Ayers told her, “Well, that ought to teach you to not be a bad girl.” 
 
 Another Star reporter, Mike Stamler, then 22, said he witnessed the assault from across the room. 
 
 “I was staring with my mouth hanging open,” he told the Advertiser. “I was stunned.” 
 
 Kennedy didn’t know what to do, she told the Alabama Political Reporter. “I just had to pull myself together because I could lose my job.” She also feared how her father would react, she said. 
 
 “I knew I couldn’t say anything because my daddy would get his .38 and shoot Brandy in the head, and he’d be in prison for the rest of his life,” Kennedy told the Star, referring to Ayers by his nickname. 
 
 Ayers was described by the Star as “among the best-known figures in Anniston, and one of the best-known small-town newspapermen in the South.” He was the son of the Star’s founder, Harry Ayers, and replaced his father as publisher in the late 1960s. He stepped down in 2016 but still serves as the publishing company’s chairman. 
 
 Leading the Star during the civil rights era, he became known nationwide for his views as a Southern liberal. He advocated for school integration — a rare progressive voice in a conservative state. His syndicated column has been published in newspapers across Alabama. 
 
 A summary of one of his books, “Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie: Fifty Years of Commentary by H. Brandt Ayers,” calls the newspaperman, “A loyal son of Alabama who extols Southern culture” and “unapologetically calls for Alabamians to cast off the moribund ideologies of the past.” 
 
 But in other writings, Ayers touched on the controversial topic of spanking. In his book “In Love with Defeat: The Making of a Southern Liberal,” Ayers wrote that in the 1940s, spanking “was as American and Southern as fried chicken on Sundays.” 
 
 He described a date with the woman who later became his wife, Josephine. At one point on the date, he became upset with her and “made a comment not calculated to endear me, ‘If I knew you better, I’d spank you.’ ” 
 
 Trisha O’Connor, a journalism professor who worked at the Star as a reporter and editor during the 1970s, told the Associated Press that stories of Ayers’s assaults on women were common knowledge in the newsroom at the time. She and other female employees at the newspaper would warn new female workers to avoid Ayers. 
 
 “We took it to upper management and said, ‘We need assistance. This is terrible,’ ” said O’Connor, who teaches at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, S.C. “Basically, from what we were able to see, nothing happened.” 
 
 The allegations against Ayers first emerged in mid November, in an online column by Joey Kennedy in the Alabama Political Reporter, vaguely mentioning allegations involving his wife, Veronica Pike Kennedy, against a publisher. He didn’t initially mention Ayers by name. 
 
 Eddie Burkhalter, then a reporter at the Star, noticed the column and expressed interest in reporting on the story. Burkhalter claims the newspaper would not allow him to pursue the story about the allegations. In response, Burkhalter quit his job and reported the story for a different outlet, the Alabama Political Reporter. 
 
 Ben Cunningham, managing editor at the Star, wrote in a commentary that Burkhalter’s allegations about pursuit of the story are “flatly false.” Bob Davis, the current editor and publisher of the Star, wrote in a separate column that he instructed Cunningham to tell Burkhalter to suspend work on the story for a few days until they had a chance to discuss how they would go about treating anonymous sources. Burkhalter agreed to wait, Davis said, but later revealed that he had continued reporting anyway. 
 
 Then Burkhalter resigned and the Star assigned a new reporter to the story. The Star published its story shortly after the Alabama Political Reporter. On Tuesday, Burkhalter started work in a plumbing supply warehouse as a clerk. 
 
 “The airing of these allegations, in our pages and elsewhere, are a difficult time for this extended family,” Cunningham wrote. “For the women who say Ayers attacked them, though, I hope it leads to peace and to a sense of justice.” 
 
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 Fusion GPS execs attack ‘fake investigations’ by GOP aimed at punishing it for Trump revelations ||||| ANNISTON, Ala. (AP) — The chairman of a company that publishes six newspapers in Alabama has been accused of assaulting female employees by spanking them while he was a newsroom executive decades ago. 
 
 In reports published in Alabama news outlets, at least three women say H. Brandt Ayers, who became a nationally known voice of Southern liberalism during his tenure as editor and publisher at The Anniston Star, assaulted them in the mid-1970s, once using a metal ruler. The women and other former newsroom employees say Ayers had a reputation for spanking other women. 
 
 Ayers — now 82 and chairman of Consolidated Publishing Co., which operates six papers including The Star — issued a statement saying he "did some things I regret" when he was a "very young man with more authority than judgment." 
 
 An online publication, Alabama Political Reporter, first reported the allegations of former Star employee Veronica Pike Kennedy. The Star later published its own account quoting Kennedy and two other women who declined to have their names published; the Montgomery Advertiser also interviewed Kennedy and cited one woman who asked to remain anonymous. 
 
 Kennedy told the Advertiser she was working as a part-time clerk in a nearly deserted newsroom on a Saturday morning more than 40 years ago when Ayers after he asked her to read one of his columns and she jokingly asked who had written it. 
 
 "And he said, 'Oh, you are being a bad girl,'" Kennedy said. "'You know what I do to bad girls? I spank them." 
 
 Ayers forcibly pulled her out of a chair and whipped her with a metal ruler, Kennedy said. Kennedy said the episode led her to seek counseling years later. 
 
 "It was hard to trust anybody in authority for a long time after that," she said. "I had anger I didn't realize I had." 
 
 Mike Stamler told the Advertiser he was in the newsroom that day, working on a story. He said he remembered seeing Ayers and Kennedy disagreed about something, then saw the assault. 
 
 "I was stunned," he said. 
 
 Trisha O'Connor, a journalism professor who worked at the Star as a reporter and editor during the period, told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday that although she didn't witness or experience assaults, stories of Ayers' behavior were so numerous that she and other women at the paper would tell new female workers to avoid Ayers and stay away from his office unless accompanied by a supervisor. 
 
 "We took it to upper management and said, 'We need assistance. This is terrible.' Basically, from what we were able to see, nothing happened," said O'Connor, who teaches at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. 
 
 Ayers did not return an email seeking comment. He addressed the accusations in a statement published by The Star on Monday: 
 
 "As a very young man with more authority than judgment, I did some things I regret," Ayers said. "At my advanced age I wish I could relive those days again, knowing the seriousness of my position and with the accumulated judgment that goes with age." 
 
 The incidents described are too old for any criminal charges to be filed. 
 
 Ayers stepped down last year as publisher of the Anniston newspaper. His successor, Bob Davis, did not return an email seeking comment on Ayers' position at Consolidated Publishing. 
 
 Ayers is a member of the Alabama Academy of Honor, which recognizes living Alabamians for their achievements. His syndicated column has been carried in papers statewide. 
 
 A longtime advocate of progressive policies in a deeply conservative state, Ayers has written articles for publications including The New York Times and was once a regular contributor to "Morning Edition" on National Public Radio. ||||| By Eddie Burkhalter 
 
 Special to the Alabama Political Reporter 
 
 As news articles broke throughout 2017 of men and women coming forward, sometimes decades afterward, to say they’d been sexually assaulted and harassed, former Anniston Star reporters took notice. 
 
 Some of these former female Star reporters say H. Brandt Ayers, the paper’s former publisher and current chairman of the board of Consolidated Publishing, which owns The Star and five other newspapers, assaulted them decades ago. 
 
 Other staff members also recall the incidents. Most of them didn’t see them take place but were aware of them. 
 
 Veronica Pike Kennedy, one of those former Star reporters, said that in February 1975, she was forcefully spanked by Ayers in the newsroom. 
 
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 Ayers, in a reply Sunday afternoon to questions emailed to him Friday about the incidents, wrote, “I have no memory of the alleged incidents.” 
 
 Ayers, the son of The Star’s founder, Harry Ayers, took over as publisher of the company’s flagship daily newspaper in 1969, remaining in that position until 2016. Also, Consolidated Publishing has a relationship with the University of Alabama’s Graduate school of Journalism, which sends between five and seven young interns to The Star newsroom each summer to work alongside staff writers and editors. 
 
 Speaking of her own incident, Kennedy said it happened early on a Saturday, “so I was usually completely alone in the mornings.” 
 
 Kennedy said Ayers came into the newsroom, handed her a piece of writing and said, “I want you to read this. This is a fine piece of writing. I’ll come back in a little while, and you can tell me what you think.” 
 
 “When he came back, I said, ‘This is really very well written. Who did it?’” Kennedy said, adding that she knew Ayers had written it, and it was to be his Sunday editorial. “He said ‘Oh, you’re being a bad girl. I’m going to have to spank you,’” Kennedy recalled. 
 
 “I just thought he was kidding, but he started coming around the desk, and I grabbed onto the seat of my desk chair with both hands as tight as I could.” 
 
 Kennedy said Ayers picked up the chair with her in it, wrested it out from under her, bent her over the desk behind and spanked her hard 18 times with a metal pica pole, leaving marks. Prior to digital publishing, pica poles were used as rulers extensively by newspaper designers and editors. 
 
 “I was fighting him the whole time. Trying to kick him. Bite him. Scratch him. Whatever I could do,” Kennedy said. 
 
 Then, Kennedy said Ayers told her, “Well, that ought to teach you to not be a bad girl.” 
 
 While Kennedy was usually alone in the newsroom early on Saturday mornings, that was not the case that particular morning. Mike Stamler had just been hired as a Star reporter earlier that month and was in a corner of the newsroom when Stamler said Ayers walked in. 
 
 Stamler, a retired press office director for the U.S. Small Business Administration, said he didn’t think much of Ayers appearing in the newsroom until he saw Ayers begin to spank the young reporter. 
 
 “After that, I was kind of stunned. That’s not something you expect to see when you’re that age,” Stamler said. 
 
 Stamler said he didn’t discuss the incident immediately afterward, but when other reporters began talking about Ayers spanking reporters, he said he described what he saw and that “people would talk about other ones. It was pretty much common knowledge among the reporters.” 
 
 Kennedy recalls crying in the bathroom after the incident and trying to calm down. 
 
 “I was panicking. I didn’t know what to do. I just had to pull myself together because I could lose my job,” Kennedy said. 
 
 Another former female Star reporter, who declined to be named because of the public nature of her current job, described being spanked by Ayers while alone in his office not long after she started at the paper in the fall of 1975. 
 
 The woman said Ayers called her to his office during lunch, when the newsroom was largely empty, and told her he was upset that she’d missed a meeting that he said should have been covered. 
 
 “All along, I kind of just thought he was trying to scare me. I didn’t think this was real,” the woman said. She said Ayers spanked her and that “I just burst into tears. I was totally humiliated.” 
 
 “He said, ‘you need to go in my bathroom and clean up before you leave,’” she recalled. 
 
 A few moments after the incident, the woman said she called her then-boyfriend to tell him about what had happened. The boyfriend, now her husband, said he remembers getting that call. 
 
 “It was a traumatic experience for her, and we just didn’t know what to do or say,” her husband said. 
 
 When news accounts began appearing this year with stories of abuse that many had kept secret for decades, the husband said he and his wife thought of The Star. 
 
 “It was something that came back into our minds immediately,” he said. “We wondered whether or not this story would come to light, because we know that she was not the only victim.” 
 
 Kennedy and several other former reporters interviewed also said the woman told them what had occurred to her shortly after it happened. 
 
 Trisha O’Connor, who worked at The Star as a reporter and editor from 1973 to 1979, recalled an incident involving her friend and fellow reporter, Wendy Sigal. 
 
 Sigal, a native of Youngstown, Ohio, came to The Star in November 1973 from The Washington Post, where she had been a general assignment and crime reporter. 
 
 O’Connor, now a Journalist/Media Executive-in-Residence at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina, and a retired editor of The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, SC., said she can’t recall precisely when the incident occurred, but thinks it was about a year after Sigal started at The Star. Sigal’s last two stories in The Star were published July 7, 1974, according to newspaper archives. 
 
 “She was in her apartment and hadn’t been coming to work,” O’Connor said of Sigal. “I got a call from her saying that Brandy had just been there. She was hysterical, so I immediately went over to see about her.” O’Connor referred to Ayers by his nickname, Brandy. 
 
 O’Connor said that when she arrived at Sigal’s Anniston apartment, her friend said Ayers had come to her apartment and told Sigal, “You’ve been bad,” and spanked her. 
 
 O’Connor said shortly after the incident, she and former Star editor, John Childs, learned that Sigal’s family members had come to Anniston, and both O’Connor and Childs went to meet them at the Downtowner motel and restaurant in Anniston. O’Connor said that when she and Childs arrived, Ayers and his wife, Josephine, were with Sigal’s family member. 
 
 O’Connor said she and Childs attempted to explain to the Sigals that Wendy Sigal was not fabricating the incident at her apartment, but that doing so in the presence of the Ayerses made that task difficult, she said. 
 
 Soon after, Sigal left Anniston, O’Connor said. She believes her family took her away, but is uncertain where. O’Connor and others have since searched for Sigal, but haven’t been able to locate her. This reporter’s efforts to find Sigal and contact her family members were also unsuccessful. 
 
 O’Connor, Kennedy, and the other female reporter in this article said female reporters discussed these matters frequently among themselves at the time, all three said in separate interviews. Kennedy said one other female Star employee told Kennedy that she, too, was spanked by Ayers. 
 
 Attempts to contact some of the other women were unsuccessful. Attempts to locate contact information for still others were unsuccessful. 
 
 In an email Friday to Ayers, and to The Star managing editor, Ben Cunningham, and editor and publisher, Bob Davis, Ayers was asked to confirm whether the separate incidents in this article involving the women were true. He was also asked whether he plans to remain chairman of the Consolidated Publishing Board, among other questions. 
 
 “Though the writer has not done me the courtesy of calling me with a direct question, I will say that I have no memory of the alleged incidents,” Ayers replied in an email Sunday afternoon. “Of course I intend to remain as Chairman of this company which has been the central mission of my family for three generations.” 
 
 In a 2006 civil lawsuit, unrelated to the incident cited in this article, filed by a former Star advertising employee against Consolidated Publishing, the topic of Ayers and spanking came up twice. 
 
 In that lawsuit, the employee, Sharon Rutherford, charged sexual misconduct on the part of a supervisor, not Ayers. 
 
 In a deposition in the suit, Rutherford recalled Ayers attending a birthday party celebration for a female Star employee, held at the paper, and that “he wanted to give her a little spanking. He wanted to give her a little birthday spanking,” according to court records. 
 
 Rutherford testified that the woman didn’t appreciate Ayers attempt to spank her, and that she ran away to another man in the room “to help her.” 
 
 James Ayer’s Jr., an attorney representing Consolidated Publishing in the suit, asked Rutherford if she knew of any other sexual affairs that took place at the company, other than the one connected to the suit. Rutherford replied that Ayers “loved to spank the little young girls. That was his thing.” 
 
 Rutherford went on to testify that she’d heard from a Star editor that Ayers spanked “Wendy Seigel,” apparently misspelling Sigal’s name, and then Rutherford referenced the name of the same former reporter quoted in this article, who described being attacked by Ayers in his office for missing a meeting. 
 
 Rutherford said former Star editor John Childs told her Ayers wanted to commit Sigal to a mental institution, but that Childs intervened and called Sigal’s brother, asking him to help. 
 
 Ayers, in a deposition, was asked about Sigal and how she came to the Star. Ayers replied that The Washington Post sent her down to Anniston “to see if we couldn’t develop her skills as a reporter.” 
 
 Asked by the plaintiff’s attorney, Candis McGowan, whether there was ever a matter involving a reporter and her parents threatening to sue The Star over some inappropriate touching, Ayers replied, “That didn’t come to me.” 
 
 Asked later during the deposition if an employee had ever complained that Ayers had inappropriately touched them or made an inappropriate sexual comment, Ayers said “not formally, no.” 
 
 “Informally?” McGowan asked Ayers. 
 
 “Possibly,” Ayers said. “Back in the dim ages.” 
 
 Attempts to contact John Childs were unsuccessful. 
 
 Dennis Love was a reporter and columnist at The Star from 1977 to 1978 and again from 1981 to 1984. Love is the author of “My City Was Gone: One American Town’s Toxic Secret, Its Angry Band of Locals, and a $700 Million Day in Court,” which chronicles Anniston’s struggles with toxic PCB contamination. 
 
 Love said that he never saw Ayers spank a woman, but that three female reporters told him they’d been spanked by Ayers. He declined to name two of them without their permissions but said that Kennedy was among them. 
 
 “And I certainly believed them. It was certainly real,” Love said. 
 
 Love described The Star at that time as a place that attracted quality reporters who practiced good journalism and that people respected Ayers and his vision for the paper. 
 
 “This was at a time when the paper was at a high-water mark. We were doing a lot of great work,” Love said. “Time magazine named the paper one of the best small dailies in the country.” 
 
 When asked how these incidents stayed largely a secret for so long, Love said it could be because the act itself “is just such an embarrassing and humiliating and traumatic thing for a victim to go through, and I can certainly understand why there would be reluctance to come forward or to try to carry that into battle.” 
 
 And Love said he thinks that there was just never a moment when people felt safe enough to come forward, but Love said that when news reports of victims doing so years afterward continued to break, he immediately thought of The Star. 
 
 Love said that at the time, for him and others, “It was like one of shock, and I think unfortunately most of us were cowards. I think I certainly was.” 
 
 “This was some time ago, and it would be easy to say, ‘It was in a different time and place,’ but that’s not right,” Love said. 
 
 In his own words, Ayers views on spanking appeared in his own writing, in his editorials and in his autobiography. 
 
 “It infuriated me,” Kennedy said of reading passages in Ayers’ 2013 memoir, titled In Love With Defeat: The Making of a Liberal Southerner. 
 
 In the two passages, Ayers wrote that in the 1940s, spanking “was as American and Southern as fried chicken on Sundays,” and that the first time he met his wife-to-be, he’d angrily made a comment “not calculated to endear me, ‘If I knew you better, I’d spank you.” 
 
 Recalling his childhood and a young neighbor girl named Lyda, Ayers wrote, “Anniston for me was still an idyll of remembered Saturday afternoons, the deadness of the mummy at Carnegie Library, the fumbled kiss I gave Lyda by the fig tree and the time Lloyd and I chased and spanked her in the backyard.” 
 
 In a May 15, 1975, editorial, Ayers railed against a column by journalist Ellen Goodman in which she criticized a U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed teachers to spank students. Ayers wrote of a study that showed a majority of southern parents approved of spanking, and that many of them “probably would say that Ms. Goodman’s perspective on life would have been improved if she’s had a few good spankings when she was a child. Note the approving modifier, Good.” 
 
 “A child quickly forgets a smarting bottom but will be scarred for life by the cold, empty, pitiless abuse of neglect,” Ayers wrote. 
 
 The former reporter who described herself being attacked by Ayers in his office said that she decided to speak up now “because I think there are a lot of young girls out there that are in positions that I was in who need a voice, and that it’s not okay.” 
 
 “When that ‘Me too’ campaign came up I really wanted to put ‘me too’ but I didn’t,” she said. “My children are grown up, and I had never told them.” 
 
 But she did finally tell her adult children, just before agreeing to speak to this reporter about her story. Her daughter, who is 25 and just a little older than she was when she said Ayers spanked her, burst into tears, “Even knowing that was something that happened to me 40 years ago.” 
 
 She described what happened to her as “humiliating” and that she didn’t know how to react and cope. 
 
 “I didn’t have the strength at that time to say, ‘what do you think you’re doing?’” she said. “But I think today, sometimes secrets are meant to be exposed and people have to be accountable.” 
 
 For Kennedy as well, it was those many news accounts that prompted her to open up, although she had wanted to for years but never managed to do so. She and her husband, Pulitzer-Prize winning editorial writer, Joey Kennedy, talked about her attack, and she agreed that he should write about it. 
 
 Joey Kennedy’s first column on the matter appeared on the Alabama Political Reporter website on Nov. 16. The column didn’t identify Ayers by name but described his wife’s attack. He wrote about it again on Dec. 28 and did name Ayers as the publisher who assaulted his wife. 
 
 Kennedy himself was a reporter at The Star in the 1970s and wrote in the later column, “Thank God for #metoo in 2017. Now, women can speak out, and not be afraid their remembrances will simply be discarded.” 
 
 “It has stayed with me to this day,” Kennedy said of that day. 
 
 The Star was, and is, a fine newspaper, Kennedy said, but there’s also a hidden thread of evil there, and that speaking out now “is about finally getting some justice.” 
 
 Burkhalter resigned as an Anniston Star staff writer on Nov. 21, 2017.
– Following accusations from multiple women that he spanked them when they were reporters in the 1970s, the former publisher of an Alabama newspaper has resigned from his position at the head of the company started by his grandfather, AL.com reports. According to the Washington Post, 82-year-old H. Brandt Ayers on Thursday stepped down as chairman of Consolidated Publishing, which owns the Anniston Star and five other newspapers. "It is of utmost importance to me that this newspaper continue to serve its role of reporting on matters of concern to the Anniston community and that nothing stand in the way of preserving the newspaper as an independently owned publication serving the community," Ayers says in a statement released to the Star. Ayers, who served as publisher of the Star until 2016, admitted earlier this week to spanking a female reporter at her home in the 70s. He claims he was following a doctor's advice to "calm her down" regarding her psychological illness. Another former reporter, Veronica Kennedy, says Ayers spanked her with a metallic ruler after pulling her from her chair in the newsroom. Ayers has said to "let the accusation stand." A third woman has also accused Ayers of spanking her. Kennedy says she's "happy that at least there was some acknowledgement that these incidents occurred." Though she says Ayers' resignation is "just a baby step," as his family will remain in control of Consolidated Publishing. Ayers' wife is replacing him as chairman.