Generally without support, it was alleged by many Schwarzenegger supporters that the L.A. Times stories in which 16 women accused Schwarzenegger of groping and humiliating them were a planned political attack on the candidate in the late stage of the campaign.

Many Schwarzenegger supporters accepted this baseless accusation as fact. Also much was made of the lack of reporting on accusations made by a single journalist in 1997, attributed in part to a secondhand and anonymous source, that Gray Davis also abused women.

Times editor John S. Carroll, forced by the echo chamber of baseless criticism to state the obvious, responds in an L.A. Times commentary:

The volcanic passions of the recall are largely spent, though we'll no doubt be feeling their effects for many years. Today, on this Sunday of relative calm, I'd like to tell you how the Los Angeles Times decided to publish the stories of 16 women who said they had been sexually mistreated and humiliated by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I'll also tell you why we published the first of those articles a mere five days before voters went to the polls, a decision that has prompted an outpouring of campaign denunciations, talk-show rants and blistering e-mails.

Critics have accused the newspaper of malice toward Republicans and of collaboration with Gray Davis and the Democrats. It has been suggested that we cynically concealed the completed story for weeks before detonating it as a last-minute bomb. Some used the term "October surprise."

I'll begin this accounting with a bit of background: One of our goals is to do more investigative reporting. At the risk of offending still more readers, I'll say that if you're put off by investigative reporting, this probably won't be the right newspaper for you in the years to come.

Investigative skills were needed when Schwarzenegger announced for governor on Aug. 6. For years, he'd had a reputation in Hollywood as a man who treated women crassly. The gossip about him reached a peak after Premiere magazine published an article in March 2001 titled "Arnold the Barbarian."

Because Schwarzenegger had a chance of becoming our next governor, we decided on the day he entered the race to see whether this reputation was warranted. The examination was part of a broader look at all the leading candidates, covering their life histories, their stands on the issues, their personalities and their characters.

We assigned the task of investigating Schwarzenegger's reputation to two veteran reporters: Robert Welkos, who has covered Hollywood for half of his 25 years on the paper, and Gary Cohn, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for investigative reporting at the Baltimore Sun.

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