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The offer came from Deborah Krisher-Steele, a 60-year-old Tokyo resident whose father, Bernard Krisher, had been at the center of a December 2017 story by Molly Ball in the Atlantic. “When the Presses Stop” discussed Krisher’s life as a journalist and philanthropist, though it focused on his founding of the small but influential newspaper Cambodia Daily, which had been shut down that fall by the autocratic regime of then-Prime Minister Hun Sen. Over the next six years, Krisher-Steele would fight the magazine for corrections in an effort to preserve her father’s legacy, an effort that included a lawsuit in a Japanese court that settled in January.

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In the process, she helped to furnish a useful lesson in how U.S. media companies fare when they cannot fall back on the ironclad legal protections they enjoy in the United States. Along with a window into an embarrassing fact-checking breakdown at a top American media outlet.

When Ball’s story hit the internet, Krisher-Steele teed up an iPad so that her then-86-year-old father could read it. He was displeased. “He’s like, ‘That didn’t happen.’ ... ‘That didn’t happen.’ He kept saying, ‘That’s not true,’” recalls Krisher-Steele.

The Atlantic nailed the high points of Krisher’s career, which included his tenure as Newsweek’s Tokyo bureau chief, steadfast advocacy on behalf of the Cambodia Daily and his work building hundreds of schools, an orphanage and a hospital for the poor in Cambodia. But there was an underreported edge to the story, as when Ball recounts meeting Krisher in the early 2000s, when she herself worked as a reporter for Cambodia Daily. The experience, she wrote, didn’t end pleasantly: Ball was diagnosed with cancer on her 24th birthday, but the publication’s “flimsy” medical insurance wouldn’t cover her treatment, she claimed. “I asked Krisher ... whether he could help somehow. A phone call, a letter? He did nothing,” the story originally read.

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Nothing, really? Though Krisher-Steele recalls being agnostic about her father’s initial misgivings about the story, she had the means to find out for herself. In the case of the insurance denial story, that was an archive of aging Eudora email files. Voilà: Krisher-Steele found an email from May 2003 in which Krisher pressed insurance officials for a resolution to Ball’s coverage problems. He wrote to her, “I think you are covered.” Ball responded that a separate effort had already “solved” the matter. Here was a stunning turnabout: Krisher, it turned out, had done precisely what Ball had alleged he hadn’t done.

The correspondence forced the Atlantic into a correction as well as the deletion of this line from Ball: “I felt, and still feel, that it was cruel and hypocritical for a purported humanitarian to abandon an employee when she became inconvenient.”

“I did their job, I did their fact-checking job,” says Krisher-Steele, who for two decades has helped to manage the Krisher family philanthropic projects.

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Krisher died at 87 of heart failure in March 2019, more than a year after the story ran. In the months before his death, Krisher was “livid” over the Atlantic’s refusal to act on a number of his concerns outside of those addressed by the magazine’s initial round of corrections. “He wrote tons of emails, like a pit bull,” says Krisher-Steele.

Before Krisher passed, his daughter assured him that she’d continue the fight against the Atlantic. “I said, ‘Don’t worry, Opa. Whatever happens, I’ll handle it,’” recalls Krisher-Steele. She and her brother, Joseph Krisher, filed suit against the Atlantic and several employees in July 2019. Though defamation suits can’t be filed in the United States on behalf of the dead, it’s possible in Japan, where Krisher had lived starting in 1962, which in some cases allows for family members affected by the statements to pursue litigation. Japan’s defamation protections for media outlets are less robust than those in the United States.

The parties rummaged through a whole range of representations made in the story, from the serious to the miscellaneous. Into the latter basket falls Ball’s claim that Krisher, as a Newsweek correspondent, “specialized in writing puffy Q&As.” According to Krisher-Steele, discussion of the “puffy” matter spanned three court sessions. “Back and forth, back and forth on the definition of ‘puffy,’” she says. While the plaintiffs argued that the term was a knock on Krisher’s journalistic integrity, the Atlantic defended the language. It secured a statement from Lucy Dalglish, former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, to the effect that “puffy” interviews “allow people to reveal themselves,” Dalglish told me when I asked her to summarize her input. “It is a style frequently implied when you want to talk to somebody who’s very high profile and that’s the only way to get them to talk and you make a judgment that, ‘Well, it’s this or nothing.’"

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Nor could the Atlantic have been happy to battle over Ball’s claim that Krisher had exaggerated the historic cachet of his 1975 exclusive one-on-one interview with Japanese Emperor Hirohito — another of the items challenged in the litigation. While Krisher-Steele argued there had been no exaggerating the scoop — and a 1989 Associated Press story backed up that position — the Atlantic, in a pre-lawsuit letter, pointed to other Hirohito interviews that, it said, provided grounding for Ball’s characterization. (Ball left the Atlantic before publication of the Krisher piece for a job at Time and now works at the Wall Street Journal.)

Turning to allegations with more direct reputational implications, Ball wrote that Krisher was “imperious and bullying,” to say the least: “According to Alan Field, a reporter who worked under Krisher, he caused at least one young woman at Newsweek to have a nervous breakdown.” Missing from that allegation was any input from the woman and any indication that the magazine........

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