Three years earlier, Tony had told Jessica he was writing "a biography of sorts." At the time, Jessica said, she'd already been through years of therapy addressing the abuse. She'd even confronted her father about it, but each time, she said, he brushed it off as her problem and "no big deal."

Finding her father's book so spare in its details of his life with her, her older sister Katherine and her mother, Judith Hendra, added insult to injury. He wrote that he'd committed "crimes" and admitted that "no father could have been more selfish — treating his family like props, possessions, inconveniences, mostly forgetting them completely in his mission to save the world through laughter." But this, Jessica concluded, was far too little, too late.

"When I read 'Father Joe,' " Jessica said, "I realized that even at what should have been my father's best moment and most introspective moment of his life, he still was not going to acknowledge the damage he had done." She considered pressing criminal charges against her father but learned the statute of limitations on sexual abuse had expired the year after she first disclosed the incident to a friend in the 1970s, she said. So, after consulting with her husband, her therapist, her friends and family, she decided to go public. Jessica detailed her allegations in an unsolicited op-ed piece that she sent to the New York Times. Op-Ed editor David Shipley didn't publish it but decided it was a serious enough issue to pass on to news editors, who assigned reporter Sonny Kleinfeld to investigate the matter.

The Hendras' story broke in the New York Times on July 1, 2004. Tony, Jessica's mother, several of Jessica's friends, two of her therapists and husband were quoted, and e-mail exchanges between father and daughter were cited in which Tony neither admits nor denies guilt. Tony, his second wife, Carla, and an ex-boyfriend of Jessica's refuted her accusations.

"I realized for her story to be false, she'd have to be lying, the several far-flung friends would have to be conspiring with her to lie, her mother would have to be lying and, in doing so, making herself look fairly bad as a mother," Kleinfeld said in a recent phone interview. "Two therapists, that as far as I can determine were reputable, would have to have concluded incorrectly about what she had told them and her husband would have to be lying as well."

The story set off a debate among New York Times writers and other journalists. At first, Daniel Okrent, the newspaper's public editor at the time, asked in a column, "What do readers of the Times (or of "Father Joe") gain by believing Hendra guilty of abuse? There's a difference between the right to know and the need to know and in this case, the need escapes me."

In response to Okrent, the New York Times child welfare reporter Nina Bernstein argued in the paper that "to define his daughter's accusation as not fit to be printed, even though we believe it to be true, is to reward the hubris that Tony Hendra has shown in publicly trading on his private transgressions to claim moral growth, knowing all along that his daughter was accusing him of a transgression more damning than those he chose to trumpet."

Okrent then revisited the column on his blog, writing that in eight months on the job he'd "never been more ambivalent" about a column he'd written.

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