Most major publications would at least pursue statements from the police & child protective services about their side of the story.

Virtually all of them? Here's the Times covering SBF's arrest: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/business/ftx-sam-bankman-...

Note all the quotes from law enforcement and details about the event.

I was probably taking you too literally. I thought you were talking about links to arrest records, which I pretty much never see. I may be not looking closely enough for those links.

Right, just verification is all that's needed. "Killingly police records confirm Rivers was arrested on January 77th" or whatever. Or maybe "Killingly police confirm Rivers was detained briefly, but note that he was never arrested". Anything like that would be great. Even "Reached for comment, Killingly police were unable to confirm Rivers' arrest, but would not deny the arrest occurred" would at least be something.

But failing to even get that far tells me that either the author doesn't care about whether this is true (not unlikely given her day job), or that they're deliberately hiding something (maybe "Killingly police deny the arrest and have no record of the interaction with Rivers").

Plenty would if it supports the narrative.