BUSTED! Plagiarists, Fakers & Literary Hoaxes

[Smilla]

JT LeRoy
This story was amusing in a way, because I got a delicious sense of schadenfreude in seeing so many annoying celebrities suckered into it.

Oh, I was hoping someone would mention JT LeRoy. God, that was hysterical.

[Karen]

One of the writers plagiarised by Cassie Edwards wrote an article about it for Newsweek. I wish he hadn't been so dismissive of the romance genre, but the article was pretty funny overall.

Move Over, ‘Meerkat Manor’

A nature writer suddenly finds himself at the heart of a hot plagiarism scandal.

[Wol]

I love how Armistead Maupin turned the tables on the Anthony Godby Johnson scam and made money off of being duped. Genius.

[ivy]

When I was younger I read this book called It Happened to Nancy, which was about a teenage girl who was raped and got HIV. It was supposedly a true story from the diary of "an anonymous teenager" as the book cover says. I always thought Nancy and her friends were a little too goody-goody, and then I found out why: the book was a fake which was written by one of those extreme Christians (no offense to normal Christians) who pretty much wrote the book to teach people that sex is bad. Not really a suprise as the book harps on how "Nancy" is so grateful she is she didn't screw her boyfriend since she could have given him HIV, and thank goodness they decided to wait to have sex. Pretending to be a teenage rape victim with AIDS as a front to preach about the evils of sex? Now that is low.

[Mutagen]

The Jukt Micronics page is HILARIOUS. Keep in mind this was described as a "big-time software company."

jaghetersimon said:

mutagen, what excuses did the New Republic people give for not catching onto Glass's lies? In the movie, they talk about how he forged his notes, but he must have done more to cover his tracks. Do you have any links to good articles about Glass? Thanks! ;D

Hmmm, it's been a while, but as I recall it was a combination of things: one, Glass himself had originally worked as a fact checker at TNR (!!!) and knew how the system worked. I think he also had a reputation for going very hard on other people's facts in their stories, so people assumed he was equally committed to accuracy in his own stories.

Two, I've heard Charles Lane claim the system simply was not designed to foil people who were ACTIVELY trying to thwart it. Three, and most fascinating in my view, is that Glass's stories were so nuts that in a roundabout way, it seemed like they couldn't possibly be made up: like when you read those Oddly Enough news stories and think "boy, truth is stranger than fiction. You can't make that stuff up." Well apparently, you can make that stuff up!

Remembrance of Things Passed: How my friend Stephen Glass got away with it by Jonathan Chait, gives some insight into how he fooled his coworkers. And, here's the Hanna Rosin article I mentioned earlier.

NPR interview with Charles Lane, primarily coverage of the movie, but also gives some insight into how Glass got away with it. He's fairly candid about his own role in publishing some of Glass's fake stories, and comes off pretty well for it IMHO.

[susyhomewrecker]

karenk said:

One of the writers plagiarised by Cassie Edwards wrote an article about it for Newsweek. I wish he hadn't been so dismissive of the romance genre, but the article was pretty funny overall.

Move Over, ‘Meerkat Manor’

A nature writer suddenly finds himself at the heart of a hot plagiarism scandal.

Kudos to him for having a sense of humor about the whole thing! Of course, it's so absurd you just have to laugh at it.

Now, I don't know anything about romance novels, but are there usually random passages like the ferret one in between the smutty parts? Or did CE's publisher impose a word/page quota that she had a little trouble reaching?

[Deleted]

That is fucking hilarious. She plagiarised the technical ferret writing AS DIALOGUE!

It's just a family of ferrets. Phew. Let's put aside for now that ferrets live on the prairie, where there are no bushes—never mind the forest where Edwards has set her characters. Seeing the cute animals, Shiona and Shadow Bear launch into a discussion about the cute little critters.

"They are so named because of their dark legs," Shadow Bear says, to which Shiona responds: "They are so small, surely weighing only about two pounds and measuring two feet from tip to tail."

Shiona then tells Shadow Bear how she once read about ferrets in a book she took from the study of her father. "I discovered they are related to minks and otters. It is said their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats," she says. "Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population."

Ohmygod that is so hot.

Shadow Bear responds: "What I have observed of them, myself, is that these tiny animals breed in early spring when the males roam the night in search of females." As the ferrets bound off into some distant bushes, he continues: "Mothers typically give birth to three kits in early summer and raise their young alone in abandoned prairie dog burrows."

Shiona: "I read that ferrets stalk and kill prairie dogs during the night. Using their keen sense of smell and whiskers to guide them through pitch-black burrows, ferrets suffocate the sleeping prey, an impressive feat considering the two species are about the same weight." Shiona shivers, upset by the thought of the cute animals locked in mortal combat.

Sensing her vulnerability, Shadow Bear knows just what to say: "In turn, coyotes, badgers, and owls prey on ferrets, whose life span in the wild is often less than two winters … They have a short, quick life."

Wow, that is some bad dialogue. It stands out as clunky and awkward even by the standards of romance novels. That's because Edwards didn't write it. I did.

Hahahaha! Even a bad writer with half a brain could have spared themselves the whole scandal by simply altering the passages to something slightly more like something a normal human would say out loud. And I like the way he subtly points out she allegedly used his writing for "research," but didn't even get the animals' habitat correct.

[intlschizo]

ivy said:

When I was younger I read this book called It Happened to Nancy, which was about a teenage girl who was raped and got HIV. It was supposedly a true story from the diary of "an anonymous teenager" as the book cover says.

Wasn't that from the Go Ask Alice series?

*goes a-Googlin'*

*edit* Hooray, Snopes!

Go Ask Alice was the product of Beatrice Sparks, an author who has come out with a number of "teens who saw their lives ruined by their bad choices" offerings, each one presented as a true story, often in the form of a diary of an anonymous teen:

* It Happened to Nancy (she's dying of AIDS)

* Annie's Baby: The Diary of Anonymous, a Pregnant Teenager

* Treacherous Love: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager (teen girl is sexually taken advantage of by a teacher)

* Jay's Journal (yet another diary, this one of a teen boy who turns to satan worship and drug use)

* Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets

* Kim: Empty Inside: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager (eating disorders)

[cantienne]

Shiona then tells Shadow Bear how she once read about ferrets in a book she took from the study of her father. "I discovered they are related to minks and otters. It is said their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats," she says. "Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population."

And in a nineteenth-century setting, nonetheless. Not that the author bears any less guilt for having plagiarized, but how does an editor not catch that? What library on the American plains had reference books linking ferrets to Siberian polecats in 1855? As a reader, don't you pause and think, "Did they know about the Bering land bridge theory back then?"

Slate ran a series a few years ago about the guy who wrote those "A Child Named It" books, Dave Pelzer, as did the NY Times. I've never read these, but was fascinated by the article, which suggests a lot of exaggeration on the author's part about everything from sales to abuse.

[Smilla]

I know she was pretty much cleared, but I wonder if we've seen the last of this scandal (or others) for J.K. Rowling.

Personally, I've always had questions about what I see as a huge drop off in quality, loss of depth, and strange change in plot direction occurring in the Potter series after the first two books. It's not proof of plagiarism, (or anything) but it's suspicious to me.