If you don't know, Catfish was a documentary and later MTV television series about a guy who tracked down a woman in Michigan who was claiming to be someone else, whom he'd fallen in love with until he started noticing some weird things. In confronting her he found out this woman had numerous fake accounts. Online it's pretty easy to use a fake picture and make up a profile. "JT Leroy" did largely the same thing only IRL.
Back in 1995, a chubby 30-something woman named Laura Albert was bummed out and for some reason called a teen suicide hotline. She used the pseudonym "Terminator" and tricked the shrink on the phone to think she was a teenage boy who'd been abused and even had his genitals mutilated so that he sounded effeminate. She called the doctor a few times, making the story bigger and bigger, until he suggested she write about it.
And so she did and then contacted Bruce Benderson, author of the book User, again using the silly "Terminator" handle. He in turn put her in touch with his agent and eventually a book called Sarah came about under the revised handle JT Leroy for Jeremiah Terminator Leroy, the surname coming from someone she knew from her job working on a phone sex line.The book was supposed to be a roman a clef about a boy who pretends to be a girl working as a hooker at a truck stop. It was a big deal because people thought it was written by a 17-year-old boy based on real experiences. (Which it wasn't.)
When the book gained notoriety people were clamoring to see JT Leroy in public. If they saw a chubby 30-something woman the whole thing would be blown, so she convinced her boyfriend's sister to dress up in a wig and bulky sunglasses and make public appearances as "JT Leroy." And not only did this work, soon JT Leroy was rubbing elbows with rock stars like Bono, Billy Corgan, and Courtney Love; actors like Matthew Modine; and directors like Gus van Sant who bought the rights to Sarah but never got it produced. "JT Leroy" was an associate producer on van Sant's 2003 movie Elephant and also began writing music for a band called Thistle--a band Albert appeared in as a British woman named "Speedie." Often "JT Leroy" and "Speedie" would be together at events along with Albert's boyfriend.
It really struck me how ridiculously easy this all was. Not only was "JT Leroy" hobnobbing with celebrities, but "he" was also being profiled in magazines, newspapers, and TV pieces and NO ONE smelled anything fishy.
Thanks to Donald Trump "fake news" has been bandied about a lot in the last 2 years. A lot of fake news is created online and spread through social media but in this case it happened largely through traditional means. The reason is because in the media you have two types of people: reporters and journalists.
Reporters are most of the media these days. They just report what someone says: Today Donald Trump tweeted the moon is made of green cheese. A journalist would actually talk to people who worked at NASA present and past and various scientists to say that no the moon isn't made of green cheese and here's the proof. It's unfortunate that we do have mostly just reporters regurgitating statements, press releases, and Tweets without actually corroborating anything to determine its accuracy.
That's why it took 10 fucking years for this scam to unravel. Ten. Fucking. YEARS! Finally in 2005 a journalist named Steven Beachy for New York magazine began poking holes in the "JT Leroy" story. Then other outlets that hadn't bothered to do any journalism on the subject previously began to pile on. (Just like Trump's Russia connections.) But it wasn't until Albert's jealous boyfriend rolled on her that things really collapsed.
And what happened? Not a lot. Albert had to pay $350,000 to a publisher for signing contracts with a false name. In the documentary she shows absolutely no remorse about duping the public or making a bunch of celebrities and news outlets look like chumps. "It was just a pen name." Bullshit! If you're an author using a pen name you have to tell your publisher this in advance. When Stephen King wrote books as Richard Bachmann or JK Rowling wrote books as Robert Galbraith you think they sent someone pretending to be that person to events? Or signed contracts with that fake name? Um, no, because that's not how you do it because that is called FRAUD. The fact she's still out there writing books under her own name now makes me kind of angry. But hey when you're a celebrity they let you do what you want, right Mr. President?
One thing that occurred to me is that she's never going to know whether her writing was published on its own merit or because the author and agent she Catfished early on thought it was coming from a teenage boy with a touching (ie marketable) backstory. But you can say her fiction must have been good if she could fool all of these people, right?
At the end of the documentary she talks about being molested as a toddler by her uncle and at that point I was numb because really, could I trust her? Or was that just another story she was making up? That's the problem when you cry wolf. And when supposed journalists just report someone crying wolf, it allows fake news to spread until we're all being Catfished.
And I have to say the problem with documentaries like this one or even the one on the Corman Fantastic Four movie I watched last month is that they too are just reporters regurgitating quotes and not delving into it to get at the truth. In this case I'd really have liked a journalist to ask Albert some hard questions and make her squirm instead of letting her off easy by just saying it was a "pen name" or some "character in her head" and leaving it at that. There are so many authors out there trying to get recognition that it just sucks when someone can cut to the head of the line and suffer almost no consequences. It does all of us a disservice.
3 comments:
Our world would be much different if people didn't cheat and try to game things.
Thanks for this thought-provoking post. A knew A Million Little Pieces was fiction because that's how the author first tried to sell it before being convinced he'd have a better shot at selling it if he lied and called it a memoir.
Good post ! Fake identities and false people always make for captivating stories, I'd say.
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