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Over the years, Steve Glass got mixed up in our minds with the fictionalized Stephen Glass from his own 2003 roman à clef, The Fabulist, or Steve Glass as played by Hayden Christensen in the 2003 movie Shattered Glass. Bush became president, we all got cell phones, laptops, spouses, children. The Monica Lewinsky scandal petered out, George W. The transition was so abrupt that, for months, Jon dreamed that he’d run into him or that Steve wanted to talk to him. Overnight, Steve went from “being one of my best friends to someone I read about in The International Herald Tribune,” Chait recalled. Could my brother be a drug addict? Did my best friend actually hate me? Jon Chait, now a political writer for New York and back then the smart young wonk in our trio, was in Paris when the scandal broke. And I wondered what else I didn’t know about people. I wondered how I could spend more time with a person during the week than I spent with my husband and not suspect a thing. I wondered how, even after he’d been caught, he could bring himself to recruit me to defend him, knowing I’d be risking my job to do so.
I wondered whether Steve had lied to me about personal things, too. People often ask me if I felt “betrayed,” but really I was deeply unsettled, like I’d woken up in the wrong room. He just went missing, like the kids on the milk cartons. Once we knew what he’d done, I tried to call Steve, but he never called back. The key at the top of this page indicates that phrases underlined in blue have been confirmed as true phrases underlined in red have been confirmed to be untrue phrases underlined in pencil cannot be confirmed either way. He can’t possibly think you would do that.”Īfter the scandal broke, the magazine fact-checked and annotated every Stephen Glass story to determine the extent of his fabrications. I probably said something about Chuck like: “Fuck him. When he called, I was in New York and I said I would come back to D.C. It was the spring of 1998 and he was still just my hapless friend Steve, who padded into my office ten times a day in white socks and was more interested in alphabetizing beer than drinking it. I didn’t know when he called me that he’d made up nearly all of the bizarre and amazing stories, that he was the perpetrator of probably the most elaborate fraud in journalistic history, that he would soon become famous on a whole new scale. While the rest of us were still scratching our way out of the intern pit, he was becoming a franchise, turning out bizarre and amazing stories week after week for The New Republic, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone-each one a home run. Steve had a way of inspiring loyalty, not jealousy, in his fellow young writers, which was remarkable given how spectacularly successful he’d been in such a short time. Chuck, as we called him, was the editor of T he New Republic and Steve was my colleague and very good friend, maybe something like a little brother, though we are only two years apart in age. (very well written, insightful - and interesting.The last time I talked to Stephen Glass, he was pleading with me on the phone to protect him from Charles Lane. It was during this research that I reached out to Stephen Glass. I started tracking the handful of new episodes that pop up every year as well as the cases that have become the stuff of legend: Janet Cooke, the Pulitzer winner at The Washington Post who fabricated the story of an eight-year-old heroin addict Jayson Blair, the young New York Times reporter who invented stories and plagiarized the work of other writers and Jack Kelley, the USA Today star who made up details in many of his stories. They rarely talk about their crimes or have an opportunity to explain themselves. Most get fired and are never heard from again. They are journalism’s ultimate sinners, yet nobody seems particularly interested in what happens to them. I found there wasn’t much academic research about them nor much follow-up reporting on them. When I became a journalism professor at Duke University, in 2013, I got assigned to teach an ethics course and decided to include a section on writers who had fabricated or plagiarized stories. But I’ve found myself intrigued by liars the way a detective is fascinated with master criminals. I was a newspaper reporter for 20 years and got so frustrated with lying politicians that I started PolitiFact, the fact-checking site. Decided he would live by one simple rule: Always tell the truth.