[New-Poetry] Drop that nom de plume

[Halvard Johnson]

Drop that nom de plume before it takes on a life
of its own.

NYT

June 23, 2007

Jury Finds Writer’s Alias Was Fraud

By ALAN FEUER
JT LeRoy, the authorial “other” whom the writer Laura Albert employed  
as her alter ego and self-protective proxy in the world, was found  
yesterday by a jury in Manhattan to be not just a fictional creation,  
but a fraud.

Ms. Albert, 41, was found by the jury in Federal District Court to  
have strayed beyond the normal limits of pseudonymous invention, in  
part by signing a movie contract using her nom de plume. After the  
verdict was announced, she stood with friends in the courtroom,  
saying she had somehow known hours before that the jury’s decision  
would not fall her way.

“I knew it this morning,” Ms. Albert said, wearing at her neck a tiny  
typewriter pendant with a legend that read “Write Hard, Die Free.” “I  
already went through it.”

As part of its verdict in the civil case, the jury ordered Ms. Albert  
to pay $116,500 to Antidote International Films, which, in 2003,  
signed an option contract with JT LeRoy to make a feature film of his  
novel “Sarah,” a tale of filial love and prostitution set among the  
“lot lizards” of a West Virginia truck stop.

When Antidote learned last year that the book had, in fact, been  
written by Ms. Albert, its president, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, sued for  
fraud and breach of contract, saying he had been duped and was  
seeking not only the option money back, but damages and lawyers’ fees  
as well.

Long before this somewhat narrow legal matter reached the courts, the  
broader story of JT LeRoy, with its agitprop allure and celebrity  
aroma, played out on the larger and much more garish canvas of the  
press. After “Sarah” thrust the writer into stardom in 2000, JT LeRoy  
became the damaged darling of the art house set, a street waif and  
supposed son of a truck stop prostitute who, usually by way of  
telephone or e-mail (he was “famously reclusive”), befriended the  
likes of Courtney Love and Winona Ryder — at least until his  
startling existence as a fiction was revealed.

All the while, of course, it was Ms. Albert, a mother and otherwise  
obscure novelist from Brooklyn Heights, who was spinning gritty  
fantasies of drug addiction and Appalachian misery for the rich and  
famous names at the other end of the keyboard or the line. She gave  
interviews in a twangy accent to Terry Gross on NPR and sometimes  
paid her former boyfriend’s half-sister to appear in disguise as JT  
LeRoy in the rarefied air of literary readings or the international  
film festival at Cannes.

It was deceptions like these that Antidote’s lawyers said constituted  
her fraud. Yet even though the company’s lawyers assailed her in  
court as a trickster and wily master of self-promotion, they — and  
their client, Mr. Levy-Hinte — admitted a grudging admiration for her  
writing talents, and for her performance.

They also evinced a quiet sympathy for Ms. Albert, for it was soon  
apparent that the eight-day trial would include testimony about her  
rather gruesome history — a litany of adolescent trauma that included  
sexual abuse, institutionalization and 13 years of telephone therapy  
in which she spoke to her psychiatrist in the adopted persona of a  
teenage boy. That boy, whom she took to calling Jeremy or Jeremiah,  
was a sort of early incarnation of the full-blown alter ego that  
would eventually evolve into JT LeRoy.

Among the various battles waged at the trial — art versus commerce,  
truth versus fiction, reality versus the imagination — it was perhaps  
the battle over JT LeRoy’s purpose in the world that was most in  
dispute. Before his identity (or, rather, nonidentity) was revealed  
last year in a series of newspaper articles, the production team at  
Antidote considered him that rare commodity in today’s biography- 
obsessed entertainment world: a gifted writer with a titillating past  
that only enhanced the value of the work. After the revelation, the  
company took the position that Ms. Albert had used the JT LeRoy  
“brand” — the same that had attracted them — as a celebrity magnet to  
draw attention to her books.

Ms. Albert herself, in testimony from the stand, suggested that JT  
LeRoy was far more than a pseudonym in the classic Mark Twain-Samuel  
Clemens mold. She offered the idea that JT LeRoy was a sort of  
“respirator” for her inner life: an imaginary, though necessary,  
survival apparatus that permitted her to breathe.

The $116,500 judgment against Ms. Albert covers the option contract  
and damages to Antidote, but not legal fees, which have not yet been  
determined. If she is ordered to pay those as well, the amount could  
be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Mr. Levy-Hinte, Antidote’s president, said in an interview yesterday  
that the lawsuit was less about getting his money back than about  
sticking up for fair dealing and telling the truth.

“I’m kind of a person of principle,” he said. “Not kind of — I am. I  
wasn’t willing to simply walk away and take a loss with no apology or  
reasonable explanation.”

He said he would not seek to make a movie out of “Sarah” as he had  
wished, calling the project “too sullied and emotionally charged,”  
although he added, “Somebody could make a good movie out of it, if  
they wanted.” He went on to say that if Ms. Albert, who never made a  
fortune from her literary works, could not afford to pay the  
judgment, he might have to consider laying claim to the rights to her  
past and future books.

Perhaps surprisingly, he said he had respect for Ms. Albert, who  
“pulled off something quite startling — all these intelligent people  
were taken in.”

It was a blessing in disguise, he said. The alter ego was gone.

“She’s liberated, in a way. It’s quite wonderful.”


"I don't know what music is."
   		--Ludvig van Beethoven

Halvard Johnson
================
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http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
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http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html