[New-Poetry] Drop that nom de plume

Sat Jun 23 15:38:52 EDT 2007

Dang.  I knew someone would blab!

- Jim

p.s. - Prosecutors: Skip fox has been using the name Halvard Johnson

On 6/23/07, Skip Fox <skip at louisiana.edu> wrote:
> Wait til they realize we're all inventions! Then we'll _never_ get out of
> the courts.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> [mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Halvard Johnson
> Sent: Friday, June 22, 2007 10:00 PM
> To: NewPoetry: &amp; Views
> Subject: [New-Poetry] Drop that nom de plume
>
> 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
> ================
> halvard at earthlink.net
> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
> http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
> http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
> http://www.hamiltonstone.org
> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html
>
>
>
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