The New York Times is still ferreting out the rat's nest of lies in the Margaret Jones fiasco, and Motoko Rich is running with the ball. Tonight she reports on the fake memoirist's (apparently) fake foundation:
The author who confessed this week to making up her memoir, Love and Consequences, about growing up as a foster child in gang-ridden South-Central Los Angeles, appears also to have made up a foundation that she claimed was helping “to reduce gang violence and mentor urban teens.”
Margaret Seltzer, who wrote under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones, referred to the International Brother/SisterHood in the author biography that appeared on the back flap of the book...With help from her agent, Faye Bender, Ms. Seltzer also set up a Web site, brothersisterhood.com, in October to describe the foundation and promote her book. Since the revelations about the book, however, Ms. Bender has taken down the Web site.
No record of the foundation could be found with the Internal Revenue Service or the states of Oregon, where Ms. Seltzer lives, or California.
I saw the site last night before it was taken down; it had very little information beyond contact info. No string of accomplishments, no financials. And Motoko Rich finds a real non-shocker:
Leaders of several other groups combating gang violence in Los Angeles who were listed on Ms. Seltzer’s Web site said they did not know of the International Brother/SisterHood or of Ms. Seltzer or Margaret B. Jones.
“I’ve never heard of her before in my life,” said Malik Spellman, an intervention prevention specialist at Unity T.W.O., which works to provide social services and stop gang activity in many South-Central Los Angeles neighborhoods and was listed on Ms. Seltzer’s site. “I believe if she was active, I would probably know her by name or the organization.”
Meanwhile, in what seems more and more a misguided attempt to deflect further facial omelettes, the Times still seems unwilling to cop to the relationship between Jones/Seltzer's editor and the former editor of the paper's book section.
Three news cycles and still not a word? Imagine the tack the Times would take with a White House obfuscation of that magnitude.
Last, I want to share an email from someone who, like me, finds the Times' defense -- and that of Mimi Read, their freelancer who Vanity-Faired the puffball profile on the liar with minimal checking -- to be disingenuous at best:
Mimi's defense is that she just has to trust people? Seriously?....
And here's the kicker. If Mimi had displayed one ounce of skepticism, if her editors had been suspicious and required follow-up, then Mimi and the New York Times would have broken this story. Instead of having egg on their faces, they'd be heroes. And you know what, that story would have been so much more compelling and interesting than the fluff features they ran on her Target furniture.
My correspondent has, as we say in New Orleans, a pernt.
The fake foundation is a new low. The agent should have known to buy the dot org instead of the dot com, and that someone would likely do a whois and find this:
Registrant:
Faye Bender Literary Agency
Bender, Faye
337 W 76th #e1
New York, NY 10023
US
Shameful!
Posted by: Alan Bluehole | March 06, 2008 at 07:39 AM
A fake charity?
I can't wait for the ballroom dancing video!
I'm starting to think the Times would have hired Aleksey Vayner: "He said he published a large-circulation daily in Uzbekistan, and you just have to trust people on things like that."
Posted by: Ranger Bob | March 06, 2008 at 07:48 AM