What do Philip Roth and John Grisham have in common? Well, they’re both American authors who have written numerous best-sellers.
Oh, yeah, an Italian freelance journalist, Tommaso Debenedetti, wrote some totally bogus articles where he quoted them as saying they were disappointed in Barack Obama. They aren’t.
More below.
I first read about this in an April 5, 2010, Judith Thurman article in The New Yorker (Counterfeit Roth). Magazines have a long tradition of putting a future date on their covers.
Philip Roth’s latest book had recently been translated into Italian and last month he agreed to do an interview with Paola Zanuttini from La Repubblica. They discussed the new book and his writing.
The real scandal revealed by the interview, however, came at the end, when Zanuttini asked Roth why he was so "disappointed" with Barack Obama. She translated, aloud, remarks attributed to him in an article by a freelance journalist, Tommaso Debenedetti, that was published last November in Libero, a tabloid notably sympathetic to Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy (who is embroiled in his own sex scandals with much younger women). "It appears that you find him nasty, vacillating, and mired in the mechanics of power," Zanuttini said. "But I have never said anything of the kind!" Roth objected. "It is completely contrary to what I think. Obama, in my opinion, is fantastic." He had never heard of Debenedetti, or of Libero. The interview, with its bitter judgment of Obama’s banality, failure, and empty rhetoric about hope and change, was a complete fabrication.
This story caused a minor scandal in Italian publishing circles. The editor of Libero was embarrassed and the fake article was removed from the website. The freelancer is not answering his phone – and his career as a writer is finished.
Roth did a little more research and discovered another article written by the same guy about John Grisham.
"Last year’s enthusiasm is remote now," Grisham allegedly told Debenedetti. "People are angry with Obama for having done little or nothing and having promised too much."
This, too, is false.
Roth had his agent contact Grisham’s agent and it turns out Grisham never talked to Debenedetti.
I checked into John Grisham’s history and learned a few things that I didn’t previously know. From 1983 to 1990, Grisham served in the Mississippi House of Representatives as a Democrat. He has donated over $100,000 to Democrats. In 2008, Grisham supported Hillary Clinton (and his wife was a Clinton superdelegate), but after Obama’s nomination, they both supported him.
What happens next? Grisham, the lawyer, is thinking about filing a lawsuit. Roth isn’t. Roth said, "It would distract me from my writing, and, worst of all, I would have to obsess about it."