![]() But after all those years I could only find faint traces of it. For a few days, I tried to call up the anger again. Chuck Lane was going to, and Steve had lined up several witnesses to speak in his favor. Did I want to provide an account of Steve’s wrongdoing? the lawyer asked. He wanted to be a lawyer and the guild apparently did not think he had reformed enough to practice law. Steve had filed an application for something called “moral character determination” with the California state bar. Then, in 2010, I got a call from a lawyer in California. For years afterward, if I thought about Steve at all-usually when I got an e-mail from a journalism student who had seen the movie in an ethics class-he was the notorious Stephen Glass, still living in the Clinton era. Reading the novel pretty much killed off my curiosity. Steve sent about 100 handwritten letters of apology that year to people he’d injured, all several pages long and very abject: “I’m genuinely sorry that I lied to you and betrayed you.” But he was also hawking his book, so we saw the letters as an effort to neutralize us. The rest of us came off as shallow jerks barely worth apologizing to. It portrays him as humble, contrite, and “a few shades hipper than the original,” I wrote in a review for Slate. The plot follows a thinly fictionalized Steve in the aftermath of the affair. It was the book that finally provoked my anger. 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. The last time I talked to Stephen Glass, he was pleading with me on the phone to protect him from Charles Lane.
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