I find I cannot ignore the increasingly out of control McGinniss/Palin neighbor issue. (In case you’re not aware, former Alaska governor, Sarah Palin has ostensibly gone into a state of shock and horror because investigative journalist Joe McGinniss has moved in next door to her for the summer. Palin’s death threat-waving legions have responded accordingly.)
Why more reporters aren’t calling this for the unmitigated nonsense that it is, I really don’t know. But they aren’t.
As it happens, because I know McGinniss, I’ve got some new news on the topic. But first some background to bring those of you unfamiliar with details of the story up to speed :
JOE
Joe McGinniss has made his reputation out of reporting in depth and well on difficult people.
To research the book that first catapulted him to journalistic stardom, “The Selling of the President,” McGinniss—still in his early 20’s— talked his way into the campaign of Richard Nixon so he could observe the techniques of Nixon’s master political “salesmen” like Roger Ailes, and, of course, he got a close-up view of the notoriously press-phobic Nixon himself.
In researching his true crime best seller, Fatal Vision, about ex-Green Beret Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, who would be convicted of murder his pregnant wife and two daughters, McGinniss embedded himself with the defense team. (McGinniss at first believed McDonald was innocent but, as he got deeper and deeper into the evidence, came to the conclusion that the subject of his book had indeed killed his family.)
For his book on Ted Kennedy, The Last Brother, he had to contend with the decidedly uncooperative Kennedy family members and friends who had collectively determined that the book would be unacceptably critical, thus did their best to block McGinniss’s research. (Those trying to paint McGinniss as a left-leaning author would do well to peruse the Kennedy book.)
Whatever the topic, for each of his books, McGinniss has the habit of immersing himself totally in this research. To write his now classic book on the Alaska pipeline, Going to Extremes, McGinniss moved himself and his family to Anchorage for two years.
The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, his cult-favorite tale recounting the improbable Cinderella success of one Italian soccer team, required that McGinniss spend a year in a small town in Italy and learn Italian.
His other true crime books (Blind Faith and Cruel Doubt ) meant similarly intense journalistic immersions.
Anyway, you get the picture. Whatever his topic, McGinniss researches to the enth degree.
As an immersion journalist myself (in the non-blogging side of my writing life), I fully and most personally understand the process.
SARAH
I bring all this up to make a couple of contextual points:
1. Joe McGinniss is anything but a smash-‘n’-grab “gotcha” reporter. Whether you like his books or you don’t, you cannot read one without understanding that he is painstaking to a fault. He does the legwork (that seems to be increasingly rare these days) and then some.
2. So when McGinniss was given a contract by Random House to write a book about Sarah Palin, although he’d already made multiple trips to Alaska, given his style of research, planting himself for at least a season in Wasilla was a mandatory minimum.
Since his Wasilla stint was going to be in the summer months McGinniss looked for a place that would be a good journalistic base, but also a place where his wife, writer/editor Nancy Doherty (who is flying to Alaska later this week), plus a rotating group of their kids and grand kids could also come through.
When word got out that McGinniss was looking around for a rental, the owner of an unusually situated house found him: He was offered a six bedroom house for $1500 a month house with a nice deck overlooking picturesque Lake Lucille. Perfect! The place was comparatively cheap by Wasilla standards. And the grand kids would love the lake.
And it had one other teensy, weensy interesting feature: It was smack next door to the home of Tod and Sarah Palin.
What to do?
McGinniss knew that his proximity would annoy Palin, as it would anyone. But, unlike, say, the Enquirer, which had also earlier tried to rent the house but had been rebuffed, he wouldn’t be peering Palinward out his windows with a zoom lens, snapping photos of the kids. (After all, he was planning to bring his own family up to stay.)
As a journalist, he could scarcely believe his luck. In fact, not to take the offered house seemed as if he was slapping fate in the face. “Journalistic malpractice,” was how he put it.
McGinniss is both a charming guy and an old school pro reporter who generally manages to get at least some kind of cooperation even out of subjects who are antagonistic. As a consequence, he thought that he’d introduce himself next door, explain about the book, tell the Palins he’d do his best not to be obtrusive. The Palins would be irritated but professional. And that would be that. Both camps would mostly ignore each other. Yet McGinniss would get a chance to soak up the Palin vib. Detente.
Boy was he wrong.
THE ATTACK MACHINE
When the Kennedys sensed that McGinniss’s book on Teddy might not be entirely a valentine, they mostly told friends not to talk to him.
However when Palin discovered the identity of her new neighbor, she ran straight to her Facebook account and, intimated that McGinniss was a combination stalker, peeping Tom and pedophile. Then she went on Glenn Beck.
McGinniss began getting death threats. Bloggers pronounced McGinniss’s wife, Nancy, and their family “fair game” and posted the couple’s home address and phone number all over the web. The calls were icky and persistent. Nancy could no longer pick up the phone. On the web, Palin fans promised to “obliterate” and “ruin” McGinnis and his career.
And those were some of the nicer statements.
Next things got genuinely scary.
The threats against Joe, became so graphic that the FBI and the state police became involved.
NOT SO FRIENDLY WARNING?
On Monday afternoon a long-time Wasilla resident, a former school official who is active in town affairs, helped Joe carry two used, overstuffed chairs into the much talked about summer rental.
About 4:30 Tuesday morning, the same helpful man was awakened by the sound of a gunshot and a car driving away at high speed. When the man went outside to check, he found that one of his car’s front windows had been shot out by a rifle. The Wasilla guy didn’t want to believe that the shot window incident was linked to the fact that he’d been seen with Joe. On the other hand, he told Joe, such a thing had never happened to him before.
I heard about the shot out window Tuesday afternoon from Joe’s wife Nancy.
LET’S REVIEW: A REPORTER’S JOB IS TO REPORT, DITTO A BOOK-WRITING JOURNALIST’S JOB
Okay full disclosure: Joe McGinniss is a friend. His wife Nancy is a close friend.
But friendship notwithstanding, by renting the Wasilla house Joe McGinniss has not done anything as a journalist that is unethical, inappropriate, bizarre or, in the general sense, even particularly unusual.
Here’s how Slate’s Jack Shafer put it:
McGinniss’ stunt will outrage those who believe reporters should get close but not too close, who believe that there is something sacred about an individual’s place of residence, who would prefer reporters to behave more like Boy Scouts and less like gumshoes.
Taking up residence next to Palin doesn’t even approach violating her legal right to privacy. She has no legal right to blind eyes looking at her property from an adjoining property or even from the street. If McGinniss didn’t live next door, he’d be completely within his rights to interview Palin’s neighbors about her. In fact, he’d be remiss if he didn’t grill them about her.
Get a few respected journalists in a room and persuade them to tell you war stories, and you’ll hear tales that make the house renting issue look laughably tame. Hell, I’ve got some doozies of my own.
When news breaks, print reporters, TV news crews and bloggers alike plant themselves outside of the houses or in the faces of crime victims, politicians, serially cheating sports stars, grieving mothers, or whomever. They talk to the neighbors, friends, troll through records, and generally invade the privacy of subjects on a regular basis. Most of us (albeit not all) try to do it in a professional and dignified manner.
Whether getting to the bottom of a hard news story, nailing an investigative series, or bringing home the goods on a book length project, journalists must do an inordinate amount of digging, sifting, probing, pushing, charming, hectoring, blustering, hanging out, dogging, manipulating, conning your way in to where you’re not supposed to be—and much more, in order to get the kind of information needed to write most anything that’s worth a damn.
Interestingly, despite the media furor, many average Wasilla residents seem to get that McGinniss is just doing his job, and are not put off by it.
The death threats and the attacks of the Palinistas and others continue. (Yesterday the LA Times ran an unpleasantly fact-challenged salvo from the paper’s latest former Bush hire, Jimmy Orr. NOTE to LAT: WTF are you thinking?). Yet, curiously, in Wasilla itself, the Palin/McGinnis kerfuffle has not sent sources scurrying for cover. Quite the opposite.
Joe confirmed on Tuesday that, thanks to all the fuss kicked up by Sarah, people who’d initially been reluctant to talk to him are now making appointments, and “new sources are emerging,” he says, for which he is “very grateful.”
That ought to worry Mrs. Palin a lot more than some 60-something book author drinking coffee on the deck next door.
“I can see Russia AND Sarah Palin from my window!” (Couldn’t resist that one.) Wow, $1500 for a 6-bedroom on a lake? Even though it’s not going to make Architectural Digest, location, location, location… Yes, I can see how McGinniss would feel it’s a deal too good to pass up since he just so happened to be writing an expose on Palin.
Thanks for the background on McGinniss and his meticulous old-school, journalistic methods. Nonetheless, you admit that he seemed much less than fair to the Kennedy’s, so he’s an equal-opportunity/party agitator in his pursuit of “truth” behind the facts as he sees it. With Palin’s sensitivity to the media based on how she’s been portrayed, this rep of depicting his subjects in a harsh light could hardly be reassuring. Nonetheless, I don’t see anything inciting in her Facebook post: to the contrary, it’s more wryly witty than she seems capable of in public appearances and this gives a glimmer of why people may find her appealing in more intimate situations, in that wink-wink way of hers. It’s not her but her fans who volunteer that he may be a stalker or even child molester — maybe drawing from Palin’s observation that she and her kids first saw him when he was peering at them 15-ft. away while they were in their yard… That CAN be creepy especially when your neighbor is there specifically to do an expose-maybe hit piece on you, as an “embedded” reporter not just casual neighbor. And in that light, I’m afraid your portraying McGinniss’s expectation that “he’d do his best not to be unobtrusive (sic)”- of course, you meant the opposite, and “both camps would mostly ignore each other,” that’s pretty disingenuous under the circumstances. Lord knows I am no fan of this woman and think that as a Rorshach (sp?) test of the American public, she’s a worrisome phenom.
BUT I’m also a big privacy advocate, and think the woman and her kids, reacting as ordinary individuals, were just reacting normally to feel creeped out, and wary. People who live in remote and/or scenic areas like that, or even in the hills of L A (or Topanga, ah-hem), where houses may be too close for comfort so they can take in a shared view, nonetheless do what they can to blot out the intrusive neighbor by trees or a fence if need be, and do their best to pretend they’re alone and keep out of their neighbor’s business too to maintain the mutual illusion and fragile sense of tranquility. When that fragile equilibrium is ruined by the overt actions of one party who’s there JUST TO “embed themselves” in your life, what did he expect? And since McGinniss admits he was also there as a “pro,” considering the impacts of his actions on his own family is part of that. Your depiction of journos/ papa doing their jobs by hectoring/ invading the privacy of/ trolling through records and trash cans, conning, pushing, hectoring, clogging streets and generally ruining the lives of subjects and neighbors, gets no sympathy from me – try living down the street from a Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton, and find out how much love you’ll get from the neighbors as you block their access and driveways, maybe even necessitating No Parking on the whole street including for your own guests…IF Joe’s a pro, he surely knew he wouldn’t be invited over for her fish stew. He wanted to bolster his name and career, and it sounds like the whole brou-haha has sure done that for him, as you say, he’s getting interviews/ access he otherwise wouldn’t have.
HOWEVER, and this is a big HOWEVER: she is of course much more than just an ordinary individual now, but a woman whose mere words or intimations can harnass a collective fury that eclipses even the jealous mania of Justin Bieber’s tween obsessives. Therefore, since things have gotten so out of hand, she’s obliged to do all she can to call off her now-rabid “fans,” because their threats are way over the top, and as someone who aspires to public office or at least public platform, she’s obliged to take the higher ground and think of everyone’s public safety.
Thanks for the heads up on the LAT’s latest Bush Hire, Jimmy Orr. But on the “WTF? What were you thinking?” you may have noticed that the Times has leaned right for some time – ever check out the background of the Op Ed page’s Rob Greene, formerly of very Republican Met-News Enterprise owned by party activist Roger M. Grace, so no wonder he and Jim Newton share the M-N E’s mission of doing PR for Cooley and Trutanich…with David Zahniser doing his part on the city desk, ever analyze his biases during the campaigns, past and future – for Cooley? But if you can find out where this pro-Republican bent started and is coming from, maybe you’d like to enlighten us.
The Miracle of Castel di Sangro
Arguably one of the two best books on the beautiful game written by someone who’s not a sportswriter, How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer being the other.
I think conservatives should thank Joe McGinniss and the other Journalists who defend him, for really stirring up a hornets’ nest of T-party activists. This blatant invasion of privacy and Joe McGinniss calling Palin a Nazi does nothing for his credibility and only makes her and others like her more electable.
Joe McGinniss has been described by other journalists as “a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse”.
In his book Fatal Vision, McGinniss depicted MacDonald as a sociopath who, unbalanced by amphetamines, had murdered his family. When questioned under oath, he admitted to fabricating much of what he wrote.
McGinniss’s manipulation of conversations and circumstances, conjecture, and his blatant
lies were exposed in court, and the (probably innocent man) MacDonald won a settlement of approximately a third of a million dollars in 1987.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments, sbl.
I respect your views on privacy and, in large part, agree. However, I also believe in investigative reporting. In most cases, I’ve found ways to successfully keep both values in balance. But sometimes they are in conflict.
Anyway, it’s a longer conversation. But a worthwhile one to have. I’ve found that most classes full of journalism students are extremely eager to engage in the discussion of ethics, which is a good thing.
Speaking of ethics, while one might agree or disagree with McGinniss’s choice of renting the house (and, yes, I think he was naive to believe there wouldn’t be blowback), Palin is a manipulator of the first water. Once the elections were over, other than my admitted fascination with the wardrobe $$ bruhaha, I have made it a point not to give Palin more than a peripheral glance. (This is for purposes of my own mental health.) But since my friends were involved, I did take the time to parse out her posts and statements about McGinniss. And I gotta say that when it comes to rerouting the narrative to suit her purposes, she’s extremely skillful. Everything she says is close enough to the truth that it can’t easily be disputed without the critic coming off as a crank.
Here’s a tiny random example. In her first Facebook post on the topic, she posted that photo of McGinniss on the deck of the rented house gazing outward.
In reference to the photo, Palin’s description reads: “Here he is—about 15 feet away on the neighbor’s rented deck overlooking my children’s play area and my kitchen window.”
Discomforting if true. However, it isn’t.
Okay, now look again at the photo that Palin posted.
(Here’s the link for easy use: http://bit.ly/9gOaXX)
Then go to the photo of the two houses in the WLA post, and I’ll tell you where Joe is really standing in relationship to her house, her kitchen window, et al.
In my photo, glance to the left of the pink arrow extending down from the word “Joe.” The rental house extends—beyond what you can see in the photo—for another six-ish feet to the left of that arrow, with the deck wrapping around the corner of the house that is not visible in my posted photo. In the Palin photo, Joe is standing at that far left corner of the deck talking on the phone, looking away from the Palin’s house toward the wooded vacant lot that borders the rental on the non-Palin side. (I’ve seen the houses from a bunch of angles, but if you go back to the Facebook photo and compare the two you’ll begin to see the layout.)
The Palin posted photo was taken from a vantage point that is right about at the top of the right hand “Lake” arrow in my photo. You can orient yourself by using as a reference that red and white storage shed that sits just to the Palin side of the property line.
(I realized this is absurdly nitpicky and painstaking, but indulge me for a minute, just for the hell of it.)
Now why should we care about any of this? Well, we shouldn’t, under normal circumstances. But if you add that and a bunch of other small but just slightly dishonest emotional cues with which Palin litters her posts and media statements, it produces the vision of a righteous mom trying to protect her kids and family from the creepy, stalkerish, possibly perverted liberal asshole trying to do her and her family dirt—as opposed to the professional, albeit aggressive, journalist doing his job in a manner that is well within the normal bounds of reporting.
The latter might promote irritation. However, the former triggers white-hot fury and death threats.
This is vintage Palin. And it seems to work very well for her.
By the way, I don’t know if I was clear, but it wasn’t that McGinniss was unfair to Kennedy. I don’t think he was. Yet his book wasn’t all roses and flowers either. It was an interesting and complex portrait of Ted’s early career. The main point was, Joe is not some knee jerk liberal out to get conservatives. He shines a strong light on whatever subject that comes within his focus. (Heck, he was detailed about the soccer time, but it wasn’t mean. Everyone loved it.)
Okay, back to work.
Pokey, with all respect, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
“When questioned under oath, he admitted to fabricating much of what he wrote.”
McGinniss did nothing of the sort.
Other than the Kennedy’s irritation with the Teddy book, virtually all of the professional criticism of McGinniss over the years has come from one source: Janet Malcolm, in her beautifully written and entirely intellectually dishonest classic, “The Journalist and the Murderer.’
The book has one of the most famous opening lines in all of contemporary nonfiction: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
Provocative, to be sure. However, if one knows Malcolm’s own work, one realizes that she is, in fact, speaking about herself in that she holds herself to be intellectually superior to every one of her subjects, so inevitably betrays the trust of every one of them. But that’s another topic altogether.
Malcolm’s entire contention was not that McGinniss fabricated anything. That has never been at issue. It was that McGinniss pretended to a belief in MacDonald’s innocence, long after he’d become convinced of the man’s guilt, and that this pretense was “indefensible.” (She also contends that McGinniss interpreted McDonald’s actions and the evidence through that prism because it made for a better book.)
That McGinniss deceived MacDonald was also the basis for the civil lawsuit. MacDonald accused McGinniss, in essence, of fraud, saying he had pretended a belief in MacDonald’s innocence in order to get further access to him—which McGinniss admitted to.
McGinniss’s most famous quote from the civil trial was: My only obligation from the beginning was to the truth.
The facts of Fatal Vision have never been challenged. McGinniss is a meticulous reporter. As for MacDonald’s guilt or innocence of the murders, the jury found MacDonald guilty. McGinniss began by believing MacDonald to be innocent but, over the course of the trial, he too concluded that McDonald had indeed murdered his wife and two daughters. He did not, however, tell MacDonald of his change of heart but continued to present himself as a sympathetic friend. Truman Capote did much similar in writing In Cold Blood. The civil trial turned on the ethics of that technique and whether or not that constituted fraud.
The civil case resulted in a hung jury, yet the publishers settled with McDonald out of court for $350,000 to avoid the expense of a brand new trial.
In terms of MacDonald’s criminal case, there were troubling prosecutorial shenanigans that have continued to muddy to the water on that case. However, the behavior of the cops and the prosecutor has zero to do with MacGinniss. Check your facts please.
The biggest irony in all this is Malcolm. While she was writing about the MacDonald/McGinniss matter, Malcolm herself was sued in an equally famous case by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson who claimed she had done what you accuse McGinniss of—namely libeled Masson by inventing quotes. In other words, it was Malcolm who was accused of making stuff up, not McGinniss.
McGinniss — “I’m not convinced that it actually happened.”
Fourteen years ago, Joe McGinniss’s best-selling book, Fatal Vision, depicted MacDonald as guilty. McGinniss theorized that MacDonald had abused diet pills, had suffered a violent amphetamine psychosis, and in a fit of rage, had murdered his family because one of the children wet the bed. The book and the pursuant movie convinced millions that this actually occurred. Yet, in a sworn deposition on October 30, 1986, McGinniss, incredibly, admitted he did not personally believe his own theory. He explained, under oath, that he had introduced the diet pill theory as a dramatic device in his “new journalism” where the story is more important than the facts. When asked why he said that he’d learned MacDonald had ingested an overdose of diet pills (which he had not learned at all), he said he hadn’t wanted to give his readers the same old “rehash of the trial.”
McGinniss finally revealed his true feelings about his central theory, the theory that had made him rich, and had convinced millions of people that MacDonald was guilty. Under oath, during hard questions by MacDonald’s attorney, he admitted, “I’m not convinced that it actually happened.”
http://www.fataljustice.com/
Thanks for that, Celeste, and I am certain Palin’s a savvy manipulator of PR of the first order, one of those Republicans who plays up her shortcomings as “people’s this” and “people’s that” and manages to make the articular, more intelligent opponent somehow seem “too elitist,” and so on. And it’s pretty hokey to believe for a minute that she could hardly wait (as she detailed in her Facebook) to get back to her little scrap of a backyard garden to play the average Alaska Mom…really, THAT’s why she gave up the governership, not to make millions and seek fame and fortune in the “Lower 48?” And that particular photo does not seem to bear out her statements: but if his window peers into her kid’s bedroom and kitchen, and peered into her backyard intitially, it still might have creeped her out.
On this one, I think you may be blinded by your friendship and (understandable and largely shared) abhorence of Palin, as someone who might actually have come a heartbeat from becoming President. (Can we imagine HER dealing with the current Middle East crises, given her utter lack of basic geography let alone history or geopolitical background or remotest capability of ever comprehending enough to become even a lowly assistant to the Assistant Undersecretary of Whatever…Actually, his showing up next door is a little like the Palestinian relief ship showing up off the shore of Israel just to provoke it. Well, just a little…) McGinniss comes off even more disingenuously downright lying on his Beck interview, claiming he’d have rented that very house at the ends of Alaska “even if she lived on the moon…” Well, maybe, insofar as he’d have snooped around town and with her neighbors, but it insults my intelligence. He’s getting all the PR he can handle for that $1500/ month – sorry for him? Not. Frankly, if he lived next door to ME and snooped on me I’d feel the same way, whether at my current home or at a lake retreat, except I wouldn’t have a fanatical army to summon.
I laud you for teaching your students to consider the ethical ramifications of what they’re doing, but still, if the objective is the story at all costs with the behaviors as you describe, and I’ve had reason to abhor, it’s reason to wish anyone claiming that sort of “Right” would have to be licensed as are other “professionals” who have to abide by certain rules and conditions. Or else. (Or else what, I’m not exactly sure. And I know, then it would be an issue of WHO does the licensing, it could become overly political – the devil’s in the details.) Most of these people act like locusts, as you describe, stripping bare everything and everyone in their path. Insofar as McGinniss is one of them, Pokey may be right, that he’s playing into HER playbook toward a national platform more than he could have imagined.
The above is from the book Fatal Justice, published in hard cover in 1995, and paperback in April, 1997.
“Besides debunking Joe McGinniss’s facile and unfounded drug theory and showing how McGinniss worked closely with his editor to delete references that might make “MacDonald look innocent,” Fatal Justice reveals glaring contradictions and discrepancies between the government’s claims about the evidence at trial and the evidence as it was actually found, recorded, and tested by the government’s investigators and technicians. “
It is likely that Joe McGinniss framed an innocent man (Green Berets and Surgeon) for the murder of his wife and children, just so his book with be more thrilling and did it in the most cowardly way possible.
(Joe McGinniss is anything but a smash-’n’-grab “gotcha” reporter) – Yes, he appears to be a hired hit man who uses a pen instead of a knife.
Pokey,
“Fatal Justice” is part of the Free MacDonald movement and, while it has many interesting points, a great deal of it has been discredited.
Anyway, I refuse to go any farther down this rabbit hole. If you want to dive in, I recommend you check out actual documents. You can find months’ worth of reading at these sites:
http://www.macdonaldcasefacts.com/html/topics.html
Here’s the wife’s family site (which is anti-MacDonald):
http://www.thejeffreymacdonaldcase.com/
Here is the pro-McDonald site:
http://www.themacdonaldcase.org/
As for the drug theory, McGinniss always clearly labeled it a theory, which he advanced in an attempt to explain MacDonald’s behavior. But, while admittedly an interpretation of the facts, it was based on existing facts. (Another analyst could interpret those facts in a different way. That’s why it’s called a “theory.”) McGinnis did not later say he believed it to be false. That’s nonsense.
I personally don’t know if MacDonald was guilty or innocent. I tend to go for guilty for a variety of reasons. Others may draw different conclusions.
But I resent the scurrilous smearing of McGinniss with half-facts and outright falsehoods.
As for the polygraph issue. Here is a fuller record of MacDonald and polygraphs:
1. Polygraph expert John Reid administered a polygraph exam to MacDonald in the spring of 1970. The test results were deemed inconclusive and MacDonald told interviewer Jeffrey Elliott that the results were due to the fact that he was “frantic with worry.”
2. Several weeks later, polygraph expert Cleve Backster administered a polygraph exam to MacDonald. Backster concluded that MacDonald had flunked the exam.
3. In 1985, polygraph expert David Raskin administered a polygraph exam to MacDonald in prison. Raskin concluded that MacDonald had passed the exam.[This is the test to which you refer.]
4. MacDonald also refused to take a polygraph exam for the CID in 1970. [Not that this matters, it’s simply part of the record.]
5. In 1973, a friend of MacDonald’s approached famed attorney Vincent Bugliosi to inquire about Bugliosi representing MacDonald. One of Bugliosi’s stipulations was that MacDonald take a polygraph exam. MacDonald’s refusal to take a polygraph exam coupled with information gathered about the Government’s case against MacDonald, resulted in Bugliosi refusing to represent MacDonald.
6. In 1995, filmmaker Errol Morris [Thin Blue Line] was interested in directing a documentary about the MacDonald case with the intention of presenting MacDonald as an innocent man. [He’d read “Fatal Justice.”] Morris subsequently decided to shelve the project after MacDonald refused to take a polygraph exam.
Happy reading.
In 2006, the DNA was finally tested, and it does not match the man in prison for the crime.
The whole case comes down to a single, non-human hair — the long, blonde wig hair that supports Jeffrey MacDonald’s version of that awful night his family was killed.
At first, the prosecution kept it a secret. When the defense finally discovered it, years after MacDonald went to prison, the prosecutors argued it was the hair of a doll. But dolls don’t have 22-inch hairdos.
So they argued that it was made from a chemical that wasn’t used in wigs at the time. When the defense tracked down wig manufacturing manuals of that era and proved otherwise, the prosecution was left with no explanation for why a long blonde wig hair appeared at this murder scene, unless….
…unless Jeffrey MacDonald was telling the truth all along.
Below are affidavits of two men who heard Helena Stoeckley claim she was at MacDonald’s the night of the murder to steal drugs, wearing a blond wig and describe specific objects in the house.
http://www.themacdonaldcase.org/Images/Britt_Affidavit.pdf
http://www.themacdonaldcase.org/Images/AFFIDAVIT_OF_WRouder.pdf
The sociopath painted by Joe McGinniss in his book Fatal Vision was fabricated like the blonde wig.
“Acid is groovy, kill the pigs” was the best MacDonald could do.?
Current Status of MacDonald Case
Little as I side with Randy I think he hit this one on the nose.
Yep. Bad dialogue is always a dead giveaway.
That wouldn’t even fly in an old Roger Corman film.
When word got out that McGinniss was looking around for a rental, the owner of an unusually situated house found him: He was offered a six bedroom house for $1500 a month house with a nice deck overlooking picturesque Lake Lucille. Perfect! The place was comparatively cheap by Wasilla standards. And the grand kids would love the lake.
Found him because said owner had a beef with Palin same as McGinnis.
And yet there were many lies within the book. He completely slandered her amazing mother, a woman every human loves and dreams of calling their own mom. He slandered kids and misrepresented what actually happened about an army incident. He put a sleazy edge on stories that weren’t a big deal. He took something that she wrote in her own book and made it sound horrible with exaggeration when it too wasn’t a big deal. He basically attacked her inlaws and drew biased depictions despite them being well-liked and respected. He either ignores or is ignorant that Sarah and family are still friends with their oldest friends and NEIGHBORS form decades ago.
I wonder if he, like the film maker from that same year, too left out positive things that kill his carefully-crafted image.
No person can write another’s biography. And if happens, no sane person takes those words to heart. Ask any hollywood celeb.