Fatal Vision
THE ROGUE is Embargoed: Due to Explosive Content, No Galleys Sent
July 18, 2011
Crown Publishing, currently the strongest division of Random House, Inc., has made yet another decision with which I agree.
They have decided not to send out pre-publication galleys of THE ROGUE to review outlets and mass media.
They’ve printed only seventy-five galleys and are keeping them locked in a safe in their offices in New York.
I myself have received only one copy.
A very few magazine editors and executive producers of national TV shows will be shown a redacted version, but only after they sign stringent, legally binding, non-disclosure agreements.
Very seldom does a publisher decide to embargo a book in this fashion.
Crown has chosen to do so because THE ROGUE contains revelations about Sarah Palin that neither they nor I want to have leaked before the September 20 publication.
As interest builds, a lot of people in national media are clamoring for an advance look.
Crown has weighed the ups and downs of a total embargo and has decided that in this case–given that some of the content will make headlines as soon as it’s revealed–it’s the only way to go.
I agree completely.
There’s some stuff we just don’t want to see online a month before THE ROGUE reaches bookstores around the country.
My wife and editor, Nancy Doherty, has read the book (Nancy having helped enormously to make it better than it would have been without her.) My lawyer, Dennis Holahan, and my agent Dave Larabell, of the David Black Agency, have also read it. As have, of course, the chosen few at Crown Publishing who are responsible for the book’s successful publication.
Normally, an author wants to see his book disseminated as widely as possible before publication, to build interest.
But in this case, some of the content is simply too sensitive to risk premature disclosure.
I’ve given only one other writer an advance look. I chose her because I admire her and trust her and because she’s never had anything to do with Sarah Palin, so she read it with an outsider’s perspective.
First, she tweeted:
…just finished your book. Holy shit. Must collect thoughts & write longer email. Suffice to say haven’t stopped thinking about it.
I wrote her to say that I hoped she meant “Holy shit” in a good way.
She replied by email:
Yes that Holy Shit was a good one.
Great one in fact.
It was is so compelling- I just devoured it. Woke up thinking of it, went to bed thinking of it.
It makes everything clear about her…The deconstruction of her religious beliefs is terrifying and shocking. I had no idea there was a fringe element called dominionists, nor did I know about this business about demon-controlled cities, and the need to destroy them…It’s a very frightening mass delusion.
I love how you grounded the whole story with your own experiences in Alaska- past and present. It was the perfect refresher, in all the right spots, to the lightless persona of SP.
This is a real tour de force and I imagine will set off a lot of depth charges. I hope you are prepared for the onslaught from her camp.
You’ve done a great service, apart from writing a great biography.
If people wake up to the insidious nature of these fringe fundamentalists then maybe her power and those like her will start to dissipate.
And apart from all that, it was just a great read.
And so Crown and I move forward to Sept. 20. Without Crown’s approval, I can’t share any details about the shows I’ll be appearing on, but suffice it that I won’t be hard to find on either network or cable TV, nor on radio, nor in the press, nor at online sites via interviews in late September and October.
The people at Crown–including publisher Molly Stern, editorial director Charlie Conrad, senior executive director of publicity David Drake, publicity director Annsley Rosner, marketing director Patty Berg, associate director of online sales and marketing Jacob Bronstein (who, for you FATAL VISION fans, is the son of Dr. Merrill Bronstein, who treated Jeffrey MacDonald in the emergency room at Fort Bragg’s Womack Hospital on Feb. 17, 1970, and testified at MacDonald’s 1979 trial), and, far from least, Matthew Martin, vice president and associate general counsel, Random House–are by far the best I’ve ever worked with over my twelve-book, forty-plus year career as an author.
Together, we’ll bring you the truth about Sarah Palin.
THRILLERFEST 2011
July 11, 2011
I’m just back from a weekend in New York City, where I received the “True Thriller” award at the sixth annual ThrillerFest, sponsored by the International Thriller Writers.
The photos are of Peter James about to present me the award and of my–very very brief–acceptance remarks.
I paid tribute to Brian Murtagh, the just-retired US Department of Justice attorney who for 41 years stayed on the case of Jeffrey MacDonald. If it weren’t for Brian, MacDonald never would have been brought to trial, much less convicted, and since that 1979 conviction Brian has been the man who’s thrown up the roadblocks every time new lawyers tried to find a way to help MacDonald weasel out of paying the life-sentence price for having murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters at Fort Bragg in 1970.
I also paid tribute to my wife, Nancy Doherty.
Nancy, for forty years, has been my best editor, and my worldwide traveling companion, but she has been so much more. Not least, the mother of two of my children. As for everything else, it’s too personal to get into here, but I can say with certainty that wherever I am today, without Nancy I’d be in a much worse place.
I’m told that a video of my interview with Kathleen Sharp and Q&A session, as well as my acceptance remarks will soon be posted at the Thrillerfest website.
It was a wonderful event, with eight hundred people in attendance. I made many new friends, including John Lescroat, whose work I’ve enjoyed and admired for years, and Douglas Preston, who, in addition to his many splendid thrillers, wrote a true crime book called The Monster of Florence, which caused him to be arrested in Italy and interrogated by the same crazed prosecutor who won a conviction against Amanda Knox (and I must give you all an advance tip on the book that finally gets to the heart of that bizarre story: The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox, by Nina Burleigh.)
I myself am a fugitive from the Italian criminal justice system, having been convicted in absentia on charges filed against me by Gabriele Gravina, president of the minor league soccer team that was the subject of The Miracle of Castel di Sangro. That story is too long to go into here, but Gravina filed criminal charges against me as part of a (largely, but not entirely) successful attempt to prevent publication of Miracle in Italy.
The actor Anthony LaPaglia, who now has his own production company, optioned The Miracle of Castel di Sangro and hired me to write the screenplay, which I did. Anthony then went to Italy to make sure there would be no, shall we say “problems” with filming there. He met personally with Gravina in Rome. Gravina told him, “Under no circumstances will this movie be filmed in Italy.”
Anthony was made to understand the amount of sabotage that could occur to all the expensive equipment on location in Castel di Sangro. Gravina explained to him that it would be a very serious mistake for him to attempt to make the movie at all. Anthony, a wonderful man who was a joy to work with and who taught me a lot about screenwriting, decided to focus on other projects and let his option on Miracle lapse.
So, yes, “those people” are alive and all too well in Italy today. They also caused my original Italian publisher, Garzanti, to cancel its contract to publish an Italian edition of Miracle.
Anyway, Doug Preston and I had a lot to talk about. I also reconnected with some very dear old friends.
OFF TOPIC: My Arizona trip is still pending. It’s amazing how complicated things can get in July when a publisher has such big plans for a book to be released on Sept. 20. All I can say is that there’s a lot of inside baseball being played right now and my goal is the same as that of Crown: to have the biggest and best possible rollout of THE ROGUE in September. Whatever helps that, I’ll do. Whatever doesn’t, I won’t. I’ll say more about Arizona in the next couple of days as questions are resolved.
Trig? New evidence from Sarah Palin emails//UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan reacts
June 14, 2011
I’ve declared myself as “trignostic,” meaning I am skeptical about Sarah’s story of her pregnancy with Trig and his birth, but I am not yet certain that it could not be true.
If it’s a hoax, it would be the worst ever perpetrated on the American electorate by a candidate for national office.
That’s a lot to swallow, which is why MSM has simply turned its collective head.
I’m still not convinced (i.e. persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt), but recent close readings of the newly-released Palin emails by Jesse Griffin at Immoral Minority and Andrew Sullivan at Daily Dish bring me closer to concluding that Sarah’s tale is an absolute and utter fraud and that Trig, in fact, was not her baby.
To me, the questions have always been valid, and the MSM dismissal of Sullivan as a misogynist freak with a tinfoil beard has been shameful.
The question of whether or not Trig was really Sarah’s baby was much on my mind last spring and summer in Alaska. Both Levi’s sister, who was photographed holding him soon after birth, and Levi’s mother assured me that conspiracy theories about Trig were absurd: Sarah gave birth to him, just as she said.
I devote a full chapter of THE ROGUE to this question, and have material in other chapters that relates directly to it.
My research did not uncover proof that Sarah was lying, but I returned from Alaska last fall more skeptical about the official version of events than I’d been when I got there.
In regard to this question, I recall the words of a US Army CID detective who on April 6, 1970 questioned Jeffrey MacDonald about his account of the murders of his wife and two daughters: “Anything is possible, but some things are more possible than others.”
I now think in regard to Trig that anything is possible, but that it’s more possible than not that Sarah’s whole story is a lie.
Even so heavily redacted, the Palin emails offer startling new evidence. By evidence, I mean facts that could be submitted to a jury in a court of law. For a long time, there have been photos online–both of Trig’s ear and Sarah’s belly–from the spring of 2008 that would seem to contradict her version of events. But much of what a photograph demonstrates, in a forensic sense, is in the eye of the beholder. If you already believe Sarah’s story to be a lie, the photos prove it. If you don’t, they’re just pictures, taken from different angles by different people at different times.
The emails, however, are in Sarah’s own words.
As I point out in THE ROGUE , for someone who wrote in her memoir that “desperation…overwhelmed me” when she realized her amniotic fluid sac had ruptured in Dallas at 4 a.m. on April 17, 2008, Sarah was strangely indifferent to her baby’s fate. I describe how close she was to so many Dallas hospitals with neo-natal intensive care units, yet she felt no need to go to one, even though her baby wasn’t due for another month, and even though she already knew that his Down Syndrome and her age made the birth high risk.
Hell, Sarah didn’t even want to call her doctor!
I go into the hours that followed in great detail, pointing out that observations by others of her behavior every step of the way from Dallas to Wasilla cast doubt upon her version of events.
What’s new in the emails is proof that seven hours after being overwhelmed by desperation about the fate of her new gift from her Heavenly Father, Sarah was firing off BlackBerry messages, including one about Andrew Halcro, one of her opponents in the gubernatorial race of 2006, who’d started a blog often critical of her.
“What a goof he is…truly annoying,” she wrote in the throes of her desperation about Trig’s fate. She added, “I’m headed home from Dallas.”
We’ve all heard about compartmentalizing, but, hey, let’s get real: her great gift from her Heavenly Father is at risk of dying before he’s even born and Sarah is bitching about Andrew Halcro?
Despite being overwhelmed by desperation, Sarah also fired off a note to an aide that morning, instructing her not to proceed with a fake letter to the editor of the Anchorage Daily News–one that was to be sent as if it came from Sarah–responding to criticism from a couple of Anchorage radio personalities.
“Don’t submit at this time as there will be more thought put into this…” she wrote.
In THE ROGUE I wonder about how Sarah spent the hours between the onset of desperation at four a.m. and her luncheon speech. Now we know: she was on her BlackBerry, dealing with inconsequential matters, as her amniotic fluid continued to leak, putting her baby, hour by hour, at increasing risk.
IF there was a baby in her womb at the time.
Jesse Griffin’s close reading of Sarah’s letter to family and friends, written as if it were from God, provides the strongest evidence I’ve yet seen that Sarah was not pregnant in 2008 and did not give birth to Trig.
In the popular idiom, “God is in the details.” Here, God is in the redactions.
I read Going Rogue (don’t get me started.) In it, Sarah says she wrote a letter about Trig “to our family and closest friends.” Being Sarah, she opted to write it as if it had come from “Trig’s Creator, the same Creator in whom I had put my trust more than thirty years before.” She signed it, “Love, Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”
First, how crazy is that? You write a letter to family and closest friends announcing the arrival of a new baby as if you were God?
I’ve read saner communiques from Son of Sam and Charles Manson.
But…what’s relevant here is what Sarah redacted from the letter as published in Going Rogue.
There was sheer nuttiness, such as this paragraph, which was redacted:
(But tell me, what do you earthlings consider “perfect” or even “normal” anyway? Have you peeked down any grocery store isle, or school hallway, or into your office lunchroom lately? Or considered the odd celebrities you consider “perfect” on t.v.? Have you noticed I make ‘em all shapes and sizes? Believe me, there is no “perfect”!)
“You earthlings?” What is this, Star Trek?
But then there was the money quote:
“I let Trig’s mom have an exceptionally comfortable pregnancy, so she could enjoy every minute of it, and I even seemed to rush it along so she could wait until near the end to surprise you with the news…”
There’s more sentimental tripe about Piper not waiting too long for a Christmas present and Palins having four-day birthday parties (“You all really like cake”), which goes to show that the heavenly father really needs an earthling editor, but the bottom line is what Jesse Griffin spotted.
Jesse writes:
I believe we’ve now seen an email that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Sarah Palin’s pregnancy was not as reported.
On Monday, April 7th, Sarah Palin sent this letter from her official government account to her yahoo accounts. It was the draft of the letter she eventually sent to friends and family after Trig was “born” on April 18th, eleven days later.
This letter was written when Sarah Palin was supposedly thirty-four weeks pregnant. Six weeks away from her announced delivery date of May 18th.
How can you possibly explain her writing a letter which thanks God for giving her an exceptionally easy pregnancy (“Then, I let Trig’s mom have an exceptionally comfortable pregnancy so she could enjoy every minute of it,”) when she should have been six LONG weeks away from the end? Still facing the weeks that any woman will tell you are going to be the most uncomfortable…
How could Sarah know for sure that her birth would be easy and free of complications or that her baby would be, except for the Down Syndrome, healthy?…
And what about this sentence? “and I even seemed to rush it along…” I believe this is a clear reference to the fact that Trig came early. But how could Sarah possibly have known, on April 7th, that that was going to happen?…
Here is my question: if she could write on April 7th that her Heavenly Father let her “have an exceptionally comfortable pregnancy,” and she knew in advance she’d give birth so easily–although a month prematurely–that she wouldn’t even have to take a day off from work, how come “desperation…overwhelmed” her in Dallas ten days later?
Sarah: forget about “The British are coming!” What should worry you is “The questions are coming!”
Ever thicker and faster.
And by the way, where is Trig? Long time no see.
UPDATE:
See “A Trignostic Wavers” from Andrew Sullivan at Daily Dish today.
Posted in Andrew Sullivan, Business Insider, Fatal Vision, Joe McGinniss, mainstream media, Palin children, Sarah Palin, The Rogue, Trig Palin, Uncategorized | 
Tags: andrew halcro, charles manson, daily dish, down syndrome, fraud, god, hoax, immoral minority, jesse griffin, lies, son of sam | 
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“Journalism on Trial:” my letter to New York Times Book Review
May 21, 2011
The New York Times Book Review will publish on Sunday my letter about Janet Malcolm’s many long-ago falsifications about the reporting I did while working on Fatal Vision. I point out that my rebuttal to Malcolm has lingered in obscurity for twenty-two years, but can now be found here.
I believe it speaks for itself.
After 22 Years, My Rebuttal to Janet Malcolm Goes Public
May 9, 2011
Thanks to the miracles of modern science (i.e. the internet) the 26-page essay I published as an epilogue to the 1989 edition of Fatal Vision, in response to Janet Malcolm’s wrongheaded and factually inaccurate New Yorker attack on my journalistic ethics and me, (later published as a book titled The Journalist and The Murderer) is now available online.
And guess where?
Right here. On this very site where you already are.
As I say in the introduction to the epilogue–I know it’s weird to have an “introduction” to an “epilogue,” but what can I do?–
In 1989, the New Yorker published a two-part article by Janet Malcolm entitled “The Journalist and the Murderer.” In the article, which was published in book form a year later, Malcolm offered her skewed perception of my relationship with Jeffrey MacDonald–the subject of my 1983 book, Fatal Vision–to support her bizarre hypothesis that “Every journalist…knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” So numerous and egregious were Malcolm’s omissions, distortions and outright misstatements of fact that I felt compelled to set the record straight in an epilogue to the updated edition of Fatal Vision that was published in 1989. There is no statute of limitations on truth. Even now, twenty-two years later, Malcolm’s fictions ought not to be accepted uncritically.
What makes this relevant to THE ROGUE is that Jeffrey MacDonald was the first pathologically narcissistic psychopath about whom I ever wrote a book.
Guess who’s the second?
