The Daily Mail is reporting that publishers and Hollywood are scrambling to get the rights to the Claudine Gay story. Gay is the famous former president of Harvard who resigned after accusations of plagiarism. The Daily Mail reports, “there’s already top-secret planning for a network TV mini-series about the daughter of Haitian immigrants’ rise to the top at Harvard and her ‘wrenching decision’ to step down after being accused of antisemitism and plagiarism, the insiders reveal. As one powerful producer tells DailyMail.com: ‘The Claudine Gay story can be this era’s Roots.’”
Roots was the epic 1970s miniseries that traced several generations of black Americans from slavery to modern times. It dramatized the resilience of Africans brought here in chains as they triumphed despite brutal racism.
The Claudine Gay story, on the other hand, is about how elites at one of America’s most respected institutions forfeited honor, integrity, and truth to virtue-signal their holy liberalism.
In fact, the Claudine Gay movie has already been made. It was called Shattered Glass and came out in 2003.
In 1998, New Republic writer Stephen Glass was found guilty of making up many of his pieces. Glass’s fabulism was so blatant and widespread that even his liberal colleagues had to take action — but not until after Glass’s lies had already been published.
In its best scene, the film depicts the moment when editor Charles Lane explodes at reporter Caitlin Avey, who has been defending Glass. Lane, the one honorable person left on staff, has to jackhammer through the liberal groupthink to find Avey’s conscience — and her sense of honor. “He handed us fiction after fiction and we printed them all as fact, just because we found him entertaining,” he says. Then he drops the bomb: “It’s indefensible. Don’t you know that?”
A lot of today’s journalists still don’t know that — or they don’t care.
For their own good, and if they have any reputation left to salvage, reporters should look into Claudine Gay’s story before signing her to the reported $15 million book deal and turning her into a Hollywood icon.
I’m not talking about going through Gay’s old yearbooks. Also, what Gay is accused of doing isn’t the outright fakery of Stephen Glass. But if she’s guilty of plagiarism, she should not be raised up as a hero.
But don’t count on journalists, much less Hollywood, to let reality cramp their virtue signaling.
Last year, the website Tablet revealed that there was a dispute over a key story that former President Barack Obama told in his memoir Dreams from My Father. Obama claimed that when he was a young activist, he broke up with a girlfriend named Sheila Miyoshi Jager because her liberalism wasn’t radical enough for his emerging black nationalism.
What the author, David Garrow, found after interviewing Jager was a different story. “In Jager’s telling,” David Samuels of Tablet explained, “the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. … Chicago politics was being roiled [at the time] by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.”
Obama supported Cokely.
David Samuels was incredulous that this different version, Jager’s version, had never been told. “Perhaps the most revealing thing about Jager’s account of her fight with Obama, though, is that not one reporter in America bothered to interview her before David Garrow found her, near the end of Obama’s presidency. As Obama’s live-in girlfriend and closest friend during the 1980s, Jager is probably the single most informed and credible source about the inner life of a young man whose election was accompanied by hopes of sweeping, peaceful social change in America.”
Samuels concludes, “The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager — or never knew who she was — defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in Dreams had been defined — by Obama — as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny. Indeed, Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself.”
This is how the Left works. But it would be nice for once if, before the cultural elites in New York and Hollywood make their deals with Gay, they make sure their star’s story checks out.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
