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Indian Express
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Fact or fiction? 7 memoirs that blurred the line
Memoirs are built on the promise of honesty. They offer a raw, intimate look into lives touched by trauma, transformation, or triumph, and readers trust that what they are consuming is at least fundamentally true. However, recently, Raynor Winn's bestselling memoir, which was recently adapted for screen, found itself in the eye of a controversy after she was accused of fabricating parts of her widely acclaimed life story. Published in 2018, The Salt Path recounts Winn's 630-mile walk with her husband, Moth, along the South West Coast Path after losing their home and receiving a terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare neurodegenerative condition. The story became an inspiration for those struggling with challenging medical diagnoses, and sold over two million copies worldwide. The recent controversy is only the latest in a long line of publishing betrayals. For decades, authors have published so-called true stories that turned o James Frey's memoir about drug addiction and recovery skyrocketed after Oprah chose it for her Book Club. Brutal, unflinching, and famously detailing a root canal with no anesthesia and an 87-day jail sentence, it felt almost too intense to be true. In 2006, The Smoking Gun revealed that Frey had fabricated or grossly exaggerated key parts of the story. He had never been in a fatal accident, never served serious jail time, and had embellished nearly every detail of his 'rock bottom.' Oprah, feeling misled, called him back on air to publicly rebuke him. Frey's publisher issued a disclaimer. Frey, meanwhile, pivoted back to fiction with Bright Shiny Morning. Claiming to be a half-Native foster child raised in gang-infested South Central L.A., 'Margaret B. Jones' delivered a gripping account of violence, survival, and resilience. Critics hailed Love and Consequences as authentic and vital, until the author's real sister stepped in. Margaret B Jones was actually Margaret Seltzer, a white woman raised in suburban Los Angeles and educated at private school. Her entire memoir was fiction. Photos, staged interviews, even 'foster siblings' had been fabricated to sell the illusion. The book was recalled immediately, with only 19,000 copies in circulation. Seltzer's defense that she was trying to give a voice to unheard communities was dismissed as exploitation. Misha Defonseca's story was almost too miraculous to believe. At age 7, she claimed, she walked 1,900 miles across Nazi-occupied Europe to find her deported parents, lived with wolves, snuck into the Warsaw Ghetto, and killed a German soldier in self-defense. The book struggled in the US but became a massive bestseller overseas and was adapted into a French film. Eleven years later, researchers unearthed documents showing that Defonseca was Catholic and had been enrolled in a school in Brussels during the time she claimed to be wandering Europe. Her real name was Monique De Wael. She eventually confessed, saying the fabricated story reflected her emotional truth. Holocaust scholars were outraged, warning that such stories gave ammunition to deniers and distorted real survivor accounts. Clifford Irving pulled off a con that briefly fooled one of America's top publishers. Claiming to have secured the cooperation of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, Irving presented forged letters and fake interviews to McGraw-Hill, who gave him a $765,000 advance for the exclusive memoir. But the hoax unraveled when Hughes himself publicly denounced the book via a phone call with reporters. Irving's forgeries were exposed, and he served 17 months in prison for fraud. The incident remains one of the most infamous literary scams ever, later adapted into the film The Hoax starring Richard Gere. It exposed the publishing industry's blind spots. When Stern magazine announced it had uncovered Adolf Hitler's personal diaries, sixty volumes hidden since WWII, it was hailed as a historic breakthrough. The diaries were said to be recovered from a crashed plane and authenticated by historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. But the story fell apart within weeks. Forensic analysis revealed the paper, ink, and glue were all post-war. The 'diaries' were fakes created by forger Konrad Kujau, who had specialised in selling counterfeit Nazi memorabilia. He and the journalist who facilitated the deal both went to prison. The scandal cost Stern millions and embarrassed historians worldwide. Marketed as a touching memoir of a Cherokee boy raised by his grandparents in the Appalachian Mountains, The Education of Little Tree was beloved for its gentle wisdom and spiritual tone. It sold over a million copies and became a classroom favorite. But Forrest Carter was actually Asa Carter, a segregationist speechwriter for George Wallace and a former KKK (Ku Klux Klan) member. He had no Cherokee heritage, and the book's portrayal of Native American life was riddled with stereotypes and inaccuracies. Despite being exposed as early as the late 1970s, the book continued to sell and was even adapted into a film. Oprah recommended it on-air in 1994, later retracting her endorsement when she learned the truth. Today, it is classified as fiction, but many readers still believe it is an authentic memoir. Presented as the real diary of a teenage girl who spirals into drug addiction and dies young, Go Ask Alice was published without an author and claimed to be 'real.' Its harrowing portrayal of sex, drugs, and despair became a cautionary tale for generations of students. But no one could verify the girl's identity and no family ever came forward. Eventually, youth counselor Beatrice Sparks admitted to editing and 'enhancing' the diary. Over time, critics determined that much of it had likely been fabricated or written entirely by Sparks herself. Despite mounting evidence, the book remains on school reading lists and is still classified as nonfiction in some libraries. Sparks went on to publish other 'diary' memoirs, many of which followed the same sensationalist, moralising formula.
The Advertiser
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Is it ever okay for a memoir to stray from the truth?
Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring. Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring. Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring. Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring.
New York Post
04-07-2025
- New York Post
$167.3M Powerball winner, 50, exposed as a career criminal who spent 30 years in jail before striking it rich: report
The winner of Kentucky's largest lottery jackpot who was arrested in Florida days after claiming his riches has a 16-page rap sheet and decades-long criminal history – earning him a jaw-dropping collection of mug shots along the way. James Shannon Farthing has spent 30 of his 50 years alive behind bars at 25 different correctional intuitions before he, along with his mother and girlfriend, claimed the $167.3 million Powerball jackpot in April, The Smoking Gun reported. The career criminal turned overnight millionaire's has racked up convictions across nine counties in Kentucky for a litany of offenses including strangling a girlfriend, bribing officers while in prison and selling cocaine to an undercover cop, according to the report. Advertisement 4 James Farthing, his mother Linda Grizzle and his girlfriend Jacqueline Fightmaster accepted his Kentucky Lottery win together in April. Kentucky lottery The lowlife's string of consistent crime started when he was just a teenager, with arrests for anything ranging from theft to reckless driving. He was only able to complete 10 years of formal schooling and earned his GED in prison. In his later years, Farthing upped the ante as he started dealing in drugs, even roping his mother in on a scheme to smuggle marijuana into a maximum security facility. Farthing accepted a plea deal that absolved Grizzle and he was sentenced to 10 years, the report said. Advertisement Even in the slammer, Farthing couldn't keep out of trouble. He was frequently placed in 'administrative segregation' after doing things like smuggling a variety of drug and alcohol paraphernalia into the prison and charging inmates to return items he stole from them like a bully on a school playground. 4 Farthing and his mother committed a marijuana smuggling plot together. WKYT The tatted-up criminal was frequently denied parole in part because of his seemingly infinite offenses with few signs of stopping. In the rare cases he was granted parole, he'd lose it just as quickly for violating terms of his release, usually through testing positive for drugs like marijuana. Advertisement Farthing appearance has been well documented in his countless booking photos — showing the transition from his baby-faced clean-shaven days to more recent times sporting a gray goatee and packing on a few extra pounds. And his newfound wealth hasn't stopped his antics. 4 Farthing's rap sheet is 16-pages long. PCSO Three days after cashing in with his 77-year-old mother Linda Grizzle and girlfriend Jacqueline Fightmaster, he was arrested in the Sunshine State after allegedly slugging another guest in the face and kicking a deputy who tried to intervene. Advertisement Farthing also violated his parole when he left Kentucky without notifying his parole officer. He was required to because of his lengthy criminal record. 4 Farthing has been in and out of prison ever since he was a teenager. WKYT Farthing was just freed from a Kentucky jail last week, according to the Kentucky Parole Board, but now has to face the charges from the Florida fight. A sliver of his lottery winnings was put towards his $11,000 bail. He pleaded not guilty and is scheduled for a July 14 arraignment, where he could face up to five years in prison for the remaining battery count on the deputy attack alone.
Business Wire
13-06-2025
- Automotive
- Business Wire
Hagens Berman: Ford Hit with New Lawsuit Following Fatal F-350 Rollover Crash and Roof Crush Defect
PUEBLO, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Automaker Ford is in the crosshairs of a new lawsuit following the fatal crash of a Colorado father who attorneys say experienced a cabin roof crush defect present in millions of 1999–2016 Ford trucks and leading to fatal rollovers, according to personal injury attorneys at Hagens Berman and Brooks Law Firm. "In the years of development leading to the release of the Super Duty, Ford weakened almost every component of the roof structure to save money,' the lawsuit states. The lawsuit was filed June 12, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma on behalf of Jamie Horn, the surviving widow of Steven Horn, and accuses the automaker of negligence and wrongful death regarding a roof crush defect in Ford Super Duty pickup trucks. Attorneys at Hagens Berman and Brooks Law Firm say Ford knew about this defect which was allegedly responsible for the tragic death of Mr. Horn, a husband and father of two, in a rollover accident in March 2025 on an Oklahoma highway. 'But when the Horns bought their Super Duty, Ford already knew that Super Duty roofs were collapsing in rollover accidents,' the lawsuit states. 'Ford knew, and it had been hiding this defect from consumers for years.'' 'As stated in our lawsuit, Mr. Horn is dead because Ford wanted to save a few dollars per truck,' said Jacob Berman, the attorney leading the case. 'We intend to hold Ford accountable under the full extent of the law for what we believe is blatant negligence that led to his wrongful death and robbed this family of a father and husband.' If you or a loved one suffered a serious injury in a Ford Super Duty truck rollover incident, find out more about Hagens Berman's personal injury representation. Design Defect Makes Frightening Rollover Fatal On March 4, 2025, Horn, whose family and estate are represented by personal injury attorneys at Hagens Berman, was traveling with his family from their home in Pueblo, Colorado to visit his father in Seminole on rural Oklahoma highway US-412. The Horns' 2012 Super Duty F-350 and the trailer it was pulling were hit by a gust of wind. Mr. Horn slowed down because of the wind, but the gust caused both the trailer and the truck to roll at least one and a half times, coming to rest on the roof. The F-350's roof collapsed on the driver's side, and Oklahoma Highway Patrol who responded pronounced Mr. Horn dead at the scene. 'In a properly designed truck, this would have been frightening, but not deadly,' the lawsuit states. 'But the driver's-side roof of the Horns' F-350 collapsed during the rollover, crushing Mr. Horn and killing him.' Horn's wife and daughter who were seated on the passenger side of the F-350 were able to crawl out of the vehicle, according to the lawsuit, 'evidence that when the roof doesn't crush, people can survive rollovers without catastrophic injuries.' The Smoking Gun – Ford's Internal Testing & Safety Evaluations According to the lawsuit, Ford's Super Duty roofs were routinely crushed in rollovers, but Ford chose not to warn consumers. 'Mr. Horn's fatal injuries are the direct result of a roof design that Ford knew was extraordinarily weak,' the lawsuit states. Ford's internal testing and safety evaluations show that prior to the development of the 1999–2016 Ford Super Duty, Ford knew rollovers were far more dangerous to vehicle occupants than other types of crashes, the lawsuit states. These documents also show that Ford knew strong vehicle roofs were fundamental to minimizing serious injury in a rollover, according to the lawsuit. 'Despite this knowledge, Ford repeatedly weakened the roof structure on Super Duty trucks to save money on labor and tooling costs. In the years of development leading to the release of the Super Duty, Ford weakened almost every component of the roof structure to save money,' the lawsuit states. 'It never performed any physical testing of the Super Duties' roof strength, and it conveniently lost records of the computerized testing it claims it did perform.' 'Ford knew Super Duty roofs were weak before the first truck rolled off the assembly line,' Berman said. 'Instead of doing what was right and making changes to its patently unsafe designs, Ford doubled down, continuing to sell the same defective design until 2016, all the while entering into secret settlements with victims and their families to try to hide the deadly nature of its cabin roof design.' According to the lawsuit, Ford still hasn't taken any steps to warn the public about the risk posed by roof collapse in 1999–2016 Super Duty trucks. Hagens Berman represents the families of two other individuals who lost their lives due to the roof crush defect present in millions of Super Duty pickup trucks. In September 2022, Hagens Berman also filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of owners of Ford Super Duty pickups nationwide, accusing the automaker of selling more than 5 million pickup trucks it was well aware were equipped with a dangerously weak and defective roof. The firm's subsequent lawsuit illuminated an even starker timeline of Ford's alleged negligence, demonstrating that the automaker had over the course of nearly a decade continually downgraded or entirely removed key structural features of the roof design to cut costs. Hagens Berman is a global plaintiffs' rights complex litigation law firm with a tenacious drive for achieving actual results for those harmed by corporate negligence and fraud. Since its founding in 1993, the firm's determination has earned it numerous national accolades, awards and titles of 'Most Feared Plaintiff's Firm,' MVPs and Trailblazers of class-action law. More about the law firm and its successes can be found at Follow the firm for updates and news at @ClassActionLaw.
USA Today
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
With new book, controversial author James Frey still angry with Oprah: 'You can't stop me'
With new book, controversial author James Frey still angry with Oprah: 'You can't stop me' Author James Frey still has a grudge against Oprah Winfrey, nearly 15 years after the host confronted him for lying in his memoir on national TV. Winfrey, who chose Frey's memoir 'A Million Little Pieces' for her book club in 2005, challenged Frey and his publisher on her show after she found out he had lied about parts of his drug addiction, criminal history and time in rehab. Frey was largely outcast from literary fame by the general public as well, an example of a public figure getting 'canceled" before the term was widely used. In 2011, Winfrey apologized to Frey for being too harsh. Despite the pair hugging it out on air, Frey told The New York Times in an interview published June 8 he's still angry, lambasting Winfrey for 'brutal hypocrisy.' 'She told more lies to the public times a thousand than I ever have. And I'll leave it at that,' Frey told the NYT. USA TODAY reached out to representatives for Oprah for comment. Frey says Oprah and critics 'won't stop' him amid new book release Frey's next novel is 'Next to Heaven' (June 17), a dive into the privilege, sex, scandal and murder lying beneath a picture-perfect Connecticut town. It's his first novel since his 2018 'Katerina.' Frey has written well over a dozen novels and many young adult books under a pseudonym since his controversial debut, 'A Million Little Pieces.' Discrepancies in the memoir came to light after an investigation by The Smoking Gun in 2006. Based on police reports, court records and interviews, The Smoking Gun found much of 'A Million Little Pieces' was dramatized or fabricated. Though Frey admits he lied in his memoir, he maintained it was merely artistic liberty, comparing it to a Picasso or Rembrandt self-portrait that isn't photorealistic. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Frey says he has a thicker skin when it comes to criticism now. Though he believes in critics' rights to 'say whatever they want,' he also believes he got 'thrown into the fire in ways that I don't think a lot of people do.' To the NYT, Frey echoed that anger when talking about his lasting anger against Winfrey: 'You might be the most influential lady in this world, you won't stop me. I will lower my head and I will walk forward and I'll keep throwing punches until I die. You can't stop me.' Now seeking a comeback, Frey also told the NYT his gripes with the current state of the publishing industry. He's spent the years since the controversy counseling other public figures who have been through similar experiences. 'For a long time, writers were fearless sorts of people who held mirrors up to society and showed us what was up. And that's not the case anymore, right? 'Writers are scared of getting canceled,' Frey said. 'Writers are scared of making work that makes people uncomfortable. Everybody wants a hug and a Pulitzer. I don't. I don't need either one.' James Frey addresses AI, new book 'Next to Heaven' Frey has also garnered controversy over his use of artificial intelligence, which he said in 2023 he used to see if it could write a story imitating his style and voice. In a 2023 interview with Centre Pompidou, he said he used AI to 'write the best book possible.' Later, to the NYT, Frey said he did not use AI to write his new book, though he did experiment with it for an earlier project he abandoned and uses it for research purposes. 'It doesn't matter what I do, people are going to find some reason to come for me,' he said. Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@
