Laura Albert committed fraud, regardless of how good her writing was. She deliberately concocted a persona of an abused and sexually confused teen--a person to whom many well-meaning people reached out with heartfelt guidance and support. She knew that in our climate of hyper-awareness of sexual abuse there would be a sympathetic audience. This wasn't just someone writing under a pen name; she wasn't disguising her own identity through any kind of demure modesty so much as purposefully making a buck off a hot topic. Being ambitious is fine; even concocting a false persona is not the world's worst crime. But please don't try to spin it as some therapeutic device that helped you through your own history of abuse (a history we have no proof of, and which we can never verify), especially when you had a willing group of cronies eager to help along the ruse. You played with fire, Laura, and you got burnt, big time.

Setting aside Albert's misguided mental illness defence, this is clearly not a true case of fraud. People bought a book that was labelled as fiction. Right there on the cover. Albert gave them a book of fiction. The film company in question purchased the rights to that novel. So far as I know--the news reporting on the case is bad, as it often is with legal stories--they did not explicitly purchase the rights to JT LeRoy's "life story." Their lawsuit stipulates that since "JT LeRoy" did not "exist" their contract is null and void. This is bullshit. Albert owned the rights to "Sarah." As the author of the novel she was well within her rights to sell the option. When Bob Dylan first became famous, he told interviewers that he grew up in New Mexico, traveling around like an oakie. He did not. His parents raised him in a middle class home in Minnesota. Is Bob Dylan a fraud? David Bowie at one time assumed the identity of a man from outer space. David Bowie comes from England, not outer space. Is he a fraud?

Exactly. Not only are Bowie and Dylan not from outer space and New Mexico, respectively, those aren't even their real names.

Which has always had me wondering: who are their checks made out to? Do I pay to the order of Robert Zimmerman, or Bob Dylan?

Authors have used fake names, created persona's, and changes of gender for a long, long time. It's never been fraud before, and it's not fraud now.

Here here! I think the company just got pissed cause they thought they couldn't make a profit from it (once it came out that it's not a real person) and backed out using "fraud" as an excuse. Egg is on their faces, not the authors.