Orlando Figes

The excrement is really hitting the fan for Orlando Figes in the wake of his confession on Friday that it wasn’t his wife who’d been writing nasty Amazon reviews of books by other historians, as he’d first claimed — it was him. (See the earlier MobyLives report.) The British press this weekend was awash in reports that he could face multiple lawsuits and that his academic position may be in jeopardy, as well as with second looks into numerous past charges of plagiarism that journalists and historians now say Figes suppressed by constantly threatening expensive lawsuits.

“He now faces legal action from at least two of the authors he wrote about” in his Amazon reviews, according to a Saturday Daily Telegraph report. “There have been some large legal costs built up in the last week which I hope to retrieve from the Figes family,” Rachel Polonsky tells the paper. The Telegraph also notes that “Dr Polonsky said she would offer legal help to Prof [Robert] Service, the historian who initially sent an email to a dozen historians about the anonymous reviews. He was threatened with libel proceedings by Figes’s laywer.”

Robert Service

Service says, “I have a distaste for scholars who reach for the instrument of law but the damage done to me has been acute. I am just reserving my position and I am expecting there to be consequences.”

Another story in the Independent reports that Figes “has a history of litigious academic spats,” and details several charges of plagiarism brought against Figes over the years. The story also notes that Figes’ job as professor of Russian hisotry at Birkbeck College, University of London may be in jeopardy, and quotes one anonymous colleague calling the incident “career suicide” and saying Figes might “never recover.”

Meanwhile a story in Saturday’s Independent looks at an excuse — or possible legal defense? — planted by Figes (or his p.r. handler) in his Friday morning confession: his comment that “This crisis has exposed some health problems.” According to the Independent, “Reports circulated on his increasingly depressed state of health, believed to have been triggered by a trip to Russia to interview victims of the gulag for his 2007 book The Whisperers.”

But the rumors may be hurting more than helping Figes’ case. “Millions of innocent people had their mental health destroyed by Stalin. Take it from me. Whatever his PR man may say, Orlando Figes is not one of them,” Polonsky says in a remarkable and gripping account for the Daily Mail in which she details her involvement with the story:

Going online to check how my book Molotov’s Magic Lantern was faring, I noticed a new review.

The reviewer, Historian, had given my book just one star. On Amazon, one star means ‘I hate it’.

‘This is the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever written,’ Historian began. ‘Polonsky, it turns out, is not an academic, as claimed in the blurb, but the wife of a foreign lawyer.’

I called to my husband Marc, who is indeed a lawyer, and has joint British and American nationality, from the study. ‘Look, Figes has reviewed me anonymously on Amazon.’ I knew it was him immediately….

… I clicked on the ‘See all my reviews’ link beside Historian’s name, and read all ten. As well as trashing my book, Historian had trashed three books by Bob Service, and the book by Kate Summerscale that beat Figes and The Whisperers to the lucrative Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008.

‘It is better to go to Figes’s The Whisperers,’ Historian told Amazon readers in his hatchet-job on Service’s Stalin.

All it took was one click on Historian’s profile to link to the incriminating nickname ‘orlando-birkbeck’. How could he have been so careless, I marvelled. The nickname was generated when Figes set up his Amazon account to buy books.

When he created Historian’s profile on the same account in 2008 and began to publish online reviews, he doubtless did not inspect the details of this profile – never pressed the link on his own name that led straight to the incriminating nickname.

Rachel Polonsky

Her account also details how Figes had his lawyer issues repeated threats to Sevice, who feared legal expenses would bankrupt him. Service himself posts a similarly compelling account of the affair in the Guardian, in which he states his intention to work to change British libel laws that allowed for such intimidation:

The public interest in this squalid little story is that if someone is wealthy and malicious enough it is possible to tread on the throat of free and open discussion in this country almost with impunity. I was close to caving in at times simply because I lacked Figes’s financial resources. We have a set of libel laws seemingly designed to produce another Robert Maxwell. At the same time we have electronic media that enable the ink to flow from poison pens. In my case, these two features of our culture were wrapped around each other like a vicious weed. Legislative reform is urgently required.

But perhaps the most surprising revelation was Polonsky’s divulgence of the act that may have finally triggered Figes to come clean: a private note Polonsky sent to Figes wife, Stephanie Palmer, “telling her I meant her and her family no harm, urging her to come clean, and suggesting that Orlando Figes’s only real enemy was inside his own head.” Palmer replied, says Polonsky. “She sent me an email, thanking me for my message, and the next day came the PR-managed announcement that Figes had confessed.”

Gerald Posner

Now it can be told: Bestselling author Gerald Posner stepped down from his position last month as “chief investigative reporter” of The Daily Beast after a Jack Shafer report for Slate accused him of plagiarizing stories from the Miami Herald about a Mob trial in Miami. As Shafer noted, Posner

… didn’t make any excuses, either. And he made no effort to escape the P-word, which writers caught stealing copy usually do.

Stating that he was “horrified” at what he did, Posner agreed that it constitutes plagiarism. But he couldn’t figure out how he did it.

He said he had no memory of having seen the Herald story, describing himself as “absolutely sure” he did not see it before sending his own story to Beast editors. But that memory must be wrong, he said, because the similarities between the two pieces are too great, and the Herald’s story was posted before he e-mailed his to his editors at 2:03 a.m. on Feb. 2.

“I must have had the Miami Herald there and copied.” He regards the subtle differences between his copy and the Herald’s as evidence of him “doing the rewrite” of what he thought was his copy.

Now, in an Associated Press wire story by Hillel Italie, Posner — author of the acclaimed book Case Closed, on the Kennedy assasination — admits just as bluntly to further plagiarism in his newest book, Miami Babylon, about the history of mob activity in Miami.

According to Italie,

Posner said he scanned many documents and books he used for “Babylon,” including from “Clubland,” into a computer database instead of working with the documents all in front of him, as he had done in previous books. Since the book took years to write, he said he should have marked the passages from other sources much better, so that when he went back to work on the chapters, he would be certain which were his words and which were others.

Some of the passages are similar but not identical because he edited them, he said.

As Posner himself says, “If you use something from another book, a statement from another book, it needs to be in quotations, or if you take something and put it in your own syntax and grammar, you still need to cite it.” He also tells Italie, “There is no worse word than the ‘p’ word — plagiarism …. It conjures up the worst elements of the business.”

A statement from the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, says, “We are reviewing the situation and discussing the issues with the author.”

Helene Hegemann

Germany’s literary world is in a tizzy over seventeen-year-old German author Helene Hegemann’s debut novel, Axolotl Roadkill, according to this report in Deutsche Welle. The book, a novel about a sixteen year-old girl’s adventures in Berlin with drugs and sex after the death of her mother, has climbed onto bestseller lists and has been nominated for a $2,000 prize for fiction at the Leipzig Book Fair.

The novel’s heroine shares many similarities with the author. “After her mother’s death, Hegemann moved to Berlin to live with her father, an established theater director and professor. Hegemann left school early after receiving the diploma conferred for completing the tenth grade,” according to Deutsche Well. But, Hegemann told DW, the novel is not an autobiography, “‘I just find the book entertaining. In literature — and in all forms of art — it’s possible to experience things which you’d have to bear the consequences for if you were to actually live them out.’”

But now come different consequences. Hegemann has been accused of plagiarism. According to DW, “blogger Dave Pirmasens showed that multiple parts of Axolotl Roadkill are nearly identical to passages from a lesser known novel called Strobo, published by a Berlin blogger who writes under the name Airen.”

Hegemann responded to the accusation, saying she did indeed use Airen’s writing. In her statements, she appears to be simultaneously contrite for the theft, angry at those who think it’s a problem, and defensive of her actions on grounds of taking creative license. “I think there are good ethical grounds for giving sources for a book - and the fact that I neglected to do so reflects my thoughtlessness and my narcissism,” she told Die Welt in an interview, according to DW, while adding, “But for me personally, it doesn’t matter at all where people get their material - what matters is what they do with it.”

She went on to say that her novel is representative of the last decade “with the rejection of all of these copyright excesses and the embrace of a right to copy and to transform.”

According to this report from The Local, she also told the Berliner Morgenpost, “I myself don’t feel it is stealing, because I put all the material into a completely different and unique context.” In the same report, she pleads ignorance, saying, “she had not ‘fully understood’ the process for acknowledging borrowed material.”

Axolotl Roadkill’s publisher, Ullstein, has said it will credit Airen for all borrowed material in the second printing of the book. Strobo’s publisher, Berlin-based Sukultur, announced Tuesday it wanted an amicable settlement. Sukultur is researching just how much of Airen’s writing was taken. Most probably permissions will be granted, and permission fees paid. Airen appears not to want to exploit the situation, and to maintain his anonymity.

Meanwhile, though the amount of plagiarized material seems to be growing to now include the title of the book as well as a short story, Hegemann still has her supporters. DW writes that “German news magazine Die Spiegel, for example, compared Axolotl Roadkill to modernist classics like Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos. It noted the plethora of uncited sources in these works: ‘Everything from newspaper articles to ads to all kinds of other texts are embedded in these foundational works of literary modernism.’”

And Hegemann is still in the running for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. According to DW, one of the judges of the prize, Verena Auffermann, is quoted as telling the dpa news agency after the plagiarism was uncovered, “We believe that this young woman is extremely gifted.”

But others have remained critical. According to DW, German news magazine Die Zeit wrote, “No hype in the world is going to help against the charges facing the book. The originality of the work is now completely dubious - regardless of whether Hegemann has an idiosyncratic view of authorship or whether her approach reflects the times.”

Sex, drugs, literary “sampling”, copyright infringement — this story has it all! And it remains to be seen how it will ramify for the young author and the German literary world.

Film director James Cameron “has been accused of plagiarism over his current worldwide blockbuster, Avatar,” says British website The First Post. According to its report, “despite the film’s anti-materialistic sentiments, the accusation comes from Russia, where it is claimed he ripped off the storyline from a hugely popular futuristic fantasy by two former Soviet sci-fi writers. Russian film-goers say Avatar has several key elements in common with The World of Noon - or Noon Universe - a series of 10 bestselling novels written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in the mid-1960s.”

The Strugatsky books are hugely popular — “they sold in their millions and were popular with Soviet teenagers and intellectuals alike” says First Post — and outraged fans are trying to get surviving brother Boris to go to a screening of the film and sue for plagiarism but so far he’s “shrugged it off.”

So is there a case? “The most obvious similarity is that both stories are set on the planet Pandora in the 22nd century. The Strugatskys’ Pandora is inhabited by the Nave, a group of humanoids whose name sounds very much like that of Cameron’s humanoids, the Na’vi. Both Pandoras are also warm and humid, and densely covered in trees,” explains First Post.

Of course, Cameron “is used to defending himself from accusations that he has borrowed from other writers,” notes the report. “The same claim was made after the release of his Terminator films and, of course, there was nothing original about Titanic.”

Camille Laurens

A Times of London story reports “France’s notoriously lofty literary world is watching in slack-jawed amazement as the country’s leading female writers lunge at each other with daggers drawn in a ferocious battle about plagiarism.” The contest is between Camille Laurens, who wrote a novel called Phillipe in 1995 about the loss of her infant child, and Marie Darrieussecq, who wrote a novel called Tom Est Mort in 2007 about a woman who loses an infant child. To further complicate matters, both writers share not only a publisher, POL, but an editor, Paul Otchakovsky.

Actually, the fight started three years ago, when Laurens reviewed Darrieussecq’s book and accused her of “psychological plagiarism.” She wrote, “Reading Tom Is Dead, I had the feeling that it had been written in my bedroom, that she [Darrieussecq] had sat on my chair, lain in my bed.”

But Darrieussecq fought back,calling the charges “vile,” and cited lots of other authors who had written about the loss of a child. (Although the Times report fails to go into detail, it appears the texts only had one line in common: “I don’t want another [child]; I want him, the same one.” Meanwhile, another leading French writer, Marie NDiaye, also “stepped forward to accuse Darrieussecq of ‘imitating’ her work,” too.

But the case seemed — abruptly — settled when editor Otchakovsky sided with Darrieussecq and fired Lauren by telling the Le Monde newspaper he would no longer publish her books. All has, apparently, been quiet ever since.

Marie Darrieussecq

Until this week, when both women published books about the fight, shocking observers who thought they’d been off working on new novels. But Darrieussecq has instead written “a studious analysis of literary theft” while Laurens’ has produced “a thinly veiled fictional account of a novelist who is dropped by her publisher after accusing a young rival of plagiarism.”

According to The Times, Laurens’ book is a moving account but “seems calculated to embarrass her former editor.” Meanwhile, Darrieussecq, who is also a practicing psychoanalyst, writes in her book that behind every charge of plagiarism is “the crazed desire to be plagiarised.”

But perhaps Darrieussecq should keep practicing: What about when someone has actually been, you know, plagiarized?

Chris Andersen

Thanks to, oh, I dunno, the death of one of the biggest pop stars of all time … or you know, all that hell breaking out in — well, lots of places … or maybe just the Twitter meltdown of Alice Hoffman … the story of Chris Anderson’s astonishing, many-layered plagiarisms in a book about, er, information and stuff wanting to be free, has disappeared from everyone’s radar without time for much in the way of consideration.

Too bad, says Brian in a post at Survival of the Book. He says some of the limited discussion of Andersen’s heist wasn’t enough — he’s particularly upset by a post at BoingBoing castigating bloggers for getting so upset about “the p-word” and lauding Andersen for apologizing briefly “without backtracking on [his] failure(s) and why they matter.”

Says Brian, “Look, I understand this isn’t George Bush declaring ‘Mission Accomplished’ a month after a war started, a war that has now gone on almost a decade, or some Bush official dismissing the thousands of people stranded and starving in New Orleans after Katrina. Fine. But ‘the p-word’ is kind of a huge deal to p-people — publishing folks like me and readers of this blog who know that the written word is all we got. If you denigrate that with the mentality that it can be fixed later, no big deal, we got some trouble coming down the line.  And this is a future that might slam BAM! right in our face if we keep moving at the current speed with such little regard for details and the integrity of publishers.”

Chris Anderson

Wired editor Chris Andersen was the talk of the book biz yesterday, due to the too-ironic-to-believe revelation that his forthcoming book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (one of those only-in-big-publishing projects: a $26.99 hardcover that talks about things such as information wanting to be free) was riddled with text Andersen apparently lifted from other texts … for free.

It started with a heads up in the Virginia Quarterly Review by Waldo Jaquith, who said he’d been sent a review copy of the book, which pubs on July 7, and “discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources…. Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia.” It’s a thorough job, even including thumbnails comparing texts side-by-side.

Shortly afterwards, however, came an even more devastating update from blogger Ed Champion, who said “the VQR’s investigations only begin to scratch the surface. A cursory plunge into the book’s contents reveals that Anderson has not only cribbed material from Wikipedia and websites (sometimes without accreditation), but that he has a troubling habit of mentioning a book or an author and using this as an excuse to reproduce the content with very few changes — in some cases, nearly verbatim.” Champion, too, does a thorough job of giving examples, and concludes that “It appears that Chris Anderson, who boasts in the acknowledgments about spending a year and a half writing this book, has spent most of these eighteen months repurposing content from other sources.”

A report on Gawker by Ryan Tate offers “the upshot: Print authors like Mike Pollan were cited for ‘intellectual debts’ Anderson owed them, while many of the forward-thinking, freely-contributing writers Anderson champions in the book got no attribution. As it happens, this is violates the copyright license governing Wikipedia.”

In a statement to Gawker later circulated to other newsletters and bloggers, Anderson said “this is my screwup… I feel terrible about it.”  But he also diminished the appropriations as “mistakes” not plagiarism, and said “We’ll have the original notes that were supposed to accompany the book, which includes all these, online by publication date.” His publisher, meanwhile — Hyperion — took his side, and his spin, telling Gawker, “We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson’s response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book.”