Another Counterfeit Interview: Gore Vidal (original) (raw)

In this week’s Talk of the Town, I reported that Tommaso Debenedetti, a freelance Italian journalist, had fabricated interviews with Philip Roth and John Grisham in which he attributed anti-Obama sentiments to both of them. The Roth interview was published in an Italian tabloid, Libero, and the Grisham interviews in two conservative newspapers, Il Resto del Carlino and La Nazione, and one with centrist politics, Il Giorno. I was curious to know what other mischief Debenedetti might have been up to, and I discovered that he had also published an interview with Gore Vidal in the Italian news weekly L’Espresso. Vidal, who lived in Italy for decades, reads and speaks Italian fluently. It seemed implausible that Debenedetti would have had the nerve to invent a long Q. & A. with him, but it also seemed unlikely that a prominent journal like L’Espresso would have run the piece without any fact-checking. Nope. This afternoon, I reached Gore Vidal, by telephone, in Los Angeles. He had never heard of Debenedetti, he told me, adding that he would have been less surprised to discover that an American journalist, rather than a European one, had perpetrated such a hoax. (I also tried to reach L’Espresso for comment, but it was too late in Italy and there was no answer at their U.S. office.) In the meantime, I am checking to see if an interview by Benedetti with last year’s Nobel Laureate in Literature, Herta Müller, that was published in Il Piccolo, a progressive newspaper with headquarters in Trieste, is another instance of his creativity. Stay tuned. And if you’re aware of other suspicious interviews by Debenedetti, please e-mail us.

UPDATE (April 1, 11 A.M.): Antonio Carlucci, the New York correspondent for L’Espresso, tells us that “L’Espresso never published an interview by Gore Vidal with Tomasso Debenedetti.” The counterfeit interview, he said, appeared in Il Piccolo, a Trieste newspaper owned by the same company as L’Espresso, which is why the interview could be found on the newsweekly’s Web site. In any case, the Debenedetti-Vidal exchange has been taken down.

“I would like to add that L’Espresso was very pleased to interview in the past Gore Vidal,” Mr. Carlucci added, “not by phone but face to face at his home in southern Italy.”