Janet Malcolm

 ( 1934 Births ) 

In August 1989, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco agreed with a lower court in dismissing a libel lawsuit that Masson had filed against Malcolm, The New Yorker and Alfred A. Knopf.

Malcolm claimed that Masson had called himself an "intellectual gigolo". She also claimed that he said he wanted to turn the Freud estate into a haven of "sex, women, and fun" and claimed that he was, "after Sigmund Freud, the greatest analyst that ever lived." Malcolm was unable to produce all the disputed material on tape. The case was partially adjudicated before the Supreme Court, which held that the case could go forward for trial by jury.

After a decade of proceedings, a jury finally decided in Malcolm's favor on November 2, 1994 on the grounds that, whether or not the quotations were genuine, more evidence would be needed to rule against Malcolm.

In August 1995, Malcolm said that she had discovered a misplaced notebook containing three of the disputed quotes, swearing "an affidavit under penalty of perjury that the notes were genuine."

Her example was the popular nonfiction writer Joe McGinniss. While researching his true crime book Fatal Vision, McGinniss lived with the defense team of doctor Jeffrey MacDonald while MacDonald was on trial for the murders of his two daughters and pregnant wife. In Malcolm’s reporting, McGinniss quickly arrived at the conclusion that MacDonald was guilty, but feigned belief in his innocence to gain MacDonald’s trust and access to the story—ultimately being sued by MacDonald over the deception.

Malcolm's book created a sensation when in March 1989 it appeared in two parts in The New Yorker magazine.Scardino, Albert, The New York Times. "Ethic, Reporters and The New Yorker", March 21. 1989. "Janet Malcolm, a staff writer for The New Yorker, returned her magazine to the center of the long-running debate over ethics in journalism this month ... Her declarations provoked outrage among authors, reporters and editors, who rushed last week to distinguish themselves from the journalists Miss Malcolm was describing." Roundly criticized upon first publication,See Friendly, Fred W., The New York Times Book Review, "Was Trust Betrayed?", February 25, 1990, and Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher, The New York Times, "Deception and Journalism: How Far to Go for the Story", February 22, 1990. the book is still controversial, although it has come to be regarded as a classic, routinely assigned to journalism students.McCollum, Douglas, Columbia Journalism Review, "You Have The Right to Remain Silent", January, February 2003. It ranks ninety-seventh in The Modern Library's list of the twentieth century's "100 Best Works of Nonfiction". Modern Library: 100 Best Nonfiction Douglas McCollum wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, "In the decade after Malcolm's essay appeared, her once controversial theory became received wisdom."

In Esquire, Tom Junod characterized Malcolm as "a self-hater whose work has managed to speak for the self-hatred (not to mention the class issues) of a profession that has designs on being 'one of the professions' but never will be." Junod found her to be devoid of "journalistic sympathy" and observed: "Very few journalists are more animated by malice than Janet Malcolm.” Junod himself, however, has been criticized for a number of journalistic duplicities, including a smirking piece in Esquire which outed the actor Kevin Spacey, as well as a similarly homophobic faux profile of the singer Michael Stipe.

Katie Roiphe summarized the tension between these polarized views, writing in 2011, "Malcolm's work, then, occupies that strange glittering territory between controversy and the establishment: she is both a grande dame of journalism, and still, somehow, its enfant terrible."

Charles Finch wrote in 2023 "it seems safe to say that the two most important long-form journalists this country produced in the second half of the last century were Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm."