Asia Argento and Others Are Angry About Being in JT LeRoy Documentary
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Version 0 of 1. When JT LeRoy, a young H.I.V.-positive novelist from West Virginia, whose fiction supposedly mirrored his tough life as a teenage hustler, was revealed in 2006 to be a literary hoax, many who had considered themselves friends or sought to help his career felt betrayed. A decade later, a documentary that includes calls with authors and celebrities recorded secretly by the hoax’s perpetrator, Laura Albert, has reopened old wounds and raised questions about whether documentary films, increasingly seen as potent forms of journalism, should adhere to the same standards as other types of reporting. “This is downright evil and disturbing,” said the actress and director Asia Argento, who did not know that her conversations had been recorded or that excerpts were in the documentary. “I am very angry.” The documentary, “Author: The JT LeRoy Story,” released last Friday, recounts Ms. Albert’s trajectory largely from her perspective. After she agreed to speak with the director, Jeff Feuerzeig, he discovered that for years she had recorded her phone conversations, preserving cassette tapes labeled with the names of people like Ms. Argento and the writers Mary Karr and Dennis Cooper. For some people who reviewed transcripts from “Author” provided by The New York Times, the revelation years after the fact that Ms. Albert had been covertly recording phone calls was yet another deception in a trail of mendacity that extended to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when JT LeRoy published “Sarah,” a novel about a 12-year-old truck-stop prostitute, and “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,” linked short stories about an abused boy. Mr. Feuerzeig said that he had used the recordings judiciously and defended his way of presenting Ms. Albert’s experience, saying, “It’s a subjective telling by her of her life.” Using an affected Appalachian accent to discuss her assumed persona’s tribulations, Ms. Albert spoke repeatedly over the years with Dr. Terrence Owens, a San Francisco psychoanalyst and psychologist who provided counseling by phone. She began writing at his suggestion and then cultivated relationships with well-known authors. In person, Ms. Albert professed to be JT LeRoy’s British friend Speedie. Her boyfriend at the time, Geoff Knoop, posed as a musician named Astor, and his half-sister, Savannah Knoop, pretended to be JT LeRoy, showing up at public events in oversize sunglasses and a blond wig that looked as if it came from the prop department of a B movie. As JT LeRoy’s fame soared, the group’s circle of friends and advocates widened to include the singers Billy Corgan and Tom Waits and the filmmaker Gus Van Sant, among others. Ms. Albert recorded many of them, documenting therapy sessions, discussions about memoir and more. Under California law, it’s illegal to record phone calls without permission from participants. Asked to comment, Ms. Albert, who lives in San Francisco, said she believed she could record any conversation she took part in. Some people whose conversations are in the movie, like Mr. Waits, declined to comment. Others could not be reached or did not respond to messages. But Dr. Owens said that he had never given patients permission to record him. Mr. Cooper said that the fact that Ms. Albert recorded calls without his knowledge and that parts of them had ended up in the documentary was “very problematic.” Ms. Karr described the recording as “a betrayal.” Stephen Beachy, a journalist in San Francisco who wrote a lengthy New York magazine article in 2005 that cast doubt on the identity of JT LeRoy, said that he knew nothing of the recordings and had refused to be interviewed for the movie because he did not want to lend credence to a version of events that he believed would rely heavily on Ms. Albert. “It looks like they found a way to use my words anyway,” he said. Like Mr. Beachy, Ms. Argento said that she had not known she was being recorded and declined to be interviewed for the film because she did not want to “validate” a narrative she believed would be shaped by Ms. Albert. Also, she was disturbed, she said, that the film includes Ms. Albert’s suggestions that she had been sexually intimate with JT LeRoy (in reality Ms. Knoop) in an effort to win the film rights to “The Heart Is Deceitful.” Ms. Argento said the accusation — which she called “nasty” and “painful” — had no merit. “It was very unethical,” she said, speaking from Rome of Mr. Feuerzeig’s decision to include Ms. Albert’s recordings and comments in the film without telling her. “As a director I would never do this; as a human being I would never do this.” Mr. Cooper agreed to an interview for the documentary but said by email: “Jeff Feuerzeig didn’t inform me that the recordings existed when he interviewed me, which seems very strange to me in retrospect.” Recently, documentaries like “Making a Murderer” and “Citizenfour” have used investigative or immersive tactics to tell compelling stories, winning acclaim and awards. Patricia Aufderheide, a professor at American University who studies documentaries, said that the people who make them generally have the same values and aims as print journalists and that there is a continuing discussion about how to integrate those values into films and “say something meaningful about something that really happened.” Although it is common journalistic practice to check factual assertions and question any that could be defamatory, Ms. Argento said she was not given the chance to counter Ms. Albert. And Warren St. John, a former reporter for The New York Times who revealed that JT LeRoy had been a fake, said that he was never alerted to Ms. Albert’s claim in the documentary that he told her, “I’m going to get you for violating the Patriot Act, and I definitely have you for mail fraud.” Mr. St. John said that did not sound like him, adding, “I’ve worked hard in my career to get sources to open up, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never invoked the Patriot Act.” In a phone interview Mr. Feuerzeig said that he had checked with some people, like Courtney Love, before including recordings in his film, and told Dr. Owens that he had included recordings of him. He said that he did not know he would use recordings with Mr. Cooper when he interviewed him, and that an excerpt from a call with Ms. Karr came from an interview conducted by JT LeRoy — “so Mary would have known she was being recorded.” (Interviewed for this article, Ms. Karr said, “I never knew I was recorded.”) Another excerpt came from an interview conducted by Mr. Beachy and recorded by Ms. Albert, Mr. Feuerzeig said, adding, “Since I assumed he was recording this interview for public use, I felt comfortable using the excerpts.” Mr. Feuerzeig said that a producer of his film had told Ms. Argento’s manager that “Author” contained calls that she did not know had been recorded. That manager also saw “Author” after it was completed, Mr. Feuerzeig said, and told the producer that Ms. Argento did not want to see it. In response, Ms. Argento said she never spoke with her manager about the movie. Mr. Feuerzeig said that he had invited Ms. Argento to be interviewed, so she could reply to Ms. Albert, but had not told her about Ms. Albert’s remarks or the recorded calls because the film was not yet edited. It was her responsibility, he added, to ask whether Ms. Albert had said anything she might not like. Mr. Feuerzeig said that he was not necessarily aiming for objectivity, citing the director Werner Herzog as an influence and journalists like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. “They believed that subjectivity was a more direct route to a deeper truth and what Herzog calls the ecstatic truth, that’s what I’m going for,” he said. “To have Laura Albert tell her own story is something I stand by.” As for Ms. Argento, Ms. Albert said: “She wooed JT to get the rights, which is what producers or directors often do. I don’t say anything more specific than that.” “Author” has received largely positive reviews, though A .O. Scott, writing in The Times, called it “less a documentary than an infomercial.” And Mr. Cooper called it “a superficial whitewash of a situation that was and remains far uglier and more damaging than his film lets on.” Ms. Karr said that she did not plan to see the film. Neither did Mr. Beachy, who said that he had scant desire to see Ms. Albert in person or onscreen. “I prefer to have as little to do with her as possible,” he said. “Laura has her destiny, and I have mine.” |