While JT LeRoy, a young H.I.V.-advantageous novelist from West Virginia, whose fiction supposedly reflected his brutal life as a teenage hustler, became discovered 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 consists of calls with authors and celebrities secretly employed by the hoax’s offender, Laura Albert, has reopened old wounds and raised questions on whether documentary films, increasingly visible as potent varieties of journalism, have to adhere to the same requirements as different kinds of reporting. That is downright evil and worrying,” said the actress and director Asia Argento, who did not recognize that her conversations were recorded or that excerpts had been in the documentary. “I am furious.”
The documentary “Writer: The JT LeRoy Story,” launched last Friday, recounts Ms. Albert’s trajectory, which, in large part, stems from her attitude. After she agreed to talk with the director, Jeff Feuerzeig, he found that she had recorded her phone conversations for years, keeping cassette tapes classified with the names of humans like Ms. Argento and the writers Mary Karr and Dennis Cooper Univers Inform.
For some folks that reviewed transcripts from “Author” provided with the aid of The Ny Instances, the revelation years after the truth that Ms. Albert had been covertly recording telephone calls became but some other deception in a path of lying that extended to the past due 1990s and early 2000s, When JT LeRoy published “Sarah,” a novel Approximately a 12-year-antique truck-forestall prostitute, and “The Coronary heart Is Deceitful Primarily Matters,” connected quick memories Approximately an abused boy.
