Creative Crimes

In her seminal work The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm launched a scandal with her famous opening sentence: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

Malcolm’s 1989 essay is a withering look at an otherwise-forgotten true-crime book. She claims that as he did his research, the journalist groomed the murderer, Jeffrey MacDonald, by leading him to believe the book would exonerate him. In fact, the journalist thought MacDonald was guilty, and used his quotes against him. MacDonald felt betrayed and sued.

Malcolm was questioning the morality of journalists who took advantage of their subjects. Yet it later emerged that, several years before publishing her book, Malcolm had herself been sued by Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson, a psychoanalyst she had profiled in The New Yorker. Masson claimed that Malcolm had misquoted and defamed him by...