Ruth Shalit Barrett

The Atlantic has retracted an article in its November 2020 issue written by Princeton University alumna and former plagiarist Ruth Shalit Barrett, citing “serious concerns about its accuracy.” The article, “The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League-Obsessed Parents”, is about parents making their children take up elite sports like fencing and lacrosse to get them into elite colleges.

In the mid-90s, Ruth Shalit was a rising star, writing for GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Observer and becoming an associate editor at The New Republic at the age of 24. She was in demand because of her conservative outlook and her enthusiasm for baiting Clinton liberals in Washington (her sister, Wendy Shalit, is a conservative writer and the author of A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (1999)). However, she was found to have plagiarized articles she wrote for The New Republic in August 1994 and June 1995, and the magazine was forced to print apologies. According to a story about the Atlantic retraction in The New York Times, Barrett denied that she had plagiarized the articles. She claimed that she had confused her typewritten notes with articles she had downloaded for research. You can judge for yourself with some further examples of plagiarism printed in Mother Jones in the same year. However, after a controversial story of hers about affirmative action at The Washington Post was found to have many errors, she was accused by the Post‘s executive editor of demonstrating “a shameful absence of journalistic standards.” She took a six-month leave of absence, returning to The New Republic to write “cultural criticism, book reviews and trend pieces.” In 1999 she left The New Republic and Washington for good and took a job in New York, developing campaign strategies at the advertising agency Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and very occasionally writing for publications like The Wall Street Journal. She remained a member of a rogue’s gallery of famous plagiarists, however. She later moved to LA, married, and took her husband’s last name (Barrett), and wrote as Ruth Shalit Barrett for publications like Elle and New York Magazine (which raised some eyebrows). She now lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with her family.

Fast forward to this November and her article in The Atlantic. The article is “laden with factual problems and misleading passages“, according to her old foe, The Washington Post. The main subject of the article, a mother identified only by her middle name, Sloane, has a completely fictitious son, and there are falsehoods about the serious fencing injuries sustained by her daughters. After she was challenged about the fictitious son, Barrett told her editors that Sloane had lied to her about having a son. But, according The Atlantic, “The next day, when we questioned her again, she admitted she was “complicit” in “compounding the deception” and that “it would not be fair to Sloane” to blame her alone for deceiving The Atlantic.” The editors concluded that “Barrett deceived The Atlantic and its readers about a section of the story that concerns a person referred to as “Sloane.””

In explaining its decision to assign an article to a former plagiarist, The Atlantic says that “more than two decades separated her from her journalistic malpractice at The New Republic” and “in recent years her work has appeared in reputable magazines.” They “took into consideration the argument that Barrett deserved a second chance to write feature stories such as this one.” However, they now believe that “We were wrong to make this assignment.”

The article appeared under the byline “Ruth S. Barrett”. In retracting, as opposed to removing, the article (it is still available as a pdf), the magazine has also updated the byline to “Ruth Shalit Barrett”, so as not to hide the identity of the former plagiarist, now turned fabulist. In becoming a fabulist, of course, she has followed in the footsteps of other associate editor at The New Republic, Stephen Glass.

Coda: In January 2022, just over a year after this post was published, Ruth Shalit Barrett brought a lawsuit against The Atlantic, accusing The Atlantic and Donald Peck, its top print editor at the time, of defamation. She is asking for $1 million in damages.

The New York Times reported a recent study by Brock University of 451 adults, aged 20 to 82. The study found that thirty-four percent of COVID-19-positive participants said that they had denied having symptoms when asked by others, and fifty-five percent reported some level of concealment of their symptoms.

The Times article is terrible. It cites a study on lying from 1996, and randomly interviews several psychologists, one of whom thinks that people typically tell three lies within the first ten minutes of meeting each other. This only illustrates how loosely lying is defined by many psychologists.

The Washington Post did better. It published a link to the study and interviewed Angela Evans, the psychology professor at Brock who conducted the study. It also interviewed people about their behavior during the pandemic. One man in Alaska, Mark Plimpton, has flown to Northern Virginia to see his brother three times during the pandemic but has not shared photos after he got some “judgmental comments” on social media about his first trip. “These people,” Mark said, “they live with their families or they have family in the local area around them. I don’t, and the only way I can see my family is by getting on an airplane and traveling to the East Coast.” As the article notes, correctly, “He didn’t lie, per se, but he went out of his way not to advertise what he was doing.”

The same can be said about Emily (she did not want her full name to be given), who is “hosting a Thanksgiving celebration for about 25 people” for the sake of her grandmother. Her grandmother has dementia, and “cut off from her church community and unfamiliar with technology” she has “felt depressed this year.” Despite Emily’s plan to “get together outdoors, wear masks when they’re preparing the meal, leave windows open in the bathroom and serve food in small groups,” she is “not comfortable telling her friends, who sometimes seem to try to one-up each other with who’s being the most cautious about the virus.”

Emily, as the author of the Post‘s article, Marisa Iati, might have made clearer to readers, is keeping a secret from her friends, not lying to them. For more on the distinction between keeping a secret and lying, see my  “Secrets vs. Lies: Is There a Moral Asymmetry?” For a summary of the Brock University study, see here.

Bridget Anne Kelly, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Chris Christie, and Bill Baroni, former Port Authority Deputy Executive Director, had their convictions for wire fraud, fraud on a federally funded program or entity (the Port Authority), and conspiracy to commit each of those crimes overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 7, 2020. It is true, the Court ruled, that both Kelly and Baroni “used deception” to “reduce from three to one the number of lanes long reserved at the George Washington Bridge’s toll plaza for Fort Lee’s morning commuters.” They claimed that the “lane realignment was for a traffic study,” when it was for “no reason other than political payback,” because Fort Lee’s major had refused to back Governor Christie’s 2013 reelection campaign. Nevertheless, as Justice Kagan wrote in the Court’s opinion, “not every corrupt act by state or local officials is a federal crime. Because the scheme here did not aim to obtain money or property, Baroni and Kelly could not have violated the federal-program fraud or wire fraud laws.”

Hope Hicks, the White House Communications Director, testified behind closed doors for nine hours before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, February 27, 2018, as part of their investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. Hicks was accompanied by her two private lawyers, as well as three lawyers from the White House, and one lawyer from the Justice Department. Hicks declined to answer most of the questions they posed, although she did not invoke executive privilege. Attorneys from the Trump administration blocked Hicks from answering 155 questions. She would not answer questions about her time in the White House, or about the transition from the campaign to the presidency. Hicks told them she was instructed by the White House to only discuss her time working on the Trump campaign, which began in 2015. Under pressure from lawmakers, however, Ms. Hicks and her lawyers consulted the White House during the interview, and they determined that she could answer limited questions about her work on the transition.

After consultation with her lawyers, she said that she had “never been asked to lie about matters of substance or consequence,” such as Russia’s interference in the election and the possible links to Trump associates. However, she said that while working for President Trump, she occasionally told “white lies.” These “white lies” on behalf of President Trump were about small matters, “such as his availability”, according to the transcript of the interview, which is now available. These “white lies” were told at Trump’s direction.

In admitting to telling lies at his direction, even if only so-called “white lies” about “small matters”, Hicks has been more honest than anyone else in the Trump administration, all of whom refuse to admit to any lying.

Immediately after the testimony on Tuesday, as word spread that she had admitted to telling white lies at Trump’s direction, Trump berated her. “According to the source, Trump asked Hicks after the testimony how could she be so stupid,” said Erin Burnett on Erin Burnett OutFront.

On Wednesday, the day afterwards, she resigned.

The White House denied that Trump berated Hicks, according to CNN.

For years, Melania Trump’s online biography stated that she had “obtained a degree in design and architecture at University in Slovenia.” This was something that she had claimed at least since 2006. However, she never obtained a degree from the University of Ljubljana. The falsehood was repeated on the Republican National Convention’s program in July 2016, despite a profile of Melanie Trump by Julia Ioffe published in April 2016 in GQ which Ioffe said that “Melania decamped to Milan after her first year of college, effectively dropping out.” In response to the lie being exposed, the online biography was temporarily taken down in late July 2016, as several news outlets reported. On her Twitter account she claimed, instead, that it was taken down because “it does not reflect my current business and professional interests.”

Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican Convention on July 18, 2016, plagiarized Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic Convention on August 25, 2008. See the plagiarized sections here. When asked about the plagiarism, Melania Trump replied “I read once over it and that’s all, because I wrote it, and with as little help as possible.” However, the speech was written by Matthew Scully and John McConnell, and then rewritten by Melania Trump, who then asked Meredith McIver, staff writer for The Trump Organization, to assist her. McIver came forward as the person who actually wrote the speech for Melanie Trump. McIver admitted to using “some of the phrasing” from Michelle Obama’s speech, after Melania Trump “read me some passages from Mrs. Obama’s speech” over the phone.