True Crime Campfire - Fake Fiction: The Story of J.T. LeRoy

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

So, this might seem like a weird question, but hear me out. Does authenticity matter? Let me be more specific. Does art need to be authentic? What if you found out, for example, that your favorite writer—somebody whose traumatic life story you related to, somebody whose identity was a living, breathing part of the power of the stories they told—was a fake? Not the person they presented themselves to be at all? Would you be fine with it, or would you feel kind of…betrayed? And how would you feel about the stories? Would they hit a little different if you knew the person who wrote them was a big, stinky fraud? Join us for the story of an audacious literary con, a scam that made its mastermind a pile of money and a whole entourage of celebrity fans—and rocked the early 2000s literary scene to its core. Sources:The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/20/jt-leroy-story-modern-literary-hoax-https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/23/my-life-as-jt-leroy-savannah-knoop-on-playing-the-great-literary-hoaxerNew York Magazine: https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/14718/Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/08/jt-leroy-documentary-interviewDocumentary "The Cult of J.T. LeRoy"Investigation Discovery's "Impostors," episode "The Heart Is Deceitful"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. So this might seem like a weird question, but hear me out. Does authenticity matter? Let me be more specific. Does art need to be authentic?

What if you found out, for example, that your favorite writer, somebody whose traumatic life story you related to, somebody whose identity was a living, breathing part of the power of the stories they told, was a fake? Not the person they presented themselves to be at all. Would you be fine with it, or would you feel kind of betrayed? And how would you feel about the stories? Would they hit a little different if you knew the person who wrote them was a big, stinky fraud? Join us for the story of an audacious literary con, a scam that made its mastermind a pile of money

and a whole entourage of celebrity fans, and rocked the early 2000s literary scene to its core. This is fake fiction, the story of J.T. Leroy. So, Camper's, for this one, we're in November 2003, on the sixth floor of the Chateau Marmont in L.A., where the rap party for the movie The Heart is Deceitful, above all things, was going at full throttle. The movie was based on the second book by a shy, mysterious young author named J.T. Leroy. It's a semi-autobiographical collection of connected short stories. and it's rough stuff, harrowing stories of abuse, underage sexual exploitation, and addiction. Leroy's first book, Sarah, was about these same kinds of dark, confessional themes. In the late 90s, his portrayals of the dark side of sex and family

had helped the teenage J.T. Leroy built his name as a writer. And quite a name it was. J.T. had managed to assemble himself one hell of an entourage of admirers, basically a who's who of celebrities who liked a little bit of edge to their public personas. Courtney Love, Madonna, Billy Corgan, Winona Ryder, just to name a few. We could run out a breath list in them all. At the rap party for the hardest deceitful were Chloe Seven Yee, Marilyn Manson, Boo, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, and the movie's writer, director, and star, Asia Argento.

So it was quite an event, if in a B-list kind of grungy sort of way. Well, B-plus, I guess. Let's say B-plus. And everybody at the party was wondering if J-T. the literary prodigy himself would actually show up this time, because he often didn't. Notoriously anxious, J.T. kept a low profile physically, by far preferring to communicate on the phone or via email. He got other writers and celebrities to do readings of his work rather than stand up there himself. Kind of understandable for somebody so young. I mean, when the guy started writing, he was all of 15.

But as it happened, he did turn up at the rap party at Chateau-Mormant. A slight little guy in a blonde wig and big dark shades that hid most of his face. He was shy, shuffling around, speaking in a teeny tiny little voice and doing whatever his roommate slash handler, Speedy, told him to. After slurring out some answers to Nancy Rommelman, a journalist from the L.A. Times, he apologized for not answering your questions very well and then promptly passed out on her lap. Oh dear. So, a best-selling author of edgy fiction based on his own life goes to a party celebrating the movie version of his latest book. On the surface, this is not really a situation where you'd get all suspicious and think, is this person real? I mean, the little guy's right there, snoring on a journalist's lap.

But it was a question that had started to bubble around the edges of the prodigies literary circle. Is this guy real? When Nancy Rommelman asked Asia Argento that question at the rat party, presumably after cleaning J.T.'s sleep drool off her panty hose, she responded with a dismissive shrug in the way probably only Italians can do. Why were there doubts about J.T. Leroy? Well, let's start by looking at the bio part of semi-autobiographical novel. What was J.T.'s story? And we should give you a little content warning here, campers, for

pretty much everything. In particular, some rough stuff about childhood abuse and exploitation. So Jeremiah Terminator Leroy was born on Halloween night, 1980, in Bumfuck Nowhere, West Virginia, by which I mean it was way out in the country. Obviously, the town wasn't really called bumfuck nowhere, although apparently Kentucky does have a town called Monkey's Eyebrow. So you really never know. In his early years, J.T. lived with his grandparents, abusive religious fundamentalists who were so convinced that J.T. was inherently sinful that they used to bathe him in lie. Just, God, that's awful. His mother was hardly more than a child herself when she had him.

She struggled with a pretty serious drug addiction and made money as a sex worker at truck stops. She'd been in and out of J.T.'s life in his early years. He could never count on her. But eventually, she came to his grandparents' house, scooped him up, and made him part of her life. And before you start thinking, oh, good. Finally. Hang on a second. When we say she made him part of her life, we mean fully part of her life. Before long, she had J.T. turning tricks at the truck stops just like her.

Oh, my God. For his encounters with clients, and I put that in air quotes, because if you're having sex with an underage kid, you're a rapist, not a client. Right. J.T.'s mom put makeup on him and dressed him like a girl. The kid wasn't even 10 years old at the time, which is just horrifying and evil. By the age of 11 or 12, J.T. was out in his own and had managed to make his way all the way across the country to San Francisco. Alone and with nowhere to stay, J.T. only knew of one way to get by. So he started hustling on Polk Street. Before long, he added a heroin addiction and an HIV diagnosis to his sad resume.

Poor kid, Jesus, Jones. But there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Eventually, J.T. came to the attention of Speedy, a 30-something ink. woman doing outreach on the streets of San Francisco. Speedy flat out rescued J.T., who was going by the street named Terminator. Before long, she'd brought him home to live with her and her boyfriend asked her, and suddenly J.T. had a brand new makeshift family. It was the first real stability he'd ever had in his life. The possibility of involving child protective services or, you know,

somebody with professional training and the ability to provide meaningful help to this traumatized kid doesn't seem to have occurred to Speedy and Astor. Nope, just throw them in with a couple of neurotic, grungy weirdos in their 30s with no experience caring for children. That'll do it. Yeah, I'm sure it'll be fine. If you don't have professional CPS, homegrown is fine. Of course, if anybody in their circle had bothered to express any doubts about the situation, it probably would have gone in one ear and out the other with Speedy.

She wasn't the type to take advice. speedy had this kind of intense wild-eyed energy that could just bulldoze over any objections, and she was clearly the one driving the bus for this weird little family. Speedy did eventually put J.T. in touch with the psychologist, and it didn't take long for him to spill all kinds of horror stories from his childhood. The psychologist encouraged J.T. to write some of the stories down as a way of coming to terms with the trauma he'd been through. J.T. really hadn't had any kind of formal education, and writing was pretty much a brand-new idea to him, but he took to it like a precocious little duck to water.

Speedy gave him a notebook and a pen, and he went ham, writing story after story in his little kid-like handwriting. It was heart-rending stuff. In 1994, when J.T. was 15, he made a bold move. He somehow dug up the phone number for Dennis Cooper, an L.A. writer with an edgy reputation. Cooper's stuff dealt with a lot of sex and abuse, and one night J.T. just called him up out of the blue. in a nervous-sounding southern accent he told Cooper he was an aspiring writer and he admired his work so much and then he spilled out some of his sad life story

and it's no surprise that Dennis Cooper took an interest in this kid I mean J.T. could have walked right off the pages of one of his books and the kid was charming with that southern drawl and everything we southern folks campers nobody can resist us yeah one second you're minding your own business scrolling on Facebook and then suddenly you have a standing date with a microphone every week. And people are sending you emails about how you have the sexiest voice in podcasting, which I still think was a prank.

Anyway, no, it's happened enough times. It's happened so many times. It's not a prank. I'm embarrassed. Okay. So Dennis Cooper listened to JT's story and told him, keep writing. Now, any published authors listening to this, y'all are going to see this coming a mile off because the next words out of JT's mouth were, well, do you think you could take

a look at some of my writing and let me know what you think. Boy. Cooper told the show Impostors that his first reaction to this was, oh, God, no, not another one. I'm going to have to try not to crush this kid's dreams. But he agreed to take a look anyway, a little reluctantly, and bless him for it too, because we really need good mentors in this world. He was expecting it to suck out loud, I'm sure.

I mean, everything I wrote at 15 certainly did. I can promise you that. I still physically cringe every time I think. think about the poem I wrote in middle school called Pretty Poison about the mean girls in my class. Oh, Lord, the shit I could read you from my high school journal, which I still have, but then I'd have to kill you. But then J.T. stuff came shooting out of Dennis's fax machine, and he was like, holy shit,

a 15-year-old kid wrote this? Holy shit. Dennis Cooper was so blown away that he started connecting J.T. with editors and other writers, and eventually talked his own agent into representing the kid. Young as he was, J.T. Leroy had the kind of talent that might create something special. When Cooper told J.T. to check out the work of an author called Bruce Benderson, he started cold-calling Benderson, too. Benderson was every bit as taken in by J.T.'s flattery and Southern Charm as Dennis Cooper was, and once the faxes started coming in, just as impressed with this 15-year-old prodigy's work. Cooper and Benderson both helped J.T. with his writing, and Benerson, and Benner's,

Anderson edited a lot of his early work for him. For free, I assume. Now, I think it's worth taking a minute to think about what's happening here. Almost immediately after J.T. Leroy begins writing, he starts courting established writers for help and connections. Look at it one way, and you see a ballsy kid just seeking out relationships with people who inspire him. But look at it another way, and you see some pretty aggressive self-promotion, an ambitious kid playing for sympathy and using charm to further his career. And also, like, weren't we just told that this kid was so anxious in social situations that he couldn't stand to do his own book signings?

That doesn't sound to me like a kid who'd have the wavos to cold call a famous writer, which is something that even I wouldn't probably have the guts to do. So, hmm, you know, it makes you think. It might seem like a cynical take, but hey, what's true crime campfire without a healthy dose of sweaty paranoia, right? we're basically the real-life version of that Futurama Giff where fries like narrowing his eyes at the camera We're suspicious bitches It's part of our charm Damn

Suspicious bitches would have been a good podcast name Oh Yeah if you use it campers let us know Why didn't we think of it? And it wasn't just writing advice that JT got from these guys He leaned really hard on them for emotional support too He called Dennis Cooper almost every day, all hours of the day and night whenever he got anxious. Sometimes he needed help during a

crisis. J.T. was feeling suicidal or was worried that a John might get violent with him or was feeling the need to use again. Cooper was as much J.T.'s therapist as he was his writing coach, but he kept advising the kid to keep writing. And it was good advice. A couple of years into their friendship, when he was only 17, J.T. Leroy signed his first book contract. And in 2000, his first novel, Sarah, out. Sarah told the story of a gender-fluid West Virginia kid pushed into sex work, who had a troubled relationship with his quote, lot lizard mom, sorry for that phrasing, but that's from the book, a plot clearly based on JT's own experience. The book was confessional, sexual, kind of surreal, kind of quirky, and it was a hit. I mean, there were loads of stories like

that at the time, tourist trips through hell for the cynical Gen X crowd. Looking at you, train spotting. So Sarah was a smash, and J.T. Leroy, so young and was such a jaw-droppingly awful life story, was becoming kind of a cult figure. People lined up for his first bookstore readings. But not everybody was buying it. One of the folks invited to J.T.'s first reading was a journalist called Stephen Beechy. When Stephen read Sarah, his first thought was, no way in hell a teenager wrote this. It was just way too polished. Now that, of course, was supposedly part of J.T. LaRoy's appeal. He was a prodigy, boy genius. But when J.T. didn't show up for the signing, Stephen Beechy's antennae started twitching. He thought, why is everybody just

taken this story at face value? Do we have proof that this kid is who he says he is? We've said it before, campers. Some people have good radar. And Stephen Beechy smelled a rat. But J.T. allegedly had a good excuse for skipping the signing. He was scared to death. His anxiety was just way too bad to let him go up in front of a crowd of strangers. This was perfectly in keeping with what people knew about J.T. Literary Prodigy or No. The kid was, by his own description, pretty messed up. Mm-hmm.

But it did highlight the fact that other than Speedy and Aster, nobody had really met J.T. face-to-face. His relationships were all over the phone, facts, and email. To give his fans the readings they wanted, J.T. back on his friendships with famous writers, talking them into reading his work at the signings and singing his praises to the fans. And of course, Speedy was always there too. J.T.'s rescuer slash roommate was now his manager, too. When people had questions about J.T., speedy always seemed to have a ready answer. Speedy was intense, the kind of person who always

made you feel like you were the single most important being on the planet when she was talking to you, which, if you've ever met one of those people, can slide pretty fast from flattering to creepy. Yeah. In 2001, J.T. Leroy's second book came out. The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. This, like Sarah, was based on J.T.'s own life story. And also, like Sarah, it was a huge success. J.T. was still avoiding being seen in public, which, if anything, only made him more famous.

People love a man of mystery. You know, we really do, which chaps my ass, because I really want to be mysterious, like, so bad, but I just can't do it because I can't shut up long enough. Everybody knows literally, like, all the people in my life know everything about me. And, you know, once you've told somebody about your endoscopy, the mystery just kind of flies right out the window. Maybe it was a mysterious endoscopy. Well, I mean, I was unconscious for it. They could have been doing anything in there. Do do do do do do. Anyway, please continue.

J.T. was starting to gather more and more celebrity fans, both by his handy-dandy cold-calling and flattering technique and by people just jumping on the J.T. LeRoy bandwagon. Other writers were still performing all J.T.'s readings. But then, to everybody's surprise, J.T. started showing up himself. But he was still anxious. That's not something you can just choose. to get over. Believe me, I've tried. And his way of handling it was to disguise himself. He wore a blonde wig and huge sunglasses, so most of his face was covered. Sometimes a reading would fall apart when J.T. had a panic attack. But whenever that happened, Speedy was always there to smooth it over. J.T. had cultivated his telephone-based friendships with the kind of focus that seems totally exhausting to me. Oh, same. He knew a lot of people, had a ton of friends, but they

were all over the phone. Now that J.T. was out in public, some of these people would come up to him on the street or at a restaurant all happy to see him IRL. But it was weird. J.T. never seemed to know them. He just stood there like a deer in the headlights. And when they referred back to conversations they'd had on the phone, he just looked confused. Hmm. Stephen Beechy, the journalist whose spidey sense had been jangling about this kid for a minute one, was feeling more and more certain that his suspicions were legit. Partly because of J.T.'s odd behavior and partly because of his own past experience. See, Beechy had been an outreach worker in San Francisco years ago, and his partner still worked as one. He knew plenty of people who did sex work and lived on the street, and the

pictures J.T. painted of this world just didn't ring true. And this irked him, to say the least. If J.T. was just making the shit up, then there was some really gross exploitation going on. Or, appropriation. Something deeply gross. Beechi kept wondering, why isn't anybody doing any investigative work to check out whether Boy Wonder really is who he claims to be? And then he was like, well, but if you want something done right, you better just do it

yourself. In the mid-90s, when J.T. was supposedly living on the streets in San Francisco, Beechie was there too, running a writer's group for kids in the tenderloin, a part of town known for crime, drugs, and sex work, and pretty much right where J.T. LaRoy was supposed to have been. Oh, hey, fun fact. You know why they call it the tenderloin? Mm-mm. It's because a cop once said that he could afford tenderloin working that beat because of all the bribes he got offered. Oh, charming. That's what you love to hear from your good folks in law enforcement, right? Lech. Hmm. But Beechie had never heard of J.T. or Terminator, the name he said he

went by on the street. So Beachy decided to start his investigation there. He went around with a copy of Vanity Fair magazine with the full-page picture of J.T. showing it to people he knew had been around at the same time. You remember this kid he went by Terminator? Did you ever see him around? But he couldn't find one person who had. Now, to Normie's, sex work is pretty much anonymous. You probably don't go to that part of town very often. You probably don't look too closely at who's on the streets. But it's not anonymous to the people doing it. They know each other. But no one seemed to know J.T. Yeah, I think you'd remember a kid called Terminator.

Right? Life on the streets was a long way off for J.T. right now. His two books were critical and commercial hits. He was working on a Hollywood screenplay. He was writing articles for major publications, mainly about his new life in the celebrity scene. Ugh, gross. His books were getting optioned for movies.

More and more celebrities wanted to be associated with him, and by this point, celebrity was the best word J.T. himself. The boy writer's writing was now less important than the boy himself. And just to prove that people are as sadly predictable as an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, as he got more famous, J.T. became more and more of an asshole. He started acting all arrogant and nasty with the writing friends he'd made before he started getting famous, flaunting his celebrity status. The little guy was getting a big balloon head. For the publicity events for his new book, Harold's End, Speedy would hustle

J.T. in the back door of the venue, shielding him from journalists and fans like he was the fucking Rolling Stones or something. I don't know whether his performance writer included a crystal bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones taken out, but I'd like to think it did. Listen, damn it. The brown M&Ms do not stimulate my genius. Don't you understand? You plebs? Now, somebody get me in Evian. Meanwhile, Stephen Beechie kept on digging. By his own admission, he was becoming kind of obsessed with getting to the bottom of J.T. Leroy's story. I can completely relate to that, I would be too. He searched birth records in West Virginia for a Jeremiah or Jeremy Leroy, but no joy.

And in the end, his big breakthrough came from sheer coincidence, not detective work. Beechy's partner had been talking with an old school friend, and out of the blue, the friend said, Hey, do you remember Jeffrey Knoop from school? Well, he and his girlfriend, Laura, say they're J.T. Leroy's roommates, but they're calling themselves speedy and Aster. Uh, what? This was a stunner to Beechie, just an unbelievable coincidence. I mean, what in the hell are the odds on this? Just insane.

And for Beechy's investigation, it was huge. He finally had real names for JT's handlers, and this threw open the floodgates. Jeffrey Knoop and Laura Albert, he soon found out, had a band called Thistle. Thistle was the reason they'd moved to San Francisco, without much security. success. And if you can track down their music, there are a few different thistles out there. It's not hard to see why. I mean, it's not like they're terrible, just, you know, forgettable, mediocre grunge, which was not something in short supply in the mid-90s, as you can imagine. Those bands were as common as dirt. And Beachy soon found some extra juicy stuff on Laura

Albert in particular. Speedy was not, in fact, an English outreach worker. In the liner notes from a tape, her bio says she was a singer-songwriter as well as an actor. actor and quote, phone sex technician from Brooklyn. I'm not going to lie, technicians made me snort laugh. So what the heck was the speedy persona all about? Right, just say operator. Operator makes more sense. Operator works.

Yeah. Technition makes it seem like you're operating like a sex robot. All right. Well, now the famous J.T. Leroy was a member of their band, writing Fissel's lyrics and doing some background vocals. They were finally getting some buzz. People were coming to their shows. They were selling CDs. This was Thistle's moment in the sun.

Stephen Beechie began to wonder, was it possible that these greasy freaks had concocted J.T. Leroy in his heartbreaking life and pushed him as the child savant author just to promote their dumb band? One thing was definitely true. JT's books were selling, and he was making money. Where exactly was this money going?

Well, Beechie found out that for the first novel, Sarah, the checks were made out to J.T.'s Cousin, who happened to be named Joanne Albert. Ah, same last name as Laura. What quinky dink. Right? And some of JT's magazine payments went to a Nevada corporation listed under the name of Carolyn Albert. Oh, wow. Another go-winky-dink. Look at that. Or not, of course. Joanne Albert was Laura's sister, and Carolyn was her mom. J.T.'s money was going straight to Laura Albert's family.

Sure now that he was on the trail of a fraudster, Stephen Beechie started contacting some of J.T.'s early acquaintances, including Dennis Cooper. At first, Cooper refused to even consider the possibility that J.T. Leroy wasn't real. He'd known this kid for years. He mentored him, but Beachy kept at him, showing him one after another of those weird little coinky dinks that seemed to follow J.T. around. Finally, and very reluctantly, Dennis Cooper started to realize he might have been had. Cooper was living in Paris by this point, but he gave Beachy permission to look through his archives, which he kept in New York, and Beachy hit Patert. A selfie J.T. had sent to K.

Cooper when they were first getting to know each other. The kid in this picture looked nothing like the J.T. Leroy, who was now appearing in public. The features were sharper. The chin and mouth and nose were totally different. J.T. was always in a wig and shades when he went out in public, so those were all you could see to compare with a selfie. But even so, the difference was clear. Beechie also found a list of San Francisco phone numbers that J.T. had called from in the 90s. Beechi started calling the numbers, and one connected to a guy that knew, Laura Albert in the 90s. He said Laura had sometimes asked to use his voicemail. Those were the

dark days before smartphones here, kids. And he remembered that Laura had this weird habit of talking on the phone in different accents. Oh, really? Uh-huh. The guy also remembered a short story Laura had written about a child being abandoned by his mother in a diner. One of JT's stories was about the exact same thing. This was enough for Beechie. He was convinced now that whoever the kid in the blonde wig might be, Laura Albert was the one writing

as J.T. LaRoy. He started calling people associated with J.T. both to break the bad news and get their reactions. And understandably, he got some pushback at first. He was talking about their friend, telling them he wasn't who he said he was. But for some people, the penny finally dropped. They'd probably been ignoring

a little voice in the back of their head for a wow now that something wasn't adding up about J.T. Beachy had convinced Dennis Cooper by now and he was dealing with a whole nasty constellation of emotions, mostly anger and betrayal. And he wasn't the only one. Finally, Stephen Beechie called up J.T. LaRoy himself to see what he had to say for himself. Somewhat surprisingly, J.T. pretty much shrugged the whole thing off. He just said, I have no great desire to prove that I'm real. Well, okay, sport. Whoa, man. That's like deep. But when Beechy's article came out in New York magazine, it went through the cozy little world J.T. and his handlers had built for themselves like a tsunami.

The article laid out, piece by meticulous piece, the evidence that Speedy and Astor didn't really exist. They were just a couple of dorks named Laura Albert and Jeffrey Knoop, lying about their backgrounds, and in Speedy's case, fake in an English accent. and that J.T. Leroy's fiction was in fact written by Laura Albert. Now, according to Laura, and I say that with great emphasis, according to Laura, she has a troubled past. Not quite as gnarly as JT's, but not great. At 16, she says she was a war to the state, living in a cramped group home in New York. As a child, she suffered abuse from a friend of her father. In 1989, right after she and Jeffrey got together in San Francisco, she says she was feeling

suicidal and started calling help lines. And one night she called a line for troubled kids. And when she connected with a psychologist on the other end, she apparently out of nowhere, started talking in the voice of a young Southern boy. Pretty much immediately, J.T. Terminator Leroy and all his sad backstory were born, fully formed. I don't know if any of y'all dabble in creative writing, but sometimes that does happen, where you're writing a character and they're suddenly just there, and it's like you're meeting them rather than creating them. That's what Laura said it was like with her and J.T. Of course, at this point, she wasn't writing the character of J.T.

She was pretending to be him on a suicide hotline for kids, which was, you know, maybe a service some actual kid needed that night. However troubled Laura might have been, there were services to help grown-ass adults in that situation, plenty more, in fact, than there were specifically for children. But this is something that would become increasingly obvious as the whole J.T. LaRoy mess unraveled, that Laura's needs and Laura's wants always come first, whether they're emotional, creative, or just vain and greedy.

Anyone and anything else has to take a back seat to what's good for Ms. Laura. Gross. Now, interestingly enough, Stephen Beechie's article didn't manage to solve one tantalizing little piece of this Hardy Boy's mystery of the two-faced author.

Who was the person in the blonde wig and sunglasses? The one who'd actually been showing up at parties and signings as J.T. LaRoy. New York Times journalist Warren St. John had been covering J.T. Leroy since Sarah, and had even interviewed him at a brunch where Speedy ended up doing most of the talking while J.T. sat there, mumbled, and played with his food. Beachy's article had divided the little community of J.T. friends and admirers. The kid was still appearing in public, so how could he be fake?

But it rang entirely true to St. John, and he started trying to uncover this last big piece of the puzzle, the real person behind J.T.'s public face. understandably most of the media focus had been on laura albert so far and she was it was now pretty clear the real author of the j t la roy books but st john decided to see if there was any gold to be mined and taken a closer look at the other half of the dynamic duo astor which granted is an absurd name but we have to admit still a step up on the cool scale from geoffrey canoop so more power to him i guess St. John discovered that Jeffrey had a sibling, Savannah. A simple Google image search scrounged up a picture of Savannah Canoop, and although the person there had short hair and no big sunglasses, there was no doubt in St. John's mind that he was looking at J.T. Leroy. So St. John tracked down some of Savannah's friends

and emailed them a picture of J.T. Leroy. He said, hey, could you just tell me who this is? The answers came back, one by one. Sure, that's Savannah. And then he did it the other way around, emailing friends of J.T. his newly uncovered picture of Savannah and just asking them to identify the person in the picture. Well, that was J.T. of course. So apparently, as J.T. Leroy got more and more famous, Laura Albert realized she had a problem on her hands. That is, she wasn't going to get away with this reclusive genius ship forever.

At some point, somebody was going to demand to see J.T. and if she couldn't produce him, people would start to figure out her little con. She needed a warm body as a stand-in, and she had a ready-made one close by. Once they had their breasts taped down, Savannah looked very much like the J.T. Leroy Laura had been describing over the phone to her friends.

I had the blonde wig and sunglasses to help J.T. with his anxiety, and Savannah was pretty convincing. The original ideal was that Savannah would be J.T. just once for a magazine photo shoot that Laura hoped would prove to everybody that the kid was real. But the shoot was a success, and Savannah enjoyed it. So Laura started paying them to be J.T. Leroy. Savannah uses they-them pronouns, just FYI. But always with speedy close at hand, coaching and directing JT and doing most of the talking. And for a little while, it was a wild ride.

expensive hotels, flashy parties, celebrity friends. Savannah was having a blast playing J.T. But then Savannah got a call from Warren St. John. Rett Rue. He told them he knew it was them under the wig and shades that he had the picture to prove it and that he was going to print the story tomorrow. Did Savannah have any comment?

Savannah was silent for a slit second. Then they said, I don't need this in my life right now. And hung up on him. St. John took this as confirmation. The article exposing Savannah Canoop was going to print. He had turned up some other dirt, too. J.T. had actually written a travel article for the Times about a trip to Disneyland Paris.

I'm not sure of the actual title, but it should have been The New York Times is paying for our Parisian vacation. The article describes four people going to Paris. J.T. along with Speedy, Aster and their young son, But the expense receipts submitted to the time showed Air France flights for only three people. Huh. Weird. Mm-hmm. Hotel employees in Paris shown pictures of Laura Albert said, Oh yeah, she's the one who introduced herself as J.T. Leroy.

When one employee told her they thought J.T. Leroy was a man. Laura said she'd had a sex change operation three years before. Holy shit. Holy moly. This bitch might not know the truth if it's spit in her. mouth but she sure as hell has audacity, don't she? Wow. Laura and Jeffrey didn't respond to St. John's request to comment on his upcoming article, although their lawyer did provide a statement purporting to be from J.T. As a transgendered human subject to attacks, I use stand-ins to protect my identity. Jesus, take the wheel. Okay, let's make a note of that for our holy shit that's gross scorecard, shall we?

There is no JT. Only Laura. Laura is a 40-year-old. straight, cisgender woman. A woman who, when caught in a lie, invokes false membership in a vulnerable group who is actually, like, frequently attacked, so she doesn't have to answer any tough questions. Ew. Laura, ew. Ew. Yeah, that's the free square on the lying on the internet bingo card I'm making.

It happens, like, fucking clockwork. They get criticized, and they're like, actually, you can't criticize me because I'm X, Y, Z. Right. Yep. And if you're a patron, you remember the HIV living scandal. We covered in a recent patron's only episode. That white, straight, cisgendered woman was collecting vulnerable identities like Pokemon. Not great. Stop it. God, you suck.

So a few weeks after St. John's article came out, he had another one ready to print. Aster slash Jeffrey Kanoop had reached out to him. He knew the jig was up. He and Laura had just separated. and he wanted to come clean. So finally, we were going to get a firsthand account from somebody who was part of the J.T. LaRoy scam from the get-go. Canoop confirmed a lot of what the reporters had already uncovered.

He'd watched Laura Albert write J.T.'s books in their apartment. He'd listened to her talk to writers and celebrities and her fake little Southern boy accent, which I bet was fucking awful, by the way. And he confirmed what Stephen Beechie had always suspected, that the original point of this little J.T. Leroy caper was to create some buzz around their band in Laura's writing. Unbelievable. He also confirmed just what a cynical, manipulative hosebag Laura was. She was a big fan of Dennis Cooper and she thought he might be able to help jumpstart her writing career, but she didn't think he'd have the time of day for a 30-something woman.

So she called him up as Terminator instead, who eventually evolved into J.T. Leroy, the troubled young street kid with the hidden talent. Like we said earlier, J.T. could have been a character in one of Cooper's books, so Laura knew exactly what she was doing there. Terminator was carefully crafted to get Dennis Cooper's attention and sympathy. Mission accomplished. I can't decide if that would be flattering or humiliating. Like, flattering that someone did it and humiliating that it worked, maybe?

Yeah, I'd want to crawl in a hole and die. Especially since we're always going, listen to your gut. Like, can you imagine? Yeeks. Embarrassing. The evidence was becoming impossible to ignore, even for J.T.'s staunchest supporters. Author Bruce Benderson, who had stuck by J.T. so far, and who considered him a very close friend, sent an email begging J.T. to write him back and, quote, please tell me this isn't true. He never heard back. Never heard from J.T. again, as a matter of fact. A close friendship just bloop turned off like a faucet. For Bruce Benderson, it was devastating.

He went from disbelief to mourning to anger. And the anger is legit. Both Dennis Cooper and Bruce Benderson and a lot of the other people J.T. pursued friendships with are gay. Laura was pretending to be a queer young man with AIDS right at the time in 1995 when U.S. AIDS deaths were at their peak. And the gay writing community was losing people at a scary clip. So these guys had lost friends and colleagues, and those wounds were still raw. I mean, of course they were going to try and help this poor kid. I think Laura Albert knew that damn well and exploited it.

And fuck her for that. Ira Silverberg, JT's one-time agent, who dropped him like a hot brick when the truth came out, told the New York Times, quote, to present yourself as a person who's dying of AIDS in a culture which has lost so many writers and voices of great meaning to take advantage of that. That sympathy and empathy is the most unfortunate part of this. So, like I said, fuck her. And look, these people didn't just support J.T.'s writing.

Remember, J.T. used to call his friends at all hours saying he was scared that a John was going to beat the crap out of him or that he was going to start using heroin again. So these friends played therapist, stressed out that their little friend was in a dangerous crisis. But there never were any violent Johns. There was never any heroin. All there was was Laura and her bottomless bag of bullshit, ruining somebody's good night's sleep. Ira Silverberg also pointed out that people were not just supporting J.T. Leroy's voice. They were supporting a person. Some supporters of Laura Albert still claim that the identity of the author is irrelevant, that the work should stand on its own.

But I don't buy that for a hot second. J.T.'s biography was an integral part of his success. The work never stood on its own. The whole point was that this damaged kid was. able to turn hardship into art. And Jeffrey Canoop says Laura Albert knew that damn well, that the whole point of JT was to get the attention that her work wasn't getting on its own. And the quality of the work itself is hard to nail down. At some point somebody asked the writer Dave Eggers to comment on the JT thing because he edited JT's third book. And he said,

I teach writing to high school students. And every year I have a kid who's writing is great. And I ask myself, is it really great or do I think it's great because a 15-year-old wrote it? You can never separate it, which if you've read the book Aragon by Christopher Paulini, you know exactly how that is. Totally, right. It's a good book for a 15-year-old, but it is not a good book. Yeah, that's a great example, actually. He took the D out of Dragon and added an E.

Like, that was the whole, anyway. Dennis Cooper was tougher, saying there were weaknesses you could drive a truck through, and J.T. stuff, but people forgave them because he was so young and traumatized that the books only had power because they were, quote, souvenirs of this boy's awful life. Right. Cutting out the crap, we have a middle class 30-something writer pretending to be trans, pretending to be queer, pretending to be sick, pretending to be addicted, pretending to be a sex worker and pretending to be poor. Yeah. All to further her own career and to make money, taking advantage of people's empathy and their desire to help marginalized people be heard. Not that Laura Albert sees it that way,

of course. She spent a lot of time trying to justify herself to Nancy Rommelman. Remember her? The poor journalist who tried to interview J.T. at a Hollywood party and got passed out on? Laura told Nancy that her own pain and suffering was just as bad as JT's, and this, quote, literary device was something she had to do to survive. When Nancy asked her whether she felt bad at all about deceiving and hurting other people, Laura turned it right back on herself. You helped someone. Do you feel bad about that? Oh my God. Do I feel bad about that? Yes, twatbag. I do because you are clearly a fucking nightmare and because you used me and lied to my face. But see, other people's pain doesn't matter to Laura. It might not even register as a thing. It's all about her.

everything is somebody else's fault and by the way that you helped someone crap is a great excuse for assholes of all kind isn't it every scumbag romance scammer who takes every penny some poor old lady has you helped someone do you feel bad about that the con man who talks to you into a can't miss investment and steals your retirement fund you helped someone do you feel bad about that John Dillinger to First National Bank. Well, you get the idea. I mean, you know, technically if somebody murders you, you've helped him get it off their chest, right? Like, you're gurgling blood out your nose, and he's like, wow, I feel so much better now. Thank you. You can feel good about that.

Laura Albert's greatest talent is lying, and she's undeniably pretty spectacular at it. She can craft a persona that's tailor-made to get you in her corner. it's something to keep in mind if you come across any of her posts about the whole debacle at one point she did a spoken word performance where she talked about it and campers i wanted to come through the screen oh yeah she was like the new york times actually used the phrase fake fiction writer like as if that's just ridiculous well yeah asshole that's what you are and if you don't see what's wrong with that i don't know where to start with you so yeah definitely remember that when you come come across all the little pretentious, neatly rationalized explanations she's put out there for what she did. She's going to try and convince you that, A, it was art, so all bets are off, and B, it was what she needed to survive. But listen, the woman is a liar. She's a fraudster. She's packed so tight with bullshit. You better hope you're not in the same room with her when she sneezes. Okay? You can't believe a damn word she says.

Oh, sure. You needed to survive by going to Hollywood parties and book signings. That's right there between food and physical safety in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I know. And it makes me just want to spit nails the way she tries to make it seem like if you're bothered by what she did. It's because you just don't understand arch or you're not an empathetic person. Look, bitch, I'm a very empathetic person, but I like to think I'm not a sucker. And I understand that nobody likes being manipulated and used. So Laura's still out there now walking a tight rope of trying to get credit for JT's work,

but avoid taking any blame for the damage done. Unfortunately, the courts have had no problem assigning blame. The film company that optioned the rights to Sarah won a $350,000 judgment against her for fraud, the contract having been signed by J.T. Leroy. Non-existent people can't sign contracts. So whoopsie doodle. Now, buckle up for this shit.

There's a new edition of Sarah out, by the way, with a foreword by Billy Corgan, bless his heart, smashing pumpkins frontman Alex Jones devotee, and a man who thinks he once had sex with a shapeshifter. So, you know, you can draw your own conclusions on that. I swear to God, I'm not making that up, by the way. The man thinks he banged a shapeshifter. Yep. Yikes. He's probably friends with those frenzy years from middle school. Oh, God. Remember the council? Yeah. The council is watching me. I know. To this day, I'm sure they're standing outside my window. So pretty much Every time we look at a scammer on TCC, there's plenty of, like, should have known better to go around.

And that is most definitely the case here. If nothing else, her West Virginia accent was just really not that great, especially since it was supposed to be like this really, like, backwoods, trashy-sounding thing. If you're going to go full-on cliche and set your poverty-meth abuse porn in Appalachia, at least do some work on your vowels, you know? Yeah, I love Appalachian accents. And, oh, I know, me too. If you want to inform yourself about Appalachia, read books by actual Appalachians. Start with the short but informative. It's like 150 pages, I think.

What you are getting wrong about Appalachia by Elizabeth Kat. And then move on to Appalachian Reckoning by Anthony Harkins and Meredith Carroll. And both are in response to the humiliatingly bad hibouillie elegy, which you should under no fucking circumstances read. It's terrible. Yes. You know that bit in silence of the lambs where lectors like mocking Starlings' upbringing and says, Was your father, dear? Is he a coal miner? Did his smell of the lamp? So there we have a Welsh actor playing a Baltimore psychiatrist going broad with the accent,

and he's more convincing than J.T. Leroy by all accounts. So God knows what her English accent is speedy was like. It's like, oh, oh, you my pets, read me if I can book, you wankers. Sorry. We started this episode by asking if art needs to be authentic. Now, I'm not really an artist, so I'm not going to jump too deep into the pool on that debate. Though if you want my opinion, I'd say, yeah, duh. But even if art doesn't have to be authentic, okay, I still think people do. Laura, if you're listening, people do. And before we wrap up, if the sound quality wasn't what it usually is this week, we apologize. We had personal stuff come up and we had to record during the day this time, which means lawnmowers and birds and God knows what else. So we're sorry, but it was either that or you didn't get an episode this week. Pretty sure we'd know which one you'd pick.

So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime. campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Jordan, Jillian, Abby, Jenny, Esther, Michelle, Angie, and Sharon. We appreciate you to the moon and back. And if you're not a patron, y'all, you are seriously missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes two, plus an extra episode a month. And once you get the $5 in up categories, you get even more cool

stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rad enamel pin while supplies last at 10, virtual events with Katie and me, we've been doing a ton of those lately and they've been super fun, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us.