Applying to the bar is very difficult, but New York
Times columnist Joe Nocera would have you believe that it
should be a cinch for a recovering pathological liar. He
writes that Stephen Glass, who had fully or partially
fabricated anywhere from 35 to 50 articles for the New
Republic, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and
elsewhere, has had a hell of a time trying to become a lawyer on
account of the scandal. California’s Committee of Bar Examiners has
rejected his application, a decision which was overturned by the
State Bar Court, and which is now heading to the state’s Supreme
Court.
But should the rest of his life also be destroyed? That,
apparently, is the view of the Committee of Bar Examiners, which
vets bar applicants for the State Bar of California. Given how
Glass has turned his life around (more about that in a minute), it
is a little hard to understand its resistance. So far, the
committee
has lost in two separate judicial proceedings, but
it continues to press on, making this last-ditch appeal to the
California State Supreme Court.…
The line, “But should the rest of his life also be
destroyed?” betrays too much hyperbolic self-absorption to be taken
seriously. There are a number of livelihoods Glass can pursue
without a license, ones that won’t become a joke because of his
participation. The California legal system has more to lose than he
does.
Besides, the California State Bar hasn’t set fire to
Glass’s house or maimed his dog, but rather upheld its own ethical
standard. And how is this a surprise? When enrolling in law school,
students are prepared not only to pass the bar, but to expect a
rigorous moral and ethical examination from the state bar. Suffice
to say, lying is a big no-no. That Glass would push on with his law
degree so that he still might take the bar tells us something about
Glass’s moxy.
Nocera buys in fully, summarizing Glass’s road to
redemption as sign enough that he’s done his penance:
…Enrolled in Georgetown University Law Center when the scandal
broke, Glass was unhireable as a lawyer when he got his degree. A
sympathetic professor,
Susan Low Bloch, helped him land a clerkship with
a District of Columbia judge. Then he moved to New York where he
passed the bar but withdrew his application when he learned he was
going to be turned down. To support himself,
he wrote a fictional account of his misdeeds. He
underwent intensive psychotherapy and sought out those whom he had
wronged to apologize. He fell in love, moved with her to California
and took — and passed — the California Bar exam.
Not only did Glass press on, by the way, but he also
appealed when California rejected his bar application,
enlisting 22 witnesses:
In all, 22 witnesses testified to Glass’s good character,
including Professor Bloch, the judge he had clerked for and, most
remarkably, Martin Peretz, who was the sole owner of The New
Republic when Glass fabricated his stories and was deeply
embarrassed by the scandal. “I always thought redemption was within
his means because he was fundamentally a good kid,” Peretz told
me.
His prodigious, phoenix-like success and his ensuing
battle is reminiscent of the first go-round. Glass hasn’t lost his
touch. He is still capable of recruiting sympathizers who will
argue on his behalf. In so doing, these people turn a blind eye to
the many questions that would naturally arise when dealing with
someone deserving greater scrutiny.
There’s nothing remarkable about Glass finding character
witnesses. He has always found ways to hide behind others. Recall
that when Glass was first exposed, it wasn’t by his friends at the
New Republic, but rather by an online Forbes
publication. Distance from Glass’s charms appears to be the only
way to see through the smoke and mirrors. (Peretz, on the other
hand, still infantilizes him with the words “a good
kid.”)
Richard Blow, who had edited Glass’s faked stories for
George magazine, recounts times he stood by his friend
“Steve” as editors questioned the material. Others would similarly
stand up for him. As Blow wrote in
Salon:
Steve was a delight to edit. I’d call him about a manuscript,
and as soon as I said hello he’d blurt, “You hate it, don’t you?
It’s terrible, I know. I’m so sorry. I know. It’s awful. Just kill
it. Really. I won’t mind.”
He was disarming, like a little kid who’s pissed off at
himself; you couldn’t help reaching out, reassuring him that
everything would be OK. “Steve, it’s great,” I’d say. “It just
needs a little tweaking.”
“You really like it?” he would ask, his voice brightening.
“Really?
So it was that the “disarming little kid” would skate past
scrutiny by playing on the sympathies of his colleagues.
If Peretz finds Glass sufficiently reformed, will he offer
Glass another opportunity to publish in his magazine regularly? Is
he confident that something Glass wrote could be published without
a thorough review? Would Jeffrey Rosen (TNR’s legal
affairs columnist) be comfortable sharing a blog with
Glass?
It depends on how willing they are to look at the details.
Peretz is a busy guy, and he might not have examined the full
record of Glass’s past decade. Perhaps if Peretz had read Glass’s
book, The Fabulist, he might have hesitated.
The fictional account of the scandal allows Glass
to do the thing he’s always done. Hanna Rosin, once a close friend
of Glass, was struck by how his deception seeped into the
narrative. When The Fabulist was published in 2003, Rosin
noticed that while the author felt bad about lying to his
friends, he described them as unsavory characters
anyway:
Our hero, meanwhile, is a soul repentant. He is humble,
contrite. He is sad and afraid. He sweats, he shakes, he is haunted
by night terrors. And he’s also a few shades hipper than the
original: Rather than going to law school, as Glass did in real
life, he works in a video store, goes to strip clubs and Vietnamese
massage parlors — and always gets his girl after the first
date.
In a way we are lucky Steve wrote this book as fiction.
With a memoir, he might have strived for a coherent mea
culpa. Here we have his imagination unfettered, his true
fantasy of how things might have been.
The release of the book, by the way, neatly coincided with the
movie that portrayed him negatively (and accurately) as the
inveterate liar he was. In the communications world, this is a
common technique. By turning negative news about you into an
opportunity, you create a soapbox to “tell your side of the story.”
Glass surely felt it was necessary given the damning account in the
movie.
Her husband, David Plotz,
pointed out that the problem with Hayden Christensen’s
portrayal of Glass in the movie Shattered Glass was
that Glass was eminently more charming in real life:
Our Steve was a lovely, winning, hilarious, endearing person.
Christensen’s Steve is not. He’s got all the Glass tics — the
endless apologies, the constant helpfulness, the excessive
ingratiation — but while Steve made them endearing, Christensen
makes them only creepy. Our Steve rubbed off on all of us, made us
think that life could be luscious and fun. We loved Steve, but this
cinematic Steve seems too weird to love. He doesn’t have enough
magic.…
Here is a more troubling thought: Maybe Shattered
Glass is right, and my memory has deceived me. Maybe this
Steve is the real one. Maybe Steve was creepy in his insecurity;
maybe he was constantly manipulating us emotionally, and maybe we
were too stupid to notice. Maybe what I remember as his charm would
seem noxious to me today. I don’t know. I prefer my memory-bank
Steve: It makes me feel slightly less a dupe.
This is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s tragedy
Othello, in which the villain Iago banks on his charm and
wit to infect the minds of his clueless companions with lies: “When
devils will the blackest sins put on/ They do suggest at first with
heavenly shows/ As I do now.” Glass’s infecting charm was just
that: Infecting. And Rosin and Plotz aren’t the only two people to
sniff out the fraud in Glass’s fiction. Even Amazon.com’s review
of the book catches the flatness of the characters:
The Fabulist is populated with
characters seemingly pulled from the scrap heap of numerous failed
sitcoms: the Egotistical Boss, the Girlfriend Who Doesn’t
Understand, the Pushy Older Jewish Lady with a Single
Granddaughter, and the Comically Mysterious Co-workers. Many of the
characters are reportedly based on real people and are portrayed,
disappointingly, as jerks and fools more deserving of derision than
apology.
Rosin points to how easily (and frequently) he apologized
for matters both small and large, so as to remain in the good
graces of his company — or, as could now be the case, to ensure
his own advance.
The New York State Bar heard those apologies and remained
unconvinced. Later, the apologies also failed when presented to the
California State Bar, for reasons that Jack Shafer smartly
examines:
According to the committee, Glass didn’t begin writing
most of his 100-plus letters of apology until after he graduated
from law school, with most of the letters sent between 2001 and
2004, and as earlier noted, he waited until 2009 — 11 years —
before compiling his complete list of fabricated articles “and only
then in connection with these moral character proceedings,” the
committee writes. “[T]he full list of fabrications was only
compiled when it suited him, and not when it was most needed by his
victims.” (The official list now contains 35 New Republic
pieces, one at Harper’s, one at Policy Review,
two at Rolling Stone, and three at
George.)
The committee also noted that he made $193,000 on his book, and
that he did not compensate those he defrauded (TNR paid
him to write truthful articles, he furnished them with false
ones).
But maybe that’s not necessary, because we’re all thinking
in this forward frame of mind, right? Glass has changed, or so he
claims, so we should look at how (as Nocera puts it) he’s turned
his life around.
But if we are to move forward, why does Glass dedicate
such an immense volume of his testimony on his past? He turns to
blaming his parents, whom he describes as controlling and
vindictive, as they applied pressure for him to go to medical
school. He cites the rejection of his childhood classmates. No
slight in his past is left untouched, revealing that Glass is still
hoping to distract you from his shortcomings by portraying himself
as a victim. Classic.
The Times’s Nocera claims that viewing these
anecdotes as “excuses” (as Shafer does) is a “serious misreading”
of Glass’s testimony, because Glass “seems to go out of his way to
not make excuses for what he did.” But even if these aren’t excuses
and merely biographical points explaining how Glass disgraced
himself, one must wrestle with the fact that Glass has been the
compulsive liar and abused child-victim of his parents for longer
than he’s been the penitent law clerk.
Addicts like this are never actually cured, they’re just
recovering. When Nocera writes “People who know him tell me that he
is ‘relentlessly honest.’ Having once been a pathological liar, he
now won’t tell even the tiniest of white lies,” it sounds like the
description of the recovering alcoholic who lacks the self-control
to stop drinking once he starts. Should California tell potential
clients that they can trust someone so publicly standing on that
rain-slick precipice?
That it took until only two years ago for Glass to “fully”
catalog his transgressions, and only as part of his effort to
become an attorney, is damning. But what’s even more damning is
that Glass has found yet another area where he can cling to the
status of victim, skate along the hard-earned reputations of
others, and force a showdown, not about justice, but about
himself.
This was as true 10 years ago as it is now. It almost
makes you wonder about his author description for The
Fabulist, which appears on Amazon: “Formerly a journalist,
Stephen Glass is currently at work on his second novel.” Yes, he
sure is.
