Court Awards Damages in J.T. LeRoy Fraud Case

Posted on June 29, 2007

San Francisco writer Laura Albert lost big in court when a federal jury awarded the production company $116,500. The jury agreed that Albert had defrauded Antidote International Films Inc. who lied to the company by pretending she was a male prostitute named J.T. LeRoy. The case is a total embarrassment for the literary community which embraced LeRoy's writing and endless sob stories about his tortured youth. Not only were any of the stories true, J.T. LeRoy never existed anywhere but in the mind of Ms. Albert.

To extend the ruse, Albert's friends donned wigs and posed as the fictitious LeRoy at book signings. They duped journalists with the phony back story about a past as an underage male prostitute. Albert even made phone calls to a psychiatrist while posing as the troubled teen, and grabbed the attention of such authors as Tobias Wolff and Dave Eggers, and filmmaker Gus Van Sant.
Although Albert stared straight ahead when the verdict was read, and said she expected the decision, she was quick to condemn it. "This goes beyond me," Albert said. "Say an artist wants to use a pseudonym for political reasons, for performance art. This is a new, dangerous brave new world we are in."
She said that Antidote had succeeded in exposing more of her life story during the trial, and will try to make more money off of it.
"They made my life public domain. It's about commerce," she said. "They're going to try to hijack my copyrights, which is like stealing my child."

Laura Albert is a con artist, pure and simple. The verdict was more than fair.