Host Matthew Kraig Kelly here. First, thank you to everyone who left a nice review, including all those who kindly gave us five stars. I notice that in the two cases where someone left a negative review, one reviewer listened to a single episode and the other to a single mini-episode. Neither, that is, actually listened to the podcast to which they so hastily gave a one-star review. I find that encouraging.
I do feel the need to address the more substantive of these two reviews, which is that left by Richard Karpel, who claims I make numerous errors of fact in Mini-Episode 1 –– which, perhaps tellingly, Mr. Karpel mistakenly refers to as Episode 7. Let’s reviews these alleged errors.
First, Mr. Karpel writes: “Podcast host Matthew Kraig Kelly says Malcolm did to Joe McGinness [sic] precisely what she claimed in TJATM he had done to Jeffrey MacDonald –– present himself as a sympathetic chronicler while planning to assault MacDonald in the version of events ultimately published in Fatal Vision.”
The qualifier “precisely” is Mr. Karpel’s, not mine. What I do is quote the famed journalist Bob Keeler:
“Listening to Malcolm’s sympathetic conversations with McGinniss, it quickly becomes clear that she did to him what McGinniss had done to MacDonald: namely, ‘worm her way into the confidence of somebody and then turn around and screw him,’ to paraphrase the journalist Bob Keeler.”
Did McGinniss “plan” all along “to assault MacDonald”? Did Malcolm plan all along to assault McGinniss? Neither I nor Keeler says anything of the sort. Rather, we say Malcolm gained McGinniss’s confidence and then destroyed his reputation just as McGinniss had gained MacDonald’s confidence and then destroyed his reputation. No serious person disputes this fact.
Mr. Karpel goes on to state that McGinniss’s relationship with MacDonald was more “extensive” than Malcolm’s with McGinniss, a fact to which he attaches an importance he neglects to explain. He then says that Malcolm’s whole “POINT” was that journalists invariably betray their subjects. But then I make the same observation. The sentence in Mini-Episode 1 immediately following the one quoted above reads: “We might give Malcolm points for consistency, at least, since she clearly believes that this is just what every journalist does to their subject.” Clearly, then, this POINT was not lost on me!
Next, Mr. Karpel writes: “Kelly also dishonestly claims Malcolm says she is too smart ever to consider empirical evidence and confidently draw a conclusion in a dispute over facts like those that lay at the heart of Fatal Vision. She said nothing of the kind. She merely said she wasn’t interested in delving into the details of the MacDonald case because it wasn’t relevant to her thesis.”
Who is being dishonest here? Put another way, who actually quotes Malcolm, me or Mr. Karpel? I do, as follows:
"I have read little of the material [Jeffrey MacDonald] has sent –– trial transcripts, motions, declarations, affidavits, reports. A document arrives, I glance at it, see words like ‘bloody syringe,’ ‘blue threads,’ ‘left chest puncture,’ ‘unidentified fingerprints,’ ‘Kimberly’s urine,’ and add it to the pile. I know I cannot learn anything about MacDonald’s guilt or innocence from this material. It is like looking for proof or disproof of the existence of God in a flower –– it all depends on how you read the evidence. If you start out with a presumption of his guilt, you read the documents one way, and another way if you presume his innocence. The material does not ‘speak for itself.’”
Does Malcolm say the evidence MacDonald sent her “wasn’t relevant to her thesis,” as Mr. Karpel claims? Not at all: “I know I cannot learn anything about MacDonald’s guilt or innocence from this material.” Her words, not mine. *She* claims looking at the evidence is a relativistic trap: “It all depends on how you read the evidence.”
Finally, Mr. Karpel states that, because MacDonald sued McGinniss for fraud and breach of contract, his standing to sue the author did not hang on a line in the contract stipulating that the “essential integrity” of his life story be maintained in Fatal Vision. But of course this is false. The entire reason MacDonald’s attorney, Bernard Segal, added that line to the *contract* between MacDonald and McGinniss was in anticipation of the possibility that McGinniss would produce a book that implicated, rather than vindicated, MacDonald, thereby breaching said contract.
In sum, and ironically, Mr. Karpel appears to have made as many errors in a handful of paragraphs as he thinks I made in a 14-minute episode.
I retract nothing. And I humbly advise Mr. Karpel to take a beat before pressing “Submit” next time around.
