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In her classic book The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm studied how the author Joe McGinniss buttered up the accused killer Jeffrey MacDonald—formally joining his legal-defense team and sending fawningly supportive letters after his conviction—only to turn around and publish a scathing book portraying him as a sociopath. Observing McGinniss’s approach, Malcolm draws a distinction between the reporting phase, when a journalist courts her subject, and the writing phase, when she betrays them. Many reporters take offense at this depiction of their trade as shamelessly exploitative, but Michael Wolff seems to take inspiration from it.
Wolff is the author of several best sellers, including 2018’s dishy Donald Trump chronicle Fire and Fury, but he’s in the spotlight this week because he shows up in newly released emails to and from the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. In the emails, Wolff appears to be positioning himself less as a reporter than as a media adviser to Epstein.
“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff wrote to Epstein about Trump in D
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