Speaking of "Made Men"

It appears that serial fabricator and plagiarist Ruth Shalit (Barrett), Princeton. 1992, is suing The Atlantic over their retraction of her largely fabricated article about parents using obscure sports to get into elite schools.

It included such whoppers as  a girl getting stabbed in the jugular in a fencing accident, families putting Olympic size hockey rinks in their back yards, etc.

It smelled really bad, particularly since Shalit-Barrett published under the name "Ruth S. Barrett", in what was a clear attempt to avoid the scrutiny that would inevitably result when someone whose reputation rivals Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass.

At The Atlantic, though, they decided that she deserved a second chance, because she is an Ivy League graduate, and they can only fail up, and she is now mad as hell that they actually held her to account:

Ruth Shalit Barrett, the freelance writer whose widely read 2020 story the Atlantic retracted after saying it had lost confidence in her credibility, is suing the magazine for $1 million in damages. She alleges that the retraction of the article and a lengthy editor’s note that disavowed her and mentioned incidents of plagiarism in her past “destroyed her reputation and career.”

Barrett said in a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in D.C. that the Atlantic “unlawfully smeared” her “for acting in accordance with the law and ethical precepts of the profession of journalism.” She alleges defamation and breach of good faith and contract, among other claims. Don Peck, the Atlantic’s former print magazine editor and current editor-at-large, is also named in the suit.

No, you didn't act in accordance with the ethical precepts of journalism, and there is no law involved in publishing phony sh%$ in a private publication.  If you have to anonymize a source, you tell your editor, which you did not.

The Atlantic ran Barrett’s story, “The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League-Obsessed Parents,” in its November 2020 issue and published it online in October that year. The article offered a look into the posh mania of competitive youth sports such as fencing and lacrosse, focusing at first on a Connecticut mother who was referred to by her purported middle name, Sloane, to protect her anonymity.

Barrett wrote that Sloane had three daughters and a son, and described one of the daughter’s fencing injuries as a being part of a “Fourth of July massacre” after she had been “stabbed in the jugular.” She also wrote that some Connecticut families had built “Olympic-size hockey rinks” in their backyards.

But those details and other elements of the story began to fall apart after Erik Wemple, The Washington Post’s media critic, examined Barrett’s story, speaking to a fencing expert who cast doubt on the likelihood of such a gruesome injury. The founder of a company that builds ice rinks for the affluent in the area said he knew of “nobody who’s built an Olympic sheet, not even the hedge-fund guys.” Wemple reported that people close to the family said the woman identified as Sloane did not have a son.

Wemple also noted that the Atlantic story appeared under the byline “Ruth S. Barrett,” obscuring the name “Shalit,” which was Barrett’s byline in the 1990s when she wrote and edited for the New Republic and New York Times Magazine. Under that name, she had been accused of plagiarism multiple times. (In response to those incidents, she has said she made errors in attribution because of “carelessness” and “sloppy work methods.”)

Shalit-Barrett is suing because she believes that she is entitled to an infinite number of chances, because she graduated from Princeton, dammit.  While she claims that the retraction of her, "Destroyed her reputation and career," she will have a very hard time claiming that she had ANY reputation or career remaining.

In fact, her choice to use a byline that obscured her notorious past is an indication of just how toxic her reputation still is.

The editors at The Atlantic, who later wrote that, "We cannot attest to the trustworthiness and credibility of the author, and therefore we cannot attest to the veracity of the article," which would have at least required a deep dive into the facts of the article pre-publication and their insistence that her byline include the name "Shalit."

They didn't though, and they would not have but for the fact checking of Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple.

More proof that nothing binds like those old school ties.