Get me fact check, stat!…

I’ve never read her work, but I’ve been aware of Naomi Wolf for a while. She’s the lefty feminist thinker and writer who’s big on outrage and who, perhaps most famously, advised Al Gore to wear brown suits when he was running for president. (I don’t know whether the advice was taken, but it didn’t do much good.)

Anyway, fact checking has apparently never been her strong suit.

In a chronological takedown of Wolf, writer Caitlin Flanagan noted:

1990’s: starts the decade with publication of the Beauty Myth which becomes a big blockbuster but includes, as harbinger, a whopper of a mistake: claims 150K women die per year in US from anorexia @CHSommers checks the numbers: 400 maximum. (Source: Flanagan’s twitter feed)

I tried a five-minute fact check of Flanagan, but couldn’t find any confirmation, other than to say that it seems that the number is a lot closer to 400 than it is to 150,000.

But that was then, way back in the 1990’s. And surely someone as Yale-grad brill as Naomi Wolf learned a lesson about getting the data right, right?

Well, maybe not.

She has a book coming out entitled Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love.  The focus of the book is (as I understand it, without having read Word One of it) is a Victorian-era British poet who struggled with his homosexuality in part because being gay was something of a death sentence in England at the time. Wolf asserts in her book that she discovered through a close reading of the records that, during the mid-19th century, a number of men were put to death for being gay.

I’m pretty sure that being a 19th century gay man in England was not trip to the beach. Oscar Wilde, quite famously, spent two years in Reading Gaol for the “crime” of being gay. And yet, there’s no evidence that gay men were being executed. As Wolf found out when she was being interviewed on BBC by Matthew Sweet.

Apparently when Wolf saw the words “death recorded” she interpreted it as someone having been put to death. This is, to me, is a reasonable interpretation. But it’s the wrong one. In fact, “death recorded” is:

…a 19th-century English legal term. [It] means that a convict was pardoned for his crimes rather than given the death sentence.

Oops.

After pointing out Wolf’s error:

Sweet pulled up his own research — news reports and prison records — showing the date that Thomas Silver [an individual Wolf had cited in her work] was discharged. (Source: NY Magazine*)

As it turns out:

…there is no historical evidence that shows anyone was ever executed for sodomy during the Victorian era.

Wolf did end up acknowledging her error, and her publisher, while pointing a finger her way, remains behind the book:

A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt spokesperson offered this statement: “While HMH employs professional editors, copyeditors, and proofreaders for each book project, we rely ultimately on authors for the integrity of their research and fact-checking. Despite this unfortunate error we believe the overall thesis of the book Outrages still holds. We are discussing corrections with the author..

But Wolf, the day after the Sweet interview, did a bit of last ditch defense of her work, tweeting out a reference to an earlier article by one A.D. Harvey.

Problem with Harvey is that he’s something of a history maker-upper:

He deceived the public into thinking that Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky met once and created several online personas and an entire fake community of academics.

Having missed the “death recorded” thang, you’d think Wolf would have been a bit more cautious about A.D. Harvey. The first thing that comes up when you Google him is his wikipedia entry, which describes him as “an English historian, novelist and hoaxer.” (Emphasis mine.)

I’m guessing that when she goes to write her next provocative bestseller, Naomi Wolf will be hiring herself a damned good fact checker.

In the meantime, she might want to jettison the blurb featured prominently on her twitter page banner.

Larry Kramer – “A remarkable and moving work of creative scholarship.”

That’s one way to look at it…

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*Here’s the link, which for some reason won’t let itself be embedded above.