More News in the Strange Case of KV
The New York Post had an interesting scooplet in the matter of defrocked writer Kaavya Viswanathan yesterday. (I'd link to it, but the Post website is virtually unusable.)
The Post found that a few months ago 17th Street Productions, the book "packager" which co-created (i.e., wrote) the now-defunct
How Opal Mehta..., "forked over an undisclosed sum to a Brooklyn author after she sued for copyright infringement."
Hunter College English professor Susan Daitch received the settlement earlier this year from Random House and 17th Street Productions....Daitch...said 17th Street rejected her novel "Blackwell's Island," about turn-of-the-century orphans sent to a notorious hospital on what's now Roosevelt Island, three years ago, then published a similar book with the same title by a different author.
In other words, people at 17th Street plagiarized from an unpublished novel, which adds more circumstantial evidence to my theory that the plagiarism in
How Opal Mehta... was committed by the ghostwriters, and not Viswanathan herself.
(I wish Viswanathan would stop obfuscating about this and tell the truth.)
The
Post also reports that "in 2004, shareholders sued 17th Street's parent company, Alloy Inc., and three top officers for $7 million, claiming the firm inflated Alloy's stock by misrepresenting its finances. The defendants settled but denied the charges."
Viswanathan has paid a price for using these ghostwriters—financial loss and permanent damage to her reputation. Will any heads roll at Little, Brown? Or are they content with letting a 19-year-old take full responsibility?
