The California supreme court has ruled that the state bar association has the right to deny former journalist Stephen Glass admission.

This should bring to an end a long and slightly ridiculous journey that began almost twenty years ago, when Stephen, whom I knew at the time (though not as well as I thought I did), began writing and fabricating articles for various magazines, including the one I worked at, George.

Glass’ argument was that he had reformed and was now both repentant and honest; the court wasn’t buying it.

“Our review of the record indicates hypocrisy and evasiveness in Glass’ testimony at the California State Bar hearing,” the court’s opinion stated. “We find it particularly disturbing that at the hearing Glass persisted in claiming that he had made a good faith effort to work with the magazines that published his works. He went through many verbal twists and turns at the hearing to avoid acknowledging the obvious fact that in his New York bar application he exaggerated his level of assistance to the magazines that published his fabrications.”

I don’t take any joy in this decision, but I do think it’s the right one; I never felt that Glass fully came clean or fully addressed what he had done. And I thought that what he had done was damaging to journalism, but was really damaging to minority groups, mostly African-Americans, whom he caricatured and stereotyped in unflattering ways in his work.

I’ve spoken on this subject a couple of times, both to the media and for the legal inquiry, and so I’m quoted in the CNN article and the court’s ruling. (Which is, by the way, fascinating reading; although writers are not always very good lawyers, lawyers can sometimes be very good writers.)

Chuck Lane, Glass’ former editor at The New Republic, is also quoted.

Sad to me, though, is that none of the editors at the other magazines Glass worked for would talk about the matter. Harper’s, which published one of Glass’ most damaging frauds, about gullible black people who believe in phone psychics—seriously—has still never admitted that the article is a fake—even though Glass himself finally did so in this court case. The article is behind a paywall, but you can still find it at Harper’s.com.

Unimpressive.

It’s too easy to blame only Glass for the frauds that he committed; in my view, the folks who edited and published them, including me, owe their readers an honest evaluation of how and why they got taken in. I’ve tried to do that—in public. So has Chuck Lane. Others, not so much. Stephen Glass isn’t the only journalist at fault here.