Somewhat late to the party, but still: Rachel Abrams in the Times does a nice job bringing the Buddy Fletcher train wreck story up to date.

Millions of dollars have been lost, that much is certain. The explanation of how that happened and who is responsible is still emerging, but the cast, in addition to Mr. Fletcher, includes “those we normally think of as creating a line of protection against such fraud,” as Mr. Davis put it in his report. Named in various lawsuits are the consultant, Mr. Meals; the administrator of the hedge fund, Citco; and its auditor, Grant Thornton, which resigned as auditor after overstating a related fund’s value by $80 million, according to court documents.

This will sound extremely arrogant, but after it does, let me explain and perhaps it won’t, or at least not so much: The most important part of Abram’s article is that she references something I reported for Boston magazine.

While at Kidder, Mr. Fletcher, then in his 20s, managed a portfolio that reported $25 million in profit. When the firm did not pay him his expected bonus, he sued, claiming discrimination.

An arbitration panel eventually awarded Mr. Fletcher $1.3 million but ruled that Kidder had not discriminated against him.

In 2012, Granville Bowie, Kidder’s human resources manager during the time Mr. Fletcher was there, told Boston Magazine that the firm declined to pay the bonus because Mr. Fletcher had refused to tell anyone how he was generating his profits.

Why is this so important? Because it disseminates in the paper of record a quote—and an idea—that I think is both crucial to Fletcher’s story and deeply damning: The idea that coworkers have been suspicious of Fletcher’s accounting since his very first second job on Wall Street. That fact shapes the way you interpret both Fletcher’s subsequent career and his time at Harvard; indeed, the entirety of his life.

I had that fact in the Boston mag piece, and was proud of it; no one had ever gotten someone from Kidder to talk on the record before. But with all due respect to Boston—a magazine I love—the Times has a much broader reach and impact. And when the TImes actually quotes someone else’s reporting, something the paper doesn’t generally like to do, it sends the message, Hey, we think this fact is so important that we’re going to do something that we’d rather not. So for a writer, getting props from the Times is a nice tip of the hat.

The truth, I believe, is that the true story of Buddy Fletcher’s life is so strange and macabre that it’s actually quite hard to tell it in a straight journalistic format; all these news stories about what’s going on in the various lawsuits only scratch the surface. Really, it would require a novel—one that most people, I think, wouldn’t want to read. There’s just nothing positive, nothing redeeming in this story whatsoever. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to report.