Janet Malcolm
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Janet Malcolm is an American author and journalist on the staff of The New Yorker magazine. Her prickly, highly intelligent pen is usually found skewering something still alive.
She was born in Prague, in 1934, one of two daughters born to a psychiatrist father, but has lived in the United States ever since her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1939. She was educated at the University of Michigan. Janet Malcolm lives in New York with her second husband, Gardner Botsford.
Her works include:
- The Crime of Sheila McGough
- Inside The Freud Archives
- The Journalist and The Murderer
- Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, an examination of the notoriously closed psychoanalytic community.
- The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes
- The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings, which contains the excellent essay, "A Girl of the Zeitgeist."
- Essays and features on photography criticism
Her book, Inside The Freud Archives, triggered a $10M legal challenge by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, who claimed that Malcolm had libelled him by fabricating explosive quotations by him that brought him into disrepute. In the disputed quotations, Masson called himself an "intellectual gigolo" who slept with over 1000 women; said that he wanted to turn the Freud estate into a haven of "sex, women and fun"; and claimed that he was, "after Freud, the greatest analyst that ever lived". Malcolm couldn't produce all the disputed material on tape. The case was even partially adjudicated before the Supreme Court (see the opinion at Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc. (89-1799), 501 U.S. 496 (1991) (http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/89-1799.ZO.html)), and after years of proceeedings, a jury finally found against Masson in 1994.
Conversely, her "The Journalist and the Murderer" triggered outrage from her peers. They line up to flog her for her statement that "Every journalist knows that what he does is morally indefensible." Malcolm's example was popular author Joe McGinniss (The Selling of the President), who ingratiated himself into the bosom of the defense team of former Green Beret doctor Jeffrey MacDonald, then on trial for the 1970 murder of his wife and two daughters. McGinniss's "Fatal Vision" concluded that MacDonald was a psychopath hopped up on amphetimines when he killed his family; however, McGinniss's "morally indefensible" act was to pretend that he thought MacDonald innocent even after he became convinced of his guilt and to thereby remain privy to defense team strategies. According to Bost and Palmer's rebuke of "Fatal Vision," called "Fatal Justice," Janet Malcolm was the only journalist who showed any interest in the matter of MacDonald v. McGinniss, after MacDonald won an out-of-court settlement against McGinniss for fraud.