Sean McDonald Speaks Out About James Frey, Kinda
The latest New York mag has a quick-n-dirty feature on Sean McDonald, the Riverhead editor who "championed" Fake Writer James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. McDonald has (wisely) stayed mostly silent during Oprah's post-Book Club ragefest, but he actually got on the phone (chaperoned by a publicist, of course) with New York's Dave Itzkoff. Curiously, Itzkoff even got some quotage from Frey himself, "just days" before the Smoking Gun published their report.
How'd they get the scoop? Coincidentally (and really, just coincidentally), New York had been working on a huge, glorious profile of McDonald as publishing's new It Boy. The piece had been in progress for quite some time, but when the Smoking Gun invalidated much of Frey's story and thus called into question the work of his publisher and editor, New York scrapped the piece.
After the fallout, New York had just enough pull with McDonald — as they'd spent so much time working on the much lovelier, previous piece — to get him on the phone for a few awkward, post-scandal grunts. After all that, however, the best we get out of him is that his "faith in James has been rocked some in the past couple weeks." Well, no shit.
