Who is Ed Klein?
Klein resigned from the New York Times Magazine after publishing “two stories of questionable accuracy.” As editor, he ran a staged photo of a drug arrest that turned out to be a four-year old advertising photo and ran an article about an encounter with the Khmer Rouge that turned out to be a hoax.
He later became a gossip columnist for Parade under the pseudonym Walter Scott. There, he produced “four gossipy, thinly sourced, and financially successful books about the Kennedy family.” [Source: The Village Voice]
Klein’s body of work
Klein’s Kennedy books were found to be “salacious” and inaccurate. As then-CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour noted, Klein took “half truths and untruths and concocted a fictional conclusion.” He employed “People-magazine-level investigative reporting” to “ferret out what may or may not be truth” from Kennedy acquaintances, even publishing outrageous claims that JFK Jr.‘s wife Carolyn Bessette was a “hot-tempered cokehead.”
In fact, much of his work is aimed at attacking prominent women like news anchor Katie Couric and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Klein’s gossip book “The Truth About Hillary” was written while he was being paid by a conservative publisher looking for an anti-Clinton book. Klein said his book, in which he made false homophobic attacks and the appalling claim that Chelsea Clinton was a product of “marital rape,” was intended to be “an attack on someone who is not suitable to be President of the United States.”
Even Klein’s fellow conservatives panned his book on then-Senator Clinton. Columnist Kathleen Parker wrote that “only the fringiest Clinton-haters” could like the book, and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan called Klein’s work “poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced, and full of the kind of loaded language that is appropriate to a polemic but not an investigation work.”
Turning his attention to President Obama, Klein later self-published a novel, “The Obama Identity: A Novel (Or Is It?)”, that rehashes every conspiracy theory about the Commander-In-Chief, including that he was born on foreign soil and is a Muslim.” He also published the demonstrably false claim that the President humiliated Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu by leaving him to have dinner with his family upstairs—an impossible claim, as his wife and their daughters were all in New York at the time. In his latest work, Klein appears to have lifted a source’s key quote from the Huffington Post (rather than his own interviews) and, according to the source, constructed a false characterization of the interview.
The reviews
Klein’s latest book, “The Amateur,” was rejected by “every respectable publishing house” and, instead, is being published by a “far-right imprint specializing in the promotion of conservative talking points.” Here’s a sampling of what reporters and even his conservative peers have to say about his body of work:
The National Review Online’s Ramesh Ponnuru on “The Amateur”: “I would say that this story if just unbelievable.” [Source: MSNBC]
International Business Times on “The Amateur”: “It may be hard for Klein’s book to be picked up as the author has been questioned for his credibility in the past.”
New Yorker on “The Truth About Hillary”: “In better times, in a better world, the shoddiness of its reporting and the vulgarity of its writing would place it safely beyond discussion.”
Tucson Citizen: Klein’s book was “a rancid, stomach-wrenching dish of sloppy research and nasty personal attacks ... the literary equivalent of a backed-up septic tank.”
USA Today refused to repeat Klein’s allegations in “The Truth About Hillary” because it had “no independent proof of their validity.”
New York Post’s John Podhoretz: Klein’s Clinton book is “hate-ography” and “one of the most sordid volumes I’ve ever waded through.”
Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly on the Clinton book: “Far too many accusations are coming from people who are settling grudges in a cowardly way.”
A closer look at the discredited author behind the latest smear on the President — AttackWatch