transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Every mystery has an answer, but some have way more than one possibility. I'm Yvette Gentile.

Speaker 2:
[00:08] And I'm her sister, Rasha Pecorero. Every week on our podcast, So Supernatural, we invite you to explore the unknown and to consider the many theories behind each unsolved mystery.

Speaker 1:
[00:21] We'll guide you as you question the world you think you know, through investigations into spine-chilling hauntings, unexplainable encounters, strange disappearances, and so much more.

Speaker 2:
[00:35] So if you're ready to be haunted by stories of the unsolved and of the unknown, listen, if you dare, to So Supernatural, every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts. Campside Media. Hello? What is this? What do you want me to say? Oh, it's just, um, Chameleon. Chameleon Weekly.

Speaker 3:
[01:01] Oh.

Speaker 4:
[01:04] A lot of reporters think, you know, when they leave a story, it's all over. Sometimes it's just beginning.

Speaker 3:
[01:12] Gay Talese is one of the most famous narrative journalists of all time, and he was well into the twilight of an illustrious career when he turned his attention to a whale of a story, his White Whale of a story, one he'd been chasing for a good chunk of his career. It would start with a feature in The New Yorker, followed by a book, and then a Netflix documentary called Voyeur, which you're hearing a little bit of right now.

Speaker 4:
[01:37] I'm pursuing a story about a man named Gerald Fuss, who decided he wanted to buy a motel, the express purpose of using it to watch everything that was being done in private.

Speaker 3:
[01:54] In other words, to be a peeping tom, a voyeur. The Voyeur's Motel, Talese's 13,000 word piece about this man, Gerald Fuss, appeared in the April 4th, 2016 issue of The New Yorker and began like this. I know a married man and father of two who bought a 21-room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur. With the assistance of his wife, he cut rectangular holes measuring 6 by 14 inches in the ceilings of more than a dozen rooms. Then he covered the openings with louvered aluminum screens that looked like ventilation grills, but were actually observation vents that allowed him, while he knelt in the attic, to see his guests in the rooms below. He watched them for decades while keeping an exhaustive written history of what he saw and heard. Never once, during all those years, was he caught.

Speaker 4:
[02:48] I mean, it's just, you can't make this up. You can't make it up.

Speaker 3:
[02:54] It had actually all begun more than 30 years earlier, back in January of 1980, with a letter from this guy in Denver, Gerald Foose. Foose had heard that Talese was working on a book about sex in America called, Thy Neighbor's Wife. The voyeurism, which he described in detail, was his method of gathering data of his own. He'd bought a motel called The Manor House in the Denver suburb, Aurora, back in the 1960s to connect his research. Talese flew to Denver to meet this man, who offered to take the writer to the motel to confirm what he was saying, on the condition that he could only report on it anonymously. So Talese did go to the motel. He met Foose's then-wife, and even went up on the secret catwalk above the rooms, where he observed one couple in action. But Talese didn't write about it at the time, because he wasn't willing to grant this apparent deviant, a man who had been violating the privacy of motel customers for a decade plus, the luxury of anonymity. The two stayed sporadically in touch, and it took Gerald Foose more than three decades to get comfortable going on the record about his perversions. Foose was getting up in years. Both men were now in their 80s, and he was ready to be acknowledged for his work. That's what Miles Cain, who co-directed the Voyeur doc with Josh Corey, thinks.

Speaker 5:
[04:17] Gay Talese was this hero of his, and also, I think seemingly he saw gay as his chance at fame or notoriety. And I think it's clear that ever since he reached out to him in 1980, his pitch was, I'm not a pervert in an attic. Do you write about sex and taboo? And it's considered high literary commentary. I want to be part of that canon. I'm a sex researcher. I have invaluable sociological research. So he really saw gay as this really important figure and potential catalyst to his own fame or notoriety.

Speaker 3:
[04:58] You know, here's Foo's in his own words.

Speaker 6:
[05:02] I think I was attempting to gain some kind of notoriety because I did something that no one else had ever accomplished or ever did. I hope that they don't. The only thing that they have in their mind is the fact that I may be a pervert and a peeping tom because I wasn't that. I was actually a researcher.

Speaker 3:
[05:25] Talese's story made quite a splash. It became news, especially in Denver.

Speaker 7:
[05:29] This one is just chilling. An Aurora Motel owner watched his guests in some of the most intimate moments without them even knowing this. Now this wasn't just once. It went on for decades.

Speaker 8:
[05:40] Foos apparently began watching guests in 1966. The New Yorker Magazine article says between Thanksgiving and January of his first year, Foos observed 46 sex acts. He kept notes. They were very polite, very organized couple of male companion, he said about one threesome.

Speaker 3:
[05:59] Steven Spielberg optioned the rights to Talese's article and forthcoming book and a prestige director, the Oscar winner, Sam Mendez, agreed to direct a film adaptation. But someone else read the voyeur story and also couldn't stop thinking about it. Paul Farhi, an investigative reporter at the Washington Post.

Speaker 9:
[06:19] I grew up reading Gay Talese. Great admiration for him. I think he's a great journalist, a legend. And reading this, I was a bit surprised, because it was based on the say-so of this one guy, Gerald Foose. That isn't to say that a single source story is necessarily wrong, but a single source story is often distorted in some ways, because it's based on the memory and the say-so of one individual. And so much of this was dependent on Gerald Foose's recollections, his diaries, his journal, and it seemed quite a bit credulous to me that a guy as good as Gay Talese would take this guy at face value.

Speaker 3:
[07:12] This is Chameleon, a show about people who choose to ignore the line between truth and fiction. And I'm Josh Dean. This week, the story of the Journalist and the Voyeur, and what it often means when something seems too good to be true. This is Chameleon Weekly. Paul Farhi devoured all 13,000 words at the Voyeurs Motel and was riveted. This was incredible stuff, possibly too incredible. He fixated in particular on the story's most outrageous and disturbing omission.

Speaker 9:
[08:03] He writes that a young woman was strangled by a man in one of the motel rooms, and that he witnessed this.

Speaker 3:
[08:13] Not just that, either. As Foose told it, he had observed the man selling drugs from the room, drugs that he had hidden in a heating vent in the wall. And Foose didn't approve. So when the man left, he entered, retrieved the drugs and flushed them. Later, Foose heard the man fighting with a woman and went to his perch, where he saw the altercation get physical. The man, he says, strangled her, though he claimed that she was still alive when he slipped out. Later, a maid found the woman dead in the room.

Speaker 9:
[08:43] He says that he went to the police and told them anonymously that he had witnessed this murder and the police checked it out.

Speaker 3:
[08:51] Talese writes that he tried to verify the story and had spoken to various police officers in Aurora, but none of them could find any record of the case. The coroner's office also had no records, he reported.

Speaker 9:
[09:03] Instead of pausing and saying that maybe Gerald Foose is not the most credible source, Gay Talese writes this off as the records were probably lost.

Speaker 3:
[09:16] That didn't sit right with Paul Farhi. He decided to pick up the task himself. He made some calls.

Speaker 9:
[09:23] Well, the records simply weren't lost. I was able to find very simply that there was a murder that fits the description of the one that Gerald Foose passed off. It occurred about 10 miles away in Denver in a hotel in Denver about eight days before the murder that Gerald Foose says occurred at his motel. In fact, the circumstances of the murder were very similar to what Gerald Foose described. Now, how could it be that there's a record of a murder in a hotel 10 miles away that fits the exact same description of the one Gerald Foose described? Well, the answer to that is, Gerald Foose probably made up the story and used the actual murder in Denver as a description of something that he witnessed. So that was a complete red flag to me. I wrote a story about this missing murder and left it at that.

Speaker 3:
[10:21] Farhi reached out to Talese for comment by email, and the author declined. He said that he was busy and worried about being misunderstood. This voyeur story is over with me, he said. I did my best as a reporter. I wrote as well as I could. Farhi also reached out to Gerald Foose, who first declined to comment, then said he was, quote, aware of the other murder, and that the cops supposedly told him that the murder Farhi was talking about had nothing to do with the one he claimed to have witnessed in his motel. Three months later, Talese's book, also called The Voyeur's Motel, was published, and Paul Farhi read that too.

Speaker 9:
[10:58] There are significant other red flags in the account. I set out to write another story about what was wrong with and some of the red flags inherent in the book. Because at this point, after reading it, I don't necessarily believe much of the account of Joe Foose. I'm also starting to wonder whether Gay Talese let him run on without ever checking anything that he says he witnessed and experienced as part of this book.

Speaker 3:
[11:33] Farhi went back to the murder. He called the Aurora Police Department again and talked to a different detective.

Speaker 9:
[11:39] And the first thing he says to me is, I can't believe you guys in the media are still writing about this because we found records in the property database in Aurora that indicated that Foose didn't own the motel after 1980, that he had sold it. I was immediately stopped by this.

Speaker 3:
[12:00] Because Foose, in his diary and in Talese's telling, claimed to have been using the motel for spying on customers throughout that period.

Speaker 9:
[12:09] Some of the things described in the book could not have happened at all because he wasn't even at the motel, couldn't have had access to the motel. And that he was just basically making up stuff about what he was witnessing.

Speaker 3:
[12:22] This, to Farhi, was proof that Foose was a fabulist, who was, in some cases, fully making things up.

Speaker 9:
[12:31] And again, Gay Talese had accepted it without real shoe leather reporting to check into the credibility of this account.

Speaker 3:
[12:40] Farhi reached back out to Talese by phone this time. I should not have believed a word, the author told Farhi, after being shown the property records of the motel sale. I'm not going to promote this book. How dare I promote it when its credibility is down the toilet.

Speaker 9:
[12:56] Which I thought was rather strong.

Speaker 3:
[12:58] Because the central premise of the book was true. Gerald Foose did buy a motel to spy on people and did it for many, many years. Talese had witnessed that himself.

Speaker 9:
[13:08] He said, the source of my book is certifiably unreliable. He's a dishonorable man. I did the best I could on this book, but maybe it wasn't enough. To that I would say, yes, it wasn't enough because the old rule in journalism, as Gay Talese knows very well, is if your mother says she loves you, go check it out and get another source.

Speaker 3:
[13:29] What seemed clear to Farhi is that Talese had cut corners, or at least had put way too much faith in the credibility of his main source, his only source. A man who had pitched himself as the subject of a book to one of the most famous writers in America.

Speaker 9:
[13:45] He didn't really do a lot of reporting. He had met the Gerald Foose just once in 1980. He had gone to the motel, had seen the catwalk, and in fact had gone up into it and spied on various people at the motel to effectively check out the story.

Speaker 3:
[14:02] Which is, by the way, also a little problematic, because Talese didn't just tour the catwalk and confirm the existence of the viewing ports into the rooms below. He, by his own admission, watched a couple in one of the rooms having sex.

Speaker 9:
[14:17] I would say that's a breach of ethical behavior. If I wanted to write about bank robbers, I'm not going to go along with bank robbers to rob a bank. But that's just effectively what Gay Talese had done in this book.

Speaker 3:
[14:28] This was hardly the biggest problem with The Voyeur's Motel. The biggest problem was Gerald Foose.

Speaker 9:
[14:35] Do I think that Foose made up the whole story? No, I don't. I think there were many parts of it that were legitimate that he had witnessed over time. But he's not a credible source, and there's reason to question his entire story.

Speaker 3:
[14:51] Gay Talese grapples with this very issue at times in The Voyeur documentary.

Speaker 4:
[14:56] You have no trust between your source and yourself. You're in real trouble.

Speaker 3:
[15:01] He lays out the arrangement as he sees it quite plainly.

Speaker 4:
[15:05] We have a deal. This man, Gerald Foose, and I have a deal. That is for me to tell the truth and him to live with it.

Speaker 3:
[15:14] One of the most telling moments in the doc is when Foose, who is an eccentric obsessive across the board, takes Talese into his basement to show off his baseball card collection. Literally millions of cards arranged in boxes that fill the room. That collection, he tells Talese, is worth a fortune. And then he picks up a card that he claims is worth $500,000 or more.

Speaker 4:
[15:35] He has these prices he keeps quoting. And I don't know, is this guy nuts? But on the other hand, I don't know. I'm not a collector. How do I know what these things are worth? How do I know if this guy is totally exaggerating? I don't know. If I reflect that he's a braggart, then it might reflect on all that I believed of what he saw. I can definitely testify to the accuracy of the room, of the attic. I know that was, I saw it, I was there. But the rest of it, I'm getting from him and he's my single source. And you're unwise to have one source.

Speaker 3:
[16:14] Farhi found one more very obvious lie in the book. Fuse told Talese that his son had once lived in the same apartment as the most infamous former resident of Aurora, Colorado, James Holmes, the mass shooter who killed 12 people in a movie theater during a showing of The Dark Knight Rises back in 2012.

Speaker 9:
[16:33] Check the property records. That didn't happen. And I'm not saying that it's terribly relevant to the story of the Voyeurs Motel per se, but again, it reflects on the credibility of the main source that he was a liar basically.

Speaker 3:
[16:49] Talese did spot some of this himself. He acknowledged in both the excerpt and the book, having found inconsistencies in Foose's story, starting with the journal.

Speaker 9:
[17:00] For instance, one of the entries was dated 1966, which should have stopped him and said, hold on a second, how could it be 1966? You didn't buy the motel until 1969. He notes at times in a sort of boilerplate fashion that, A, I couldn't check out everything that Foose told me, and B, some of it I have my doubts about, I have no doubt that Foose was an epic voyeur, Talese wrote.

Speaker 3:
[17:29] But he could sometimes be an inaccurate and unreliable narrator. I cannot vouch for every detail that he recounts in his manuscript.

Speaker 9:
[17:37] Instead of just a paragraph of doubt, it should have been pages upon pages of doubt.

Speaker 3:
[17:43] Farhi also confronted Gerald Foose with his findings, that certain key assertions in the book were just not true, had been proven as such.

Speaker 9:
[17:51] First of all, he said, I've never told a lie, I've never knowingly told a lie, so any accusation to the contrary is untrue. But he said that after selling the motel, he had lived in it and therefore had access to the catwalk during the period where he didn't own it, which was disputed by the guy he sold the motel to.

Speaker 3:
[18:14] Earl Ballard is that guy's name.

Speaker 9:
[18:16] I spoke with him as well. He said, no, Foose was not on the property, he had no access to the property. Foose is a liar.

Speaker 3:
[18:23] Not that this guy is the most credible source either.

Speaker 9:
[18:27] The guy he sold it to was a co-criminal, I guess you'd say. He had gone into the catwalk with Foose back in the 1970s. He himself was a voyeur and had some sort of falling out or troubled history with Foose.

Speaker 3:
[18:46] Farhi's reporting on the voyeur's motel got a lot of attention at the time in 2016 and that was gratifying. But the idea that he was investigating and to some extent embarrassing a man whose work and career he admired felt less great.

Speaker 9:
[19:01] I have to tell you, I kind of felt sorry for him because again, he's a legend and here I am more or less a nobody, calling him up and saying, hey legend, your work is shoddy. When you see what he missed, which was so easy to find, you wonder how come and then here's the worst part of it, I think, is it makes you reflect on what he has written previously, some of the best new journalism work from the 1960s on. Was he a shoddy reporter altogether or was just this one, a one-off that he swung and missed on? I don't know and I don't want to trash his reputation, but I will say narrowly, in this case, he certainly had a lot to defend.

Speaker 3:
[19:50] So what did Gerald Foose actually do? We'll get into that question after the break. You're listening to Chameleon, The Weekly. You could make a case that Gay Talese isn't the only one who should have caught Gerald Foos in his lies. That excerpt was published in The New Yorker, a magazine that prides itself on its rigorous fact-checking. But editor David Remnick stood by the story, saying this to The New York Times in the form of a statement. The central fact of the piece that Gerald Foos was in the late 60s and 70s of Hoyer, spying on the guests in his motel, is not in doubt in the article. The fact that he could sometimes prove an unreliable and inaccurate narrator is also something that Gay Talese makes clear to the reader, repeatedly, and is part of the way Foos is characterized throughout the article. Grove Atlantic, Talese's publisher, also came out in support. So while Talese had temporarily disowned the book in his first conversation with Farhi, he ultimately walked that back. And everyone, Talese, The New Yorker and Grove Atlantic, adopted the same position. The central premise of the book is true. But the main source also can't be totally trusted, nor can his notebooks. Here's how Miles Cain, co-director of the doc, looks at those diaries.

Speaker 5:
[21:13] The diaries that we see and that Gay uses and we're kind of using as a source document, there was a sense that this was sort of a repackaged publication that he had consolidated from his years of writing in pencil and I think it was kind of clear and not necessarily a bad thing but there was a reality that you felt these are kind of big fish tales.

Speaker 3:
[21:36] Big Fish, If You Don't Know is a reference to a 2003 Tim Burton movie based on a 1998 novel about a dying father who tells his son colorful and wildly exaggerated stories about his life.

Speaker 5:
[21:48] Like everything has kind of been considered and then what he chose to put in the diaries were kind of, let's call it a best of, but it was in a scientific looking format, name, age, race, like all these kind of facts and figures, and then a description of the things he saw, and then occasionally these strange charts of comparing how many male orgasms to female orgasms are just weird stuff. That's like, okay, I mean, maybe a sociologist could do something with this, but then how did you collect this? It's obviously a flawed document, but fascinating. I mean, he and Gay kind of as these shadow yin and yang characters who, in this scenario of this voyeur's motel story, need each other for various reasons. Like we have to frame that this guy is not 100%. But I think what the trap was were the voyeur's attempt at putting these things in black and white, you know, in the diaries, it's like he presented that as this is fact. Every word here is my experience. And while I don't think Gay totally believed that, it was intriguing to talk about this sort of wellspring, this diary. That already was sort of a bit of a poison pill, you know, it was like, ooh, the diaries, but they're not all correct. But you should believe a lot of it because I think he definitely did this stuff. It was just like a bit of a trap.

Speaker 3:
[23:23] Once Talese decided to stand by his book, he took his case to the public. He did a series of media spots and made these same points that most of the book takes place before Foos sold the hotel. He also claimed to have called Earl Ballard, the guy who bought it, after Farhi made him aware of the sale and was told that Foos did still have at least sporadic access to that catwalk. But the murder, that was trickier. Here's what he told WNYC when a host pressed him on the question of why, if he believed that Foos was confessing to having witnessed a murder, he didn't immediately report it.

Speaker 4:
[24:00] How do I justify this to you or to anybody? Well, as a reporter, I protect sources. I once dealt with the mafia for six, seven years. I protect sources. I was dealing with killers and I wasn't calling the cops. My whole life, though, not to justify it, but let me tell you, has always been like a reporter, unless a person that I am a reporter. I keep secrets. I respect. When people tell me it's off the record, it's off the record and I was off the record for 32 years with this voyeur, Gerald Foose. I kept my word to the voyeur, who was a despicable guy, but I've dealt with despicable people, including killers in the mafia before. I've been through this. That's no excuse, but that's the way I am.

Speaker 3:
[24:44] A journalist's job is to report and, to the extent it's possible, be objective. Of course, that's almost impossible in practice. Every decision you make when writing a story influences the reader's perspective. And I certainly didn't expect Paul Farhi, who was not a psychologist, to speak for Gerald Foose. But I did wonder if he had an operating theory for why Foose lied. The man's story, even without the lies, was outlandish. It would have warranted a book. But he just couldn't stop at the truth.

Speaker 9:
[25:17] This guy, Foose, wanted to be a big deal, I think. He contacted Talese right after the publication of Thy Neighbor's Wife, which was a big bestseller. Foose contacts him after this. And he calls himself a sex researcher. Well, it's a bit of an inflated title. He's not a sex researcher. He's a voyeur. He's a peeping tom. I don't know if it's a misdemeanor or a felony, but he committed it over and over again, according to his own account. So there's a kind of grandiosity to this guy, Foose.

Speaker 3:
[25:51] A grandiosity that covers for the darker truth. Gerald Foose wanted to be recognized as an important man, someone who had studied sex in America and had a body of work to contribute to the science, I guess. But that's not what Gerald Foose actually was. Here's the film's co-director, Josh Corey.

Speaker 10:
[26:13] There's a great moment in the, it's a quiet moment in the documentary where Gerald and Anita are sitting at the table and after everything has come out and Gerald's reflecting and he's like, you know, with all this information out there, people are just going to think I'm some sort of a pervert.

Speaker 6:
[26:28] This is pointing direct fingers at the devoyer, as being just nothing but a creep.

Speaker 10:
[26:34] Well, you are.

Speaker 6:
[26:40] Well, I guess so.

Speaker 10:
[26:44] Yes, he enjoyed these things, but he wasn't a pervert, he was a researcher. And it's this lie he told himself. And this lie he pitched to Gay. And through the telling of that over many years, it just became more and more fabricated and embellished and bigger than life.

Speaker 5:
[26:59] And perfect for, you know, who else than your partner, his wife Anita, the one who can break through and be like, Gerald, you're a pervert.

Speaker 10:
[27:09] We all know this score.

Speaker 5:
[27:10] He's like, you got me. Yeah, I am. I am.

Speaker 3:
[27:14] It's very likely that Gerald Foose has always been a fabulist. But Miles Cain thinks the Gay Talese factor mattered a lot here. Foose had sought this journalist out specifically. So we don't just have a source who's prone to exaggeration. We have a source who also needs to impress the journalist he idolizes, the journalist he hand selected to talk to.

Speaker 5:
[27:39] He was enamored with Gay Talese in the writing. And I think there's a feeling of, well, I better give this guy some good stuff, not even I want to lie to him, but just I got to put my best foot forward. If you're a guy who actually spent years up in this motel, probably watching mostly just people's boring private lives, but occasionally getting these sexual scenes. Yeah, I think the urge is like, cut out everything else. Let me pull out the most intriguing tantalizing thing because that's what people, especially this writer is gonna want to hear. So there was a certain sense of like, almost like him trying to brand himself, brand this whole story of like, into the most interesting and tantalizing material.

Speaker 3:
[28:30] Including some material that wasn't true. Like a murder that Foose hadn't just witnessed. A murder that, as he was telling it, he may have helped set in motion.

Speaker 5:
[28:41] It's such an intriguing story. It's amazing. It's sort of like, narratively, it brings it to this moral edge, where you think as bad as watching people, what happens when? And, obviously, Gay also keyed into that, of what an amazing narrative twist, you know?

Speaker 3:
[28:58] I mean, I get it. A twist like this, that the voyeur witnessed, not just lots of sex, but also a murder, is such a stakes raiser. But you have to be extra wary when the circumstances are that only he saw it. That's what Paul Farhi keeps coming back to.

Speaker 9:
[29:14] When you predicate a story on a single source, in many ways, you have to take their word for it. These events happen because I witnessed them, and I am telling you that I witnessed them. It isn't to say that your account is wrong, but here's the problem with a single source account. Your memory fades, your understanding of events is rather siloed, your basic credibility is in question to the extent that it requires corroboration. It requires reporting that suggests you actually did experience the things you experienced.

Speaker 3:
[29:52] This is one of the trickiest parts of reporting unsensitive stories. Paul raised the example of the flood of MeToo stories that followed in the wake of the New York Times investigation into the crimes of Harvey Weinstein. Those stories were almost all based on accounts from women who'd been abused, typically in private, with no witnesses. In nearly every case, it's an allegation you can't objectively prove. There are no witnesses.

Speaker 9:
[30:19] So, if person A says, this person sexually harassed me on this date and these events occurred, what evidence can you marshal to suggest that this person's story, if not absolutely true, is certainly credible?

Speaker 3:
[30:36] That's a journalist's responsibility. What do you do? You look for contemporaneous accounts. Did the accuser tell anyone at the time, a friend or a family member? Did she write it down in an email or diary?

Speaker 9:
[30:50] Now, go back to the Voyage Motel. Did Talese check out this guy's story? Well, not very well, as it turns out. He took his word for it. That's where you get into danger, dangerous territory. Is he making up stuff? Quite possibly he was. What was he making up? Well, for instance, the murder. The murder was easily checked. Those records exist forever. And if the central dramatic moment of this book is predicated on something that didn't happen, it bears on all the other events that he says did occur.

Speaker 3:
[31:28] What's most surprising to me about this story isn't that an odd man, a guy who buys a motel specifically to become a peeping Tom, who calls himself a sex researcher, might be a bit of a fabulist. It's that the journalist who decided to devote a book to that man didn't see the cracks in his story and drive a wedge into them. Because a book that tells Fuse's story while also picking apart his lies is, in my opinion, still a very worthy project. It's honestly a lot more layered and interesting.

Speaker 9:
[32:00] You would get deeper into the character of this man. It's like, what motivates him? Not only is he a voyeur, which is kind of an oddly fascinating kind of instinct, but what motivates him to be a liar about the weird thing he's doing? And the whole ball of wax becomes a kind of dive into the deeper character and psychosis, if you will, a personality at least, of an individual. And I think actually Gay Talese is quite equipped as a reporter to do that kind of story.

Speaker 3:
[32:39] Anyone who listens to this show regularly knows that these are the questions we ask every week. Obviously, Chameleon exists in part to tell holy shit stranger than fiction stories. But it's also a larger project, I guess. A journey into the lives and, to the extent that we can see in there, the minds of the world's most compelling liars.

Speaker 9:
[33:01] Why do we like con men? We like con men because they trick us in interesting ways. They play to our prejudices, they play to titillation, they play to greed. As a reporter, they play to the desire for a good story. We all want good stories. The problem with good stories is sometimes they're not as good as you think they are. And when you blow past the things that should make you stop and say, hold on, you are now complicit in the con. And that's not what journalists and journalism should be.

Speaker 3:
[33:37] And that gets at what's most interesting about the Voyeur documentary. It's really about the relationship between a journalist and his source.

Speaker 5:
[33:45] He and Gay kind of as these shadow yin and yang characters who kind of, in this scenario of this Voyeur's motel story, need each other for various reasons, you know.

Speaker 3:
[33:59] And the negotiations the two go into in the creation of a story, one that they both have a vested interest in.

Speaker 9:
[34:06] There's another element here, I think, that every journalist is susceptible to, which is I want this story to be true. It's such a good story. And please don't tell me that reality is going to intrude on my great story. That impulse is very, very dangerous. And that's why there are editors and readers, frankly, to tell you that you got to get over yourself, that you have to do more than just root for the story. You've got to root for the facts, underlining the story. But we're all driven by wanting the story to be as good as it can be. And we don't really want the facts to get in the way sometimes. And it's not because we're untruthful, it's because it's so good, you don't want things to stop it from being as good as it is. But that's a very dangerous instinct, and you have to overcome it.

Speaker 3:
[35:04] Paul Farhi isn't perfect. No reporter is. We all make mistakes. And understanding that is actually a key to doing this job responsibly.

Speaker 9:
[35:14] I got to tell you, on the eve of my story being published, I still have that sensation of, oh God, did I get something wrong? You have that anxiety in the hours before publication that you've screwed up something very, very badly. And it makes you nervous, but I would also say that's a really good instinct, because maybe you did screw up something, and maybe you missed something in the reporting that's going to come back to bite you. In the internet age, stories can go not just to the readers of a printed newspaper, which is a relatively tight and small world, but to the entire world. The entire world will see your story. And believe me, there's no reporter who knows more than the crowd knows.

Speaker 3:
[36:04] Miles Cain and Josh Corey went to Denver to be there, filming with Gerald Foose and his second wife, Anita, when the New Yorker story first dropped. Gerald was excited.

Speaker 5:
[36:14] The talk of the town and within seconds of it publishing, he's starting to regret his decision, and we're watching this on camera.

Speaker 3:
[36:22] Because, surprise, people didn't immediately celebrate Gerald Foose or his work as a sex researcher.

Speaker 5:
[36:29] I think the film's perspective is for the first half of the movie, Gay Talese is your protagonist, he's the one you trust, Gerald's this kind of wild card and a little gross seeming, or he's got quite a history, and yeah, you're not trusting of him. Then emotionally, it really does, if not flip, you really do restarted to empathize with Gerald, and especially being there with them when they're out there, literally they're most vulnerable. I mean, they're starting to get death threat, phone calls, it blew up, which for most of us is like, well, what did you expect? I mean, they weren't going to have a parade.

Speaker 3:
[37:14] The film observed Gerald Foo seeing the biggest of his lies for the first time after 36 years of anticipation, the lie about who he really was.

Speaker 10:
[37:24] I mean, I think he's a pervert in the attic who spent a great period of time jerking off and being weird. That's what I think of him.

Speaker 3:
[37:34] The film also observed Gay Talese grappling with a truth that seemed to be nearly as painful, peers attacking the thing he cared about the most, his journalism. Gerald worshiped Gay until he actually read the story he'd been waiting to see for decades. One of the things that upset him is that Talese talked about his baseball card collection and even suggested that maybe one motive for going public was to increase the value of that collection. He gets angry about this on screen.

Speaker 6:
[38:04] You don't write about a man's money. I mean, I'm really mad at Gay. I'm mad as hell at him because he should have consulted me. I'm the guy, not him. He's made this thing point, hey, I'm the big star here, you know. I'm the big star, you know, I've written all these books.

Speaker 5:
[38:23] It was a wild experience. Again, just exactly what we wanted, which was, let's make a story about this voyeur and this journalist, but also let's make a story about the journalistic process unfolding in real time, which you don't get to see often.

Speaker 3:
[38:40] Miles and Josh screened the film for both of its main characters separately. They showed it to Gay first in New York.

Speaker 5:
[38:47] At the end of the screening, his review was, it was tough but fair, which we felt was...

Speaker 10:
[38:53] Not as good as you're going to get.

Speaker 3:
[38:55] Then they went back to Denver to screen it for Gerald and Anita. Gerald had had time by this point to get through the blowback. The threats had subsided. Miles sat right next to the voyeur in an otherwise empty theater. And he seemed to really enjoy a movie that isn't exactly flattering.

Speaker 5:
[39:13] Gerald tells a great story. I mean, these are big fish tales at this point, so he has them dialed in. In the film, we sort of echo that telling of it, and it's sort of larger than life, and we use these miniatures, but you see all these two men dressed in sheep costumes, and all this stuff he claims he saw, and we fully visualize it almost for him, even though we knew the whole thing was gonna sort of come apart at the seams a bit. So for him, I think it was like, yeah, watching this amazing, his words brought to life.

Speaker 3:
[39:44] It may even have made his exaggeration seem truer in his own mind, because as Paul Farhi points out, it's possible that Foose wasn't even lying intentionally.

Speaker 9:
[39:54] I do believe that he honestly believed all his assertions. We all do that. We all think that we did something that we're proud of or that we experienced that we know intimately. Did it actually happen the way you remember it? That often is where the thing falls apart. I'll tell you just one quick anecdote in my own life. I did an interview back in college with George Carlin.

Speaker 3:
[40:25] Carlin was one of the most famous and influential stand-up comics of the 70s and 80s. He died in 2008.

Speaker 9:
[40:32] He was another idol of mine for the school paper, and it was recorded and syndicated. A couple of years ago, I was watching a HBO documentary on George Carlin's life by Judd Apatow. Toward the end of the first episode, he's being interviewed, and for a second, I'm stopped by this voice, and within about four or five seconds, I realized who this voice is interviewing him. It's me.

Speaker 3:
[41:00] Judd Apatow had found this recording in Carlin's archive, one of probably hundreds of hours of interviews from the comedian's life.

Speaker 9:
[41:07] I said, yeah, I remember that interview so clearly. I did it when I was a senior in college, and we did it outside on the lawn by the school steps and blah, blah, blah. Someone went into the archives and found the story that I had written based on this interview. It wasn't when I was a senior, it was when I was a sophomore. It was two years earlier. Other details that I quote unquote remembered about this interview, were completely contradicted by the real-time story that I had written after I had done the interview. So even in my own life, you mess up details and that was a moment to say, don't just trust but verify things you think are true. And there's a limit to how far you'll go, you drive yourself crazy. But nevertheless, it's a very good instinct to keep turning over the past and examining what you think is true before you tell people it's true.

Speaker 3:
[42:05] After Paul Farhi's stories and the controversy over the book's accuracy, Gay Talese sat for an interview with New York magazine writer Boris Kachka in a room with Talese's wife and two representatives of his publisher. He was alternately humbled and cantankerous. And at the end, when a publicist told him it was time to stop, Talese had one final thing to say to the room. You're going to tell me tomorrow whenever you read this guy's stuff. See, I told you, keep your fucking mouth shut and don't try to explain. But I'm sorry. Kill the interviews from now on. And you could. This might be the last one. I don't care. I'm sick of having to be both honest and have to shape up to this PR level of being careful. I'm not careful. If I was careful, I wouldn't have written anything at all. It made me think of the end of the Voyeur doc, which gives its final words to Gay Talese too.

Speaker 4:
[43:00] When I got permission for you to come down, the first day you arrived, he started talking freely. I thought, does he know what he's doing? Does he know what he's doing? He opened up his home to you, his bedroom to you, his wife to you. He liked the publicity of the camera. The camera turned him on. And there it was, the reverse procedure. He's now being watched.

Speaker 3:
[43:53] For very different reasons, both men learned the same lesson. Be careful what you wish for. Scrutiny is very rarely comfortable. Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Audiochuck. It's written and hosted by me, Josh Dean, and produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Siminoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimack. Themed by Ewan Leitrimuhin and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Grigoriadis, Matt Scherr, and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow, and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help. And if you have any feedback, tips, or story ideas, you can email us at chameleonpod at campsidemedia.com, or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 201-743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

Speaker 11:
[45:20] I think Chuck would approve. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers, and on my podcast, The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. Because these stories deserve to be heard, and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck now wherever you get your podcasts.