Jewish World Review March 12, 2004 / 19 Adar, 5764

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OOPS!, did Jayson Blair do it again?; skewing Young; more


http://www.jewishworldreview.com | NEW YORK — Is admitted liar and plagiarist Jayson Blair still up to his old tricks?


During this week's media blitz for "Burning Down My Master's House," his memoir of his flameout at The New York Times, Blair has said over and over that he's sincerely sorry for his journalistic crimes — which he also has vowed over and over never to repeat.


But New York University Law School student Carter Nelsen — who was a summer intern with the notorious author at The Boston Globe in 1997 — isn't buying it.


The 28-year-old Nelsen has just posted a letter on Jim Romenesko's media gossip site suggesting suspicious similarities between a paragraph in Blair's book and one in a May 22, 2003, article about Blair written by Globe reporters Don Aucoin and Bella English.


Blair: "It was the summer of 1997. I was in the glass-walled office of Louisa Williams, the assistant managing editor in charge of recruitment, hiring and interns at The Boston Globe. I was about halfway into the 12-week internship. Editors had been praising me for being enterprising, intense and coming to work early and staying late, but I could tell that this conversation was not going to be pretty."


Aucoin and English: "It was the summer of 1997, and Jayson T. Blair was at the center of a newsroom controversy. Blair, then 21, was sitting in the glass-walled office of assistant managing editor Louisa Williams. The door was closed. Just six weeks into a 12-week summer internship, Blair had already cut a considerable swath through The Boston Globe. In some respects, he was exactly what editors look for in a reporter: nervy, enterprising, prolific, eager to arrive early and stay late."


"I don't know if that qualifies as plagiarism," Nelsen commented, "but it reads to me like it's in the same ballpark."


On Wednesday, Aucoin told me: "People are free to make their own judgments about it." Globe Executive Editor Martin Baron also begged off: "I'm going to leave this to people like you."


But English told me: "It seems hilarious and absurd to me that Jayson Blair — who was there at the scene — had to take a second-hand account and painstakingly use that as a first-person account. . . . It seems pathological for him to come back and steal our version of his story."


Blair Wednesday called the plagiarism charge "simply bogus" and insisted that he didn't even have a copy of the Globe story handy when he was writing the passage that appears at the beginning of Chapter 7.


"I was there," Blair told me. "I witnessed the same things the Globe wrote about and knew first-hand what was going on. And I was a source for the Boston Globe. I was quoted on the record throughout their story and talked to them off the record. They received their description of what that meeting was like from me."



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SKEWING YOUNG


Add model-singer Bebe Buell and rocker Jim Wallerstein to that alluring older woman-younger man synergy so ably represented by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher along with Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake.


The 50-year-old Buell, aka Liv Tyler's mom, and her 34-year-old husband, Wallerstein, were cozily ensconced at Tyler's table at the Hard Rock Cafe the other night during the premiere party for "Jersey Girl" — in which the 26-year-old Tyler plays Ben Affleck's love interest.


"Jim and I got married in the summer of 2002," Buell told this column later, as Wallerstein and his band Vacationland were setting up for Wednesday's show at the downtown club Don's Hill. "I think that women are lasting longer and men are growing up faster. The best guys are the ones who grew up in the '60s. They are used to women being independent. They were brought up by mothers who were burning their bras and protesting. Men from my generation are chauvinist pigs!"


Buell — who gave birth to Liv after an 8-month romance with Aerosmith's Steven Tyler — said she met her second husband at a Christmas party in 1999. "We only saw each other that night, just made eye contact. But then ironically, we ran into each other all over New York," she said. "Jim and I have been together five years.


"My husband's pretty exceptional. He put himself through NYU and graduated with a degree in electronics. He's pretty brainy. His band just made a record. Right now, in the industry, there is a bidding war, so it's a very exciting time for them — they're about to be signed."


Bebe and Liv's youthful stepdad were at the party with Liv, Bebe's 76-year-old mother, Dorothea Johnson, and Steven Tyler's wife, Teresa, along with assorted friends and relatives.


"We are a big, loving extended family," said Buell, who was previously married to Canadian songwriter Coyote Shivers after relationships with Tyler and Todd Rundgren.


"So I'm a rock wife again," Buell said. "It's just funny, everything I was doing in my 20s in New York, I'm doing again. I'm modeling, my husband is about to get signed. It's so funny! It's a wonderful time in my life, I couldn't be happier."


THE BRIEFING


FOND MEMORIES?: The friends of Walter Yetnikoff celebrated Tuesday night, and the colorful and occasionally crazed record mogul signed copies of his new memoir "Howling at the Moon," at an Upper East Side book party co-hosted by Billy Joel and Broadway Books Publisher Stephen Rubin. An ebullient Yetnikoff, 70, told this column: "This reminds me of my cocaine days: People bringing me things!"


KELLY GREEN: An assortment of Kellys — including Time magazine editor Jim Kelly, novelist Thomas Kelly, and media columnist Keith Kelly of the New York Post — are gathering at Michael's on St. Patrick's Day next Wednesday to toast the late journalist Michael Kelly and raise money (at $100 a ticket) for the college fund of his sons, Tom and Jack Kelly. Their father was killed last April while reporting on the war in Iraq.



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