"I've had a great deal of therapy"

With a movie about his stunning journalistic misdeeds coming out, Stephen Glass talks about writing, forgiveness, why he's not a sociopath and having to look away from scenes in "Shattered Glass."

By Kerry Lauerman

Oct 28, 2003 | When you talk to Stephen Glass about Stephen Glass -- the villain in the new movie "Shattered Glass," the misunderstood antihero of his novel "The Fabulist" and the guy sitting right in front of you -- it's easy to get a little confused about whom, actually, you're talking about. He gets a little confused too, insisting that his novel is not a memoir and cannot be treated as fact at one moment, then defending the factual representations in the novel the next.

For the uninitiated, though, this much remains clear: Glass perpetrated one of the great journalistic frauds in modern American history. In 1998 -- before Jayson Blair was out of college -- Glass, a 25-year-old rising star at the New Republic, was caught making up one of his stories. An internal investigation by the magazine followed, and the number of discredited stories ballooned to 27, and that doesn't include major pieces he penned for Rolling Stone, George and Harper's, whose editors were also duped by Glass' wonderfully lurid tales of drug-abusing young Republican activists and Wall Street traders who worshipped at a shrine dedicated to Alan Greenspan. [Full disclosure: I assigned Glass a feature that year, before the scandal broke, while I was an editor at another magazine. He never turned it in.]

Almost as fascinating as his fantastical stories were Glass' elaborate efforts to cover his tracks. Before reporter Adam Penenberg, of Forbes.com, exposed his lies, Glass fabricated e-mails, Web sites and voice mails in order to evade fact-checking staffs. The skittish boy-man who attracted editors now drew reporters eager to expose the whole, sordid story. And on Friday, "Shattered Glass," which features "Star Wars" star Hayden Christensen as Glass and is based on a story that appeared in Vanity Fair, will make Glass an even bigger name -- and object of scorn -- outside of media circles. Christensen plays Glass as an obsequious shape-shifter, eager to please and preemptively apologetic -- his main tic is to plaintively ask, "Are you mad at me?" the moment anyone signals disappointment. The movie opens on Halloween, which will seem appropriate to many; after this, Glass will be enshrined as journalists' favorite monster, our own smirking Chucky doll.

Glass says he's trying to make amends for his misdeeds and move on. He is at work on his next novel, and hopeful of soon passing the New York Bar. (He says he passed the written exam three years ago, shortly after graduating Georgetown Law School, but his case has been under review since by the New York Bar's committee on character and fitness.) But the biggest mystery left unsolved by the movie -- and the novel, and the countless magazine stories written about the scandal -- is the most basic one: Why did he do it? Last week Salon interviewed Glass, by phone and in person.

So, you've been to a screening of "Shattered Glass," and you like it?

Did I like the movie? I couldn't watch much of the movie. It was my own personal horror film. It was seeing the moments of my life I am most ashamed of and having them portrayed by excellent actors. But in total fairness, the movie has strong performances.

When did you first have to look away?

There were whole chunks of the movie I had to look away. It's very, very painful to watch the things you hate most about your life, and what you did, and see it up on a movie screen.

Anything about the film you think was unfair, or inaccurate?

They got very many things right about the story, I want to be clear on that. In particular Chloë Sevigny's performance -- I don't know [then-Forbes' reporter] Adam Penenberg, so I don't know how Steve Zahn [did] -- but what emotionally they got right with Chloë Sevigny was a sort of moral pole that could have easily been lost or forgotten --

Sevigny is presumably portraying a character based on your TNR colleague Hanna Rosin --

Yes, but I also think she represents a whole important moral pole that's beyond her, I mean inclusive of her, but what it means to be someone's friend and what it means to be loyal and how devastating that can be, and how loyalty can be tested. That's something I truly am ashamed of, and something [they] did a really wonderful job presenting.

Because I wasn't involved in the movie and wasn't a part of the movie, I don't feel it represents what it feels like to go through this. But there are limitations to what you can do. At the same time, they took an incredibly interior story, a nonfilmic story, a story that's not just about writing but about someone, me, who invents [his] stories ... and they rendered that on the screen, and that's an amazing accomplishment.

There are key differences, though, between the film and your book, "The Fabulist." The most notable one being the way Charles Lane, TNR editor at the time you were caught, is portrayed. In the movie, he's the unquestionable hero. In your novel, the character seemingly based on Lane, Robert, is not a hero, or a sympathetic character at all.

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