JT LeRoy — a wounded boy novelist who never existed

Between roughly 1996 and 2006, the acclaimed young American author “JT LeRoy” — a fragile, HIV-anxious former teenage truck-stop prostitute from West Virginia who wrote about abuse and survival — was revealed to be a fiction. Every word attributed to LeRoy was written by Laura Albert, a Brooklyn-born woman in her thirties and forties who had worked as a phone-sex operator; the slight, sunglassed figure who appeared at readings and on red carpets as “JT” was Savannah Knoop, the half-sibling of Albert’s partner. The hoax was punctured by Stephen Beachy in New York magazine in October 2005, confirmed by Warren St. John in The New York Times on 9 January 2006, and adjudicated as fraud by a Manhattan federal jury on 22 June 2007.

LeRoy did not deceive through forged documents or a stolen estate. The deception ran on a published body of work — the novella Sarah (2000), the linked stories The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2001), and the novella Harold’s End (2004) — wrapped in a backstory of unbearable authenticity. A boy who had supposedly been prostituted by his mother and rescued by literacy was exactly the kind of survivor the culture wanted to champion, and champion it did. Courtney Love, Winona Ryder, Lou Reed, Madonna, Gus Van Sant, Dennis Cooper and the film director Asia Argento drew close to LeRoy, mistaking a constructed avatar for a real and wounded person.

The mechanism was intimacy at a distance. Albert built relationships almost entirely by telephone and email, in the voice of a damaged, gender-ambiguous youth who needed protection; she also performed in person as “Speedie,” LeRoy’s brash British-accented friend and handler. The public “JT” — Knoop in a blond wig and dark glasses — said little, which read as shyness and trauma rather than absence. The empty space at the center was filled by each admirer’s own projection.

The unmasking was gradual and then total. Beachy traced the publishing money and the contradictions; St. John identified Knoop as the body double, and a follow-up established Albert as the writer behind the phone. When a film company that had paid to option Sarah sued, a jury found that signing the contract as a person who did not exist was fraud. Albert never disputed the authorship; she reframed it as art, and the court reframed it as a signature on a contract that bound no one.