The New York ‘Post’: A Psycho’s Best Friend
Perhaps you, like us, read the Post’s lengthy interview with fake fireman/sexual assailant Peter Braunstein this past weekend, in which he expresses regret about not killing his ex-girlfriend Jane Larkworthy and details a murder fantasy about New York reporter Vanessa Grigoriadis? And perhaps you, like us, asked yourself this: Isn’t it kind of weird and creepy that the Post sent a reporter to spend three days at the Clinton Correctional Facility indulging the murderous woman-hating fantasies of an avowed psycho? And isn’t it kind of strange and sick-making that they named the people he fantasizes about killing and furthermore put them in big puffy pull quotes? Wouldn’t it be awful, if you were one of those people, to read someone’s death fantasy about you in the paper?
And finally, of particular interest to us: Isn’t this the paper that recently allowed a reporter to air his own weird rape fantasy about Grigoriadis? We decided to ignore that at the time, since it was such an obvious and egregious error in judgment. (One which others were happy to point out rather forcefully.) Since there’s no news hook to the most recent story (Braunstein is two years into his prison sentence which is scheduled to last another sixteen), we can only assume they’re just exploiting the gruesome details for shock value. Which, well, duh, it’s the Post; there’s a reason people spend 25 cents on it. But at this point, we have to wonder if the Post’s editors have spent so long playing up to their rough-hewn, hard-drinking image that they’ve lost all sense of perspective.
the follow-up
A Second Life for Regan’s ‘7’Judith Regan may be gone from the publishing world (at least for now), but her projects live on (at least for now). Last we heard about her orphaned volumes of controversy, an attention-seeking Canadian publisher was proclaiming its interest in bringing out O.J.’s confession. (Not, you know, that anyone asked, or that they held rights to it.) Today’s news, buried as a squib in the Times, is that Lyons Press, a division of Globe Pequot, has agreed to publish 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel, another controversial project from the late-Regan period. The pub date has yet to be announced, and the print run is pegged at 250,000. “I think all the negative publicity came from people who haven’t read it,” Gene Brissie, Globe Pequot’s associate publisher, told the Times, perhaps a touch aggressively. Of course, as New York’s Vanessa Grigoriadis reported a few weeks ago, the Mantle book — and not the disastrous O.J. project — is what really got Regan fired from HarperCollins. So we can imagine why Brissie would be playing a strong defense.
7, Mantle Novel, Finds a Publisher [NYT]
Even Bitches Have Feelings [NYM]
