Painter John Perry didn’t like a story from The New Yorker that made him out to be an obsessive stalker of the eighties film star John Lurie, so he launched a hunger strike. So far he’s been starving for seventeen days, he says. He’s waiting for them to issue some sort of correction and seems sort of willing to die in pursuit of that goal. “The last thing they want is for me to drop dead out here, because then someone will look over that article with a fine-tooth comb,” he told the Post. “It will call into question their renowned fact checking.” (This article came out last August, by the way.) “The piece was thoroughly reported and fact-checked, and is a fair representation of both sides of the story,” New Yorker editor David Remnick said. “We looked into [Perry’s] complaints carefully and found nothing to correct or retract. As concerned as we are about his health, we can’t print something we don’t believe is true.” Meanwhile, a source from the magazine tells the Post that most of the crazy details from the story, like the time Perry hunted down Lurie in the Caribbean — came from Perry himself.
The squawk of the town [NYP]
