Michael Finkel
Michael Finkel (* 1968 ) is an American journalist and memoirist who wrote the books True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa and The Stranger in the Woods: The extraordinary story of the last true hermit .
Life
Finkel was a writer for the New York Times until it was discovered in 2002 that he was using multi-person interviews to create a composite protagonist, Youssouf Malé, for a story he had written about the African slave trade. Finkel had originally submitted a child slave story to the New York Times, but his subsequent reporting found no evidence of enslavement, although he encountered teenagers working in difficult conditions for meager wages. The story that Finkel presented is supposed to depict a young West African boy, Youssouf Malé, who sold himself into slavery on a cocoa plantation on the Ivory Coast. The published story included photographs, one of which was described as that of Malé. After the release, a Save the Children employee contacted Finkel and said the boy pictured was not Male. When asked by his editors, Finkel admitted that the boy featured in the article was actually made up of several boys he interviewed, including one by the name of Youssouf Malé. Finkel was then fired. After his release from the New York Times, Finkel learned that Christian Longo, an Oregon man who murdered his own wife and three children in December 2001, had used "Michael Finkel" as a pseudonym during his several weeks' escape. Finkel communicated with him after Longo's capture the next month. According to Finkel, Longo had hoped before the trial that the journalist would publish "the real story" in order to obtain the acquittal. After the conviction, the convict gave Finkel interviews in which he admitted his guilt. Finkel wrote a treatise on the relationship: True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa . Finkel is also the author of The Stranger in the Woods , which tells the story of Christopher Thomas Knight, a hermit who lived alone in woods in the North Pond area of Maine for 27 years.
Today he writes for National Geographic and lives in Bozeman , Montana.
Awards
- 2006: nominated for the Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category for True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa
- 2008: National Magazine Award with John Stanmeyer for Bedlam in the Blood: Malaria
filming
Based on True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa , the film True Story was made in 2015 .
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Finkel, Michael |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American journalist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1968 |