Will Caleb Hannan ever address the Dr. V story?

for a longreads item.... that was notably short.

 

Sure is a short post for #LongReads and not wanting to relitigate all those old arguments but Hannan had a writerly obligation to reveal that his subject was running a con.

A reasonable person could think that the subject having been born a man and was now living as a woman was also part of the con.

The reveal, as said however months back, was part of the problem but you always run the risk of something awful happening when you write about a person who has a history of suicide attempts and mental illness.

 

So is YankeeFan actually Hanna Rosin?

I had no idea.

 

Glad that YF's crusade finally got this information out there.

 

But he didn't bash through this one. This story unfolded over a great length of time, and he was directly confronted about the issue by two people, including his wife. He deliberated and came to the conclusion that they were wrong. Then he basked in the glow for a day or two after the story published.

And when it goes south, he waits until he gets a celebrity speaking engagement of sorts -- cool free weekend, bro, was there an honorarium too?

He missed the limelight, and the public hand-wringing was the way to grab it again.

 

If his wife's and fact checker's ominous warnings don't scare him off, a spine-climbing cold chill sure as hell ain't either.

 

Could somebody check on YF? I'm worried since he hasn't chimed in on one his favorite topics.

 

Reading those comments, and remembering the original story, I realize again that there are some gifted writers/reporters so moralistic and narcissistic (the primary story becomes "I'm being lied to, and that's wrong and worthy of pursuit in and of itself") they achieve a kind of childlike naivete about their role in journalism.

When sources/subjects started lying to me, or getting hyperbolic with the narrative, that wasn't a cue for me to entrap them. Just the damn opposite; you're to be ultra way with lies and fabulist nonsense.

"I remember even telling a coach once "you've popped off a few quote checks that I don't think your team will come close to cashing. The evidence doesn't support it and it's going to make a mess for everyone involved here in a month or so, when I have to drag some of these back up. Think about it." Are those rare circumstances? Sure. But that's part of being a good journalist, too. If your fidelity is the truth, then chew on what the real truth is. In Hannan's worldview, Dr. V was, first and foremost, a liar. Not a broken person, or really even a person, but the incarnation of a negative personal trait.

Bigger question: What story was that fact-checker reading? From the Longreads piece:

Late in the process of vetting the story, Hannan said he was contacted by one of Grantland’s freelance fact-checkers, who raised concerns about the story—the first time anyone other than his wife had voiced those concerns. “Some of the first words out of her mouth were, ‘There’s a chance this woman is going to hurt herself,’ and I said, ‘I know and I’m scared shitless, and I don’t know what to do,’ and she said, ‘Okay I just want to make sure I said that.’ And that’s a conversation I immediately should have taken to my editor, but I didn’t.”

From Simmons' apology:

"We first reached the “Is it worth it?” point with Caleb’s piece in September, after Caleb turned in a rollicking draft that included a number of twists and turns. The story had no ending because Dr. V wouldn’t talk to him anymore. We never seriously considered running his piece, at least in that version’s form."

Our decision: Sorry, Caleb, you need to keep reporting this one. It’s not there.

You know what happened next: One last correspondence between Caleb and Dr. V in September, the one that included her threat and the “hate crime” accusation (both covered in the piece that eventually ran). To be clear, Caleb only interacted with her a handful of times. He never, at any time, threatened to out her on Grantland. He was reporting a story and verifying discrepancy issues with her background. That’s it. Just finding out facts and asking questions. This is what reporters do. She had been selling a “magical” putter by touting credentials that didn’t exist. Just about everything she had told Caleb, at every point of his reporting process, turned out not to be true. There was no hounding. There was no badgering. It just didn’t happen that way.

From Hannan's story:

The last time I heard from Dr. V she warned me that I was about to commit a hate crime. But before that, I received a voice mail from Jordan.

Neither of them had contacted me in months, since I had sent an email trying to confirm what I had discovered, and Jordan wrote back to deny everything. “Your attack tale should be published in the National Enquirer,” Jordan wrote, “right next to the article on Martians … If I am to believe your diatribe, what you are telling golfers is that the most scientifically advanced Near Zero MOI putter, and the science of the Inertia Matrix was invented by a lesbian auto mechanic.”

Now, Jordan’s message said she was calling to propose a deal. When I phoned her back, Jordan explained the offer. I could fly to Arizona and meet with Dr. V at her attorney’s office, where she would show me proof of her degrees from both MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. V then got on the phone and added another detail. Once I saw the documents I would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement barring me from revealing any of the details I’d learned about Dr. V’s past.

The “deal” was one I could not accept, and when I explained this Dr. V got upset. “What is your intention?” she asked. “Are you being paid by someone to destroy Yar?” Dr. V’s anger made it so that what she said came out fast and with almost no interruption. I tried to record everything she said and ask the occasional question, but it was like yelling into a wind tunnel. When she finally had said her piece, she handed the phone back to Jordan. “Well, I guess you’re just going to print what you’re going to print,” Jordan said. “Try to lead a decent life. Have a good one.” Then she hung up.

A few days later, Dr. V sent one final email. It had her signature mix of scattered punctuation and randomly capitalized words. Once upon a time I had brushed off these grammatical quirks, but now they seemed like outward expressions of the inner chaos she struggled to contain. “To whom this may concern,” it read. “I spoke with Caleb Hannan last Saturday his deportment is reminiscent to schoolyard bullies, his sole intention is to injure or bring harm to me … Because of a computer glitch, some documents that are germane only to me, were visible to web-viewers, government officials have now rectified this egregious condition … Caleb Hannan came into possession of documents that were clearly marked: MADE NON-PUBLIC (Restricted) … Exposing NON-PUBLIC Documents is a Crime, and prosecution of such are under the auspices of many State and Federal Laws, including Hate Crimes Legislation signed into Law by President Obama.”

So I think I have this right:

Summer: Jordan denies what Hannan has discovered, which does or does not include Dr. V's previous identity. (Hard to say, but I think does not.)

September: Hannan turns in a draft (who knows what that draft was like) that isn't fit for print, per Simmons, because Hannan needed to keep reporting it.

Later in September: Jordan calls Hannan back (out of the blue?) with a deal for print, which Hannan turns down.

A few days after that: Dr. V sends an email.

So, again: What story is the fact checker reading? It's "late in the vetting process." If it is the September draft, how would the fact-checker have deduced Dr. V. would harm herself if the gender identity material wasn't in the draft? If it's not, what could have changed from the September draft from a later draft to make the fact-checker concerned?

Later in Simmons' apology, he writes:

But even now, it’s hard for me to accept that Dr. V’s transgender status wasn’t part of this story. Caleb couldn’t find out anything about her pre-2001 background for a very specific reason. Let’s say we omitted that reason or wrote around it, then that reason emerged after we posted the piece.

Reading all this again, I'm stunned by how shitty the chronology of the story and Simmons' apology is. Emails have dates. Phone calls have dates. Why wasn't any of that in the story? Unbelievably, reading Hannan's story again, he never even pins down the date when he discovered Dr. V's original name was Krol or, for that matter, when he talked to the Gilbert, Arizona risk manager. I assume the latter is before Dr. V killed herself and the former is after she did, but who knows.

From the Arizona Republic story, Jordan says by May Dr. V and Jordan thought her original identity was going to be uncovered, and by June she'd called McCord and stepped down as Yar's president.

So, either the fact checker was reading a story that had gender identity material in it, or she knew about the element, but was reading a story that didn't have it in the story, and simply inferred that Dr. V might harm herself anyway.

It's about as shoddy and confused a process as you'd get. Still, it seems.

 

More on our friend Caleb

Caleb Hannan Talks About What Went Wrong With His Grantland Piece "Dr. V's Magical Putter"