Sarah Palin's New Neighbor, Author Joe McGinniss, Is Writing a Tell-All Biography
Sarah Palin has a well-known new neighbor living some 15 feet away from her Alaska home, and she isn’t pleased.
It’s best-selling author Joe McGinniss, known for his true-crime books and other nonfiction writing. And, as the former Alaska governor and onetime Republican candidate for vice president of the United States is well aware, he’s already working on an unauthorized biography about her, according to CBS News and the New York Daily News.
Palin apparently realizes that the author is within his rights, however, since she talks in a Facebook post about building a fence in response, a Slate article notes.
“Taking up residence next to Palin doesn’t even approach violating her legal right to privacy. She has no legal right to blind eyes looking at her property from an adjoining property or even from the street,” says author Jack Shafer. A fellow Slate contributor suggests that writer Janet Malcolm, who has publicly criticized the journalist ethics of McGinniss, should make arrangements to rent the home on the other side of the new McGinniss abode to gather material for a new piece.
McGinniss, who is perhaps best-known for his Fatal Vision book about Jeffrey MacDonald, a U.S. Army physician convicted of murdering his wife and their two daughters, was sued by his subject after he published the book. MacDonald, with whom Malcolm sided in an article published in the New Yorker that later became a book, The Journalist and the Murderer, contended that McGinniss had breached their cooperation contract by misrepresenting his intentions, in order to worm information out of the physician for the book.
An Associated Press article written after a federal jury deadlocked in a trial of the case in 1987 provides more details.
McGinniss himself said in an afterword to later editions of Fatal Vision that he did nothing wrong but an insurer nonetheless settled the case.
McGinniss already made it to the Palin home in Wasilla last year, when he stopped by and left a copy of one of his books. Discussing that visit at the time with the New York Daily News, he told the newspaper “I’m not intending to write a salacious book about Sarah Palin’s sex life. But if it’s true, I’ll find out.”
Now, as the new tenant next door to Palin, he has a bird’s-eye view of her kitchen and a daughter’s bedroom, says Palin in her Facebook post.
Additional coverage:
Midwest Voices (Kansas City Star): “Sarah Palin’s right. McGinniss move is just tacky”
Ben Smith (Politico): “Annals of journalistic enterprise”
Mirabella (1992): “Who’s Afraid of Janet Malcolm?”
