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Salon’s Tim Grieve
reminded readers of Leopold’s checkered history with the publication.
Salon removed Leopold’s August 29, 2002 story about Enron from its site after it was discovered that he
plagiarized parts from the
Financial Times and was unable to provide a copy of an email that was critical to the piece. Leopold’s response? A hysterical rant which claimed that
Salon’s version of events was “nothing but lies,” and that “At this point, I wonder why
Salon would go to great lengths to further twist the knife into my back. I suppose the
New York Times will now release their version of the events. I can see the headline now ‘Jason Leopold Must Die.’” In other words, people are out to get him, and it’s not his fault.
Fast forward to March 2005, when Leopold’s memoir,
Off the Record, was set to be released. In the book,
according to Howard Kurtz, Leopold says that he details his own “lying, cheating and backstabbing,” and comes clean about how he got fired from the
Los Angeles Times and quit Dow Jones just before they fired him because, as he said, it “Seems I got all of the facts wrong” on a story about Enron.
But the book was not to be. Rowman & Littlefield, the book’s publisher, cancelled production just before it went to press after one of the book’s sources threatened to sue. That source, Steven Maviglio, who was a spokesman for California Governor Gray Davis, said that Leopold “just got it completely wrong” when recounting how he allegedly told Leopold that he “might have broken the law by investing in energy companies using inside information.”
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