The other side of the account.
In 320 gripping pages, 28-year-old O'Keefe describes being thrust under the national microscope at a young age after he and fellow activist Hannah Giles, armed with hidden cameras, asked employees of the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to help them open a brothel for underage teens from Latin America. In the videos, some ACORN employees obliged or looked the other way. The footage caused a sensation at the time and led to an overwhelming vote in Congress to strip ACORN of grant money from the federal government.
The operation made O'Keefe an instant household name—and also a target.
The videos, first released by the late Andrew Breitbart's website, made O'Keefe the scourge of the American left. O'Keefe was quickly maligned as "racist" for wearing a "pimp costume" in his videos that consisted of a chinchilla coat he borrowed from his grandmother. He was also called a manipulator who "selectively edits" his videos to make them appear sensational. (O'Keefe pushes back on that criticism, noting that he makes it a habit to release the raw, unedited versions of footage alongside his final product, a practice largely unused by most documentary filmmakers and television journalists.)
“If you’ve never been subject to this kind of ritual defamation," O'Keefe writes in his book, "let me warn you, it hurts.”
Riding high after the ACORN hit in January 2010, O'Keefe led a team into Landrieu's office in New Orleans, La., in an attempt to find out if she was lying when she told constituents who could not reach her office that the phone lines were malfunctioning. Two of the men with O'Keefe, who were dressed as telephone repairmen, asked to "check the phones to make sure they're working." Landrieu's staff didn't buy it—O'Keefe's "repairmen" were wearing tool belts without tools in them—and the group was quickly detained and their equipment confiscated. (Law enforcement officials erased the footage on their cameras before returning them, O'Keefe says.)
After a few days in a local jail and a lengthy fight in court, O'Keefe was cleared of felony charges but convicted of the misdemeanor of entering a federal building under "false pretenses."
Off probation, filmmaker James O?Keefe gives his side of story in tell-all book
