JANUARY
8--Oprah Winfrey's been had.
The Man Who Conned Oprah
(Better HERE
. (There are pictures.))
JANUARY
8--Oprah Winfrey's been had.
Three months ago, in what the talk show host termed a "radical departure," Winfrey announced that "A Million Little Pieces," author James Frey's nonfiction memoir of his vomit-caked years as an alcoholic, drug addict, and criminal, was her latest selection for the world's most powerful book club.
In an October 26 show entitled "The Man Who Kept Oprah Awake At Night," Winfrey hailed Frey's graphic and coarse book as "like nothing you've ever read before. Everybody at Harpo is reading it. When we were staying up late at night reading it, we'd come in the next morning saying, 'What page are you on?'" In emotional filmed testimonials, employees of Winfrey's Harpo Productions lauded the book as revelatory, with some choking back tears. When the camera then returned to a damp-eyed Winfrey, she said, "I'm crying 'cause these are all my Harpo family so, and we all loved the book so much."
But a six-week investigation by The Smoking Gun reveals that there may be a lot less to love about Frey's runaway hit, which has sold more than 3.5 million copies and, thanks to Winfrey, has sat atop The New York Times nonfiction paperback best seller list for the past 15 weeks. Next to the latest Harry Potter title, Nielsen BookScan reported Friday, Frey's book sold more copies in the U.S. in 2005--1.77 million--than any other title, with the majority of that total coming after Winfrey's selection.
Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey's book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw "wanted in three states."
In additon to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book's most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy's third victim. It's a cynical and offensive ploy that has left one of the victims' parents bewildered. "As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the accident," said the mother of one of the dead girls. "I figured he was taking license...he's a writer, you know, they don't tell everything that's factual and true."
Frey
appears to have fictionalized his past to propel and sweeten the
book's already melodramatic narrative and help convince readers of
his malevolence. "I was a bad guy," Frey told Winfrey. "If
I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book
that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very,
very negative ways." That is repeatedly apparent in his memoir,
which announces, "I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I
am a Criminal." It is an incantation he repeats eight times in
the book, always making sure to capitalize the 'c' in Criminal.
But he has demonstrably fabricated key parts of the book, which could--and probably should--cause a discerning reader (and Winfrey has ushered millions of them Frey's way) to wonder what is true in "A Million Little Pieces" and its sequel, "My Friend Leonard."
When TSG confronted him Friday (1/6) afternoon with our findings, Frey refused to address the significant conflicts we discovered between his published accounts and those contained in various police reports. When we suggested that he might owe millions of readers and Winfrey fans an explanation for these discrepancies, Frey, now a publishing powerhouse, replied, "There's nothing at this point can come out of this conversation that, that is good for me."
It was the third time since December 1 that we had spoken with Frey, who told us Friday that our second interview with him, on December 14, had left him so "rattled" that he went out and hired Los Angeles attorney Martin Singer, whose law firm handles litigation matters for A-list stars like Jennifer Aniston, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Britney Spears. While saying that he had initially asked his counsel not to send us a pre-publication legal letter, Frey apparently relented late Friday night. That's when Singer e-mailed us a five-page letter threatening a lawsuit (and the prospect of millions in damages) if we published a story stating that Frey was "a liar and/or that he fabricated or falsified background as reflected in 'A Million Little Pieces.'"
On Saturday evening, Frey published on his web site an e-mail we sent him earlier in the day requesting a final interview. That TSG letter also detailed many topics we discussed with him in our first two interviews, both of which were off the record. We consider this preemptive strike on Frey's part as a waiver of confidentiality and, as such, this story will include some of his remarks during those sessions, which totaled about 90 minutes. Frey explained that he was posting our letter to inform his fans of the "latest attempt to discredit me...So let the haters hate, let the doubters doubt, I stand by my book, and my life, and I won't dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response."
This was, Frey wrote, "an effort to be consistent with my policy of openness and transparency." Strangely, this policy seemed to have lapsed in recent weeks when Frey, in interviews with TSG, repeatedly refused to talk on the record about various matters, declined our request to review "court" and "criminal" records he has said he possesses, and continued to peddle book tales directly contradicted by various law enforcement records and officials.
But during these interviews, Frey did, for the first time, admit that he had embellished central details of his criminal career and purported incarceration for "obvious dramatic reasons" in the nonfiction work. He also admitted to taking steps, around the time "A Million Little Pieces" was published in hardcover in 2003, to legally expunge court records related to the seemingly most egregious criminal activity of his lifetime. That episode--a violent, crack-fueled confrontation with Ohio cops that resulted in a passel of serious felony charges--is a crucial moment in "A Million Little Pieces," serving as a narrative maypole around which many other key dramatic scenes revolve and depend upon for their suspense and conflict. Frey has repeatedly asserted in press interviews that the book is "all true" and he told Winfrey, "I think I wrote about the events in the book truly and honestly and accurately."
The author told us that he had the court records purged in a bid to "erect walls around myself." Referring to our inquiries about his past criminal career, Frey noted, "I wanted to put up walls as much as I possibly could, frankly, to avoid situations like this." The walls, he added, served to "keep people away from me and to keep people away from my private business." So much for the openness and transparency.
So why would a man who spends 430 pages chronicling every grimy and repulsive detail of his formerly debased life (and then goes on to talk about it nonstop for 2-1/2 years in interviews with everybody from bloggers to Oprah herself) need to wall off the details of a decade-old arrest? When you spend paragraphs describing the viscosity of your own vomit, your sexual failings, and the nightmare of shitting blood daily, who knew bashfulness was still possible, especially from a guy who wears the tattooed acronym FTBSITTTD (Fuck The Bullshit It's Time To Throw Down).
We discovered the answer to that question in the basement of an Ohio police headquarters, where Frey & Co. failed to expunge the single remaining document that provides a contemporaneous account of his watershed felonious spree.
Since the book's 2003 publication (the $14.95 paperback was issued last summer by Anchor Books), Frey has defended "A Million Little Pieces" against critic claims that parts of the book rang untrue. In a New York Times review, Janet Maslin mocked the author--a former alcoholic who has rejected the precepts of Alcoholics Anonymous--for instead hewing to a cynical "memoirist's Twelve Step program." A few journalists, most notably Deborah Caulfield Rybak of Minneapolis's Star Tribune, have openly questioned the truthfulness of some book passages, especially segments dealing with Frey undergoing brutal root-canal surgery without the aid of anesthesia and an airplane trip during which an incapacitated Frey is bleeding, has a hole in his cheek, and is wearing clothes covered with "a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood." And then there's the time in Paris (he's supposedly fled to Europe after jumping bail in Ohio) when, on his way to commit suicide by throwing himself into the Seine, Frey stops into a church to have a good cry. There, a "Priest," while pretending to listen to Frey's description of his wrecked life, makes a lunge for Frey's crotch. "You must not resist God's will, my Son," says the priest. A vicious beatdown ensues, with Frey possibly killing the grasping cleric, whom the author kicked in the balls 15 times. Mon dieu!
Frey told Cleveland's Plain Dealer in a May 2003 interview that the book was straight nonfiction, claiming that his publisher, Doubleday, "contacted the people I wrote about in the book. All the events depicted in the book checked out as factually accurate. I changed people's names. I do believe in the anonymity part of AA. The only things I changed were aspects of people that might reveal their identity. Otherwise, it's all true." However, the book, which has been printed scores of times worldwide, has never carried a disclaimer acknowledging those name changes (or any other fictionalization). Frey told us that his publisher "felt comfortable running it" without a disclaimer and that he "didn't ask or not ask" for one. "I didn't frankly even think about it."
In subsequent book store appearances (Frey can draw 1000+ fans and celebrity worshipers like Lindsay Lohan) and interviews, he has repeated the claim that "A Million Little Pieces" is truthful. And he has never shied away from discussing his criminal past.
In
a recent "Meet The Writers" interview for Barnes &
Noble's web site (which
you can listen to here), Frey was asked about his history of
incarceration. "I was in jail a bunch of times," he
answered, "The last time I was in for about three months."
When asked if books offered a bit of solace behind bars, Frey
replied, "Yeah, I mean there's nothing to do there. You can go
out to the yard and walk around or shoot hoops or lift weights. I
didn't really want to do anything, so I spent most of my time reading
books." Frey added that during that last three-month stretch he
knocked off "Don Quixote," "War and Peace," and
"The Brothers Karamazov." He also sampled some Proust, but
found it too boring. "When you have literally hours and hours
and hours a day to do nothing because you're locked in a cell, I
found that the best way to pass time was to pick up books."
In a July 2005 interview, Frey recalled reading some of those classics to a fellow inmate, an illiterate accused double murderer nicknamed Porterhouse. "We got to enjoy the books at the same time, which was cool," Frey said. The author's Ohio jailhouse interactions with Porterhouse kick off the best-selling "My Friend Leonard," (currently #9 on the Times nonfiction list, also thanks to Winfrey). The first memoir ends with Frey leaving Minnesota's Hazelden rehab clinic, and "My Friend Leonard" picks up, months later, with him on the 87th day of a three-month jail term.
In an interview with blogger Claire Zulkey, Frey compared those two stints: "Jail is really fucking boring, and occasionally, really fucking scary. It is about doing time and getting it over with and staying out of trouble. Rehab is about fixing and changing your life. It, however, can also be boring and scary."
When recalling criminal activities, looming prison sentences, and jailhouse rituals, Frey writes with a swaggering machismo and bravado that absolutely crackles. Which is truly impressive considering that, as TSG discovered, he made much of it up. The closest Frey has ever come to a jail cell was the few unshackled hours he once spent in a small Ohio police headquarters waiting for a buddy to post $733 cash bond.
Winfrey's pick of "A Million Little Pieces" was unexpected since it overflows with vulgar and graphic language. It marked her abrupt and bracing return to the selection of contemporary authors after more than three years of choosing classics (and propelling those titles, often for months at a time, to the top of bestseller lists nationwide). Prior to tabbing Frey's book, Winfrey's other 2005 book club choices were three William Faulkner novels. Winfrey had selected books by John Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Leo Tolstoy, and Carson McCullers in the two prior years.
The coronation of "A Million Little Pieces" came in September, when Winfrey told a Chicago studio audience (which included Frey's mother Lynne) that she had chosen a book that she "couldn't put down...a gut-wrenching memoir that is raw and it's so real..." She would later say that, "After turning the last page...You want to meet the man who lived to tell this tale."
During the October show, which featured Frey as its only guest, Winfrey discussed details of that tale. He was, she said, "the child you pray you never have to raise," a raging, drug-abusing teenager who had been arrested 11 times by age 19. In college, he drank to excess, took meth, freebased cocaine, huffed glue and nitrous oxide, smoked PCP, ate mushrooms, and was "under investigation by police." By the time he checked into Hazelden in late-1993, Frey, then 23, was "wanted in three states," added Winfrey. Though Frey's book does not name the Minnesota clinic in which he stayed, the author has subsequently identified Hazelden as that rehab facility.
By that point, he had added three more arrests to his rap sheet (which now totaled 14 busts), including his multiple-felony bust for that melee with Ohio cops, a confrontation that started when Frey struck a foot patrolman with his car, according to the book. That episode serves as a crucial and transitional moment in "A Million Little Pieces."
"I
know that, like many of us who have read this book, I kept turning to
the back of the book to remind myself, 'He's alive. He's okay,"
Winfrey said. In essence, that is part of the book's narrative power
and a primary marketing tool. All this terrible stuff actually
happened to a guy named James Frey, a former degenerate who survived
drug and alcohol addiction, escaped his criminal past, and somehow
avoided a relapse in the decade-plus since leaving Hazelden. When
Doubleday sent the book's galleys out to reviewers, editor Sean
McDonald wrote a letter touting Frey's "fearless candor,"
while a publicity manager hailed his "unprecedented honesty."
Of course, if "A Million Little Pieces" was fictional, just some overheated stories of woe, heartache, and debauchery cooked up by a wannabe author, it probably would not get published. As it was, Frey's original manuscript was rejected by 17 publishers before being accepted by industry titan Nan Talese, who runs a respected boutique imprint at Doubleday (Talese reportedly paid Frey a $50,000 advance). According to a February 2003 New York Observer story by Joe Hagan, Frey originally tried to sell the book as a fictional work, but the Talese imprint "declined to publish it as such." A retooled manuscript, presumably with all the fake stuff excised, was published in April 2003 amid a major publicity campaign.
Frey told Winfrey that he wrote "A Million Little Pieces" with the assistance of "like 400 pages" of very detailed Hazelden records, documents that he told her included "legal records." In a promotional CD prepared by Doubleday, Frey reported gathering "all of my records: medical, psychological, financial, criminal, and otherwise" that were kept during his treatment center stay. Declining a TSG request to examine those documents, Frey said, "Once I start providing records for people it never ends for me...I feel like I provided the records to the people who were appropriate, who needed to see them." He added that he turned down The New York Times when the newspaper sought to review the material, though he showed Hazelden records to Winfrey staff members.
Winfrey clearly recognized the book's appeal to her largely female audience. When he's not banging hookers or having a gal snort cocaine off his penis, Frey shows a deep, and often sweet, reverence for the women with whom he is involved. At turns volatile and vulnerable, chivalrous and brutish, Frey is a true reclamation project, complete with puke- and snot-stained clothing. What's a girl not to love?
Pursuing Frey documents, we were struck by the number of people TSG contacted who were either reading, or had already read, "A Million Little Pieces" as a result of the Winfrey endorsement. When we sent copies of the book to a pair of male cops, the volumes were quickly commandeered by their respective significant others. When a Michigan sheriff's aide sent us an old Frey mug shot, she enclosed a handwritten letter noting, "And by the way, I am reading his 1st book "A Million Little Pieces" & can't put it down." An Ohio police chief told us that his dispatcher had finished the book two weeks before we first called. Friends and relatives, too, were reading Frey, with one acquaintance reporting that she bought the book after seeing three other women reading it in her Metro-North railroad car.
It was after the Oprah show aired that TSG first took a look at Frey. We had simply planned to track down one of his many mug shots and add it to our site's large collection. While Frey offers no specific details about when and where he was collared, the book does mention three states where he ran into trouble: Ohio, Michigan, and North Carolina. While nine of Frey's 14 reported arrests would have occurred when he was a minor, there still remained five cases for which a booking photo (not to mention police and court records) should have existed. When we asked Frey if his reporting of the laundry list of juvenile crimes and arrests was accurate, he answered, "Yeah, some of 'em are, some of 'em aren't. I mean I just sorta tried to play off memory for that stuff."
However,
repeated dead ends on a county-by-county records search turned our
one-off hunt for a mug shot into a more prolonged review of various
portions of Frey's book. In an attempt to confirm or disprove his
accounts, we examined matters for which there would likely be a paper
trail at courthouses, police departments, or motor vehicle agencies.
While the book is brimming with improbable characters--like the colorful mafioso Leonard and the tragic crack whore Lilly, with whom Frey takes up in Hazelden--and equally implausible scenes, we chose to focus on the crime and justice aspect of "A Million Little Pieces." Which wasn't much of a decision since almost every character in Frey's book that could address the remaining topics has either committed suicide, been murdered, died of AIDS, been sentenced to life in prison, gone missing, landed in an institution for the criminally insane, or fell off a fishing boat never to be seen again.
While we do not doubt Frey spent time in rehab, there really isn't anyone left (besides the author himself) to vouch for many of the book's outlandish stories.
According to Frey, his juvenile criminal career included the kind of mindless vandalism that many suburban kids might recognize: blowing up mailboxes, breaking a statue on a neighbor's lawn, etc. As with most things Frey, tales of his delinquency can't be verified.
Frey, you see, was a raging young man who hated living in leafy, prosperous St. Joseph, Michigan (his family moved there from a Cleveland suburb when he was 12). He was an outcast who didn't "relate to any of the Kids in the Town...At first I made an effort to fit in, but I couldn't pretend, and after a few weeks, I stopped trying. I am who I am and they could either like me or hate me. They hated me with a fucking vengeance."
Soon, Jimmy Frey was getting "taunted, pushed around and beat up." He matched every aggression with his own taunts and punches. "Within a month or two I had a reputation. Teachers talked about me, Parents talked about me, the local Cops talked about me." He declared "War" on these unnamed tormentors: "I didn't care whether I won or lost, I just wanted to fight. Bring it on, you Motherfuckers, bring everything you've got. I'm ready to go fucking fight."
The Ohio transplant was radioactive, a friendless outcast, the "worst kid" in St. Joseph. Frey told Winfrey, "I was one of those kids who parents said, 'Stay away from Jimmy Frey. He's trouble.'"
Somehow,
that message was lost on Paul Santarlas, a high school classmate of
Frey's who grew up directly across the street from him on Valley View
Drive and called Frey's parents a "very generous" couple.
"I don't think he was ever in any more trouble than anyone
else," said Santarlas, who, like Frey, was a member of the St.
Joseph High School Class of 1988. Frey, he recalled, was a
"reasonably popular guy in high school" who "wasn't an
outcast." [A large photo in the 1988 yearbook, the "Mazenblue,"
shows Frey
in action on the school's soccer team.]
"I never saw anything that stood out," said Santarlas. Frey was a "normal guy" who didn't get in any more trouble than the average St. Joseph teen--perhaps a little drinking here, some weed there. What about those stern parental warnings to avoid Frey? "I never heard that," said Santarlas, who had not yet read "A Million Little Pieces" when interviewed by TSG.
A thorough review of court and police records in the city and township of St. Joseph, the larger Berrien County, and surrounding counties turned up only one case, which landed Frey in a Michigan District Court around the time of his high school graduation. Here's how he succinctly described that drunk driving bust in "A Million Little Pieces": "Got first DUI. Blew a .36, and set a County Record. Went to Jail for a week."
A report by the St. Joseph Township Police tells a different story. Just after midnight on June 8, 1988, a cop spotted the 18-year-old Frey's car weaving across the center line of Lakeshore Drive. After executing a traffic stop, the officer noticed Frey's eyes were glassy, his breath smelled of booze, and he "appeared dazed." Frey first told the cop he had drunk two beers, but later revised the estimate to four. After failing a series of field sobriety tests, Frey was arrested for drunk driving and for failure to carry his driver's license. He was transported to the Berrien County Sheriff's Office, where he agreed to undergo a Breathalyzer test.
Though
he would later write of setting a .36 county record, Frey's blood
alcohol level was actually recorded in successive tests at .21 and
.20 (about twice the legal limit). As for his claim to have spent a
week in jail after the arrest, the report debunks that assertion.
After Frey's parents were called, he was allowed to quickly bond out,
since the county jail "did not want him in their facility."
Because Frey had the chicken pox (which is apparent
in his mug shot) and the sheriff did not want him anywhere near
other arrestees. Two weeks later, court records show, he pleaded
guilty to a reduced charge of reckless driving and was fined $305. No
jail, no framed certificate for setting the Berrien County Blood
Alcohol Content record.
[When we asked Frey why he didn't move to expunge the records from this DUI arrest, as he did with the subsequent Ohio case, he said, "'Cause I didn't think it was that big a deal. It's not as big a deal as it is in the book."]
But these are minor embellishments compared to how Frey has described his next police encounter.
Three months after his Michigan arrest, Frey began his studies at Denison University, a 2100-student liberal arts school in the central Ohio town of Granville. It was here, according to "A Million Little Pieces," that Frey majored in substance abuse. He blacked out and vomited daily, frequently bled from his nose due to cocaine ingestion, and even pissed in his bed for the first time. This abuse of alcohol and drugs exacerbated Frey's rage, anger, and extreme pain, a self-destructive cocktail that he named "the Fury."
His
habits were underwritten by a monthly allowance from his wealthy and
unwitting folks (dad was a top executive). He supplemented his income
by selling dope, which brought him to the attention of the local cops
and the FBI, who jointly probed his narcotics operation, Frey claims
in the book. Amazingly, though he was reportedly a vomiting drunken
addict bleeding from various orifices, Frey was able to graduate from
Denison on time in 1992 (talk about managing your addiction!). Maybe
it was support from fellow brothers at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon
fraternity that helped the Michigan high school outcast persevere.
Makes you wonder if Frey had shot heroin, perhaps he would have also
snagged a master's.
During these drug-addled Denison days, Frey wrote, "Lying became part of my life. I lied if I needed to lie to get something or get out of something."
While Frey claims to have been arrested several times during college, TSG found evidence of only one bust--and it's the single crime for which he offers any significant details in "A Million Little Pieces." Though Frey provides no dates, the incident occurred in October 1992, about five months after his Denison graduation.
As he tells it, Frey returned to Ohio in a bid to reconcile with a college girlfriend who, it turned out, wanted nothing to do with him. "I was crushed. I went out and I drank as much as I could and smoked as much crack as I could and when I was good and loaded, I decided to go find her and try to talk to her again." He headed to look for her at a local bar. And that's when the trouble began. Here's his account from "A Million Little Pieces":
As I was driving up, I saw her standing out front with a few of her friends. I was staring at her and not paying attention to the road and I drove up onto a sidewalk and hit a Cop who was standing there. I didn't hit him hard because I was only going about five miles an hour, but I hit him. The Cop called for backup and I sat in the car and stared at her and waited. The backup came and they approached the car and asked me to get out and I said you want me out, then get me out, you fucking Pigs. They opened the door, I started swinging, and they beat my ass with billy clubs and arrested me. As they hauled me away kicking and screaming, I tried to get the crowd to attack them and free me, which didn't happen.
After a night in jail, Frey was arraigned the following morning and released after a friend posted his bail with a credit card. He was, the book noted, hit with an imposing set of criminal charges: "Assault with a Deadly Weapon, Assaulting an Officer of the Law, Felony DUI, Disturbing the Peace, Resisting Arrest, Driving Without a License, Driving Without Insurance, Attempted Incitement of a Riot, Possession of a Narcotic with Intent to Distribute, and Felony Mayhem." The only count Frey took issue with was the drug charge (for possession of a "bag of crack cocaine"): "That was bullshit because I intended to use it, not distribute it."
The Ohio arrest--and its related judicial peril--is a crucial part of "A Million Little Pieces." The violent, drug-fueled arrest certifies Frey as a wild man and justifies the capital 'c' in Criminal.
It also leads to tense scenes in Hazelden, when Frey, sitting with his parents, realizes that "The Day of Judgment has arrived." A lawyer for the facility, who had been talking on Frey's behalf with the Ohio authorities, gravely informs him that, "You're in a lot of trouble in Ohio. It's a Small Town and they don't see much like what they saw with you. They say you caused quite a few problems there and made a number of enemies within the Police Department." The attorney, named Randall, adds, "They are incredibly angry, as angry as any Prosecutors that I have ever had to deal with on a case, and they want to make an example out of you."
Randall then relays a prosecution offer: "If you agree to plead guilty to all of the charges, they'll agree to three years in State Prison, followed by five years of Probation. If you violate your Probation, you will be required to serve the full term of the Sentence, which is an additional five years." Randall added that Frey would also have to pay $15,000 in fines and serve 1000 hours of community service upon his prison release.
But
if he opted for a trial, prosecutors would press for the "maximum
Sentence, which is eight and a half years," Randall warned. And
that didn't seem like such a good idea since, Randall explained,
prosecutors claimed to have 30 witnesses, a blood alcohol test
registering .29, and a bag of crack as evidence.
"The fear is gone, replaced by horror," Frey writes. "I shake my head, think about three years in a State Prison...Three years of savagery, three years of fighting and three years protecting myself every second of every day. Three fucking years."
With his mother in tears, Frey's father asks, "Would you like to mount a defense?"
"It'd be a waste of time."
"Why?"
"Because I'm guilty of all the charges."
Resigned to his fate, Frey announces that he'll take the plea deal, though the three years in prison "is an eternity, and it's likely I'll be put in Maximum Security. I have never been there, but I know people who have been there. They did not come out rehabilitated and they did not come out resembling who they were when they went in. Addicts became Thieves. Thieves became Dealers. Dealers became Killers. Killers killed again."
Frey then requested that Randall try to keep him off a "Maximum Security Block." In fact, Frey added, "If there's any sort of choice, which sounds like an incredible longshot, I would rather do more time than go into Max."
It would take 83 more pages of "A Million Little Pieces" to finally learn the disposition of Frey's Ohio case.
He is called into a room at Hazelden where Randall passes on some good--and unexpected--news. The Ohio prosecutor had magically "encountered some problems, that there were some issues with missing evidence, and that he had received a couple of phone calls on your behalf," the lawyer reported. While Frey had, only weeks earlier, agreed to three years in prison (with the specter of eight-plus if convicted at trial), Randall explained that the prosecutor, who goes unnamed, had suddenly turned course. He was now willing, in return for Frey doing three-to-six months in a county jail, to reduce felony counts to misdemeanors and wipe Frey's record if he satisfactorily completed a three-year probation term.
Frey, not surprisingly, was ecstatic, since "three to six months in County is a fucking cakewalk...I'll be in with a bunch of drunk drivers and wife beaters and Pot dealers. I won't have any problems with them. It'll be a cakewalk."
A few pages later, Frey attributes the sudden reversal of fortune (or fix) to the intercession on his behalf by two fellow rehab center residents, the gangster Leonard and Miles, a New Orleans federal appeals court judge. "Thank you both very much," he says after approaching the pair in a Hazelden room. "Consider yourself a very fortunate young man, James," says Miles. "Very fucking fortunate," Leonard adds.
Now, suddenly free from the prospect of three long years in the can, Frey can chart his post-rehab life with Lilly, the Hazelden squeeze he plans on reuniting with in Chicago after his three months in jail. Leaving Hazelden, he tells a crying Lilly, "I have to go to jail in Ohio. It's only a few months. I'm going to write you every day, and I'll call you whenever I can."
As it turned out, however, things didn't go as planned for James and Lilly, according to the opening pages of "My Friend Leonard." With just a day left in jail, Frey speaks by phone with a hysterical Lilly, who is distraught over her grandmother's recent death. "Scared and lonely" and "sobbing and heaving," she begs Frey, "I need you right now, please, please, please, I need you right now." Frey explains, "I'm in jail Lilly, I can't do anything here but talk to you." He tries to console her by promising he'll be out in just 12 hours and would race to her side.
Upon leaving the Ohio jail, Frey sped, 20 red roses in hand, to a Chicago halfway house for a reunion with his crackhead inamorata. Sadly, imprisonment had slowed a timely rescue mission and Frey arrived too late: Lilly had hung herself from the shower faucet, just another one of James Frey's People Who Died. A reader, of course, can only ponder whether fragile Lilly would have perished if James didn't have to do those three months in an Ohio lockup.
When TSG read Frey's description of his arrest, the related criminal charges, and the case's strange disposition, we first attempted to find court records related to the incident. We assumed--correctly as it turned out--it might have occurred in Licking County, Ohio, which includes the village of Granville (present pop. 5098, including students) and the Denison campus.
However,
indices at the county's Common Pleas Court--where felony cases are
handled--contained no records for Frey. At the county's Municipal
Court, where misdemeanor and traffic cases are adjudicated, only a
single matter turned up, a November 1990 traffic ticket for speeding
and driving without a seat belt. Frey paid a small fine and the case
was closed out. When we reviewed Mayor's Court dockets in Granville,
there was also no record for Frey.
Of course, it was only later that we learned from Frey that the records--once apparently held in Municipal Court--had been expunged as part of his wall building effort. An Ohio defendant is eligible for the expungement, or sealing, of court records if, among several conditions, the case at hand was their first conviction (or if prior convictions involved only minor misdemeanors). An expungement petition, which can only be granted by a judge, can first be made after a year has passed following a defendant's "final discharge." A final discharge refers to a defendant's completion of a jail or probationary term.
A search by Licking County Sheriff Randy Thorp at the county jail also turned up nothing. Frey, he told TSG, had never been an inmate in the jail, a small, low-rise facility off Route 16 in Newark, Ohio.
When we ran Frey's name past Robert Becker, Licking County's Prosecuting Attorney, he could find no record that his office, which deals with felony prosecutions, had ever handled a case against the author. Becker, the county's chief prosecutor since 1984, told TSG that he had reviewed both his office's computer system and an index card catalog that predates the computerized records. He noted that his office would generally maintain a record "on any case that came in whether or not it resulted in felony charges."
Becker raised the possibility that Frey's case may not have risen to the level of either being handled (or reviewed) by his office if the charges were not as severe as Frey claimed. In such an instance, a city or village would sometimes farm the prosecution out to an attorney in private practice who is retained to handle minor misdemeanor cases. Becker, who read Frey's account of the Ohio case after we provided him with pages from "A Million Little Pieces," noted that the author claimed to have been charged with felony DUI, a count that did not exist in Ohio until after 1996. He was also stumped by another count: "There is no such charge as felony mayhem." And as for the threat of such hefty fines and community service terms? "I can't think of any cases where we ever got any kinds of substantial fines in this county, let alone $15,000, my gosh. One thousand hours of community service? Oh, come on."
And when we asked about Frey's case being fixed from afar by two Hazelden cronies, one of whom was a mobster, Becker laughed. "Oh, my gosh, wasn't me," he said. "It wasn't me." He then added, "It does not seem likely to me that any of these events occurred in this county."
Which, as we soon learned, was an accurate appraisal from the veteran lawman.
When
we first contacted the Granville Police Department, an initial search
also came up empty. But then Sergeant Dave Dudgeon, 45, dug into old
mug shot binders and found a photo of Frey snapped in the wee hours
of October 25, 1992. That discovery led him to the department's
basement, where old police incident reports are stored. While many
agencies would have destroyed documents dating back 13 years, Chief
Steve Cartnal, 47, explained that the Granville P.D.--which makes
between 300-400 arrests annually and employs nine full-time
officers--was not pressed for storage space, so there was no need to
toss records.
In the basement, Dudgeon located Granville Police Department Official Report 92-300B, which memorialized Frey's now-famous Ohio arrest. As he looked at the report's face page, Dudgeon recognized the name of the arresting officer: "Oh, it was me!"
The Granville report, which you can read here, gave this description of Frey's arrest:
While on foot patrol at about 11 PM on October 24, Dudgeon was standing in front of a knick-knack store called the Tole House when he spotted a 1989 white Mercury pull out of a nearby bank parking lot. The driver then attempted to park in a no parking zone directly across the street from the Granville firehouse and a few doors down from a bar/pizzeria popular with Denison students. The vehicle's right front tire rolled up onto the curb, missing a power pole by just a few inches.
[Click here to see a photo of the Ohio crime scene, complete with arrows showing the path of Frey's Mercury. TSG snapped the image last month in Granville.]
Dudgeon,
then 32 and on the Granville force for 3-1/2 years, approached the
car and told Frey that he was in a no parking zone. Dudgeon noticed
that Frey was slurring his words, his eyes were bloodshot and glassy,
and he smelled of alcohol. There was also a half-full, 12-ounce
bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer between the car's bucket seats.
After Frey exited the Mercury at Dudgeon's request, the cop
administered several field sobriety tests, which Frey failed. Dudgeon
then arrested the 23-year-old. Since Dudgeon was on foot, a second
cop came and drove Frey the few blocks to police headquarters. There,
Patrolman Charles Maneely reported, Frey declined to take a blood
alcohol test.
Since headquarters did not have a cell or any kind of secured holding area, Cartnal explained, Frey would have been placed in a paneled room with chairs and a fold-up table upon which sat the department's Breathalyzer machine. And Frey would not have been handcuffed unless he was being unruly, added Cartnal.
Frey was issued two traffic tickets, one for driving under the influence and another for driving without a license, and a separate misdemeanor criminal summons for having that open container of Pabst. He was directed to appear in Mayor's Court in 10 days. Frey was then released on $733 cash bond, according to the report, which was written at 4 AM on October 25. So, Frey's time in custody did not exceed five hours.
To review:
There was no patrolman struck with a car.
There was no urgent call for backup.
There was no rebuffed request to exit the car.
There was no "You want me out, then get me out."
There was no "fucking Pigs" taunt.
There were no swings at cops.
There was no billy club beatdown.
There was no kicking and screaming.
There was no mayhem.
There was no attempted riot inciting.
There were no 30 witnesses.
There was no .29 blood alcohol test.
There was no crack.
There was no Assault with a Deadly Weapon, Assaulting an Officer of the Law, Felony DUI, Disturbing the Peace, Resisting Arrest, Driving Without Insurance, Attempted Incitement of a Riot, Possession of a Narcotic with Intent to Distribute, or Felony Mayhem.
And
though he would later vividly write about being consumed by an
internal rage that he named like a pet, Frey was somehow able to keep
"the Fury" in check on that drunken October night in
Granville. As Patrolman Maneely reported, he "was polite and
cooperative at all times." (Click
here to see Frey's Granville mug shot.) Frey's arrest was as
mundane as they get, as vanilla as the arrestee himself, a neatly
dressed frat boy five months out of school and plastered on cheap
beer.
In fact, he was processed and released so expeditiously, it makes you wonder when Frey, then 23, had the time for a gripping bit of suicidal ideation as described in "A Million Little Pieces":
Right after my arrest in Ohio, while I was sitting in Jail, I started thinking about my life. I was twenty-two years old. I had been an Alcoholic and drug Addict for a decade. I hated myself. I didn't see a future and the only thing in my past was wreckage and disaster. I decided that I wanted to die.
As we sat with Dudgeon and Cartnal in police headquarters, TSG asked the sergeant if he had ever been hit by an automobile during his 17 years on the force. "No," he said. Would that necessarily have been something he would recall? "I think I'd remember that, yup," he answered, laughing. "There are certain things in your career that stand out to you, like the first time you did an arrest..."
"Or the first time you've been hit by a car," Cartnal interjected.
In a TSG interview, while Frey admitted that "to a certain extent" the Ohio incident and the severity of the resulting charges were "embellished in the book for obvious dramatic reasons," he continued to claim that he struck a cop with his car and was carrying a "bag of crack in my pocket" when busted. When he first made these statements, in a December 14 interview, TSG had yet to obtain the Granville police report. During an interview Friday, Frey, who was unaware that we then had a copy of the police document, said he was "willing to provide independent witnesses who were with me at certain events that you can't find paperwork for, including the events in Ohio. There's a college professor that was with me who's still a professor at a university who was in the car with me. Witness to the entire thing."
The police report makes no mention of a second passenger in the car, nor does it identify anyone else as a suspect in connection with ownership of that open bottle of Pabst. The only reference to another party is Frey's statement to Dudgeon that he "was just pulling around to pick up a friend." In his retelling of the episode in "A Million Little Pieces," Frey never mentions that there was a passenger in his car when he took on half the pigs on the Granville force. As for the identity of the eyewitness claimed by Frey, we can only assume that he was referring to a male professor with whom he claimed, in "My Friend Leonard," to have smoked crack and drank moonshine (which the educator reportedly brewed in his basement). In the second book, Frey adds that this professor was present more than once when the author was arrested.
In his legal threat letter to TSG, Singer identified Frey's purported passenger as a female. The lawyer also stated that we surely had the wrong police report since our version makes no mention of Frey's passenger. "My client has had many altercations with the law, and the fact that you may have one police report that refers to one offense does not necessarily mean that you have the police report of the incident described in the book."
However, based on Frey's own statements in a TSG interview, there can be little, if any, doubt that the incident described in the Granville police report is the same one fictionalized in Frey's book. He told us that right before striking the cop, he had pulled out of a nearby parking lot and drove across a sidewalk into the street. Which is exactly how Dudgeon's report describes the movement of the author's car. He said he was arrested that evening by the "Granville P.D." He put the time frame of the arrest as about a year prior to his September 1993 admission to Hazelden (the Dudgeon arrest came in October 1992).
Most importantly, Frey told us that after graduating Denison in late-April or early-May of 1992, he moved to France and stayed there for several months before returning to the States "literally for two, probably three or four days." The arrest in the book, he said, came during those few days, after which he "went back to France immediately." He remained in Europe until returning to the U.S. (specifically, North Carolina) six to eight weeks prior to entering Hazelden. So, the notion that there was somehow another October 1992 arrest in Granville during which Frey rolled his car up on a sidewalk after leaving a parking lot seems a bit of a stretch, even for an enterprising attorney like Singer.
Frey's tall tales would, of course, be pretty funny if so many people didn't actually believe them.
While claiming that he does not desire to become the poster boy for unconventional recovery, Frey has nonetheless emerged as a source of inspiration and guidance for countless substance abusers (as well as their friends and loved ones) and other readers who have embraced "A Million Little Pieces" as a forthright, honest, and unconventional look at addiction. For Winfrey's show, he even traveled to a Minnesota clinic and gave an on-camera pep talk to Sandie, a viewer who checked herself into rehab after learning about Frey's book via an e-mail from the Oprah club. "If I can do it, you can do it," Frey told her. A second Winfrey show is in the works, with her web site seeking viewers whose lives have been "dramatically impacted" by Frey's book. The site asks, "Did 'A Million Little Pieces' Save Your Life?"
Frey rejected the Twelve Step approach and considers addiction a weakness, not a disease (cancer and Parkinson's are diseases, he points out). Frey's reported post-Hazelden recovery was unorthodox, hinging on his ability to continually surmount temptation, thanks to a superhuman will that helped him avoid using at the same time he was purposely placing himself in situations where alcohol and drugs were prevalent. For those struggling with substance abuse, Frey is a shiny, relapse-free success story, a man who beat formidable odds with steely resolve. (Click here for audio of Frey talking about his ordeal on a Doubleday promotional CD.)
For desperate people, there appears to be magic in his approach, though it really boils down to a familiar refrain: Just say 'No.' But since that phrase has long been tainted, Frey has opted for an even pithier maxim: "Hold on." "Whenever you want to go do something you know you shouldn't do, just hold on, and sooner or later you'll feel better," Frey told Sandie.
Some of the author's acolytes even get "Hold on" tattooed on themselves. Others prefer to go the t-shirt route, lending Frey's slogan the kind of spiritual heft that can only be found when it's scrawled on a Fruit of the Loom product.
Frey's fabrications have carried through to his purported Ohio jail time. He has repeated this fiction in numerous interviews and in a recent "Life After Rehab" essay he penned for Winfrey's web site. The essay, the site notes, is "as open and honest as his book." Recounting his three-month imprisonment after departing Hazelden, Frey writes that he would only be allowed to call girlfriend Lilly for 10 minutes a day and how, "soon as I walked out of the jail," he drove six hours to Chicago to reunite with her. After Lilly's suicide, though, he was crushed and facing a bleak future: "I didn't have a job or the type of CV, jail rehab jail jail jail, that would get me a job."
When TSG challenged Frey on his claim to have spent 90 days in the Licking County jail, he laughed and said, "Again, I got to make sure this is all off the record. 'Cause I don't want to read an article in a magazine next week." He then admitted, "I was in for a significantly shorter period of time than three months." We then asked if his detention in connection with the Ohio incident could have actually been limited to time in custody prior to making bail (though we would later learn that he spent no more than five hours at the Granville police headquarters, we estimated such pre-bail detention at a day or two). He replied, "Yeah, that's something more to the line of what we're talking about."
As for the final disposition of the Ohio criminal case, Frey told us that he returned to Licking County after departing Hazelden to "finish dealing with all of it." In a brief appearance before a male judge in a courtroom in Newark (the county seat), he said, "I pled guilty to things and then they let me go and I left and went back to Chicago." Though Frey had the court's records purged, based on TSG's review of similar minor misdemeanor cases, he would have likely been sentenced to pay a fine of several hundred dollars. Jail would not have been a worry for him. When we asked about the severity of his punishment, Frey replied, "I got in almost no trouble, if that answers the question."
A detailed account of his prison stay emerges in the opening pages of Frey's follow-up memoir, "My Friend Leonard." Unlike Frey's first book, the sequel carries a small disclaimer noting that "some names and identifying characteristics have been changed" and "some sequences and details of events have been changed." But Frey has steadfastly--and repeatedly--maintained that he did three months in an Ohio county jail.
As Frey tells it, he lived in a 32-inmate module for "violent and felonious offenders" who were always watched over by five to seven deputies. He wears a blue- and yellow-striped jumpsuit. Moving between rooms, Frey walks past barred doors and through metal detectors. The walls, floor, and bed in his cell are cement. A small bulletproof window, with bars on each side of it, looks out onto a brick wall. The facility is surrounded by a 15-foot high razor wire fence.
Frey
spends hours each day in his cell reading to Porterhouse, an
illiterate inmate facing trial for two homicides (he is said to have
pushed his girlfriend out a window after finding her in bed with
another man, whom Porterhouse then tortures before dispatching him
with a bullet to the heart). The Frey-Porterhouse Book Club gets
through "Don Quixote," "Leaves of Grass," and
"East of Eden." And, as Frey is nearing release, the pair
is reading "War and Peace." Porterhouse loves the book,
crying when Anatole betrayed Natasha. He carries it around with him,
Frey writes, and "cradles it as if it were his child."
If you're wondering how these two met, Frey explains that on his first day in the joint, the 300-pound Porterhouse clobbered him in the head with a metal food tray as Frey was waiting in line for lunch. The hulking inmate then hit Frey in the face, drawing blood from his nose and mouth, and clamped on a headlock. By the following day, however, the beating was a distant memory, as Frey began reading to Porterhouse after being invited into the accused killer's cell for a chat. Porterhouse explained that Frey's ass kicking had been contracted out to him by a "County Sheriff" in exchange for three cartons of cigarettes. Why would a screw want Frey harmed, Porterhouse wondered.
"I told him that I had hit a County Sheriff with a car going five miles an hour while I was drunk and high on crack and that I had fought several others when they tried to arrest me," Frey explained.
Seated at his desk in the Licking County jail, Sheriff Randy Thorp had a bemused look on his face as TSG asked him questions about details of Frey's incarceration, the one for which Thorp said there are no records. We had previously provided him with book excerpts covering the nonexistent jail term, so he was familiar with Frey's penal claims.
The Frey account is correct as far as the jail operating on a modular system with 32 inmates per unit, Thorp said. However, with regard to almost every other point, Frey is wildly inaccurate. Module inmates are watched over by a single deputy, not five to seven. Blue and yellow jumpsuits? "Never," Thorp said. "Orange for males, white if they're a work trustee, and the women wear khaki." The jail, Thorp said, also does not have bars, barred doors, and metal detectors. A 15-foot fence? "Not even one foot," said Thorp, a 22-year veteran of the institution. He added that the beds are made of steel, the cell windows do not have bars on either side, and, in a small point, cell windows are made of reinforced, not bulletproof, glass.
And
as for the cozy reading room ambience of Frey's cell, Thorp said that
would not be allowed in the module, where inmates can stay alone in
their cells or congregate in a communal day area. "You do not
want them [two prisoners] in a cell where you can't see what they're
doing," he said. So, TSG asked, could a couple of bookworms get
through 1400 pages of Tolstoy (or, for that matter, other hefty
Penguin Classics) undetected? "No, you couldn't," Thorp
said. "That's heavy reading."
When we asked Frey if he actually was assaulted by Porterhouse, he said, "Uh, something along those lines happened, yes." Was it done at the direction of law enforcement officers in retaliation for him supposedly tangling with Granville cops? "I don't know that, man," he said. And despite all that quality time spent with Porterhouse on Napoleon's invasion of Russia, Frey could not recall the inmate's actual first or last name.
The sheriff also dismissed the notion that a guard would order a retaliatory inmate assault--and pay for it with smokes. "We're a triple accredited agency," Thorp said, noting that jail personnel take the subject of inmate treatment seriously and have sought to give prisoners a voice and an ability to grieve procedures or occurrences in the facility. When we commented that the assault-for-cigarettes equation seemed "cinematic" (especially coming from Frey, who has penned several screenplays), Thorp said, "Good choice of words."
For his part, Dudgeon, the Granville cop who arrested the "polite" Frey, joked that he was upset that no record existed of the author's jail term: "You mean I didn't buy somebody off with cigarettes to beat him up?"
"Seems Mr. Frey has quite an imagination. He thinks he's a bit of a desperado. He's making a bunch of crap up."
That's the assessment of David Baer, a former Granville police sergeant who, at TSG's request, reviewed old police records and Frey's account of his starring role as a chief target in a narcotics probe supposedly jointly run by the FBI and Granville cops. "The FBI started investigating me for dealing and I got questioned by them at the local Police Station five or six times," he claims in "A Million Little Pieces." Though he attaches no names or time frame to this account, documents show that Frey is referring to incidents that purportedly occurred in early 1992, weeks before his Denison graduation. The story picks up with him in a "Bar" with his college sweetheart:
About an hour after we got there, some Cops walk in with a Guy I'd never seen before. These were Small-Town Cops, fat stupid Assholes with mustaches and beer guts and badges. I knew them and they knew me. In the years I had spent in that Town, I had openly taunted them and had dared them to try and catch me on something, which they never had. Now they had this new Guy, and they marched up to me, full of bullshit Cop bravado, and they pulled out a warrant, and they said I had to come down to the Station with them to answer some questions. They said there was another team of People searching my House with dogs. I laughed and told them to get the fuck out of my face, and the new Guy pulled out his badge and said Son, I am with the FBI and your number is up, and he grabbed me and hauled my ass out of there...The ride down to the station was bullshit. I sang the National Anthem at the top of my lungs, and in between renditions, asked the Cops when we were stopping for pie. The questioning session was even more ridiculous. The FBI Agent kept asking me about my trips to Brazil, which had nothing to do with drugs, and about who I knew in South America, and I just alternated answers. I won't speak until I have a Lawyer. Your mustache makes you look like a fucking idiot. Eventually the Search Team came back and they hadn't found anything at my House because there was nothing left to find, and they had to let me go. I walked out, and on my way, I told every Cop I saw to go fuck himself.
On the way out, Frey added, one cop "threw a cup of coffee at me."
The grand criminal probe of which Frey writes he was the main target, Baer said, was actually a very small-scale affair: "It was college kids doing dope." Baer, now a lieutenant with Florida's Marco Island Police Department, said the Granville investigation, which he ran, had no federal agencies involved. "I never, ever, ever worked with the FBI on a drug case" in Granville, said Baer. "Never did it once."
Baer's investigation began with the cooperation of a Denison student who got ratted out by a frat boy who himself was popped on a minor drug charge. The Denison student, eager to save his own ass, acknowledged using cocaine, acid, and pot. The student's main concern was that he would have to continue his senior year "being known as an informant," according to a January 1992 police report.
When
the young snitch sat down with investigators, he helped them draw up
a list of 11 Denison students--many of them fraternity
members--suspected of dealing. Frey was one of eight students
described in an investigative report as allegedly selling small
amounts of cocaine. Frey's name does not appear anywhere else in a
detailed
13-page report prepared by Baer and other officers. Three other
students allegedly sold marijuana, one dealt LSD, and five were
described as suspected customers of one campus coke dealer.
The cooperating student would go on to make an undercover buy of a half-a-hit of acid from an SAE brother of Frey's. That student, Alexander Speyer, pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor drug charge and was fined $150. When Granville police closed down their investigation that April, they interviewed seven students about their suspected drug sales. Frey, police reports show, was not one of the students Granville cops set out to interview, nor was he questioned.
Though armed with no warrants during the early-morning Q&A sessions, most students granted permission for cops to search their dorm or frat rooms. In a few instances, police recovered pot, for which the students were charged and later fined small amounts in Granville Mayor's Court.
A
second frat brother of Frey's, Andrew Delano, was popped that morning
when he nervously (and voluntarily) handed over three wooden boxes
containing a small amount of marijuana. While it was Delano's second
arrest in three months (he had been nabbed in January for disorderly
conduct/public intoxication and fined $150), he again walked out of
Mayor's Court with a small fine and no jail time.
The second misdemeanor slap on Delano's wrist makes Frey's contention that he was made to serve three months county time (on equally minor charges) all the more ridiculous.
Frey, who first told us about the arrests of frat brothers Delano and Speyer, said that cops tried to get both students to flip on him, a claim not reflected in police records. Neither Delano nor Speyer responded to TSG efforts to contact them about Frey's assertions.
Calling Frey's account of the drug probe (and his supposed chief role in it) "bullshit," Baer told TSG that that Granville police were simply trying to make "nickel bag drug cases." While he wished the case had an exotic, South American angle to it--as Frey tried to make it seem in "A Million Little Pieces"--Baer said the probe was small potatoes. "We were trying to buy baggies of pot."
[Frey's claim of being grilled by the FBI over his trips to Brazil apparently is an oblique reference to visiting his parents, who were living there while his father headed up Whirlpool's Latin American division.]
The university, Baer said, was not filled with roughnecks and drug toughs. A Denison gang would be "wearing khakis and blue sport blazers. We're not talking Detroit here," he added. "It's like Biffy and Buffy saying, 'I think we should steal a stop sign.'"
On a final note, Baer denied being the overweight Asshole Cop who purportedly threw his coffee at Frey after the wiseass frat boy bolted police headquarters following an interview session that never actually took place. "I was skinny then and didn't drink coffee," he claimed.
The two other criminal activities that TSG tried to confirm supposedly resulted in Frey being wanted on drug possession charges in Michigan and North Carolina (as well as in Ohio). He has repeated this since the 2003 publication of "A Million Little Pieces."
The only proof, as it were, offered in the book is the claim that after landing in North Carolina (in late 1993, shortly after pummeling that pervy Parisian priest), "I was so fucked up all the time, but I know I got arrested again." He then tacked up another wanted poster: "I also know I got arrested in Michigan, though I have no idea what I was doing in Michigan. I skipped Bail in both places, so I guess I'm wanted there as well."
The "I've been an Alcoholic for a decade and a drug Addict and a Criminal for almost as long and I'm wanted in three states" refrain has appeared, in some form, in hundreds of stories about Frey, in promotional material for the book, and was one of the first things Winfrey said about him when introducing Frey to her audience.
We'll start with Michigan. As previously mentioned, TSG conducted extensive searches in the state and came up with the single case Frey himself provides scant details about in "A Million Little Pieces." That arrest occurred on June 8, 1988 and was settled with a plea before the month was over. The court docket makes no mention of any outstanding warrant that needed to be addressed by the defendant. Less than three months later, Frey moved to Ohio to begin studies at Denison.
By his own admission, most recently on "Oprah" when he returned to St. Joseph with a camera crew in tow, Frey had not been in Michigan in the intervening 18 years. So when and where he racked up that supposed drug arrest is a mystery. The only other mention of it in the book comes when Randall, the Hazelden attorney, reports that the "Authorities" in Michigan and North Carolina were each seeking "Misdemeanor Possession" pleas because "Courts in both places are overloaded and want this to go away." In return for the pleas, Randall tells him, "Your time in here will be time served." In addition, Randall explains, he'll face "a couple thousand dollar" fines in each jurisdiction, though Frey's "Record will be cleared in three years."
Our search of North Carolina records also turned up no cases or warrants for Frey, who has said the bust there came in either Wilmington or the neighboring Wrightsville Beach. Checks with the police departments in both places turned up no records for a James Frey. At the New Hanover county level, the sheriff's office, the Superior Court, which handles felony matters, and the District Court, which handles misdemeanors and lower-level infractions, all had no record of him in their respective files, all of which date back prior to the 1990s.
Wrightsville Police Department Officer Sean Appler also searched North Carolina driver's history records, conducted a criminal history check, and performed an Administrative Offices of the Court case query. All three returned no hits for Frey's name. To aid in searches, TSG often provided law enforcement officials with identifying details like Frey's date of birth, middle name, or social security number. And sometimes all three.
When we told Frey that records checks in both states came up empty, he acknowledged that neither case involved narcotics possession, as claimed in "A Million Little Pieces." He said the North Carolina matter--which would have come in the weeks before his Hazelden admission--was "alcohol-related" and "some bullshit nothing." It involved "like walking down a street with open containers and getting in a confrontation with other people walking down the street with open containers," added Frey. Asked if this would have been an offense for which he was issued something akin to a citation, Frey answered, "Yes."
He could offer even fewer details of the supposed Michigan incident besides, "It was probably something dumb like a traffic citation or a dumb bullshit warrant like that."
In both states, it remains entirely unclear where these supposed arrest warrants were purportedly lodged against Frey, who could offer us no guidance in locating them.
While Frey's fabrications and embellishments of his criminal "career" and jail time are patently dishonest, the section of "A Million Little Pieces" that deals with a tragedy that took place while he was a high school student is downright creepy and detestable.
On November 15, 1986 at 9:17 PM, a northbound C&O locomotive pulling a caboose and headed for nearby Benton Harbor slammed broadside into a 1976 Oldsmobile Toronado at the Maiden Lane railroad crossing in Michigan's St. Joseph Township.
The two-door car was driven by 17-year-old Dean Sperlik. Sharing the front seat with him was Jane Hall and Melissa Sanders, both also 17. Hall and Sanders were best friends and classmates at St. Joseph High School. Sperlik, who had moved from St. Joseph to Grand Rapids only months earlier, had previously attended the school with the girls.
According
to a St. Joseph Township Police Department report, on the night of
the accident, Sperlik hosted a party at a residence where he was
house sitting. About a dozen teenage partygoers played Ping Pong and
some, including Sperlik, were seen drinking. Sometime after 8:30 PM,
Sperlik, Hall, and Sanders left the party in the boy's auto.
Witnesses differed on whether the trio was going to another party or
planned to return after purchasing wine coolers.
Less than an hour later, Hall and Sanders were dead, and Sperlik was seriously injured. Despite flashing railroad warning signals, Sperlik, driving at about 50 mph, tried to beat the train through an intersection. Instead, the Olds was hit flush on its right side, where Sanders was seated next to the door. A subsequent investigation determined the car was dragged 626 feet down the tracks.
Sanders, a member of her school's varsity tennis, volleyball, and softball teams, died at the scene from massive head and internal injuries. An autopsy determined that she had no trace of alcohol in her system. Hall, a varsity tennis player and a member of the French club, died of multiple fractures and internal injuries. While seriously injured, Sperlik survived the crash and subsequently pleaded no contest to a negligent homicide charge. He was sentenced to six months in jail and two years probation.
When recreating the train accident in "A Million Little Pieces," Frey manipulates the time frame, claiming it occurred halfway through the eighth grade, just six months after he relocated (at age 12) to St. Joseph from the Cleveland area. In fact, Sanders and Hall were high school seniors and Frey, also 17, was a junior at the time of the train crash. He also refers to Melissa Sanders as just "Michelle" in the book.
Frey identified "Michelle" as Melissa Sanders in a December 14 TSG interview. While prepared to ask him questions about his supposed role in the train crash, Frey ended an interview Friday before we could explore the subject with him.
Frey introduces Michelle to readers by carrying on a conversation with the dead girl while showering one day at Hazelden. "I say you have been on my mind lately. I say I may see you soon. I say please be there when I arrive, I'm looking forward to spending some time together."
He goes on to explain how he met Michelle when he moved to their "small Town." He was an outsider hated by the local kids. Michelle, of course, was "popular, beautiful and smart." She played sports, was a cheerleader, and got straight A's. And, for some reason, she wanted to be Frey's friend. One day in English class, she passed him a note saying that he did not seem "as awful as I hear you are." He wrote back, "I am as awful as people say and worse." Soon, the pair was talking on the phone, passing notes in class, eating lunch together, and "riding in the same seat on the Bus." When Michelle's friends wondered why she befriended that pariah Frey, she just ignored them since Michelle "had too much going for her for anyone to make her suffer for our friendship."
Halfway through eighth grade, Michelle got asked out on a date by a high school boy, Frey writes. Knowing that her parents would not let her go, Michelle told them she was actually heading to the movies with Frey, her beard for the night. "I had never done anything to them and I had always been pleasant and polite in their presence, so they agreed and they drove us to the Theater." Frey adds that he went inside and watched the movie, pint of whiskey in hand, while Michelle got picked up there by her high school suitor (the couple, he said, then went and parked somewhere and drank beer). But as Michelle and the high school boy, a "football Hero," were driving back to the theater--presumably so that Michelle's parents could pick her up--he tried to beat a train across some tracks. "His car got hit and Michelle was killed...She was my only friend...She got hit by a fucking Train and killed."
Surely, like anyone who lived in St. Joseph at the time of the accident, Frey knew that two girls had died in the crash. But for the fabulist's narrative purposes, Janie Hall needed to be thrown under that C&O locomotive.
After learning of the accident the following day, "I got blamed by her Parents and by her friends and by everyone else in that fucking hellhole," Frey claims. "If she hadn't lied and if I hadn't helped her, it would not have happened. If we hadn't gone to the Theater, she would not have gone on that date." Sure, a couple of mangled girls landed in a hospital morgue, but that's narrative gold in the hands of James Frey.
The
car's driver was unhurt and everyone felt sorry for him. Instead, it
was poor Jimmy Frey who became the object of St. Joseph's scorn:
I got taken down to the local Police Station and questioned. That was the way it worked there. Blame the fuck-up, feel sorry for the football Hero. Vilify one forever, forget the other had anything to do with it. I took a lot of punches for that bullshit, and every time I threw a punch back, and I threw one back every single time, I threw it back for her. I threw it back as hard as I fucking could and I threw it back for her.
Standing in that Hazelden shower, Frey wishes he could again smell Michelle, touch her hair, tell her he loves her because, "I did and I do and I never did it when she was still alive."
Frey's alternate reality, as you might have guessed, is not reflected in the final 16-page police report on the 1986 fatalities. There is no mention of him in the document, though several other St. Joseph High School students were questioned by investigators. No person interviewed said anything about Sanders going to the movies that evening. The chief police investigator, Dennis Padgett, told TSG, "I don't remember Mr. Frey. I don't recognize the name." Asked if a key witness like Frey could have been interviewed by him or other probers and not be referred to in the final report, Padgett answered, "Not typically, no."
While Sanders, who demonstrably was a real person, is another character--like Leonard or Lilly--who died before she could see Frey enjoy fame and wealth (or even visit his Big Jim Industries web site), her parents are still alive. And Bill and Marianne Sanders say that Frey created a meaningful relationship with their daughter where, the couple believes, one did not exist.
Sanders was a senior, Frey just a junior, so he deftly skipped a grade to better appropriate her family's tragedy. And since it would be hard to claim "Michelle" as his beautiful protector and only friend five years after arriving in town, Frey instead turns back the odometer and has her coming to his rescue at age 12, only months after he landed in that verdant Michigan "hellhole."
The Sanders family learned of "A Million Little Pieces" late last year when they returned to Michigan (they now live in New York) for a funeral. A relative had heard about the book via "Oprah" and told Marianne that they suspected the train accident described by Frey was the one that took Melissa's life.
Marianne began to read the book, but did not recognize many of the details surrounding her own daughter's death. "Everything that I believe he wrote, even about my daughter...was not an actual, the way the accident happened or anything," she told TSG. "I never heard his name in connection with it."
Sanders said that she did not think Frey's name ever came up in connection with Melissa's death and, "I don't believe that he was ever actually questioned in regard to the accident because he had nothing to do with it."
She disputed Frey's claim that he had always "been pleasant and polite" in the company of her and her husband. She could recall meeting him only once before Melissa's death and believed that Frey dropped off a condolence card after the accident. They may have been acquaintances, she said, and might have ridden on the same school bus.
As for driving Frey and her daughter, who was not a cheerleader, to the movies the night Melissa died, Sanders said that did not happen. "When I read that I figured he was taking license...he's a writer, you know, they don't tell everything that's factual and true." She added, "I just figured he embroidered a few things...I mean I'm sure not every single thing he said in there is gonna be true, do you think?"
In an e-mail exchange, Bill Sanders told TSG that on the night of the accident, a Saturday, "Janie stopped by and picked Melissa up. Melissa told me they were going out and she would be home around 12:00 midnight. I have never met Mr. Frey and I never drove him anywhere."
Asked about St. Joseph residents purportedly turning on Frey after the crash, Marianne Sanders replied, "No, I don't think that part's true at all." She added, "I never heard anything like that after it happened. As far as I know his name never came up in anything." TSG spoke with Sanders last month, a particularly tough time of the year for her family. Three years after Melissa's death, her twin brother Mark was killed in a New York auto accident. "It's very hard to lose children," she said.
In a Q&A section on Winfrey's web site, Frey recently answered a viewer's question about whether he ever spoke about the death of his high school "girl friend" with his parents or a Hazelden staff psychologist. "I discussed it a bit with my parents when it happened, but not that much. I have often kept the things that hurt me the most to myself. I don't know if that's because they hurt so much to talk about, or if I just want them to be mine and mine alone."
That would be one explanation.
When
Oprah Winfrey decided to place her book club's coveted seal of
approval on "A Million Little Pieces," she further cemented
James Frey's place near the top of the publishing heap. At least in
terms of sales, if not literary achievement. The book has reportedly
sold more copies than any other title chosen by the TV star. He has
embraced Winfrey with gusto, calling her selection of his book an
"honor." Quite the opposite of the forearm shiver Jonathan
Franzen, another contemporary New York author, gave Winfrey in 2001
when she picked his novel, "The Corrections," for her book
club.
Frey's nonfiction memoir's roaring success (and that of its sequel "My Friend Leonard") has earned him millions of dollars and allowed for the kind of luxuries that few young authors ever see--a $2.55 million Manhattan apartment, an Amagansett summer house, and first-class travel. And, as silly as it sounds, Frey has become something of a literary rock star, attracting crowds at book signings that jam stores to capacity and prompt comparisons to established draws like David Sedaris and Dave Eggers.
He has written the screenplay for "A Million Little Pieces" and has said that the film is being co-produced by Brad Pitt and directed by Mark Romanek. Frey is more than happy to tick off the top-shelf Hollywood actors (some of whom he counts as friends) up for the role of him: Ryan Gosling, Tobey Maguire, Orlando Bloom, Josh Hartnett, and Jake Gyllenhaal. "Whoever they're gonna choose I'll be happy with. I'm much more worried with the studio staying true to the story than I am about who they put in it," Frey told Winfrey. Now in between books, he's working on a screenplay about the Hell's Angels for director Tony Scott.
At a packed appearance last month at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square (on his web site, Frey estimated the audience at 1200), he proudly told the crowd that "nobody who has been in either of the books has ever had a problem with anything I wrote, even when I didn't necessarily write good things about them." As for future plans, he said he was done writing memoirs. He told Publishers Weekly in an October interview that his next work, a novel, would be "a big, ambitious 500- or 600-page book about life in contemporary Los Angeles."
He noted, "I'm looking forward to showing people that I can write fiction."