Helen Darville - Later Work and Allegations of Plagiarism

Later Work and Allegations of Plagiarism

In 1995, the Australian culture journal Meanjin published a short story, Pieces of the Puzzle, also by Demidenko although the journal also mentioned that Demidenko had "taken back" her previous name as Darville. She now admitted that she had met Ukrainian witnesses and based the story on them, resulting in correspondence from the Simon Wiesenthal Center demanding that she identify these possible war criminals.

Darville was briefly a columnist with the Brisbane daily newspaper, The Courier-Mail, before being dismissed over accusations of plagiarism for repeating jokes originally from the Evil Overlord List in one of her columns and passing them off as her own. She continued to write freelance features for other News Corporation newspapers and magazines, and occasionally the Fairfax press.

In 2000, she was again accused of anti-semitism after choosing to interview historian and Holocaust denier David Irving, for Australian Style magazine during his failed libel trial in London. She wrote a post-11 September article in The Sydney Morning Herald. Darville is reported to have worked variously as a graphic designer, property law lecturer and PE teacher.

After working as a secondary teacher for several years in Australia and the UK, she returned to the University of Queensland in 2002 to study law. Graduating with a first class honours degree in law in 2005, she commenced work as a judge's associate ("judge's clerk" in the U.S.) for Peter Dutney, a justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland.

Previously a regular contributor to the libertarian group blog Catallaxy files under the name 'skepticlawyer,' Darville now has her own blog in this name. In recent times, she has also appeared on the SBS program Insight (in a special on liars) and as a guest of Melbourne University's Publishing and Communications Program. She has a strong involvement with the Australian Skeptics, and has written for both their in-house magazine and Quadrant Magazine, a conservative journal. Recently Darville was included as an entry in Ben Peek's Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, a novel exploring the nature of truth in literature, and is reported to be working on a second novel, more than a decade after the publication of the first.