A Million Little Pieces - Controversy

Controversy

After a six week long investigation, The Smoking Gun published an article on January 8, 2006 called "A Million Little Lies". The article described fabrications in Frey's account of his drug abuse experiences, life, and criminal record. According to CNN, The Smoking Gun's editor, William Bastone, said "the probe was prompted after the Oprah show aired". He further stated, "We initially set off to just find a mug shot of him... It basically set off a chain of events that started with us having a difficult time finding a booking photo of this guy".

The Minneapolis Star Tribune had questioned James Frey's claims as early as 2003. Frey responded then by saying, "I've never denied I've altered small details."

Stories surfaced about Random House, publisher of A Million Little Pieces, deciding to give full refunds to anyone who had purchased the book directly through it. According to a Gawker.com report, customers could have a claim to money if they truly felt deceived by Frey. Speaking in March 2009, on City Talk to Trisha Goddard, it was stated fewer than 2,000 claimed a refund.

In an article detailing the book, Frey is quoted saying he "stands by the book as being the essential truth of my life". However, on January 26, 2006, Frey once again appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and this time admitted that the same "Demons" that had made him turn to alcohol and drugs had also driven him to fabricate crucial portions of his "memoir"; it first having been shopped as being a novel but declined by many, including Random House itself. Winfrey told Frey that she felt "really duped" but that, "more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers." She also apologized for her previous telephoned statement to Larry King Live — during Frey's appearance on that show on January 11, 2006 — that what mattered was not the truth of Frey's book, but its value as a therapeutic tool for addicts. She said, "I left the impression that the truth is not important." During the show Winfrey interrogated Frey about everything from the number of root canals he had to the existence of his girlfriend, Lilly. Winfrey then brought out Frey's publisher, Nan Talese, to defend her decision to classify the book as a memoir, and forced Talese to admit that she had done nothing to check the book's veracity, despite the fact that her representatives had assured Winfrey's staff that the book was indeed non-fiction and described it as "brutally honest" in a press release.

The media feasted over the televised showdown. David Carr of the New York Times wrote, "Both Mr. Frey and Ms. Talese were snapped in two like dry winter twigs." "Oprah annihilates Frey," proclaimed Larry King. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, "It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into swiftboating and swift bucks, into W.'s delusion and denial, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying," and the Washington Post's Richard Cohen was so impressed by the confrontation that he crowned Winfrey "Mensch of the Year." All of Winfrey's reactions, as well as video clips of her interview with Frey, are found within her book club's website.

On January 13, 2006, Steven Levitt, co-author of the book Freakonomics, stated in his blog that, having searched the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention database of mortality detail records, he was unable to identify a single death that reasonably closely matched Frey's description of the circumstances of the death of "Lilly", Frey's alleged girlfriend in the book. Following Frey's admission to Winfrey that he had altered Lilly's method of suicide in the book from cutting her wrists to hanging, on January 27, 2006, Levitt recorded on his blog that he was again unable to find a recorded death consistent with Frey's revised description. As Levitt states,

"Frey’s primary defense has been to say that his criminal history is a minor part of the book and these inconsistencies do not substantively change the meaning of the story. Of course, his criminal history is the only thing that thesmokinggun.com actually looked into. Given that virtually nothing checked out, it doesn’t bode well for the veracity of the rest of the book."