Reception and Controversy
In 1984, MacDonald sued McGinniss for breach of contract, including "journalistic distortion." Following a mistrial, the suit was settled out of court for $325,000.
In 1990, The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm published a widely read article, "The Journalist and the Murderer", the thesis of which was that McGinniss committed a "morally indefensible" act in pretending that he believed MacDonald was innocent, even after he became convinced of his guilt.
Fatal Vision, both book and miniseries, helped to popularize the case against MacDonald, but failed to sway all his supporters. In 1995, MacDonald defenders Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bost challenged McGinniss' narrative with Fatal Justice: Reinvestigating the MacDonald Murders.
Read more about this topic: Fatal Vision
Famous quotes containing the words reception and/or controversy:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)