I suggest you read the (well written and quite readable) article. There is no reason to suggest Hannan was planning to out her as trans. He planned to out her as not being a Vanderbilt, not being an MIT grad, not having worked for the DoD, and inventing an entire person (McCord) to back up her lies. This is all…

I got the joke :) Love you.

You make an excellent point.

Some mafia guy who wrote a memoir late in life talked about how, when you've got contraband/a person in your trunk, you drive very safely and inconspicuously, because the last thing you need is to be pulled over for speeding/not signalling then. Being trans is clearly not a perfect parallel, but ... if you've got a…

God, I liked restaurants so much more before I knew what I know now about food handling practices.

Face it: people who use their credentials, real or not, to give them credibility to boost sales, they make themselves part of the product and any story written about it.

I'm going to defend Jez on this point for three reasons. First, Dr. V is already dead. By itself, that wouldn't make it acceptable necessarily. But second, Dr. V has already been outed. And third, if there is a point to be made out of exposing journalistic malpractice (which I don't think there is, but it's fair if…

As to the first point: it's still fraud. If I build a better mousetrap in my garage and want to get investors, I can't say "I'm a mousetrap engineer with 18 years' experience coming up with ways to kill household vermin efficiently" when I'm actually a housewife with an education in the humanities who happened to…

I personally am outraged and plan to boycott the network for giving exposure to someone with such poor command of grammar and syntax. I guarantee you, my kids would be far more confused trying to puzzle out what this clown is saying than they would be by two daddies cuddling in the master bedroom.

Can you link? If he did in fact threaten to expose her identity as trans, as compared to exposing the lies related to her expertise and connections, that changes things entirely.

I see nothing in the piece indicating that he threatened to out her as trans. Now he wrote this piece after her suicide, so one could argue that he's hardly likely to say anything else. But threatening to expose someone as trans, either to get them to cooperate or just for a good story, is disgusting and immoral, so…

Agreed, that's my point exactly. The story just sent chills up my spine. People who are pathological liars (and who pick such insane lies) and invent alter egos and have whole conversations while pretending to be another person, and say they can't discuss something because of their association with classified project…

Hell, at this point the only way I'd start watching is if they have a gay edition. I've seen every possible permutation of the hetero variety on this show, and I hate them all.

I am agreeing with you. I agree that if she were born a woman it would (still) be a story about her scamming people with fraudulent claims. Her past name had some relevance to the investigation (it's how Hannan was able to verify that she had no credentials under any name, not just under her current name) but none to…

And we are saying that there is nothing in the story that indicates that he was planning on outing her as trans. If you see something that indicates that was Hannan's plan, I'd like to know about it, because that would be an important deviation from his own account, and a reprehensible thing. But there is, as yet, no…

Yeah. And if we ask journalists not to publish information* that reveals lying or fraud, or could embarrass people, we're putting some pretty serious shackles on the entire idea of investigative reporting.

I think you could write a piece showing the fraud without discussing the trans element. "I found no evidence that Dr. V was related to the Vanderbilt family, had ever attended MIT, worked for the Pentagon, socialized with Dan Quayle, or worked on the B-2 bomber, at any point," would cover it. You could even say you'd…

Well, she was using her identity - claiming to be a Vanderbilt, friends with Dan Quayle, and MIT grad who worked on the B-2 bomber and volunteered with veterans - in the scam, but not the gender element of her identity. It would be a hell of a story if she'd been born a woman. Honestly, the grandiosity of the lies is…

To me the subject sounds profoundly boring, too (a new and exciting putter, woohoo!) But the principle has nothing to do with the appeal of the topic. If the argument is that the lies told by someone with serious problems, that were used to attract investors, should not be exposed because of that person's problems,…

She killed herself before the story ran. And there is absolutely no indication that Hannan was planning to refer to the gender issue; he had MORE than enough to write an expose about fraud without mentioning it. Did you read the story?