Urgh this makes me so mad because an ex did this to me, and it’s why he’s an ex now. He is 100% in the wrong, that is a clear violation of your consent. Fuck him.

Man is an Asshole who is lucky Woman didn’t call Police.

The act of writing about him in a non-negative light, and paying him for the privilege to do so, is defense enough.

Even if the murder is made up, there is no way that he could have spied on people for 15+ years and not have witnessed other crimes that he did nothing about, child and partner abuse and sexual assault among them.

Foos’s writings might be useful for studying voyeurs, but his observations were not unbiased or verifiable. They reveal far more about him than the subjects he may or may not have “studied”.

The very same. No big surprise, eh?

I don’t. I experienced the hotelkeeper as a garden-variety pervert with delusions that were used to justify his voyeuristic sex crimes. No new information there.

What is the most fascinating to me is Tales’s pervertedness. To inflate himself as a writer by imagining that he is somehow providing some insight into the mind of a garden-variety pervert. Not interested in the subject matter, especially since the only person who knew about it let the statute of limitations expire.…

I read the whole article last week when it published online. Foos is nothing but a criminal. He’s an extremely disturbed asshole who started the whole thing as a way to get his rocks off, then came up with the whole “research” bullshit angle after the fact to make himself feel important.

A better word would be protecting him. The fact he didn’t report Foos and allowed him to operate for decades is terrible. In that time, he could have protected the people who ended up getting violated by Foos. What’s worst, if this can be believed, he took part in watching with Foos.

It is not the duty of a journalist to aid and abet sex crimes.

The fact that he didn’t defend Foos means nothing next to the fact that he didn’t alert authorities. He let this scum get away with his crimes so that he could profit off of the story.

You don’t need permission to report on people.

Just to clarify we are talking about the Gay Talese who has never found inspiration in a woman’s writing?

Yeah, this. If Gerald Foos had simply sent Gay Talese a manuscript last year, out of nowhere, and Talese had edited it into a book, that would be defensible as journalism. But Talese knew this was going on *while* it was going on, and did nothing.

This article made me crazy, and I’m so glad people are talking about it.

THIS. I was absolutely shocked when I saw this link in a thread dedicated to creepy news stories on another forum. That forum, while generally progressive, is also male-dominated, and literally no one else in that discussion saw a real problem with Talese’s actions. I was foaming at the mouth. No, it’s not harmless.…

But I think it’s the duty of journalists to report on everything, even things that are uncomfortable or weird or cross ethical boundaries.

He also followed a woman home at least once.

This man violated so many people with his “observation,” it’s unreal. Not just by watching but going into their rooms and touching their things. Even if he did see drugs, call the police. I’m not sure how true the story about the murder woman is but it shows how callously he treated the people he observed. I can’t…