A Book or How May an Author be Inauthentic?

"Last Friday, Laura Albert—the woman who created 'J.T. LeRoy,' the transgender former teen prostitute who nominally wrote two novels and a short story collection—lost a lawsuit brought by Antidote International Films. Antidote had purchased the rights to LeRoy's first novel, Sarah—the novel that had made Leroy something of a literary celebrity—before the world learned that LeRoy was actually Albert's creation. After the mask dropped, Antidote sued, asking for development costs back plus punitive damages, claiming that the contract was invalid because one party to it did not exist. Albert defended herself by recounting her real history of child sexual abuse, explaining (in the Paris Review and on the witness stand) that victims can split themselves into personae: J.T., she maintained, was part of her. Antidote countered by pointing to events in which someone else (usually Albert's ex-partner's half-sister, Savannah Knoop) played the role of LeRoy in public. J.T. was no split personality, therefore, but a deliberate fake, designed to get attention for Albert's writings. Albert will now have to cough up $116,500 unless she prevails on appeal."