Don Foster strikes again

Recall that Don Foster is the Vassar English professor who achieved minor celebrity when he used what he calls the "science of literary forensics" to determine that Joe Klein wrote "Primary Colors," the anonymous novel about Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign for president. He also supposedly identified a sonnet by Shakespeare that was attributed to someone else. Foster's attribution turned out to be wrong, as he admitted himself. And he made an ass of himself in the Jon Benet Ramsey case.

He made an ass of himself again by helping a Northcoast weekly newspaper in its campaign to convince the authorities that it was Judi Bari's ex-husband who put the bomb under the driver's seat of her car. Not surprisingly, Foster left his work on the Bari bombing out of his book ("Author Unknown: on the Trail of Anonymous," Henry Holt, 2000).

I've written skeptically before about the "new evidence" case against the ex-husband in the Bari bombing.

It turns out that "literary forensics" isn't a science at all but at best an art that is fraught with difficulties, especially for those Foster, after examining their prose, fingers as culprits. Foster's latest victim is Steven Hatfill, who was accused of sending the anthrax letters shortly after 9/11. 

After he became the FBI's main suspect, that fact was leaked to the media, which led to his being swarmed by the media and continuously hounded by the FBI, which guaranteed that Hatfill was unemployable, almost cracking him under the constant pressure. It turns out that Hatfill was completely innocent, and his nightmare story is told by David Freed in the current Atlantic magazine (The Wrong Man). 

Hatfill survived the government's attempt to destroy him and eventually successfully sued Don Foster, Vanity Fair, and the Reader’s Digest, which reprinted Foster’s Vanity Fair article.

According to Freed, Foster is oblivious to the damage he did to Hatfill:

Foster says he never intended to imply that Hatfill was a murderer, yet continues to stand by his reporting as “inaccurate in only minor details.” I asked if he had any regrets about what he’d written. “On what grounds?” he asked. “The heartache it caused Hatfill. The heartache it caused you and Vanity Fair.” Foster pondered the question, then said, “I don’t know Steven Hatfill. I don’t know his heartache. But anytime an American citizen, a journalist, a scientist, a scholar, is made the object of unfair or inaccurate public scrutiny, it’s unfortunate. It’s part of a free press to set that right."

No thanks to Foster, it has been more or less "set right" by the successful lawsuits and Freed's article in the Atlantic. But only Hatfill's innate toughness and a girl friend who stood by him throughout the ordeal enabled him to survive. Apparently Hatfill will be Foster's last victim:

“The entire unhappy episode” is how Don Foster, the Vassar professor who wrote the Vanity Fair article, sums up Hatfill’s story and his own role in it. Foster says he no longer consults for the FBI. “The anthrax case was it for me,” he told me recently. “I’m happier teaching. Like Steven Hatfill, I would prefer to be a private person.”