Last April, in a Talk of the Town piece, I broke the story of a literary hoax perpetrated by an Italian freelancer, Tommaso Debenedetti, who, it transpired, had published interviews invented from whole cloth with Philip Roth and John Grisham. Further research led me to a purported interview with Gore Vidal, and to an online archive of some sixty additional conversations, all signed by Debenedetti, and published by a provincial newspaper. His subjects included dozens of world-famous authors and Nobel laureates in literature—all of whom, when I reached them or their representatives, denied any memory or knowledge of Debenedetti. He had also “interviewed” Desmond Tutu; Elie Wiesel; Cardinal Ratzinger, just prior to his election to the papacy; Mikhail Gorbachev; and the Dalai Lama.
I managed to get Debenedetti on his cell phone, in Rome, and he insisted that the interviews were real, and that Roth and others had self-serving motives for denying them. One of the hoaxer’s victims, Paul Auster, was recently in Italy, where he learned that Debenedetti has finally confessed to his impostures, albeit with a defiant pride. Auster contacted Roth, who alerted me. The confession was published in the Spanish newspaper El Pais.
“My idea,” Debenedetti told Miguel Mora, “was to be a serious and honorable cultural journalist,” but, as a freelancer, he couldn’t get his work published, so he turned to fiction. He claimed that the editors of the provincial newspapers that accepted his fake interviews without any documentation had to know that they were invented, but didn’t care. “Italy is a joke,” he said. “Information in this country is based on falsehoods.” He made fun of La Nazione for believing his story that he had had obtained an “exclusive” interview with “the Homer of the Caribbean,” Derek Walcott, hiding under a table in Saint Lucia on the day of the Haitian earthquake. “Didn’t it seem strange to them?” he asked wryly.
Debenedetti knew, he said, that the major Italian newspapers of record, Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, fact-checked their reportage, so he never approached them, but observed that the conservative press had an “inferiority complex,” and was likelier to accept his work, especially if he gave a right-wing slant to the “interviews,” however improbable, so he did so.
Why were Philip Roth (he invented five Roth interviews) and Abraham Yehoshua (nine fake interviews) his favorite subjects, Mora asked? “Yehoshua because Israel and the Middle East sell really well. Roth because I invented his support for Obama before he declared it, when he was still a nobody in the primaries.”
It became a game, he continued—”comic and tragic at the same time,” and “I amused myself like crazy for ten years.” The first hoax he could recall was in 2000—the Vidal interview. His greatest coups, he judged, were an “interview” with Naguib Mahfouz, in 2003, that was reprinted in France Soir, and his “interview” with Ratzinger, republished with the headline query “Last interview before he becomes Pope?”
Debenedetti declared himself “satisfied” with his literary productions, adding, “I would like to be Italy’s champion of the lie.” He chafes at Roth’s assertion, to me, that Debenedetti’s career must surely be over. His career, maybe, he said, but his work, no. And he suggested that he might take it up again under a pseudonym, or publish a book of fake interviews—with a prologue by Roth.