clipped from www.mediabistro.com

You may have seen this morning's item about the judgment against "JT Leroy", as Laura Albert was ordered by a jury to pay $116,500 to the production company that bought the rights to her novel, Sarah. But here's the thing: Even if one maintains reservations on the appropriateness of the lengths Albert went to in order to ensure "JT" was the public face of her work—and acknowledging the point that signing a contract under a, let's say, extra-legal name probably isn't the most kosher of actions—if we're going to start finding fraud in authors choosing literary personae at odds with their material realities... well, let's just say it's not exactly a healthy precedent.