Washington Post: ‘Appalling’ What Lena Dunham, Random House Did to ‘Barry One’

Washington Post legal writer Eugene Volokh reacted harshly to the admission from Random House Monday that “Barry” is indeed a pseudonym and that Barry One is not the man identified as a rapist in Dunham’s memoir, Not That Kind of Girl. After posting Random House’s full statement exonerating Barry One and offering to pay his legal fees, Volokh writes:

Appalling. The book wasn’t a novel; it was a memoir, offered to readers as such. The copyright page, which I suspect few people read, does say that “Some names and identifying details have been changed,” but it certainly doesn’t tell people which ones. […]

This is going to dog Identifiable Conservative Barry for years to come — for the simple reason that Dunham and Random House published a factual item (the statement that the alleged rapist was named Barry) that

they knew

was false

without stating, clearly and immediately (again, as they had done with regard to another man), that the name was made up. […]

[N]ow that Random House has admitted that Identifiable Conservative Barry actually didn’t do these things, the case becomes much easier.

The full post is a must-read, as is Volokh’s earlier post.