Author Responds To Review
On March 28, Scene carried a review of "Predator: Rape, Madness and Injustice in Seattle," by Bainbridge Island author Jack Olsen. The book looks at a serial rapist and at Steve Titus, an innocent man whose rape conviction was overturned after investigative reporting by Paul Henderson in The Seattle Times. Olsen took exception both to the review and to an April 20 correction of errors and clarification of a quotation. He wrote this response:
I notice that it took The Seattle Times three weeks to get off its fat backside and admit it erred while mugging my latest work, "Predator," in a so-called "book review."
But as one might have expected from a newspaper which would publish such an attack in the first place, you chose to correct only a few of the nine errors that made you and reviewer Clark Humphrey look merely careless (misspellings, misquotes, simple misstatements of fact), and conspicuously ignored far more serious errors that made you look incompetent, if not downright malicious. For example:
1. You wrote that I depicted your reporter Paul Henderson as trying to tell the true story of the railroading of Steve Titus while "battling . . . his own reluctant editors." In fact, I said the opposite, taking great pains to show Henderson and his editors working together smoothly. This is not a difference of literary opinion or interpretation; it is an error of fact.
2. You suggest that I mistakenly portrayed Detective Cpl. Ronald Parker (whom, in your peculiar rush to judgment, you dubbed Sgt. Roland Parker) as "a callous thug" instead of "a sincere officer." I submit that an amoral delinquent who terrorized his neighborhood as a youth, who gravely injured his father with his boots and fists, who repeatedly abused his wife and later pulled a gun on her (avoiding arrest only because he was a cop), who tried to move a female friend into the family home to provide sex while his cancer-stricken wife slept in the other room, who was guilty of womanizing, drunkenness, insubordination, false arrest and other offenses on the job, and who committed numerous felonies including forgery, perjury, subornation of perjury and fabrication of evidence while in effect sentencing poor Steve Titus to death - such a man could no more be described as "a sincere officer" than Saddam Hussein could be described as "a sincere statesman." This is not a difference of literary opinion or interpretation; it is an error of fact.
3. Despite your hitman's acknowledgement that half of "Predator," "recreates the life of the real criminal" and his admission that "Olsen explores Smith's (the predator's) upbringing in a family torn by poverty, instability and abuse," he comes to the astonishing conclusion that my book "fails to bring us any closer to real understanding" of "the roots of violence."
Say what? "Predator" contains some 60,000 words about my anti-hero's development from a normal, happy infant to one of the most dangerous rapists in Washington history, including lengthy descriptions of his dysfunctional and rootless family, the grossly mixed signals sent by his inept parents, the early tips on crime provided by helpful relatives, his childhood lessons in deviant sex and anti-social behavior, his homosexual rape by an older man and seduction by a slatternly stepmother, his introduction into fanatical religion and witchcraft, the family's corrosive poverty, the boy's sense of futility and rage, his gravitation toward other anti-social losers, his lack of admirable role models, his failure to develop a conscience or a sense of empathy and exactly how that crucial failure came about, and on and on and on.
"Predator" also contains voluminous observations and insights about this particular sociopath's "roots of violence" by nationally known experts on sexual criminality who came into direct contact with him on a clinical basis. These rare glimpses into the criminal mind and its formation are provided by the brilliant Maureen Saylor, former director of the Sex Offender Program at Western State Hospital, and the eminent psychotherapists Michael Comte, Irwin S. Dreiblatt and Walter G. Peterson. Additional information about the sexual predator comes from anonymous staffers who were involved in his treatment during three years at Western State.
To claim that such saturation coverage (some might call it over-coverage) "fails to bring us any closer to real understanding" of "the roots of violence" is not a difference of literary opinion or interpretation; it is an error of fact.
There were other errors and misstatements in your article, of course; it is in the nature of such hysterical assaults that the attacker over-extends himself and begins spouting grander and grander falsehoods while reviewing from the dust jacket, his fevered imagination, and his own toxic agenda.
But what explains the pusillanimous performance of the good gray Times? Have you abandoned the practice of fact-checking? Have your editors lost their ability to separate invective from criticism? And what is the function of your literary editor Donn Fry, other than to shill for the work of personal favorites like Michael Upchurch and David Eyre and the blank-verse poets of greater Poulsbo?
Many of my journalistic friends are asking the same question that I've asked ever since the knife slid between my ribs: What motivated The Times to take out a contract on me in the first place? And to hire such an inept assassin? And to be in such a headlong rush that you became the only publication in the country to break the release date? What sins, literary or otherwise, earned me such a malignant notice, so markedly different in tone and content from other reviews now beginning to appear? How did my book manage to achieve critical success everywhere but at home? Doesn't that strike you as odd? Why didn't The Times just continue to ignore my work, as it's done for lo these many years?
(Could it be because I had the temerity to write about The Times and, in effect, sit in judgment on its purity and holiness? And to make a hero of Paul Henderson, who after winning the Pulitzer Prize found working conditions at The Times intolerable and abandoned ship? Are those imagined affronts to your delicate sensibilities that Clark Humphrey was quietly avenging in his vicious "review?" Just asking . . . .)
And why, after I pointed out some of your errors in a detailed letter to your managing editor Alex MacLeod, did you choose to run such a niggardly, backside-covering correction? Is it The Seattle Times' policy to admit only a specific percentage of your mistakes and distortions - say 22.1 percent? 31.9? Half? Or do you admit only the errors that don't reveal malicious intent?
And why such a long delay? Did you have to hold your customary 40 damage-control meetings to decide exactly how to weasel out with the least harm to your regal and majestic image?
And did your sense of fairness really lead you to believe that a watered-down partial correction in a skimpy Saturday paper would even begin to atone for a splashy poison-pen review that appeared under two four-column heads on pages 1 and 2 of the highly read Thursday edition of Scene? Or were you just hoping that everyone would be out sailing and wouldn't read your begrudging admission of imperfection?
What a disgraceful performance! The Times should be ashamed.