Asia Argento, JT Leroy

Laura Albert, the monster behind the J.T. Leroy fraud.

Asia Argento started out as a very nice woman staying in touch with a child actor she worked with. When I see former child stars in trouble, I always wonder where all the adults are who they had worked with. Movie stars showed up at John Gotti's trial---you'd think they'd show some support when some poor kid was in trouble. Like Dick Van Patten who helped Adam Rich get into rehab.

I saw The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. It was sort of like Sleepers or the alien abduction movie Communion. They were supposedly true stories that might have seemed plausible in book form but looked absurd under the harsh glare of the klieg lights.

I had read about the book by J.T. Leroy and was a bit shocked. I went to a bookstore and looked at a copy. It was written in the pseudo poetic style peculiar to literary frauds. I've read true stuff written by teenagers and they're often pretty good writers, but they're good because they're straightforward.

The book in this case was written by a middle-aged woman impersonating a teenage boy prostitute. Why do literary frauds always impersonate suffering children? It's incredibly callous. I don't know what drew Argento to the story, but the woman who called herself J.T. Leroy didn't show any sympathy for homeless kids who had to resort to prostitution. A group of street kids in San Francisco issued a statement pointing this out when the fraud was exposed.