New Yorker Writer Back in Court for Libel Retrial

The retrial of a celebrated libel suit over a New Yorker magazine article started Monday where the first trial left off, with writer Janet Malcolm acknowledging that she rearranged quotes but denying that she invented them.

“I was following here a technique which the New Yorker is known for, organizing people’s speech” into a coherent monologue, said Malcolm, who was called as an adverse witness by a lawyer for psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson.

Masson, former projects director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, accuses Malcolm of fabricating or distorting five statements she attributed to him in a 1983 article. The article, later published as a book, centered on Masson’s firing by the archives in 1981 after he challenged Freud’s theory that women usually fantasize accounts of childhood sexual abuse.

The challenged quotes include statements that Masson planned to turn Freud’s house into “a place of sex, women, fun,” that archive officials considered him an “intellectual gigolo,” and that he would be regarded as the greatest analyst since Freud.

Only one of the five quotes appears in more than 40 hours of tape recordings of Malcolm’s interviews with Masson, and the context is in dispute. Malcolm says most of the others were in her notes.

A federal court jury found last year that all five quotes were false but deadlocked on damages, requiring a retrial. The New Yorker was cleared of wrongdoing by the jury.