Frey follow-up ...

The Smoking Gun has published a lengthy invetigation into the true facts behind James Frey's past.

Be sure to check out their clever graphic - which is a take-off of the book's iconic cover. ALso the sections of the article are broken up with 3 small pieces of candy from the cover image.

snip:

And as for the cozy reading room ambience of Frey's cell, Thorp said that would not be allowed in the module, where inmates can stay alone in their cells or congregate in a communal day area. "You do not want them [two prisoners] in a cell where you can't see what they're doing," he said. So, TSG asked, could a couple of bookworms get through 1400 pages of Tolstoy (or, for that matter, other hefty Penguin Classics) undetected? "No, you couldn't," Thorp said. "That's heavy reading."

When we asked Frey if he actually was assaulted by Porterhouse, he said, "Uh, something along those lines happened, yes." Was it done at the direction of law enforcement officers in retaliation for him supposedly tangling with Granville cops? "I don't know that, man," he said. And despite all that quality time spent with Porterhouse on Napoleon's invasion of Russia, Frey could not recall the inmate's actual first or last name.

The sheriff also dismissed the notion that a guard would order a retaliatory inmate assault--and pay for it with smokes. "We're a triple accredited agency," Thorp said, noting that jail personnel take the subject of inmate treatment seriously and have sought to give prisoners a voice and an ability to grieve procedures or occurrences in the facility. When we commented that the assault-for-cigarettes equation seemed "cinematic" (especially coming from Frey, who has penned several screenplays), Thorp said, "Good choice of words."

For his part, Dudgeon, the Granville cop who arrested the "polite" Frey, joked that he was upset that no record existed of the author's jail term: "You mean I didn't buy somebody off with cigarettes to beat him up?"