The Atlantic Says It Was Deceived by Writer Ruth Shalit Barrett

“The claim that I told her to pretend she had a son that didn’t exist is not true. Absolutely not true,” she said.

She said she blamed herself for not verifying the existence of a son.

“All of my internal alarms went off about the claim of the son, and I was wrong not to drill down and resolve it,” she said. “I did not cook this up with her. But I take responsibility for it.”

Ms. Barrett said she “got no benefit” from the creation of a son and “it didn’t make the article better.”

“Even if you want to attribute to me the most malign motives, there was nothing to be gained,” she said. “It was just a lapse.”

The editor’s note said The Atlantic had corrected other details in the article, including one about the severity of a neck injury sustained by Sloane’s middle daughter and another about the size of backyard hockey rinks which, although large and equipped with floodlights and generators, are not “Olympic-size,” as the article initially stated.

The Atlantic said it had also updated Ms. Barrett’s byline on the article, which was initially Ruth S. Barrett, at her request, but has since been changed to Ruth Shalit Barrett. Ruth Shalit was Ms. Barrett’s byline in the 1990s when the plagiarism incidents occurred, and the editor’s note said it had made the change “in the interest of transparency.”

“We are continuing to review this article,” the editor’s note said. “We will correct any errors we find, and we will communicate our findings to our readers as speedily as possible.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/01/business/media/atlantic-ruth-shalit-barrett.html