Celebrated 33-Year-Old German Journalist Adds A Line To His Resume: Fraudster
A reporter with the German publication Der Spiegel has admitted to fabricating material in news stories.
picture alliance via Getty Image
hide caption
toggle caption
picture alliance via Getty Image
You could say he was a wunderkind.
Four years ago, Claas Relotius was named CNN’s Journalist of the Year. Earlier this month, the 33-year-old Der Spiegel writer was celebrated as Germany’s top reporter.
On Wednesday, his rising star came crashing down as a lengthy article in his own magazine outlined repeated falsification in his reporting. In fact, the piece said Relotius is “not a reporter,” and that “he tells fairy tales whenever he pleases.” The article continues: “truth and lies are confused in his texts, because some stories are clean … others completely invented.”
Claas Relotius: Er hat sein Talent missbraucht https://t.co/W7htj1oOJQ pic.twitter.com/KtZAsHwMOZ
— WELT (@welt) December 19, 2018
Relotius, who has admitted to faking some of his reporting, had written dozens of articles for Der Spiegel since 2011. According to a Q&A also published by the magazine Wednesday, Relotius identified 14 specific stories that included fictional dialogues, “character collages” and other incorrect or misleading details. He is no longer employed there.
“I’m sick, and I have to get help now,” an apologetic and embarrassed Relotius said in an interview with Der Spiegel, which has over 6 million online subscribers.
But his admission of guilt was apparently hard-won. On Dec. 3 — the same day he received the German press award — an Arizona woman raised the first questions surrounding his reporting and his profile of vigilante border guards in the southern U.S.
As Der Spiegel reports, Juan Moreno, his co-reporter on the story, started to investigate Relotius’ work, despite his repeated claims of honesty and other colleagues’ incredulity that their acclaimed coworker could be lying. Moreno returned to Arizona to re-interview people Relotius claimed to have spent time with. Some of his “sources” insisted they had never met him.
After being confronted, Relotius finally admitted to the fraud last week.
Relotius’ Arizona story wasn’t his only falsified work about the United States. A 2017 piece about a rural Minnesota town’s love of President Trump opened with a striking anecdote about a sign at the city’s entrance that read “Mexicans keep out.” Der Spiegel now says the sign never existed. Two residents of the town posted an article Wednesday outlining other fabrications in the piece.
Here’s more context about Claas Relotius’ fabricated portrayal of Fergus Falls, MN. Hope that it helps shed light on how our community and the rural narrative overall has been affected. https://t.co/i5uCBHdh3G
— Michele Anderson (@micheleeamn) December 19, 2018
Later that same year, Relotius reportedly invented a phone interview with Colin Kaepernick’s parents for a profile of the football star’s political activism.
“I tend to want to be in control,” Relotius told Der Spiegel, adding that if he wasn’t able to report a story to his satisfaction, he felt the urge to create a forgery. The magazine notes that while his stories were fact checked, there was “a basic trust that the editors at home give him.” Relotius has also written for a number of other news outlets, although it wasn’t immediately clear if that work also contained falsehoods.
Der Spiegel, which apologized to anyone who was inaccurately portrayed in their writer’s stories, announced that a committee would investigate the fraud. It also acknowledged that although Relotius had admitted to some untruths, the full extent of his deception might not yet be known.
“Can one believe him?” the magazine asks. “Couldn’t there clearly be more?”
'Realization Of An Impossible Dream': MLB And Cuba Make Historic Deal
The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Yasiel Puig defected from Cuba to play baseball in the U.S. On Wednesday, Major League Baseball and Cuba’s baseball federation reached an agreement allowing Cuban players to sign with U.S. teams without having to defect first.
Jae C. Hong/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Jae C. Hong/AP
A new inning has begun for Cuban baseball players, after a historic agreement will allow the athletes to sign with U.S. teams without needing to defect.
Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association announced Wednesday that they had reached an agreement with the Cuban Baseball Federation after years of negotiating.
Under the deal, Cuba must release baseball players who are at least 25 or with more than six years of experience, and any major league club with which they sign will pay Cuba’s baseball federation a “release fee.” The athlete will be able to sign with a club while in Cuba, apply to the U.S. for a work visa and return to his homeland during the offseason.
The agreement is meant to stem the trafficking of Cuban athletes, its architects say. Since the U.S. embargo against Cuba began in 1962, baseball players on the island have had no choice but to defect and establish residence in a third country before signing a contract with a major league club in the United States.
That has led to a slew of perilous and harrowing encounters, including trafficking and extortion. Los Angeles Dodgers right fielder Yasiel Puig was smuggled out of Cuba to Mexico, then held by gangsters for ransom before receiving a $42 million contract.
“Establishing a safe, legal process for entry to our system is the most important step we can take to ending the exploitation and endangerment of Cuban players who pursue careers in Major League Baseball,” MLB Players Association Executive Director Tony Clark said in a statement. “The safety and wellbeing of these young men remains our primary concern.”
Deputy Commissioner Dan Halem told Reuters that the payments to Cuba are acceptable despite the sanctions because the Cuban Baseball Federation isn’t part of the island’s government.
A State Department official told NPR in an emailed statement that the agency is aware of the agreement and that baseball players will still have to go to another country to apply for a work visa, in accordance with U.S. policy.
If athletes choose to defect, they will face a mandatory waiting period before being eligible to sign.
It is unclear when the agreement will take effect. MLB did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for comment.
Similar agreements exist with Korea, Taiwan and Japan.
As part of its effort to form a deal, Major League Baseball spent more than $1.3 million lobbying on Cuban issues last year and nearly $1 million through the third quarter of 2018, Yahoo reported.
Baseball agent and consultant Joe Kehoskie told The Washington Post that despite an end to their legal obstacles, players will “likely end up worse off financially.” A reported 15 to 25 percent release fee to Cuba’s baseball federation is “roughly the same percentage Cuban players are currently paying to smugglers, and they’d likely be signing less-valuable contracts, since they’d be negotiating within a more restrictive [release] system, or draft, rather than as free agents.”
Emily Mendrala, executive director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, called it “great news for Cuba, for the U.S., for the safety of Cuban baseball players and their families, and for baseball fans everywhere.”
In a statement, she described the long, shared history of baseball between the U.S. and Cuba, from Jackie Robinson training in 1940s Havana to a 2016 game between Cuba’s national team and Florida’s Tampa Bay Rays, with then-Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro in attendance.
Despite economic isolation, Cuba has continued to produce renowned baseball players over the years, including Puig, the Boston Red Sox’s Rusney Castillo, Chicago White Sox’s Jose Abreu, and former pitcher Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez.
“Knowing that the next generation of Cuban baseball players will not endure the unimaginable fate of past Cuban players is the realization of an impossible dream for all of us,” Abreu said in a statement. “Dealing with the exploitation of smugglers and unscrupulous agencies will finally come to an end for the Cuban baseball player.”
5-Time Gold Medalist Missy Franklin Retires From Swimming
Swimming champion Missy Franklin announced her retirement from the sport in an emotional letter to ESPN.com on Wednesday. She is 23.
Simon Hofmann/Getty Images for Laureus
hide caption
toggle caption
Simon Hofmann/Getty Images for Laureus
Five-time Olympic gold medalist and world record-holder Missy Franklin announced her retirement from swimming in an impassioned letter to ESPN.com on Wednesday, citing chronic shoulder pain that has ravaged her body and psyche over the last years of her career.
“It took me a long time to say the words, ‘I am retiring.’ A long, long time. But now I’m ready,” she said.
“I’m ready to not be in pain every day. I’m ready to become a wife and, one day, a mother. I’m ready to continue growing each and every day to be the best person and role model I can be. I’m ready for the rest of my life,” Franklin wrote.
The 23-year-old became an Olympic sensation during the 2012 London games where she was hailed by authorities in the sport as the new, best hope of American swimming. And she did not disappoint.
At 17, with her braces recently removed, she beamed from the podium time and time again, earning a total of five medals and becoming the first woman to win four gold medals in a single Olympics in any sport.
Franklin broke the world record for the 200-meter backstroke with a record time of 2:04:06, which netted the teen athlete a third gold medal at the games. At the time the young phenom was still training with her childhood swimming coach.
Over her amateur and professional career the swimming champion has won more than two dozen medals and accolades, including FINA World Swimmer of the Year in 2011 and 2012. But things began to unravel leading into Franklin’s second Olympic games.
“I’ve been very open about what I went through as I prepared for the Olympics in 2016 and talked openly about the struggles I endured, which included shoulder pain whenever I tried to train or compete, depression, anxiety and insomnia. It was also the year when I began to fully accept the fact that something was wrong with my body and it wasn’t working the way it was supposed to work,” Franklin said in the letter.
While she qualified for the games in Brazil she did not make it to the finals in either of her strongest events — the 200-meter freestyle and the 200-meter backstroke. Her only medal was a gold in the 4×200-meter freestyle relay.
Franklin described years of “the worst” shoulder pain, surgeries, physical therapy and mental anguish. She explained she has been diagnosed with “severe chronic tendonitis of both the rotator cuff and the bicep tendon.”
She said she has gone through three rounds of cortisone shots, including one just before the U.S. nationals in July in which she finished third in the C final of the 200-meter freestyle.
And just as she prepared to begin her “comeback, to prove everyone wrong, to show what a fighter” she is, Franklin was told she would need to have another surgery. She decided she couldn’t go through with it.
“I’ve been in too much pain, for too long, to go through another surgery with a longer recovery time and no guarantee it would even help,” she said.
Looking toward the future, Franklin said her “greatest dream in life, more so than Olympic gold, has always been becoming a mom.”
“This is by no means the end,” she added. “Rather, I choose to look at this as a new beginning. Swimming has been, and always will be, a big part of my life and I absolutely plan to stay involved in what I feel is the best sport in the world, just in a different way.”
Judge Who Invalidated Obamacare Has Been A 'Go-To Judge' For Republicans, Critics Say
In 2015, demonstrators in Washington, D.C., urged Supreme Court justices to save the Affordable Care Act from a legal challenge. The federal health law survived, but last week U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled it invalid. An appeal of his controversial decision is underway.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Bloomberg/Getty Images
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor has a history of siding with Republicans on ideologically motivated lawsuits. His ruling last week, in which he sided with the GOP on a challenge to the Affordable Care Act, was not a one-off.
In fact, critics say, his history is ultimately why that case was before him in the first place.
By all accounts, O’Connor’s ruling is sweeping. It says the entire health care law became invalid when Congress zeroed out, in 2017, the tax penalty for Americans who don’t have health insurance — a penalty that had been tied to what’s known as the law’s individual mandate that nearly everyone have insurance.
“I think he went too far in rejecting the entire law,” says Josh Blackman, a conservative legal scholar and professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. “I think he could have stopped short and simply severed the Obamacare mandate.”
While O’Connor’s decision may seem a bit extreme to some legal scholars, it wasn’t surprising.
Justin Nelson, a law professor at the University of Texas, Austin, says if you know anything about O’Connor’s past rulings, this was predictable.
“In case after case,” Nelson says, “what he has shown is that he has tended to side with the Republican attorneys general who are bringing ideological suits.”
Nelson recently ran an unsuccessful campaign to oust Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who led this multistate legal challenge to the health care law. Nelson says Paxton and the other Republican attorneys general have filed lawsuits in the U.S District Court for the Northern District of Texas because they know there’s a good chance they’ll get O’Connor as the judge.
“Judge O’Connor has been the go-to judge for Ken Paxton and Republican attorneys general who want to file ideological suits in any court across the country,” Nelson says. “Reed O’Connor is their best shot to get a ruling that they like.”
O’Connor, who did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment, was a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill before he was nominated to the federal bench by George W. Bush in 2007. So far, he has had to weigh in on at least a couple of contentious issues.
For example, O’Connor is known for striking down an Obama-era rule that protected transgender students. In that case he also sided with Paxton, who filed that legal challenge.
“They’ve done this over and over again on the hope that Judge O’Connor would rule on behalf of an ideological agenda,” Nelson says. “And I don’t think that is proper. I don’t think that is right.”
Paxton has filed lawsuits in other courts, too. He filed challenges to Obama-era immigration laws in a court in South Texas, which also has a reliably conservative judge on the bench.
However, Blackman believes criticism of this practice is “overblown.”
“All lawyers generally file the case where it leads to the best chance of success,” Blackman says. “And to the extent that [there’s a] criticism — that’s criticism of the attorney general and not of the judge. The judge doesn’t control which cases come to him.”
Furthermore, because O’Connor is getting a lot of ideological lawsuits brought to him, it’s making his voting record more controversial, Blackman adds.
“I think by virtue of the attorney generals’ form selection,” he says, “Judge O’Connor’s had a greater share than average of hot-button issues.”
However, Blackman says he is concerned that criticisms of controversial opinions are increasingly shifting toward the judges who issue the opinions — instead of toward the decisions themselves.
“President Trump does this all the time,” Blackman says. “Politicians do it all time. And usually this happens to Supreme Court justices, but here it is being done to a district court judge in Fort Worth — who, 99 percent of his docket no one will even know about.”
No matter how controversial O’Connor’s ruling on the health care law, Blackman says, the decision over the Affordable Care Act will now pass to another judge, as the case moves on to a higher court.
