STEPHEN Glass
faked all or parts of more than 40 articles for American magazines between 1996 and 1998. In 2003, he acknowledged his violation of journalistic standards was so severe he would ”never be welcomed within journalism, and rightly so”.
Now the California Supreme Court will decide whether Glass’ behaviour was so bad as to make him morally unfit to practise law.
Glass, whose frauds were the subject of the 2003 film Shattered Glass, is now a 39-year-old law clerk at a firm in Beverly Hills. He passed the bar exam and applied for an attorney’s licence in 2007, but the State Bar’s Committee of Bar Examiners turned him down, questioning his claims of remorse and rehabilitation and saying he had not yet shown he could be trusted.
Glass appealed to the independent State Bar Court, which ruled 2-1 in his favour in July. The majority found ”overwhelming evidence of Glass’ reform and rehabilitation” since 1998 and noted he had impressive character references from 22 witnesses, including two judges who had employed him, two psychiatrists who treated him, and the former editor-in-chief of The New Republic, where most of the articles appeared.
Glass ”has learned, painfully, from his mistakes”, the former editor, Martin Peretz, told the bar court.
The bar examiners appealed, and the state’s high court voted last month to review the case, leaving Glass’ application on hold while he awaits a hearing.
Glass did not respond to a request for comment.
This will be the court’s first ruling on a would-be lawyer’s moral fitness since 2000, when it rejected a man who said he had turned his life around after serving a manslaughter sentence for beating and stabbing his sister to death in 1975.
Glass was not charged with any crimes for his articles. But the court must decide whether he has behaved well enough, and for long enough, to erase doubts about his character.
Glass’ deceptions also appeared in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Policy Review and now-defunct George magazine. He invented stories about politicians across the spectrum.