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The recent revelations about Naomi Wolf's sketchy relationship to sources and research are ... not news to people who've interacted with her work in the past.
The Naomi Wolf story is less a "this could happen to any of us" thing than an "it was inevitable that this would eventually happen to her" thing.
If you haven't been following the story, Naomi Wolf has a new book out that claims there was a wave of judicial executions for consensual gay sex in Victorian Britain. No such wave occurred—she misread legal documents and failed to do basic confirmatory research.
Here's a brief excerpt from a BBC interview in which she was confronted with the defects in her research.
And here's the full interview. The relevant section begins about twenty minutes in. bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0…
For context, here's one of several blogposts I wrote in 2010 about Wolf's abject misrepresentation of the allegations against Julian Assange. studentactivism.net/2010/12/20/nao…
And a google search for reviews of (for instance) her 2012 book "Vagina: A New Biography" will turn up eerily similar methodological and analytical criticisms.
