SAN FRANCISCO — When the journalist came calling 10 years ago, the psychoanalyst was good and ready to talk. Jeffrey M. Masson had lost his job for espousing renegade views on Sigmund Freud, and was quite eager to air a retort.
He bared his soul through 40 hours of interviews, and Janet Malcolm listened, tape recorder at hand. Then she wrote a stinging pair of stories for the New Yorker, portraying Masson--who had hoped for redemption--as an egomaniacal sex fiend.
This week the two sit on opposite sides of a San Francisco courtroom, dueling over a $10-million libel lawsuit Masson filed against Malcolm and the renowned magazine that published her work.
With its themes of betrayal, sex and journalistic intrigue, Masson vs. Malcolm is a spicy show, drawing a standing-room-only crowd of therapists, journalists and assorted tweed-clad intellectuals. The voyeurs are attracted, in part, by the principals--he, a rakish psychoanalyst who dazzled and then disappointed his peers, she a queen bee in the New Yorker's hive of gifted writers.
Testifying first, Masson charged that Malcolm invented five quotations to enrich her devastating portrait of him. Malcolm, who took her turn on the stand Thursday, insists he is suffering a sort of buyer's remorse--regretting unflattering phrases that he did in fact say.
The dispute has bounced about the courts, and was even dismissed twice. But in a landmark decision in 1991, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated Masson's suit--and established a new test that he and other public figures who allege libel must meet to prove their case.
Now the celebrated spat has finally landed before a U.S. District Court jury. The trial will not break legal ground, but one scholar in the gallery, University of California law professor Stephen Barnett, calls it "an irresistible combination of law, journalism, psychoanalysis, sex and arresting personalities."
The case also offers some delicious ironies, the juiciest of which concerns Malcolm's condemnation of her own profession in a 1990 book dissecting author Joe McGinniss' book about murderer Jeffrey MacDonald. In an attack strangely similar to some of Masson's complaints, Malcolm accused "every journalist" of "preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and then betraying them without remorse."
It is the jury's job to sift through the facts and bluster and answer the essential question in the case: Did Malcolm deliberately fabricate five quotations, damaging Masson's reputation as a result? To win under the Supreme Court's new rule, Masson must show not only that he was misquoted, but also that the inaccuracies fostered a "material change in meaning" that specifically caused him harm.
Because the trial is likely to center on the two principals' credibility, it was not surprising that each of the warring lawyers sought in the trial's opening moments to trumpet his client as the credible one.
Masson (pronounced MAY-son) is "a brilliant man," said his attorney, Charles Morgan Jr., one whose career was ruined by a writer who "put statements in his mouth" and twisted those he did say.
Au contraire, argued Malcolm's attorney, Gary L. Bostwick, who portrayed his client as a painstaking person who has been falsely accused by a chronic complainer with a faulty memory.
There are some facts on which both sides agree, among them that Masson, 52, and Malcolm, 58, initially met thanks to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
Masson's interest in Freud surfaced in the 1970s, when he traded his life as a professor of Sanskrit for that of a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis had intrigued him, Masson testified this week, since his days as a student at Harvard University, where his disturbing tendency to sleep with every woman he met drove him to seek professional counseling.
By 1980, Masson had won an appointment as curator of the Freud Archives--a prestigious post that made him custodian of Freud's research, letters and other documents. Soon after, however, Masson uncovered evidence that soured his view of Freud. Ultimately, he concluded that peer pressure had pushed Freud to abandon his famous seduction theory, which linked certain adult neuroses with childhood sexual abuse.
Masson's conclusion made him an instant heretic in the psychoanalytic community--and cost him his job at the Freud Archives. It also made him of interest to Malcolm, who had read of his dizzying rise and fall and suspected it would yield a compelling tale.
She was right, and when her 48,500-word articles appeared in the New Yorker in December, 1983, Masson sued. Initially, he challenged a large bundle of quotations as either fabricated or altered in a damaging way. But court rulings have whittled the number at issue to five.
