The Journalist And The Voyeur: It’s Not So Easy When You’re The One Being Watched

Chameleon

Audiochuck | Campside Media

Documentary, Society & Culture, True Crime, Tv & Film

4.5 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2026

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Gay Talese thought he’d landed a once-in-a-lifetime story every journalist dreams about: a motel owner who built a hidden viewing platform so he could watch guests in their most private moments and kept meticulous “research” notes for decades. But when Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi starts pulling at the threads, the story begins to unravel into something messy. A source who can’t stop exaggerating, and journalist who may have wanted to believe a little too much.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Campside Media
0:02.9	Hello?
0:06.2	What is this?
0:06.7	What do you want me to say?
0:08.7	Oh, it's just a
0:09.7	Commit.
0:11.3	Camillion Weekly.
0:14.7	A lot of reporters think, you know,
0:17.9	when they leave the story, it's all over.
0:21.1	Sometimes it's just beginning.
0:23.5	Gay Talese is one of the most famous narrative journalists of all time, and he was well into
0:28.3	the twilight of an illustrious career when he turned his attention to a whale of a story,
0:33.4	his white whale of a story, one he'd been chasing for a good chunk of his career.
0:39.3	It would start with the feature in the New Yorker, followed by a book,
0:42.4	and then a Netflix documentary called Voyeur,
0:45.1	which you're hearing a little bit of right now.
0:48.2	I'm pursuing a story about a man named Gerald Fuss,
0:52.9	who decided he wanted to buy a motel,
0:58.7	the express purpose of using it to watch everything that was being done in private.
1:05.2	In other words, to be a peeping Tom, a voyeur.
1:09.5	The Voyeur's motel, Tiles' 13,000 word piece about this man,
1:15.0	Gerald Fuse, appeared in the April 4th, 2016 issue of the New Yorker and began like this.
	...

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