Hi, welcome to the Wolves and Sheep podcast. I'm Roberta Glass, and today I'm going to be talking to you about celebrity dupes and the West Memphis 3. Stay tuned.

I got a phone call from a very peculiar and interesting kid.

He ended up just calling me all the time, almost every day.

The person on the other end of the line made a request I usually dread,

Can I show you my writing?

And when I read it, I thought, my God, this kid is incredible.

I can't believe he's 15 years old.

It was a story about balloons and heroin.

If you look at the outsider in fiction,

the work of J.T. Leroy definitely seemed like the next step.

It was kind of, like, circulating for, you know, like a year or two. You know, who is? Who is, Jake DeLore anyway, who is? I was his entire world. I was everything in my mind. I was his mother, his father, he was in love with me. I didn't believe that he was who he claimed he said he was. First novel written by a 16-year-old, you know, uneducated kid.

Yes, of course that seems like a phenomenon.

It's all based in the human element.

That's why it's so easy to join the cult.

I was fooled, and I guess I wanted to be fooled.

Yeah. was fooled, and I guess I wanted to be fooled. Okay, so that was the trailer to the cult of J.T. Leroy.

Now, why am I talking about J.T. Leroy and who was J.T. Leroy? Now, J.T. Leroy. Now, why am I talking about J.T. Leroy and who was J.T. Leroy? Now, J.T. Leroy was a young writer that came on the

literary scene in the end of the 1990s. He started getting his work published when he was 15. He was the product of a

prostitute truck stop prostitute mother. And he was a cross-dressing, formerly heroin-addicted, shy, terribly, painfully shy, so shy, in fact,

that he never read his own work in public. He had celebrities read it for him,

celebrities like Sandra Bernhardt and Lou Reed and Nancy Sinatra and

Winona Ryder. And later on he did start to make appearances, always very short, always in a wig

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