Plagiarism scandal rocks Stutts

No one expects the Stutts Daily Spectacle to have its facts straight, least of all its readers. After all, they know better than anyone how much work it takes to maintain a 4.0.

But even a blind squirrel finds an occasional nut, so in March the Spec reported that a Stutts student, Malati Sulabha '08, had plagiarized large chunks of her first novel, "Girl with Perfect SATs Goes Nuts, Drinks Cosmos, and Hooks Up," from another "chick-lit" offering, "The Rodeo Drive Club's Blow Job Queens of MySpace." Ms. Sulabha had received $500,000 in a two-book deal, an astonishing advance for an unpublished writer, even one attending Stutts, the world's finest university.

Ms. Sulabha (or as she was known on campus, "the fucking bitch who got all that money to write a book I totally could if I wanted to--did I tell you I won like, five literary prizes in high school?--it's just that I spent the entire summer doing Outward Bound with like, poor kids") initially characterized the disputed passages as "unintentional." This defense became problematic when evidence surfaced showing that whole chapters had been simply photocopied. Ms. Sulabha then backtracked, saying, "The Xerox machine at my Dad's office is totally weird."

As the scandal deepened, Ms. Sulabha's publishers professed shock and surprise. "When I was reading along and all the characters' names changed, I thought, 'Wow, postmodern," said Bernys de Lesseps of Sutton Place Press. When asked if he had ever read the book Ms. Sulabha had copied from, de Lesseps replied candidly, "I haven't read anything but spreadsheets since 1993." But you just said you'd read... "I was lying."

Just when it couldn't get any worse, copies of the earlier book began to surface with the author's name crossed out and Ms. Sulabha's name written on them in Sharpie. At that point, the student decided to come clean. "It's better to seem corrupt than stupid," as they say in Great Littleton, and so the young writer's tune changed to a symphony of contrition. "I'm really, really, sorry this happened." So far, her sorrow, while great, has not taken any financial form. In fact the whole brouhaha has done wonders for her book sales.

As a result, publishers have begun to scour Great Littleton for other writers who are willing to shamelessly plagiarize novels. "We're looking for that 'Stutts touch,'" one publisher said anonymously. "Somebody who doesn't have anything to say besides, 'I am smart and hard-working and will TOTALLY WHORE MYSELF OUT FOR SUCCESS.'" The publisher paused. "Make sure you put that in all-caps," she said.

They're likely to find a lot of takers. Happily, the rise of book packagers means that no content whatsoever need originate with the student. "We sell the proposal, we write the book, we deliver the book," said Jonathan Greene-Green of King's Cross Productions, creators of the wildly popular "Sodomy Girls Go Shopping" series. "The job of the author is merely to apologize to whatever audience is appropriate given our book's demos."

"Of course she plagiarized. What else could she do?" asked Randy Gillespie, an adjunct professor in the Stutts English Department. Since the scandal broke, several of his colleagues have been hospitalized with acute schadenfreude. "Look, most people don't have a pamphlet in them," Gillespie said, "much less a novel, much less two novels. It was an impossible situation, a sucker's bet, and one that no Stutts student could ever turn down. Five hundred grand just to make some stuff up? Where do I sign? Then you start and find out it's not as easy as it looks..." When asked why she didn't simply give back the money, Gillespie laughed. "Kids here know how to do everything but fail. Better to be the girl who cheated rather than the girl who failed."

The professor's own novels, a satirical tetralogy based on the Epic of Gilgamesh which send up academic life "from an insider's perspective," have sold 1,007 copies, mostly in Dutch. When it is suggested that he's just bitter, Gillespie replied, "Hell yes! Why'd I spend all those years learning to write when it obviously comes down to--I don't know, something else. Did you hear? She doesn't even want to be a writer--she wants to be an investment banker!"

But this sad story of ambition run amok does prove one thing: the enduring power of the written word. When it comes to knocking a classmate off their pedestal, nobody works harder than the Daily Spec. "As soon as we got copies of her book, it was like Woodward to the power of Bernstein in there," said Cal Davis '07, an editor on the paper. Davis intimated that Ms. Sulabha's fate was sealed from the moment that her deal went public. "As soon as everybody heard that she was getting $500,000, she was meat," Davis said. "I only got fifty grand for my memoir about Aderol addiction, and my uncle edits Details, bitch!"

UPDATE (5-2-06): After the kind of media scrutiny once reserved for heads of state, natural disasters, and other things that actually matter, it has been discovered that Ms. Sulabha's book contains verbatim passages from at least 58 more books. The list, which was still growing at press time, includes "The Good Earth," "The Origin of Species," "I'm OK, You're OK," "Bleak House," and--perhaps most worrisome of all-- the 1973 Chilton Guide to Small Engine Repair.

In a statement this afternoon, a badly shaken de Lesseps said, "I think it's clear that Ms. Sulabha has written not a book, but some sort of pernicious, cannibalizing chick-lit virus. In ways not yet known, 'Perfect SATs' absorbs portions of any book it comes into contact with and absorbs it into its narrative structure. For the sake of the world's literature, I'm asking--no, begging--anyone who bought the book to destroy it immediately. May God have mercy on our souls."