By rights, Stephen Jimenez ought to be a famous author and his book a bestseller - and taught in journalism schools, law school, and police academy to boot.
Because his subject - the murder of Matthew Shepard 17 years ago - is the clearest example of what happens when a favored lobby group inserts itself between the news coverage and reality.
The official version - gay martyrdom in the heartland of a bigoted rural America - is still being peddled, in The Huffington Post and on the Oprah Network.
The fact that it is completely false makes no difference to the Big Gay enforcers, as Mr Jimenez, who is himself gay, discovered when he set out to tell the truth about what happened.
The official version - gay martyrdom in the heartland of a bigoted rural America - is still being peddled, in The Huffington Post and on the Oprah Network.
The fact that it is completely false makes no difference to the Big Gay enforcers, as Mr Jimenez, who is himself gay, discovered when he set out to tell the truth about what happened.
A few days ago Spiked! in Britain carried a fascinating interview with Jimenez:
Stephen Jimenez spent 13 years researching The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard, which argues that the Matthew Shepard story, a US 21-year-old student who was allegedly beaten to death for being gay in 1998, as it has been popularly told has little, if anything, to do with the details of Matthew's life and death. He spoke with me this week about the book, and some of the well-guarded territory it covers.
Mark Adnum: You've said that the media reported the story of Matthew's murder 'inaccurately from the beginning', and as a result 'an overtly simplistic narrative got set in stone'. What core elements of the story are inaccurate?
Stephen Jimenez: Nearly every national news organisation originally reported that Matthew Shepard and his killers were strangers on the night they met. But Aaron McKinney and Matthew Shepard were not strangers. On the contrary, they had a tangled friendship and personal relationship that involved sex and drugs, primarily crystal meth. They partied together, bought and sold meth from each other, and had gotten to know each other months before the October 1998 attack. Interestingly, Aaron and Matthew were friends before Aaron and his accomplice Russell Henderson began their friendship in early summer 1998.
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