The story of Emma Cline and Chaz Reetz-Laiol — what a plot!

I'm reading "Can the Plagiarism Charges Against Emma Cline Hold Up in Court?" by Lila Shapiro (in NY Magazine). Emma Cline wrote a well-regarded novel called "The Girls," which I'm just guessing you don't care about. But the question of what counts as plagiarism doesn't require that you care about the particular book, so pay attention.

You've got a writer who shared her life for a while with another writer, the delightfully named Chaz Reetz-Laiol. They were together, and then they broke up.

So they are each other's material, right? Have you ever been raw material for a writer who was also raw material for your writing? I have! More famously, there was that couple of all couples, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald:

In 1932, while being treated at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Zelda had a burst of creativity. Over the course of her first six weeks at the clinic, she wrote an entire novel and sent it to Scott's publisher, Maxwell Perkins.

When Scott finally read Zelda's book, a week after she'd sent it to Perkins, he was furious. The book was a semi-autobiographical account of the Fitzgeralds' marriage. In letters, Scott berated her and fumed that the novel had drawn upon the autobiographical material that he planned to use in Tender Is the Night, which he'd been working on for years, and which would finally see publication in 1934.

Zelda's book "Save Me the Waltz" came out first, but only after she'd complied with his demand to remove everything based on material that he was using in his book. Even though she used the material in her own way, she was scooping him on the stories. For various reasons, he got his way, she was silenced, and there was no litigation. F. Scott had accused her of plagiarism and of being a bad writer, and she never wrote another book. The crushing of Zelda's art was the subject of the 1970 biography "Zelda," by Nancy Milford, which was pretty much required reading for those of us who read "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch" back then.

But back to Emma Cline and her Reetz-Laiol. They had what looks like a bad relationship for about 4 years, beginning when she was 20 and he was 33. According to the NY Magazine article, she "installed spy software on her own computer — a computer that Reetz-Laiolo occasionally used," because she wanted to spy on him, and she later sold that computer to him and continued to spy on him through that spyware after they broke up.

Her complaint says she did this because she knew he was cheating on her, because he was abusive, because she "could no longer distinguish the truth from ReetzLaiolo’s [sic] constant lies." 

If you knew he was cheating on you and he was abusive and lying at least some of the time, why wouldn't you just be done with him? Why embark on a creepy spying exercise?

It was after they broke up that Cline asked Reetz-Laiolo to read a draft of her novel, and he found things he considered plagiarism:

According to [Orly Lobel, a professor of law at the University of San Diego], most of these examples [of plagiarism] would not hold up in court. One instance includes the mention of the body brush, a personal grooming implement. In an earlier draft of the book, Cline included this sentence: “My mother spoke to Sal about body brushing, of the movement of energies around meridian points. The charts.” Reetz-Laiolo claimed this plagiarized a sentence that appeared in his short story, “Animals,” in Ecotone magazine: “Laurel in the morning brushing her body on the patio with a body brush, slowly combing it up her legs towards her heart, up her arms towards her heart. Circling her belly. There was something totemic about her out there in the sun.”

But Cline’s complaint stated that she owned a body brush. “The law does not allow you to own those kinds of ideas for art,” said Lobel. “There’s no copyright infringement there. It’s very clear that our whole history of art, of writing, of literature is built on paying homage to previous authors, other authors, being in conversation, and that’s actually part of what art is.”

I certainly agree with Lobel about that, but perhaps New York Magazine singled out the feeblest example of plagiarism. And, more importantly, every example of plagiarism Reetz-Laiolo complained about got excised before publication. You'd think, in our day, the man wouldn't be able to silence the woman like that, and these people were hardly F. Scott and Zelda. And yet, the threat of litigation intimidates publishers, and I'm not surprised to see the publisher (here, Random House) cave.

But Reetz-Laiolo had also asked Cline to remove a small section of the text that his complaint alleged resembled a section of his screenplay, a script she could only have read if she did, in fact, remotely hack into his computer. If the case does go to trial, this will likely be at the center of it, since it is the only instance of alleged plagiarism that made its way into the published version of The Girls. Lobel was skeptical of the plagiarism charge here as well, but if Reetz-Laiolo’s legal team is able to prove that Cline hacked into Reetz-Laiolo’s computer, Cline may be charged with something, though likely not plagiarism.

It's something much worse than plagiarism!

It’s important to note that Reetz-Laiolo hired Harvey Weinstein’s former law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, and that the law firm used a trove of Cline’s personal documents — captured by the spyware program she installed on her own computer — to threaten Cline.

Oh, here's a plot!  Look how carefully the plot point is revealed: Aggressive, expensive lawyers (tainted by the villainous Harvey Weinstein), the woman's "personal documents," the woman threatened. But she's hoist by her own petard: the spyware! She was looking at him, but the spyware was looking at everyone. She preserved the evidence, and, going after him, she unleashed a robot who spied without any allegiance to her. Unlike a novelist, the electronic spy had no point of view. It generated relentless raw material, from which any author could cull material to use to tell a story from any point of view. And that includes those oft-disparaged authors — we call them lawyers — who write legal complaints.

Reetz-Laiolo’s complaint is threaded with salacious and humiliating details about Cline that are completely unrelated to any charge of plagiarism.... According to The New Yorker, an earlier draft of the complaint contained even more salacious details, including naked selfies, explicit chat messages, and a section called “Cline’s History of Manipulating Older Men,” which began like this: “[E]vidence shows that Cline was not the innocent and inexperienced naïf she portrayed herself to be, and had instead for many years maintained numerous ‘relations’ with older men and others, from whom she extracted gifts and money.”...

As Cline’s complaint noted, this earlier draft of Reetz-Laiolo’s lawsuit “followed an age-old playbook: it invoked the specter of sexual shame to threaten a woman into silence and acquiescence.”

But she spied on him! She invaded his privacy, and she invaded her own privacy. What should be done with these two? Imagine if a man had installed software on a computer that he left in the possession of a woman, and she took that computer with her into her life after she got away from him, and he spied on her through it for years and collected her writings and appropriated her stories for a book of his, which won acclaim. Would we be saying the woman was shaming the man? If the spyware collected embarrassing sexual material about him, would we be outraged that it became public after she decided to fight him for what he did or would we be laughing at him and calling it just deserts?

The New Yorker article is "How the Lawyer David Boies Turned a Young Novelist’s Sexual Past Against Her," by Sheelah Kolhatkar:

Cline’s attorneys were outraged by what they regarded as Boies Schiller’s attempt to use embarrassing sexual material that had nothing to do with the heart of the legal dispute to push her to settle the case. “I’m not going to speculate about their motives, but it was content that was completely inappropriate and ludicrous, just based on how sexually graphic it was, to put in a complaint,” Carrie Goldberg, who specializes in representing victims of revenge porn and other forms of harassment, and is one of several attorneys representing Cline in the case, told me. “Legal complaints are public record, and, basically, they’re saying, ‘Hey, if you don’t give us what our client wants, we’re going to put this very personal information out into the open, and the whole world is going to know the inner workings of your sex life and your sexual history and every proclivity that you have.’ ”...

In an e-mail to me on Thursday, Cline wrote, “I never, in any scenario, could have imagined publishing a novel would have resulted in a bunch of lawyers combing through records of my porn habits, or choosing which naked photo of me to include in a legal document. Whatever independence I gained, as a writer and as a person, felt meaningless in the face of this kind of onslaught.”....

Why couldn't she imagine that? She's a novelist. It would be a great idea for a novel. But some novelists need to see the raw material out there in real life, and their art is about taking that and making it into something really interesting and revealing about human nature. And wow, this is some fabulous raw material.

Whatever independence I gained, as a writer and as a person... Isn't that insanely hypocritical when you installed the spyware?!