Fatal Vision
Joe McGinniss, author of a good number of books, some not so praise worthy wrote Fatal Vision in 1983. This book exposed what he saw as the facts of a gruesome murder and how he interpreted it to have occurred. A contract was made with Jeffery MacDonald to write a book about the trial and murder to try and exonerate him. Only when the book turned out to do just the opposite did things get nasty. Nineteen years ago, McGinniss' best-selling book, Fatal Vision, depicted Jeffrey MacDonald as a self-absorbed psychopath who murdered his family. McGinniss' theory, presented as truth and the only written account of what might have happened to MacDonalds family, was that MacDonald had abused diet pills he was taking, suffered a vicious amphetamine psychosis, and, in a fit of rage, savagely slaughtered his entire family because one of his children wet their bed. The book and the pursuant movie convinced millions that MacDonald actually committed these heinous crimes. In turn with the publication of the book and the production of the movie, MacDonalds reputation was severely tarnished and his hopes of appellate courts granting his motions for a retrial had been dashed. The trial of MacDonald v. McGinniss was born and Jeffery MacDonald promptly sued McGinniss for not for libel but for fraud. In a sworn deposition on October 30, 1986, McGinniss admitted, incredibly, that he did not personally believe his own theory of the diet pill overdose. He explained, under oath in the courts, that he had introduced the diet pill theory as a dramatic device in his "new journalism" of half-witted factional work, where the story was more important than the facts. When McGinniss decided to move from presenting the facts gathered at the trials to concocting his own idea of what happened and putting it into a best selling novel, MacDonald promptly realized he had been duped. MacDonald v. McGinniss became a trial against the first amendment rights.