Gaps spotted in The Voyeur’s Motel, a non-fiction account of a motel owner who spied on his guests, cast doubt on its veracity

The excerpts have been printed, the movie rights sold, but just days before publication the acclaimed journalist Gay Talese has disowned his new book, saying that its credibility is “down the toilet”.

The Voyeur’s Motel, due out on 12 July, is Talese’s account of how Colorado motel owner Gerald Foos spent four decades spying on unsuspecting guests from an attic “observation platform” that he built in the 1960s. Among the scenes he claimed to have witnessed was the murder of a young woman by her boyfriend in 1977.

But an investigation by the Washington Post has called the veracity of the diaries into question, revealing that Foos was not the owner of the hotel for eight years in the 80s – a period during which Talese had claimed that Foos was sometimes joined by his wife in the attic.

Publisher Grove Press says that Talese was contacted by Foos after he published his study of sex in America, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, in 1980. Talese then travelled to Colorado where he met Foos, “verified his story in person, and read some of his extensive journals, a secret record of [the US’s] changing social and sexual mores”.

The book was excerpted in the New Yorker in April, with film rights subsequently acquired by DreamWorks and Sam Mendes.

Talese wrote in the New Yorker that Foos “regarded his voyeurism as serious research, undertaken, in some vague way, for the betterment of society.”

“At the end of each year, he tallied his observations into an annual report, trying to identify significant social trends. In 1973, he noted that of the 296 sexual acts that he witnessed, 195 involved white heterosexuals, who favored the missionary position. Over all, he counted 184 male orgasms and 33 female orgasms,” wrote Talese.

It was in a 300-page batch of handwritten journals covering the later 1970s that he discovered the account of the murder, which is alleged to have happened in Room 10.

The incident involved a young couple on whom Foos had been snooping for several weeks, during which, he wrote, he had realised that the boyfriend was a drug dealer. In a row over some missing drugs, which the man accused his girlfriend of stealing, Foos – writing of himself in the third person – recalled:

“After fighting and arguing for about one hour, the scene below the voyeur turned to violence. The male subject grabbed the female subject by the neck and strangled her until she fell unconscious to the floor. The male subject, then in a panic, picked up all his things and fled the vicinity of the motel.

“The voyeur ... without doubt ... could see the chest of the female subject moving, which indicated to the voyeur that she was still alive and therefore O.K. So, the voyeur was convinced in his own mind that the female subject had survived the strangulation assault and would be all right, and he swiftly departed the observation platform for the evening.”

The next morning, Talese writes, a maid ran into the motel office and said that a woman was dead in Room 10. Foos reported that he immediately called the police.

Talese does note in the book that “I cannot vouch for every detail that he recounts in his manuscript”. But he was unprepared for the Washington Post’s revelation that, although Foos said he spied on guests from the late 60s to the mid-90s, local property records show that he sold the motel in 1980 and only reacquired it eight years later.

When the Post informed Talese about the discrepancy, the author “expressed surprise, disappointment and anger to learn about the transactions”. “I should not have believed a word he said,” Talese told the Post, adding: “I’m not going to promote this book. How dare I promote it when its credibility is down the toilet?”

Though Talese told the Post that “the source of my book, Gerald Foos, is certifiably unreliable. He’s a dishonourable man, totally dishonourable … I know that … I did the best I could on this book, but maybe it wasn’t good enough.,” Foos himself insisted that “everything I said in that book is the truth”.

Grove Press said that the majority of events in the book took place before the motel was sold by Foos in 1980, but that the company would consider including a note in future editions explaining any errors or missing information.