Knoop says not: they claim to be naive about what they were doing. “At the time I don’t know if I understood it as being performance art,” they say, though they admits that “performance is very adrenalising and it becomes a thing where you go out and look for that feeling. It does happen when you take on a role, especially one for a long time, like you hear about actors embodying a role, you really kind of fall into it, you blend in with it.”

As for whether they see what they did as a 'scam'? Knoop leans towards it being more of an artistic experiment. “I think it’s very complicated about the ethics of it. I think [with] those experiences of being LeRoy at the beginning, it was almost dismantling the way you thought things work or could work,” they say, cryptically. “It was about engaging with the ethics of it, but kind of being confused!”

The allure of victimhood

If there is any blame to be apportioned in a situation like this, then Knoop is also keen to pass the buck to the media and readers who embraced LeRoy so readily. “People were consuming his victimhood, that was part of the narrative.”

Indeed, part of the reason Albert got Knoop to dress up as LeRoy in public, rather than just keep her persona invisible, was that she realised that the appeal of JT Leroy rested upon the authenticity of her character’s ‘outsider’ identity. So when it was revealed that LeRoy was a fabrication, people were angrier than was the case when, say, the crime writer Robert Galbraith was revealed as none other than JK Rowling. Readers were not invested in Galbraith and his presumed boring middle-aged male persona in the same way they were with LeRoy’s 'transgender sex worker-turned-novelist' one.