Recently, documentaries like “Making a Murderer” and “Citizenfour” have used investigative or immersive tactics to tell compelling stories, winning acclaim and awards. Patricia Aufderheide, a professor at American University who studies documentaries, said that the people who make them generally have the same values and aims as print journalists and that there is a continuing discussion about how to integrate those values into films and “say something meaningful about something that really happened.”

Although it is common journalistic practice to check factual assertions and question any that could be defamatory, Ms. Argento said she was not given the chance to counter Ms. Albert.

And Warren St. John, a former reporter for The New York Times who revealed that JT LeRoy had been a fake, said that he was never alerted to Ms. Albert’s claim in the documentary that he told her, “I’m going to get you for violating the Patriot Act, and I definitely have you for mail fraud.”

Mr. St. John said that did not sound like him, adding, “I’ve worked hard in my career to get sources to open up, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never invoked the Patriot Act.”

In a phone interview Mr. Feuerzeig said that he had checked with some people, like Courtney Love, before including recordings in his film, and told Dr. Owens that he had included recordings of him.

He said that he did not know he would use recordings with Mr. Cooper when he interviewed him, and that an excerpt from a call with Ms. Karr came from an interview conducted by JT LeRoy — “so Mary would have known she was being recorded.” (Interviewed for this article, Ms. Karr said, “I never knew I was recorded.”) Another excerpt came from an interview conducted by Mr. Beachy and recorded by Ms. Albert, Mr. Feuerzeig said, adding, “Since I assumed he was recording this interview for public use, I felt comfortable using the excerpts.”