Not long ago an NYU journalism student interviewed me for a class project. His topic was “almost famous people” and he told me I was the ideal subject. While I have a smidgen of fame for my role in helping to unmask serial fabricator Stephen Glass, which led to Steve Zahn portraying me in an indie movie, it’s not like my name lands me a hard-to-get reservation at a hot new restaurant or past a nightclub’s velvet rope. On Wikipedia my entry is a “stub.” My brush with fame does result in the odd email or two when Shattered Glass airs on late-night cable or is shown as a cautionary tale to journalism classes. Sometimes I’m congratulated on my scoop, as if it happened last week. More often a high school or college student researching a paper on ethics requests an interview.

I’ve never met Stephen Glass but over the years have obliquely followed his goings and doings. After The New Republic fired him in 1998, Glass graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law School. He passed the New York State bar exam in 2000 but wasn’t granted a license to practice law because he had committed “acts of moral turpitude.” In 2003 Jann Wenner assigned him an article for Rolling Stone on Canada’s drug laws. Glass also received a $190,000 advance for The Fabulist, a novel about a young journalist caught fabricating stories, and promoted it with a TV blitz, appearing on 60 Minutes and a slew of other news shows. Which prompted Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic’s literary editor, to observe, “Even when it comes to reckoning with his own sins, he is still incapable of nonfiction.”

Despite the excessive promotion the book fared poorly–it sold fewer than 5,000 copies–debunking the notion there’s no such thing as bad publicity. The following year Glass moved to California and passed that state’s bar exam, but in 2009 California bar examiners rejected his application, questioning whether he had truly rehabilitated himself. Around that time Billy Ray, Shattered Glass‘s screenwriter/director, told me he was waiting on line for a movie in Los Angeles when he spotted Glass working as a street performer with Un-Cabaret. Later he took a job at a Beverly Hills law firm as either a paralegal or law clerk, depending on whose account you believe. (I’d ask Glass, but he hasn’t returned my call for this piece.)

Now Glass is in the news again. His battle to join the legal profession has wound through the appeals process, with Glass winning two separate victories: A State Bar Court judge overturned the Committee of Bar Examiners’ decision to block Glass; then a three-judge review panel also decided 2-1 in Glass’s favor. Recently the California Supreme Court opted to hear the case, and a ruling should be forthcoming. Read all the details in a meticulously researched column by Jack Shafer of Reuters.

When I first learned of Glass’s quest to join the legal profession, I thought, Christ, it’s been 13 years. And, since when does lying disqualify someone from being a lawyer? Let the guy earn a living. Leave it to Glass to disgrace himself in one mistrusted profession only to apply to another. (Gallup polls consistently rank reporters and lawyers as only slightly more favorable to car salesmen and members of Congress.) After reading Shafer’s piece, however, I changed my mind. Few words are as dangerous as, “I’m no psychologist, but…” it occurred to me the strategies Glass adopted to fight his ban are eerily similar to the ones I confronted all those years ago.

Travel in my way-back machine to May 1998, when, after three full days of dissecting every word in Glass’s now famous story, “Hack Heaven,” I was interrogating him over the phone along with then-Forbes.com managing editor, Kambiz Foroohar. Every time we questioned another “fact” we could not verify, Glass spun another lie. As I wrote two days later, “It’s tough proving a negative. It is even tougher proving that something or someone does not exist.” And Glass did everything he could to make harder. He concocted phony business cards and voicemails, a fake website for his fake company Jukt Micronics, and faux sources to vouch for his fabricated sources. Instead of coming clean he copped to lesser crimes if he thought it would divert us from learning far worse. After we eviscerated each and every fact in his story he finally admitted to being an egregiously sloppy reporter who didn’t check facts and unintentionally misled readers and editors. He might have been duped, he claimed. Perhaps some malevolent hackers took advantage of him. At the same time New Republic editor Chuck Lane was fending off an insurrection within the magazine, with Glass trying to turn staff against him.