Nothing in Charles Lane’s 15 years of journalism, not the bitter blood of Latin America, nor war in Bosnia, nor the difficult early days of his editorship of the fractious New Republic, could compare with this surreal episode. On the second Friday in May in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel in the Maryland suburb of Bethesda, near Washington, nothing less than the most sustained fraud in the history of modern journalism was unraveling. No one in Lane’s experience, no one, had affected him in the eerie manner of Stephen Glass, a 25-year-old associate editor at The New Republic and a white-hot rising star in Washington journalism. It wasn’t just the relentlessness of the young reporter. Or the utter conviction with which Glass had presented work that Lane now feared was completely fabricated. It was the ingenuity of the con, the daring with which Glass had concocted his attention-getting creations, the subtle ease with which even now, as he attempted to clear himself, the strangely gifted kid created an impromptu illusion using makeshift details he had spied in the lobby just seconds earlier—a chair, a cocktail table, smoke from a cigarette. It all seemed increasingly bizarre to Lane, who had brought Glass to the Hyatt, the supposed setting for one of those bogus stories, to see if the young man could explain it all away somehow. What was behind Glass’s behavior? Why did he do it? Lane didn’t know then that Stephen Glass had always been good at such risky business. Exceptionally good. He didn’t know that, in 1990, as a high-school senior in the North Shore Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Stephen Glass—a theater-lover—had served as a technical director of Stunts, a group of talented students who produced their own work. (One production involved a Washington journalist caught up in a web of conspiracy and corruption.) The yearbook pictured Glass, directing the movements of the cast through a headset. “Stephen Glass,” read the caption, “peruses the script, ready to call the scenes, sets, and props.” Not that many years later, Glass would present other elaborate orchestrations of made-up scenes and characters, this time passing them off as journalism. During his last year in high school, Glass also participated in an activity designed to encourage rapid and inventive thinking called Adventures of the Mind. At Highland Park High—a rigorous, competitive school where it wasn’t unusual for 5 percent of the senior class to be National Merit semifinalists—Adventures of the Mind drew the “mental giants” who loved the game of designing scenarios with creative flair. They were asked to prepare a musical in 15 minutes. Or come up, rapid-fire, with clever commercial slogans. Or act out raising a chair off the ground to see if it would float. It was the perfect fodder for smart kids. “You start with an idea,” said Glass in the yearbook, “expand on that idea until it’s a reality. It makes you more aware of not only your own capabilities, but also exposes you to the different types of careers that are waiting for us after we graduate.” Beneath the inventions of Stephen Glass there is his own story. People try to explain it now by citing the pressure he faced to perform, and it is true that he came from an environment in which there was brutal pressure to excel. Some stress the fact that Glass was working too much. And he was illogically, and even crazily, overextended. More tempting is the idea of seeing each of Glass’s articles, each act of manipulative, aggressive trickery, as a grander and more precariously improvised adventure of the mind.

The crisis had begun to escalate on that second Friday in May. Already, Lane was virtually certain that Glass was lying about the veracity of “Hack Heaven,” a story written for the May 18 issue that dealt with the phenomenon of a teenage computer hacker seeking to extort thousands of dollars from a vulnerable corporation. During the previous day, Lane had seen Glass, when confronted with questions about his story, respond not only with a barrage of faked material to support his piece but also with his own psychological weaponry. (Lane reconstructed his interactions with Glass during a six-hour taped interview for Vanity Fair in which he frequently referred to a memo that he privately kept of what took place.) “Look, you’re not backing me up,” Glass had told Lane the night before. He had appeared wounded, almost outraged. But Glass was acting; he knew exactly what he had done. Every name, every company, virtually every single solitary detail—except Glass’s own byline—had been a product of the young man’s imagination. But there wasn’t the slightest acknowledgment. “I really feel hurt,” Lane remembers Glass telling him. “You know, Chuck, I just feel really attacked. And you’re my editor and you should be backing me up.” He threw the 36-year-old Lane onto the defensive. Because this, after all, was Stephen Glass, the compelling wunderkind who had seeped inside the skins of editors not only at The New Republic but also at Harper’s, George, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones. This was the Stephen Glass who had so many different writing contracts that his income this year might well have reached $150,000 (including his $45,000 New Republic salary). This was the Stephen Glass whose stories had attracted the attention not just of Random House—his agent was trying to score a book deal—but of several screenwriters. When unmasked, Stephen Glass was revealed as Washington journalism’s variation on Six Degrees of Separation. But before the revelation, this talented, smooth-cheeked, and painfully insecure boy had won over the world of magazines with the vigor of his youth and his equally alluring vulnerability. He had appeared, amid the self-centeredness of the capital city, as refreshingly flexible. “There are so many assholes in journalism, so many braggarts and arrogant jerks,” said Margaret Talbot, a senior editor at The New Republic who worked with Glass. “Someone comes along who appears to have talent, is self-effacing to a fault, and is sweet and solicitous.” He was hardly the first to make up stories. Janet Cooke had done it in 1980 in a Pulitzer Prize–winning piece for The Washington Post. Nik Cohn, 21 years after the fact, blithely admitted to having made up most of the New York story that inspired the film Saturday Night Fever. More recently, Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith was fired for making up parts of her columns. But none of these journalists approached the sheer calculation of Glass’s deceptions. He is the perfect expression of his time and place: an era is cresting in Washington; it is a time when fact and fiction are blurred not only by writers eager to score but also by presidents and their attorneys, spinmeisters and special prosecutors. From one perspective, Stephen Glass was a master parodist of his city’s shifting truths.

The New Republic, after an investigation involving a substantial portion of its editorial staff, would ultimately acknowledge fabrications in 27 of the 41 bylined pieces that Glass had written for the magazine in the two-and-a-half-year period between December 1995 and May 1998. In Manhattan, John F. Kennedy Jr., editor of George, would write a personal letter to Vernon Jordan apologizing for Glass’s conjuring up two sources who had made juicy and emphatic remarks about the sexual proclivities of the presidential adviser and his boss. At Harper’s, Glass would be dismissed from his contract after a story he had written about phone psychics, which contained 13 first-name sources, could not be verified. For those two and a half years, the Stephen Glass show played to a captivated audience; then the curtain abruptly fell. He got away with his mind games because of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if they were doing their jobs. He wasn’t, obviously, too lazy to report. He apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than mere truth offered. It all worked because of his skill at creating incredibly complex scenes and also because of that accommodating personality. Glass was the guy always ready to lend a sympathetic ear to colleagues going through divorces or trying to juggle kids and careers. He was almost brutally self-flagellating about his own work and abilities—so much so that his co-workers felt protective. But Glass’s seeming insecurity hid guts of steel. He reacted to warning shots from his possible doubters with audacity; he simply enlarged his fictions. Glass stealthily warded off a Fortune reporter who couldn’t find a listing for an imaginary company Glass had written about. He avoided an intern from Harper’s who wanted the name of a software company that didn’t exist. He never responded to E-mail from a former New Republic colleague who asked for the name of the Las Vegas casino that took bets on whether a space shuttle would malfunction. (The casino existed only in Glass’s mind.) He even held his own during an embarrassing moment at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 1997 when a Wall Street Journal reporter asked him how long it had taken to make up one controversial article. It worked because Michael Kelly, Chuck Lane’s predecessor at The New Republic, never wavered in his support for the cub reporter he had helped catapult into the big leagues. When confronted with two different accusations of fabrication in Glass’s work during a three-month period in 1997, Kelly responded not with a soul-searching interrogation of his protégé but, in one of the incidents, by dashing off angry and vitriolic letters to the offended parties. Kelly called one of them dishonest and labeled his complaint meritless, and told another that he owed Glass an apology.

Stephen Glass rode the fast curve of instant ordainment that encircles the celebrity age of the 90s; his reputation in the incestuous world of Washington magazine journalism exploded so exponentially after a few of his better-than-true stories that he could basically write anything and get away with it, regardless of the fact that his reporting almost always uncovered the near incredible and was laden with shoddy sourcing. His reports described events which occurred at nebulous locations, and included quotes from idiosyncratic characters (with no last names mentioned) whose language suggested the street poetry of Kerouac and the psychological acuity of Freud. He had an odd, prurient eye for a department-store Santa with an erection and evangelists who liked getting naked in the woods. And nobody called his bluff. What finally brought Stephen Glass down was himself. He kept upping the risk, enlarging the dimensions of his performance, going beyond his production of fake notes, a fake Web site, a fake business card, and memos by pulling his own brother into his fading act for a guest appearance. Clearly, he would have done anything to save himself. “He wanted desperately to save his ass at the expense of anything,” said Chuck Lane. “He would have destroyed the magazine.” The saga of Stephen Glass is wrenching, shameful, and sad. His actions are both destructive and self-destructive, and if there is an explanation for them, his family has chosen not to offer it. Repeated attempts to interview Stephen were rebuffed, and all his father, Jeffrey Glass, said in a phone conversation was this: “There’s a lot unsaid. You can do whatever you want to do. There’s no comment.”

‘I do trust you,” Chuck Lane said on that Thursday night when Stephen Glass had accused his editor of desertion. But by the next morning, on that second Friday in May, Lane was wavering. Around nine a.m., Glass was questioned on a speaker phone by Lane and by two outsiders, editor Adam Penenberg and executive editor Kambiz Foroohar, from the on-line publication Forbes Digital Tool. Doing exhaustive research of his own, Penenberg had discovered the gaping holes in Glass’s hacker piece, and Forbes Digital Tool was planning to do some type of story about the errors. The three men interrogated Glass, and it became apparent that nothing checked out. The conversation, portions of which were taped, is chilling because of Glass’s psychological dexterity. “We called some of the numbers that you gave us, and we got voice mails,” Foroohar said to Glass. “We tried E-mailing people and we have our E-mails returned back to us. Three of the E-mail addresses that we used came back saying no address or the account was closed—whatever.” “Who are the people?,” Glass replied, still upbeat. “ ‘Cause I’ve E-mailed them.” (In fact, he hadn’t. They didn’t exist.) Gradually a quiet exasperation crept into Glass’s voice; he seemed to imply that the problem was the incompetents at Forbes Digital Tool who were questioning him. The conversation turned to Jukt Micronics, the company featured in “Hack Heaven.” Jukt, according to Glass’s account, had offered a teenage hacker named Ian Restil tens of thousands in cash and goods not to destroy its computer system. “We still can’t get anything from Jukt,” said Foroohar. Jukt had been identified in the story as a big-time California software company. But Penenberg, after combing dozens of different databases as well as corporate records in an attempt to locate the company, could not find a single mention of it. Glass didn’t flinch. “Did they call you back?” he asked. “No.” “Ever?” Glass sounded surprised, as if there had been some breakdown in communication, and maybe there was. Realizing that Forbes Digital Tool was onto him, he had cast his younger brother, Michael, a senior studying psychology at Stanford and an accomplished actor in high school, in the role of a Jukt Micronics executive named George Sims. The night before, Michael had left a voice mail for Forbes Digital Tool. He had also spoken directly to Lane. Their conversation had been relatively short, but Michael acted his part with the aplomb that had earned him kudos for his portrayal of Tom in The Grapes of Wrath at Highland Park High School. He sounded young, but all principals of software companies sound young, and he snappily told Lane that he had no comment on the story and then hung up. They moved on to the Jukt Micronics Web site on America Online (which Glass had created on the computer in his New Republic office). “We looked at the Web site and it looks very suspicious to us,” said Foroohar. “Why?” asked Lane. “It doesn’t look like a real Web site. It looks like a Web site that was created for purposes different from what it proclaims to be.” Glass began speaking a bit more rapidly, but there was no indication that he was nervous. Instead, he added a new wrinkle to his repertoire: deference. “I don’t have a Web site, so I don’t know how easy or hard it is. I trust you guys know better than me.” The gambit worked. Foroohar suggested that Glass had been the unwitting victim of clever hackers, and Glass seized upon the role. “I feel really bad about doing this,” said Foroohar. “I’m very sorry, too,” said Glass in a tone of complete understanding. “Um,” he added, as if to suggest he was about to make some type of painful confession. “Um,” he said again, and again. Then finally, finally, it came out. “I’m increasingly beginning to think I was duped.” Foroohar, bending over backward to be fair and honorable, was sympathetic. So was Penenberg. Like so many others, they became Glass’s protectors. “Look,” said Penenberg, trying to make Glass feel a little bit better about it all. “Covering hackers is very difficult.”

There are three houses on the cul-de-sac, curved in the shape of a clamshell, where Stephen Glass lived before he went to college. One is a faux château, but the Glasses’ house is of drab brown brick and has a pool out back. There is no sidewalk, and on a weekday in June the only sound comes from a lawn mower. Highland Park has the feel of a gated community without the actual gates. Nestled in a cluster of affluent North Shore Chicago suburbs, it has a population of approximately 31,000, a median household income of $77,905, and a median house value of $257,000. Central Avenue, the shopping area, would look familiar to the creators of The Truman Show. Two qualities particularly distinguish Highland Park, and both made an impression on Stephen Glass. The first is its theatrical tradition. Highland Park is a town of boys with very clever minds who left to strike gold in Hollywood. The creators of the Revenge of the Nerds movies grew up here. So did the director of Beethoven and The Flintstones. And so did Paul Brickman, the writer and director of Risky Business, which captured one of Highland Park’s key characteristics, namely the way many parents here push their kids to succeed. Harvard educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot spent a good deal of time at Highland Park High School researching her 1983 book, The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture. She was impressed with the school’s stunning academic programs but noted that values such as character and morality were sometimes little more than brushstrokes against the relentlessness of achievement. Highland Park parents, she found, expected children to be reading before kindergarten and were critical of teachers who stressed social-psychological development. Parents lived vicariously through their children and saw Ivy League admissions as emblems of their own success. It was a place, Lawrence-Lightfoot noted, where an average kid was seen as slow. Everyone in the Glass household worked hard to succeed. Jeffrey Glass was a gastroenterologist, and Stephen’s mother, Michele, was in nursing. Their two boys, Stephen and Michael, cut an impressive path through Highland Park High. In addition to his extracurricular theatrical activities, Stephen was vice president of the National Honor Society his senior year and president of the Student Congress. Academically he did extremely well, gaining acceptance to the University of Pennsylvania as a special scholar. These distinctions were apparently crucial for him. According to more than a dozen people who knew Glass in high school, college, and later on, pleasing his parents and bettering their expectations with even more prodigious attainments was essential to him. In 1997, despite his flourishing journalism career, he told colleagues that, at the behest of his parents, he had decided to go to law school while continuing his work full-time as a reporter.

Glass also had to surmount another obstacle: a younger brother whose accomplishments in high school made his own look utterly unremarkable. Michael Glass was a National Merit scholarship semifinalist at Highland Park High. He was a star of a school play presented by the nationally recognized theater department. Michael Glass was cute, cool, and popular with girls. In a senior class composed of some of the nation’s best and brightest, he was voted Most Likely to Succeed. Stephen, on the other hand, had a squeaky voice, wore ultra-preppy clothes, and sometimes seemed effeminate. And he had to grapple with something else: his parents had wanted him to be a doctor. Glass began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990 on a pre-medical curriculum. According to various accounts, he held his own at the beginning. But then his grades nose-dived. He apparently flunked one course and barely passed another, suggesting that he had simply lost interest in being on a pre-med track, or had done poorly on purpose to shut the door to any future career in medicine. Glass ultimately majored in anthropology. He reportedly did well in this area of study, but given his inconsistent performance in pre-med courses, his overall grade-point average at Penn was hardly distinguished—slightly less than a B. “His shit wasn’t always as together as everyone thought it was,” said Matthew Klein, who roomed with Glass at Penn when he was a senior and Glass a junior. There were indicators to Klein that Glass was not doing particularly well academically, but Glass never acknowledged it. “He always said he was doing fine, doing fine,” said Klein.

Almost as soon as Glass had gotten to Penn, he started working for The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper. By all accounts, he loved it, but quit at the insistence of his parents, apparently because of his inconsistent grades. Glass subsequently returned to the newspaper. He worked tirelessly and with ambition. Socially, he seemed to fashion himself as a kind of proud androgyne. “Steve Glass doesn’t drink and doesn’t smoke,” said The Daily Pennsylvanian when Glass became executive editor in January of 1993. “And sex is definitely out.” Those who worked at the paper had no idea of Glass’s sexuality, and there was speculation that he was gay, or at least sexually confused. When he started to date a girl, the rumors didn’t dissipate. Glass himself was aware of them, and in some ways seemed to promote them, describing encounters with men who assumed he was gay. Later on, at The New Republic, he wrote a story which was never published depicting his life as an “effeminate heterosexual.” Those who read it recall it vividly: Glass wrote about his knowledge of lipstick shades and his habit of reading women’s magazines. He mentioned a social outing with a man who attempted to kiss him after dinner.

Chuck Lane, although quiet during the call with Forbes Digital Tool, was not convinced that Stephen Glass had been duped by hackers. He insisted that Glass show him the location of the conference that he had written about in “Hack Heaven.” So off they went in Glass’s Honda, leaving the New Republic offices in Washington and making their way on Wisconsin Avenue toward Bethesda. Glass drove slowly, 20 miles an hour, maybe 25. They turned off Wisconsin Avenue and drove up to the entrance of the Hyatt. They went into the lobby, and Lane felt certain that Stephen Glass was lying. In fact, he wasn’t even sure that Glass had ever set foot in the lobby. And yet … I was in this chair. And Ian was sitting there across from me, and Hiert was in that chair, and we sat here for a little while, and then somebody came along who was smoking too close to us, so we had to move, and we moved over here in these chairs. After about 45 minutes we got up and I had to go to the bathroom. For a moment Lane thought about just telling Glass to knock it off. But on another level, the whole thing was too fascinating to interrupt—the very image, as he would later recall, of this 25-year-old boy “retracing these imaginary steps of these imaginary people in a calm, matter-of-fact voice.” Glass led Lane down an escalator, through a hallway, out of the Hyatt, and into a next-door office building. The lobby was horseshoe-shaped, utterly implausible as the setting for the conference Glass had reported. But, in a matter of seconds, Glass sized up the place and started pointing out the tables where the participants had been set up. He mentioned that he had watched from a table in the far corner of the lobby. He hadn’t ever been seated at that table, but he described it in a way that corresponded perfectly to the diagram he had presented to fact checkers. Lane found a building engineer, and then a security guard, both of whom said they had never heard of such a conference taking place in the lobby. And, as it happened, the building had been closed on the day Glass said the conference occurred. “All I know is they let me in,” Glass told Lane. “I was let into the building.” He kept insisting, looking Lane straight in the eye. “I don’t understand what is going on here, but I was here. They let me into the building.” And he was so good, so convincing, that Chuck Lane almost believed him.

Glass graduated from Penn in 1994, and went to work for the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review. After about a year he became an intern at The New Republic, working as an assistant to Andrew Sullivan, who preceded Michael Kelly as the editor. It was not a particularly stimulating job, involving administrative tasks such as answering the phone, answering correspondence, and an occasional personal errand for Sullivan. Glass did little actual writing under Sullivan, but did complete assignments on disputes over governmental subsidies for cheese and on presidential candidate Bob Dole’s handlers. They were straightforward, with none of his later trademarks. At a magazine filled with precocious kids, he was far from the top. But Glass’s personality endeared him to everyone. Among his friends, there is debate as to how much of Glass’s warmth was cultivated, but there is no doubt that it helped further his rise. In every way, he seemed above reproach. He appeared to work around the clock and was always asking others if they needed anything when he went out for coffee. “The nickname for Steve was Hub,” said Michael Crowley, who worked at The New Republic with Glass when they were interns. “He was constantly on the make. Constantly needing this steady supply of dish. [He] needed to have relationships with everyone. He just knew all the office gossip. He knew everything. That’s why, to some extent, his reporting was credible—he knew everything inside the magazine, so why wouldn’t he figure out what was going on in the world of his stories?” If there was one aspect of Glass’s personality that seemed indisputably genuine, it was this nonstop yearning to please. He had a near-masochistic inability to say no to anyone in authority. “That was the weirdest thing about him,” said a former colleague. “That held back my ability to respect him and like him a lot. It was really preposterous and cartoonish. It also made him impossible to deal with on the same level that you deal with other people. There was some sort of a core that was missing, that core sense of confidence and security.” “Are you mad at me?” That was something Glass said incessantly. The slightest look or gesture could send him into a panic of self-doubt. Certain friends advised him to stop asking the question; others found that it called forth their protective instincts. Glass’s would-be parent surrogates wanted only to help make this terribly insecure boy, who would describe a story he wrote as a “piece of shit,” feel better about himself. Those familiar with his early work said he struggled with his writing. His original drafts were rough, the prose clunky and imprecise. The idea for Glass’s breakthrough piece, “Taxis and the Meaning of Work” (published in August of 1996), came from New Republic owner Martin Peretz himself. Peretz had spoken frequently about how black taxi drivers in Washington were being replaced by cabbies from other immigrant groups; he thought it revealed something important about the attitudes of blacks toward certain kinds of work. The piece was a kind of audition for Peretz—a chance for Glass to shine—and he spent months on it. Early drafts were ragged, but from the outset it revealed a talent that Glass had not previously shown: a remarkable ability to weave in anecdotes and colorful detail. “The color saved his ass,” said the former colleague. “People were in wonderment about his ability to find these crazy characters.”

In November 1996, Michael Kelly, then a respected political columnist working for The New Yorker, took over as editor of The New Republic. Roughly a month later, Glass delivered his first lengthy story under the new regime—a 2,795-word article on the Center for Science in the Public Interest (C.S.P.I.), headed by Michael Jacobson. The article depicted the center as doing little more than selling hysteria with its diatribes against Chinese food, movie-theater popcorn, and the fat substitute olestra. Glass’s biting attitude toward Jacobson seemed perfectly pitched for Kelly and the tone he seemingly wanted to establish for the magazine. Jacobson was presented as arrogant and manipulative, and in the story’s opening paragraph was portrayed obsessively grilling a waitress in a Chinese restaurant on the ingredients of various dishes. According to the story, the description was drawn from the anonymous account of someone who had eaten with Jacobson. But the chairperson of the board of C.S.P.I., in a detailed response, challenged virtually every aspect of Glass’s story. “The sheer quantity of errors in the article not only calls into question whether minimum standards of objective journalism were consciously disregarded, but makes an adequate response in limited space impossible,” the letter said. It referred specifically to the opening paragraph about Jacobson, describing it as a “fictionalized account.” In a recent interview, Kelly said that questions about the scene had been discussed during the editing process, and that Glass gave convincing assurances that he had talked to friends who had witnessed Jacobson eating. “You either trust the writer or you don’t,” said Kelly, calling the complaints “nitpicks.” Kelly went beyond an editor’s ordinary defense of a writer. When pointed criticism of the article also came from Jacobson, Kelly fired off a private letter that Jacobson later described as one of the nastiest he had ever received. “Mr. Jacobson, you lied, and you lied because lying supported your thesis, and you attempted to cover up your lie,” Kelly wrote. “You have shown that you are willing to smear someone’s professional reputation without any concern for truth … I await your apology to Stephen Glass and to this magazine.” Jim Naureckas, editor of the magazine Extra! (published by the group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), also wrote Kelly questioning Glass’s piece. “The whole article,” he claimed, “is so dishonest in approach that one can’t help but suspect that Glass knew he was fudging.” Kelly also privately replied to Naureckas, writing: “I regard your assessment of Mr. Glass’s work as meritless: dishonest, wrong-headed and clearly motivated by devotion to ideology, rather than by any concern for truth or accuracy.… “I take criticism of TNR seriously, when it comes from a credible source. That doesn’t include you. If you want to make it your occupation to do hackwork and hatchet jobs on behalf of the left’s party line, that’s up to you, but don’t expect me to accept you as the arbitrer [sic] of what constitutes shoddy.” The New Republic investigation concluded that Glass’s first unequivocal use of fabrications was in the piece about C.S.P.I. and Michael Jacobson. The complaints had been on target. Glass had invented the anonymous people who had seen Jacobson eating, as well as an enormously inflammatory quote from an unnamed and nonexistent Food and Drug Administration official. When Jacobson first saw an article exposing Glass’s fabrications, he did feel a certain vindication. But, he said, “it doesn’t negate … holding me up to ridicule. That’s the kind of thing you cannot erase.” When interviewed, Kelly said that he would gladly apologize to Jacobson for the opening anecdote—as long as he was given definitive proof of its embellishment. As for his support of Glass, he offers this: “I know a lot of people who are dishonest as journalists, but they’re dishonest in pretty conventional ways.… [Glass] would make it up with a level of specificity that was so rich that to suspect him you had to wrap yourself around the idea that this reporter was making up things entirely.… In hindsight I wish I had been smarter or more skeptical. I wish I had caught him.”

After leaving the Hyatt, Lane and Glass headed back down Wisconsin Avenue. “Look,” said Lane, “if there’s anything you need to tell me, tell me now.” “I didn’t do anything wrong,” said Glass over and over. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” It went on like this for about 15 minutes, with Lane gently prodding. Then, following a long silence, Glass said, “All right, Chuck, I lied. I wasn’t at the conference.” It seemed to be the dénouement, the final coming clean. But it was just Stephen Glass grasping for another act. He insisted that he had spoken with all the people named in the story, and that they had reconstructed the conference for him. He was admitting a transgression, but one not nearly as serious as making up the event. “If it will help you to say I made it up, I will,” Glass added. Lane believed that the comment was a trap, a way for Glass to claim he had been forced to confess something untrue. “I want you to tell the truth,” Lane said. The C.S.P.I. article was the first of 31 that Glass wrote for The New Republic, 27 of which were later determined to contain fabrications. At first the made-up parts were relatively small. Fictional details were melded with mostly factual stories. Quotes and vignettes were constructed to add the edge Kelly seemed to adore. But in the March 31, 1997, issue of The New Republic, Glass raised the stakes with a report about the Conservative Political Action Conference. Eight young men, Glass claimed, men with names such as Jason and Michael, were drinking beer and smoking pot. They went looking for “the ugliest and loneliest” woman they could find, lured her to their hotel room, and sexually humiliated her. The piece, almost entirely an invention, was spoken of with reverence. Subsequent to it, Glass’s work began to appear in George, Rolling Stone, and Harper’s. But challenges to Glass’s veracity followed. David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, called Glass “quite a fiction writer” and noted that the description of the Omni Shoreham room littered with empty bottles from the mini-bar had a problem. There were no mini-bars in any of the Omni’s rooms. After hearing the complaints, Kelly asked Glass to explain the apparent discrepancy. After Glass called the hotel, he reported that, while the hotel did not have mini-bars, it did supply mini-refrigerators to guests. Kelly privately called the hotel and found out the same thing. This added to Kelly’s level of comfort about the story. But the existence of some mini-refrigerators didn’t explain the presence of the mini-bottles of liquor that Glass had described. Did the young conservatives purposely buy mini-bottles of liquor? A dainty purchase, it would seem, for would-be sexual predators. Yet Kelly focused his attention elsewhere. “I believe that young men, when they’re drinking, are capable of anything.” One of the first steps Kelly had taken as The New Republic’s editor had been to hire a research specialist from The New Yorker to revamp the fact-checking system. Glass, however, had actually worked as a fact checker at The New Republic; he even continued to do checking during some of the period when he reported. He had a sophisticated knowledge of the department’s methods. He also ingratiated himself with the new fact checkers, staying around late while they worked and marking his stories with Post-Its to assist them in quickly finding his backup materials. When fact-checking the stories of others, Glass established himself as the Darth Vader of Detail. No inaccuracy, however small, escaped him, and he wasn’t above warning editors of certain writers’ sloppiness. He took advantage of the vulnerability of Ruth Shalit, who had previously been forced to admit plagiarism in two New Republic pieces. “He was known as the best fact checker,” said a staffer. “He was always ratting [people] out. He was always pissing on Ruth. He was always seen as the stickler, and he used that, and the fact checkers came to trust him.”

Kelly left the magazine in September of 1997. Without Kelly’s editing, said Hanna Rosin, a former staffer, Glass’s pieces lost some protective padding. Around this time, a piece Glass wrote for Rolling Stone not only contained apparent fabrications, but the few concrete details in the article appeared to have been lifted from another source. The article, entitled “The College Rankings Scam,” ran in the magazine’s October 16, 1997, edition. It told of the ways in which colleges and universities supplied suspect data to U.S. News & World Report for the magazine’s annual college rankings. The most gripping part of the story involved Glass’s description of a meeting at a college in which admissions officers spoke openly of supplying misleading data to U.S. News. The location of the meeting was never given, nor was anyone named. Beyond the meeting, Glass cited eight specific examples of colleges and universities supplying questionable data to U.S. News. What he did not say in the piece is that seven of those examples had been published two and a half years earlier by The Wall Street Journal in its own groundbreaking story on the U.S. News rankings. Still, Glass grew more emboldened. By the beginning of 1998, he had begun to routinely invent stories almost in their entirety. A possible explanation is that now, in addition to his many magazine assignments, he was attending Georgetown University Law Center. In January, he wrote a largely concocted piece about HDT, a fictional New York–based company that for $25,000 each would drop travelers in the wilderness and supervise them unobtrusively. Fortune’s Ed Brown, a writer-reporter, called Glass afterward to say that he had been unable to locate the company. He wondered aloud if the piece had been intended as a joke. It should have been a warning to Glass.

Glass and Lane were in the Honda at the corner of Abermarle and Wisconsin, near a Hechinger retail store, when Glass burst into tears. Concerned that the kid might have an accident, Lane took the wheel. Sobbing on Lane’s shoulder, Glass told the editor how his life was falling apart, and explained how his parents had pressured him to attend law school and how he thought Lane would fire him if he didn’t keep up his productivity at the magazine. They returned to the office about noon, and Lane started looking through the story that Glass had written prior to “Hack Heaven.” The subject was a memorabilia convention featuring trinkets relating to Monica Lewinsky. After making several calls, Lane became convinced that this piece had also been manufactured. He questioned Glass, who improvised another series of lies. Lane fired Glass. But it was not an easy decision, given the reporter’s youth and the fact that the news of his faked stories would completely destroy his career. There was another consideration, too. All that Lane could prove was that the hackers’ conference had not taken place in Bethesda. It was the only offense that Glass had actually admitted to. After listening to others, Lane decided to give Glass a two-year suspension. To Lane that was tantamount to firing; he doubted that Glass would ever return. It was also an act of decency, a testament to the feelings of so many at The New Republic for Glass. His colleagues didn’t know, at this point, that Glass had fictionalized all or parts of 26 other stories he had written for their magazine.

While Lane was trying to be fair, Glass was busy attempting to sabotage the editor and to divide further an already fractured magazine. Lane had become editor of The New Republic after Kelly was fired when his differences with Peretz had grown unresolvable. Kelly was enormously popular among the staff; he was known as a writer’s editor. The firing had not been handled with any degree of grace, and from the very beginning Lane had found himself in a tender position as he attempted to gain the confidence of the staff. Now Glass, in an effort to minimize damage to himself, was trying to destroy what inroads Lane had made. According to several colleagues, Glass told them that Lane was out to get him because he had been a Kelly disciple. “Have you heard what happened?” he asked a colleague, and then wove his tale of persecution. “Chuck’s being such an asshole.” Several of Glass’s listeners judged the assessment to be correct: he was being punished unfairly if all he had done was say he had been someplace he wasn’t. That Friday night, Glass called Kelly, and he and his girlfriend went to the former editor’s house. Kelly cooked salmon and listened as Glass unfurled his saga of lies, including how Lane was out to get him because of his allegiance to Kelly. As Stephen Glass spun feverishly, Lane anguished. He received advice from his father, a lawyer, whom he had visited for dinner at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He had no doubt the hacker story was trash, but he was still bugged by the calls from George Sims of Jukt Micronics. At about 11 p.m., Lane spoke on the phone with senior editor Talbot. He filled her in on what had happened, and by chance, Talbot mentioned that Glass had a brother who lived in Palo Alto, California. The second she uttered it, Lane knew.

The next day, Saturday, Lane went in to work to get some papers. He arrived at 9:25 a.m., and because the offices were closed, he had to sign in. Scrawling his signature, he noticed that someone had signed in three minutes earlier—at 9:22. Stephen Glass. He was sitting in his office at his computer, and was clearly surprised to see Lane, who became convinced that Glass was trying to erase incriminating evidence off his hard drive. Lane was angry and confrontational. “Your brother is George Sims, isn’t he?” Glass’s eyes shifted and there was an audible gulp. “No, no, that’s a real guy,” he insisted to Lane. “I know your brother lives in Palo Alto and that’s a Palo Alto cell-phone number. You faked all those voice mails.” “No, no. They’re real.” Lane ordered Glass to leave his office. Glass pleaded to be allowed to take his Rolodex and some files from the hard drive of his computer, but Lane refused to let him. Instead, the only thing that Stephen Glass carried out of The New Republic—after Lane had searched his pockets—was a blue blazer. “If your brother is involved in this, it’s a very bad business and a very serious matter,” said Lane, easing his tone. “If you’ve gotten him involved, you need to tell me.” Glass continued to deny it, and finally Lane told him, “I’m going to find out who George Sims is. Don’t make me do it myself.” Glass said he was on his way to Washington Dulles International Airport to fly to Chicago to be with his parents, and he begged Lane to go with him to the airport. But Lane, thinking Glass was attempting to come up with yet another explanation, said he could not. In fact, he escorted him to the door of the office and watched him leave. Ten to 15 minutes later, the office’s doorbell rang. “Chuck, I lied to you,” said Glass. “It was my brother.” And then Stephen Glass did what he always did, what he had done for so long that maybe he no longer realized what he was doing. He lied some more, inventing a new adventure of the mind, both pathetic and incomprehensible, of how Sims really did exist, how he had been under such pressure from Forbes Digital Tool to find him, but couldn’t, not in the time they had given him. So he said that he had asked his brother to pose as George Sims, just until he could find the real one. “You’ve lost your job,” Lane told him, completely severing his ties to the magazine. And then, the former golden boy, “everybody’s brother, everybody’s protégé,” as Michael Kelly would describe him, left the offices of The New Republic. Glass never actually returned, but in spirit he did, about a month later, when the magazine ran an unparalleled note to readers. It was meant as an explanation, but might well have been an epitaph for the sweet and nice boy, the hardworking boy who could never be what he wanted to be, the boy who couldn’t live up to the expectations he had inherited and then perpetuated in order to elevate himself into someone who did not have to repeat, over and over, “Are you mad at me?”