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The Margin Note That Stole Her Career: The Blue-Ink Confession · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: On July ninth, twenty nineteen, a church volunteer named John
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Muller shook out a borrowed rain poncho hanging on a
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: pew hook at the first Congregational Thrift Annex. A Manila
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: envelope fell from the pancho's pocket and landed face up
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: on a folding table.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: Muller opened it.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Inside was a forty one page paper published twenty five
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: years earlier, and on the margins of page eighteen in
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: blue ballpoint, inc someone had circled a phrase and written
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: one word next to it mine underlined twice. The paper
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: listed one author, doctor Wallace Greer. Greer had been dead
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: for sixteen years, so whose handwriting was that. Muller called
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Harwick University's Cultural Studies office that same afternoon. What followed
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: would take eight months, require testimony from two women, and
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: force a jury to decide whether what happened inside an
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: academic department in nineteen ninety four was confusion or a
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: deliberate dismantling of someone's professional existence. That envelope had been
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: carried for twenty five years by a woman who was
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: never quite sure whether she left it.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: On that pew hook by accident.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: That detail matters hold on to it. To understand what
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: was inside that envelope, you have to understand who put
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: it there and what she had been living with since
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: the year it was sealed. Emily Richardson was fifty five
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: years old in the summer of two thousand nineteen. She
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: had worked at Harwick University for twenty six years as
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: a non ten year track lecturer, no tenure, no promotion,
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: never a single peer reviewed article published under her own name.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Her last academic conference presentation had been in two thousand one,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: eighteen years before Muller found the envelope. In academic terms,
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: her career had stopped moving before most of her students
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: had entered high school. That picture, on its surface suggests
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: someone who simply did not produce the record tells a
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: different story. In the spring of nineteen ninety three, Emily
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: was twenty eight.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: Years old and finishing her doctoral field work.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: She drove into Harlan and Lecher Counties in eastern Kentucky,
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: a region of closed coal mines and layered oral memory,
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: and she began recording Over the following five months. From
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: March through August of nineteen ninety three, she completed two
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: hundred twelve hours of recorded interviews with community members. That
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: is not a number to skim past. Two hundred twelve
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: hours of field work is a doctoral dissertation. It is
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: the foundation of a research career. It is, in the
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: language of folklore studies, primary source material that cannot be reconstructed.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: She was building something. That same fall, a new faculty
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: member joined the department. Ralph Russo arrived at Harwick in
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: the fall of nineteen ninety two, one year before Emily
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: completed her field work. He held tenure. He averaged three
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: published articles per year. His CV was the kind that
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: department chairs frame in their minds when they think about
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: what a productive scholar looks like. He had a wife
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: named Linda, two sons, and a reputation for identifying promising
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: research early. He met Emily when she was twenty eight
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: and carrying two hundred twelve hours of recorded voices. What
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: happened next did not happen loudly. It happened in memos
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: and email threads and archive sign out logs.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: It happened in a closed.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Office door and a paper published in the Journal of
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: American Folklore in the fall of nineteen ninety four. It
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: happened in the way a career quietly stops accelerating and
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: then quietly stops moving at all. There is a word
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: for what the margin notes described. Emily wrote it herself
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: in blue ballpoint, next to a phrase she recognized from
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: her own thinking. She underlined it twice because once was
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: not enough. What she could not know in nineteen ninety
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: four was that the word would take twenty five years
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: and a poncho on a pew hook to be heard.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: In October of nineteen ninety three, Ralph Russo sent an
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: e mail to Wallace Greer.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: The message was brief.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: It said, my source is very productive. He did not
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: say her name that phrase my source is the first
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: anomaly worth holding on to. Russou was a tenured associate
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: professor who averaged three published articles per year. He did
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: not need a source. He had his own research. What
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: he had been doing since joining Harwick the previous fall
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: was something else, watching Emily Richardson build two hundred twelve
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: hours of primary material from scratch inside communities that had
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: never granted that kind of access to an outsider before.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: He called her a source. Between the spring of nineteen
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: ninety three, in the summer of nineteen ninety four, Russo
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: published nothing fourteen consecutive months without a single article from
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: a scholar whose output had been relentless. That silence is
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: not on its own proof of anything, but silence has
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: a shape, and the shape of this one aligned precisely
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: with Emily's fieldwork calendar. She finished recording in August of
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three. He stopped publishing that spring. He started
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: publishing again after the paper appeared. In January of nineteen
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: ninety four, Emily wrote a theoretical memo. She sent it
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: to Russo as a working document, a framework she had
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: been developing from patterns she heard in the interviews, a
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: way of thinking about how post war Appellachian communities constructed
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: and transmitted local knowledge. The memo laid out the intellectual
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: core of what would become the third section she wrote
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: it that is not contested. In April of nineteen ninety four,
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: a forty one page paper was submitted to the Journal
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: of American Folklore. The author of record was Wallace Greer.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: The department chair, Emily Richardson, was listed in the acknowledgments
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: as a research assistant. Rousseau's name did not appear anywhere
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: on the submission he didn't need it to. Later correspondence
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: confirmed what that arrangement was worth to Greer. Russo had
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: given him co authorship on a separate paper in exchange
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: for lending his name to this one. Greer was not
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: the intellectual author of the nineteen ninety four paper. He
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: was a door held open. The paper was published that fall.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Emily read it. She recognized the third section immediately she
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: confronted Russo. He closed his office door. What she did
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: next is one of the most quietly devastating details in
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: this entire case. She did not file a complaint. She
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: did not contact the journal. She went home, made an
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: annotated copy of the published paper and wrote her responses
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: in blue ballpoint pen in the margins, next to a
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: phrase she knew came from her own thinking. She wrote
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: one word, She underlined it twice. Then she sealed the
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: copy in a Manila envelope and carried it. She carried
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: it for twenty five years. The envelope is where most
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: people's attention lands. But there is a second object that
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: deserves equal weight, and it almost no one thinks about
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: until they understand what it contains. The Harwich Folklore Archive
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: holds a collection that was donated in two thousand four.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: It came from Wallace Greer's estate after his death the
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: previous year. The collection included field recordings, correspondence and research
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: materials accumulated during his tenure as department chair. Among those
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: materials Emily Richardson's two hundred twelve weel interview tapes from
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Harlan and Lecher Counties. Emily's tapes in Greer's collection donated
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: to an archive she could access but did not control.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: The archive maintained sign out logs, as archives do. Researchers
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: who borrowed materials signed their names and the date between
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: the donation in two thousand four and the summer of
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen. One name appeared on the sign out
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: log for Emily's tapes twice. Not Emily Ralph Russo signed
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: out her tapes in two thousand and eight. He signed
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: them out again in twenty fourteen. The archive records show
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: no associated research project for either withdrawal. No paper emerged
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: from those years that cited the tapes, no conference presentation,
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: no published article that would explain why a tenured professor
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: needed to borrow recordings he had already used in a
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: published paper more than a decade earlier. When investigators examined
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: them sign out logs, the absence of a paper trail
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: was itself a trail. There is something almost clinical about
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: that image. A man signing his name, borrowing two hundred
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: twelve hours of another person's voice, and returning them without explanation,
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: not once, twice, fifteen years apart. Whatever he was looking
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: for or confirming, he wanted those tapes in his hands.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: And here is where the head fake lives. For much
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: of the proceeding, the theoretical assumption was that the margin
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: notes were the central evidence. They were Emily's handwriting, they
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: were her analysis. They placed her inside the intellectual work
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: of the paper at a specific moment in time plaintiffs
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Exhibit seven. The case seemed to rest on a single
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: annotated document that one woman had carried in secret for
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: a quarter century. But the archive logs did something different.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: They did not prove the original theft. They recontextualized it.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: They showed that rus had returned to the source material
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: repeatedly years after the paper was published, for reasons he
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: could not or would not explain. The margin notes told
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: you what Emily knew in nineteen ninety four the sign
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: out logs told you what Russo was still doing about
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: it in twenty fourteen. He was not done with her tapes,
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: and that changes the picture entirely.
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: Picture a room in.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: The summer of two thousand nineteen. Richard Peterson, Arwick's academic
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: integrity liaison, sits across from a colleague who has just
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: handed him a Manila envelope found in a church thrift
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: annex by a volunteer named John Muller. Peterson is a
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: licensed councilor. He is not a trained investigator. He is
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: reading margin notes written in blue ballpoint by a woman
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: who is now fifty five and has not published a
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: peer reviewed article in her entire career. He reads the
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: word she underlined twice. The first scenario that takes shape
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: around the evidence is the simplest one. Emily Richardson conducted
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: the field work. Emily wrote the theoretical memo. The memo
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: appeared nearly verbatim in the paper's third section. She made
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: a contemporary annotated record and preserved it. The case is
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: on this reading a straightforward matter of documented intellectual theft,
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: confirmed by the margin notes and the memo's time stamp.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: But that version has a scene in it. A document
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: carried privately for twenty five years without ever being filed
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: officially raises a question that any careful reader of.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: This record has to sit with. Why did she carry it?
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: Why not file it?
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: Why in the fall of nineteen ninety four, when the
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: evidence was fresh and the memory was immediate, did Emily
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: Richardson go home and annotate a copy and seal it
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: in an envelope rather than walk it to the academic
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: integrity office. The simplest answer is also the most uncomfortable.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: She was a non tenure track lecturer in a department
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: where the man she would be accusing averaged three published
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: articles per year and had just arranged to put the
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: department chair's name on a partner paper. She had no
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: institutional standing, She had no published record. She had two
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: hundred twelve hours of field work and a closed door.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: Rousseau's response at the formal proceeding is its own kind
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: of evidence. According to the record, he used the word
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: confusion four times during the August twenty nineteen hearing. He
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: described the attribution as insufficiently transparent. He arrived with a lawyer.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: He never said the word the theft. That is a
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: very specific verbal architecture. Confusion implies accident. Insufficiently transparent implies
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: a degree problem, not a kind problem. The languages calibrated
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: to place the event in a register of administrative error
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: rather than deliberate appropriation. It is the language of a
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: man who has thought carefully about which words to use
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: and which words to avoid. Then Angela Novak's name entered
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: the record. Novak had been a graduate student under Russo
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: at an Ohio area institution in the late nineteen eighties.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: Her oral history work on mining communities appeared in a
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: chapter of Russo's nineteen ninety book. She had signed a
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: release form. That form, examined during the proceeding turned out
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: to have been drafted by Russo himself and presented to
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: Novak as standard departmental procedure. The form assigned him full
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: intellectual rights over work conducted under his supervision. He had
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: done this before. The pattern snaps into focus when you
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: place Novak's case next to Emily's. The mechanism is identical
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: identify a field worker producing original primary material, position as
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: mentor or or collaborator, arranged the paperwork or the attribution,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: so the credit flows upward, and if challenged close the door.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: Novak signed a fabricated form. Emily was listed as a
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: research assistant. The outcomes were different, the architecture was the same.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: The strongest reading of this record, the one that the
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: jury ultimately accepted, is not that Ralph Russo made an
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: attribution error in nineteen ninety four. It is that attribution
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: errors were his method. The confusion was the strategy, and
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: the margin notes carried for twenty five years in a
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: sealed envelope and left on a pew hook in a
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: rain poncho where the one piece of the architecture he
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: could not control. Emily Richardson was not sure she left
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: that envelope accidentally.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: Neither, in the end, was the jury.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: The trial opened in the spring of twenty Emily Richardson
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: walked into that court room carrying nothing except her memory
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: and the knowledge that the paper copy had already made
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: the jury Ernie without her. The margin notes were entered
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: into evidence as plaintiffs Exhibit seven. Angela Novak testified first.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: She described the release form the way it had been
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: presented as routine, the way she had signed it without
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: reading past the first paragraph, because Russeau.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: Had told her it was standard.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: She described watching her field work become his chapter and
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: understanding slowly that there was no mechanism inside the institution
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: to undo it. Then Emily took the stand. She did
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: not characterize what Russou had done. She described what she
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: had done. She described the drive to Harlan County in
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: March of nineteen ninety three, the cold in the interview rooms,
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: the way the men she recorded paused before answering questions
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: about the mines. She described writing the January memo at
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: her kitchen table, working through the theoretical framework in longhand
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: before typing it. She described confronting Russou in nineteen ninety
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: four and the sound of.
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: His office door closing.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: She described folding the annotated copy into the manila envelope
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: that same week and sealing it. The jury had the email.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: The jury had the archive sign out logs from two
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: thousand eight and two thousand fourteen, both in Russou's handwriting,
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: neither attached to any research project. The jury had the
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: fabricated release form that Russou had presented to Novak as
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: departmental standard, and the jury had forty one pages of
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: margin notes in blue ballpoint with arrows. Abbreviations and one
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: circled phrase with a single word written beside it and
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: underlined twice. Rousseau was convicted on all counts. The sentence
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: was four years. He served twenty two months. The university
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: settlement came separately. Emily Richardson was awarded formal authorship credit
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: on the nineteen ninety four paper. The process took eight
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: months and required a letter signed by fourteen scholars who
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: had reviewed the evidence and the original field work materials.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: The authorship credit was made retroactive, and Harwick granted her
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: a tenured position, also made retroactive, effective from two thousand one.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: Two thousand one, that is the year her career had
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: effectively stopped. The retroactive date is the university acknowledging in
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: the only language institutions have what twenty one years of
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: stalled motion actually meant. The word mine is underlined twice
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: in the margin of page eleven. It is in blue ballpoint.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: The handwriting is Emily Richardson's placed there in nineteen ninety four,
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: when she was thirty years old and had just watched
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: her name reduced to a two word credit at the
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: bottom of someone else's work. She carried that page for
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: twenty five years. There is something in this case that
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: resists the comfortable frame of rezz Brusso was convicted, Emily
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: received her authorship credit and her retroactive tenure. The institutional
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: record was corrected. These are real things. They happened, and
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: yet the nineteen ninety four paper remains published. It still
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: appears in syllabi under Greer's name. The tapes Emily made,
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: two hundred twelve hours of recorded voices from Harlan and
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: Lecher Counties sat in an archive for fifteen years before
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: anyone understood what had happened to them. The men and
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: women who spoke into Emily's recorder do not know their
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: words traveled this far or what they cost her. Angela
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: Novak testified at trial, so did Emily, two women separated
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: by years and institutions, whose primary source work had moved
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: through the same hands and into the same system and
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: disappeared in the same way. Novak's mining oral histories Emily's
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: Appalachian field work. Two different papers, two different decadesides one method.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: What the case leaves is this. The mechanism Rousseau used
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: required no dramatic act. It required only patients institutional access
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: and the reliable assumption that a non tenure track lecturer
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: with no publications and no named chair behind her would
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: not find a way to be heard. He was right
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: about that. For twenty five years, he had not counted
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: on a rain poncho left on a pew hook. Emily
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: Richardson still walks from Morning Loop. She still stops under
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: the Edgemont Avenue water tower on Edgemont Avenue. The walk
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: is the same, she is not. This show is made
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: by Obo Media,