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He Stole Her Story: How a Mentor Erased a Career · Narcisist Psychology

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Speaker 1: On a Tuesday morning in July of two thoy nineteen,
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Speaker 1: a retired postal supervisor named Kimberly Whitley stopped at the
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Speaker 1: base of a split oak behind Ardenmore University's Humanities building.
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Speaker 2: She was birding.
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Speaker 1: She was not looking for evidence, but eight feet up,
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Speaker 1: wedged into the fork of the tree was a blue
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Speaker 1: bound manuscript, two hundred forty pages, the work of fourteen months,
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Speaker 1: and its title page listed one name as author. The
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Speaker 1: stamp on the spine listed another. That contradiction would eventually
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Speaker 1: unravel four years of carefully constructed control. This is the
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Speaker 1: story of Jennifer Romano, a forty four year old associate
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Speaker 1: professor of sociology whose work was taken from her so
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Speaker 1: gradually and so deliberately that by the time she recognized
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Speaker 1: what had happened, she had already learned to doubt her
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Speaker 1: own memory. And it is the story of how Richard Long,
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Speaker 1: a full professor with nineteen years at arden Moore and
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Speaker 1: a reputation built on other people's trust, dismantled her professional
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Speaker 1: reality one small adjustment at a time. Jennifer Romano came
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Speaker 1: to arden Moore University six years before the events of
1:14
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen. She was not new to academic life, but
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Speaker 1: she was new to this institution, and that distinction matters.
1:22
Speaker 1: A new arrival at a research university occupies a specific
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Speaker 1: and vulnerable position. She has her work, her ideas, her record,
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Speaker 1: and she has no established network to confirm any of it.
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Speaker 1: She relies on the people around her to reflect her
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Speaker 1: standing back to her accurately. Romano was building something real.
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Speaker 1: Her research focused on institutional sociology, the way organizations shape
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Speaker 1: the people inside them, often without those people noticing. The
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Speaker 1: irony of that focus, given what was coming is the
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Speaker 1: kind of detail that stays with you. By twenty fifteen,
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Speaker 1: Romano had been at Ardenmore long enough to be considered
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Speaker 1: for a formal mentorship assignment. The department paired her with
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Speaker 1: Richard Long. On paper, it was an ideal match. Long
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Speaker 1: had nineteen years at the institution. He knew the university press,
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Speaker 1: the grand committees, the department chair. He had the relationships
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Speaker 1: that Romano, as an associate professor still working toward promotion,
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Speaker 1: genuinely needed. According to accounts from colleagues, he was warm, precise,
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Speaker 1: and professionally generous. He introduced Romano at conferences. He praised
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Speaker 1: her work. In faculty meetings. He co authored a conference
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Speaker 1: paper with her, a paper that colleagues later described as
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Speaker 1: largely Romano's thinking. Though Long's name appeared first on the byeline,
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Speaker 1: that detail seemed unremarkable at the time. The year two
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Speaker 1: thousand fifteen into twenty sixteen looked from the outside like
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Speaker 1: a productive collaboration. Romano was visible in ways she had
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Speaker 1: not been before. Long made sure of it. But something
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Speaker 1: else was happening beneath that visibility, something that would only
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Speaker 1: become legible much later. Long was also learning how Romano worked.
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Speaker 1: He was learning her rhythms, her insecurities, her professional aspirations.
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Speaker 1: He was learning in precise detail what she most needed
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Speaker 1: to hear and who she most needed to hear it from.
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Speaker 1: By twenty seventeen, the texture of the mentorship had changed.
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Speaker 1: Romano's access to outside professional feedback began to narrow. Long
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Speaker 1: filtered comments from reviewers. He positioned himself as the authoritative
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Speaker 1: interpreter of how the department, the press, and the broader field.
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Speaker 2: Perceived her work.
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Speaker 1: Colleagues who had known Romano as direct and confident began
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Speaker 1: to notice something different. She second guessed her phrasing and meetings.
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Speaker 1: She deferred to Long on questions that had previously been
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Speaker 1: hers to answer. Her Graduate students Marcus Rivera and Priyanath
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Speaker 1: observed the shift, neither had a framework for naming it
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Speaker 1: at the time. In fall of two thousand eighteen, Romano
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Speaker 1: stood before a faculty gathering and apologized. She apologized for,
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Speaker 1: as the record reflects, creating confusion around her seminar design,
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Speaker 1: a seminar that colleagues and students had not found confusing.
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Speaker 1: The apology was not demanded. It was offered later in
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Speaker 1: the context of the criminal case. Therapist Donna Brooks would
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Speaker 1: describe this moment as evidence of a successful replacement of
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Speaker 1: Romano's self assessment with Long's version. Romano had stopped trusting
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Speaker 1: her own read of the room. She had by then
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Speaker 1: been working on the monograph for nearly a year. The
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Speaker 1: manuscript was the center of everything. Two hundred forty pages
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Speaker 1: of original sociological research, the work most likely to secure
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Speaker 1: her promotion, the argument she had been building across her
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Speaker 1: entire time at Ardenmoor. She completed it in March of
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Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen. It represented fourteen months of documented work.
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Speaker 1: It was by any measure, pers Ramano trusted Long with it.
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Speaker 1: The mentorship structure gave him legitimate access to her professional materials.
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Speaker 1: That access was, as investigators would later note, the door
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Speaker 1: that opened inward, and Long had been standing at it
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Speaker 1: for years. What happened next happened fast, and Romano did
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Speaker 1: not see it coming. But a question her friend, Susan Ellery,
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Speaker 1: asked her in late May of twenty nineteen, had already
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Speaker 1: planted a splinter of doubt. Ellery asked Romano when she
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Speaker 1: had last made a significant professional decision that Long had
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Speaker 1: not already known about in advance.
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Speaker 2: Romano could not answer.
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Speaker 1: She would not know why that question mattered so much
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Speaker 1: until the summer, when a woman with binoculars looked up
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Speaker 1: into a split oak and found something that should never
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Speaker 1: have been there. Kimberly Whitley was not looking for anything
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Speaker 1: in partet picular. On the morning of July eleventh, twenty nineteen.
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Speaker 2: She was a.
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Speaker 1: Retired postal supervisor. She birded Stop seven on Tuesdays and Saturdays.
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Speaker 1: She kept a log. That morning, she looked up into
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Speaker 1: the split oak behind the Humanities Building and saw something
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Speaker 1: blue wedged about eight feet off the ground in the
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Speaker 1: fork of the trunk. She documented it before she touched it.
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Speaker 1: That was her habit. The object was a bound manuscript
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Speaker 1: two hundred forty pages, blue doctoral cover, the kind the
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Speaker 1: arden wore bindary used for official academic documents. The title
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Speaker 1: page listed one name as author. A red institutional stamp
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Speaker 1: on the interior listed a second name as the document's
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Speaker 1: registered owner. Those two names did not match. That gap
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Speaker 1: between the name on the title page and the name
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Speaker 1: on the stamp was the first concrete image investigators had
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Speaker 1: to work with, and it would take weeks before they
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Speaker 1: understood how those two names had been separated. What they
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Speaker 1: found when they traced the manuscript back to the bindery
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Speaker 1: was a transaction record. On a date in April of
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Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, Richard Long had brought a bound manuscript
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Speaker 1: to Owen Tate, the university's bindery technician. Long's account delivered
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Speaker 1: that day was that a coffee spill had damaged to
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Speaker 1: the original binding. He presented an authorization form bearing the
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Speaker 1: department chair's signature block He requested a blue doctoral cover.
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Speaker 1: He said it was urgent. Tape processed it. He did
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Speaker 1: not retain a copy of the authorization form. That form
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Speaker 1: was never subsequently verified as genuine. The original author page
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Speaker 1: was removed, a replacement page was inserted, listing Long as
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Speaker 1: sole scholar. Jennifer Romano's name moved to the acknowledgments section,
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Speaker 1: identified there as having provided research assistance fourteen months of
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Speaker 1: Romano's documented work reclassified in an afternoon. But here is
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Speaker 1: the thing about that red stamp. The bindery's institutional stamp
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Speaker 1: was applied to the interior of the document during processing,
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Speaker 1: meaning it recorded the name of the person who brought
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Speaker 1: the manuscript in. Tait had no reason to think twice
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Speaker 1: about it at the time he stamped it as a
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Speaker 1: matter of routine. That stamp was the one piece of
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Speaker 1: the transaction. Long could not remove after the fact it
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Speaker 1: was already embedded in a copy he believed was safely hidden.
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Speaker 1: He had not anticipated. Kimberly Whitley. Investigators working backward from
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Speaker 1: the tree, established that Long had almost certainly placed the
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Speaker 1: manuscript in the oak within forty eight hours before Whitley's discovery.
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Speaker 1: Their reconstruction rested on a key fact. Romano had contacted
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Speaker 1: the university press directly in late May twenty nineteen teen,
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Speaker 1: asking about the status of a manuscript she understood to
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Speaker 1: be hers. The intake coordinator, Felicia Drummond had logged the
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Speaker 1: submission to Long's departmental address that discrepancy. Romano, calling about
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Speaker 1: her manuscript. Long's address on the submission, reached Long quickly.
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Speaker 1: What followed, the evidence suggests, was not a plan to
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Speaker 1: destroy it was a plan to conceal. Long kept the
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Speaker 1: bound copy because it bore the bindery's official.
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Speaker 2: Stamp in his name.
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Speaker 1: He appears to have reasoned that a stamped copy constituted
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Speaker 1: a form of institutional record in his favor. He placed
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Speaker 1: it somewhere he believed it would not be found. He
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Speaker 1: did not destroy it because destroying it would have meant
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Speaker 1: erasing evidence he thought worked for him. He was wrong
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Speaker 1: about Kimberly Whitley. He was wrong about the stamp. Three
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Speaker 1: days after Romano reported the manuscript's discovery to university administration,
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Speaker 1: she walked into the office of Donna Brooks, a licensed
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Speaker 1: clinical social worker she.
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Speaker 2: Had been referred.
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Speaker 1: She was not in crisis in the way the word
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Speaker 1: is commonly on understood. She was, by her own account
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Speaker 1: to Brooks, uncertain about what had actually happened to her.
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Speaker 1: That uncertainty was itself finding. Brooks would later provide a
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Speaker 1: formal statement used.
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Speaker 2: In the criminal case.
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Speaker 1: In it, she described a pattern she had observed to
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Speaker 1: cross her sessions with Romano from July of twenty nineteen forward.
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Speaker 1: The pattern had a clinical shape, a person who had
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Speaker 1: been systematically taught to distrust her own perception of events
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Speaker 1: to the point where when the external record contradicted that
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Speaker 1: self perception, she experienced the contradiction as personal error rather
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Speaker 1: than evidence of manipulation. The Fall twenty eighteen apology was
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Speaker 1: the clearest marker Romano had stood before colleagues and apologized
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Speaker 1: for confusion. She had not caused about a seminar that
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Speaker 1: had not been confusing.
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Speaker 2: She had not been.
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Speaker 1: Coerced into that apology in any moment that others could see,
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Speaker 1: she had offered it. Brooks's statement framed this not as weakness,
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Speaker 1: but as the logical endpoint of a sustained process. Long
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Speaker 1: had spent years functioning as Romano's primary professional interpreter. He
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Speaker 1: filtered which feedback reached her. He determined which of her
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Speaker 1: instincts were sound and which required his correction. By twenty eighteen,
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Speaker 1: Romano's self assessment had been substantially replaced by his version
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Speaker 1: of it. That was why Susan Eleary's question asked in
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Speaker 1: late May of twenty nineteen, had landed so strangely. When
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Speaker 1: Ellery asked Romano when she had last made a significant
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Speaker 1: professional decision that Long did not already know about in advance,
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Speaker 1: Romano could not answer. She had not framed the question
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Speaker 1: to herself that way before. She could not locate an example,
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Speaker 1: because there was not one to locate. She had been
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Speaker 1: in Brooks's clinical language, isolated within a professional structure that
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Speaker 1: was supposed to protect her. The manuscript in the tree
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Speaker 1: was not where the dismantling started. It was where it
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Speaker 1: became visible. At trial, Long's defense attorney, Frank Ocafort, built
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Speaker 1: the case around consent. Romano had agreed to the arrangement.
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Speaker 1: She was a contributor, not the primary author. The acknowledgments
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Speaker 1: reflected the actual division of labor. Long testified to this
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Speaker 1: confidently and at length picture what that version of events requires.
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Speaker 1: It requires Romano to have spent fourteen months producing two
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Speaker 1: hundred forty pages of original sociological research, then agreed to
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Speaker 1: have her name moved to a line thanking her for assistance,
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Speaker 1: and to have made that agreement without telling a single colleague,
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Speaker 1: without mentioning it to Ellery, without disclosing it to her
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Speaker 1: graduate students, Marcus Rivera and Priya Nath, who had watched
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Speaker 1: her work. It requires her to have then contacted the
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Speaker 1: university press in late May to inquire about a manuscript
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Speaker 1: she had supposedly signed away, and it requires Long to
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Speaker 1: have hidden a bound copy of that manuscript in an
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Speaker 1: oak tree as a reasonable response to a consensual arrangement.
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Speaker 1: The jury took that version and set it aside. But
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Speaker 1: the more difficult reconstruction is not the one the jury considered.
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Speaker 1: It concerns what happened before April of two thousand nineteen,
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Speaker 1: before the bindery, before the tree. It concerns the four
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Speaker 1: years between Long's assignment as Romano's mentor and the moment
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Speaker 1: he walked into Owen Tate's office with a coffee spill.
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Speaker 1: Story walked back to two thousand fifteen. Long was warmth
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Speaker 1: and doors opened. He introduced Romano to people who mattered.
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Speaker 1: He put his name first on a conference paper she
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Speaker 1: largely wrote, and she accepted that as the cost of
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Speaker 1: access to his network. That was the first replacement her
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Speaker 1: assessment of fair credit, overwritten by his framing of professional generosity.
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Speaker 1: By two thousand seventeen, the doors had quietly closed, the
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Speaker 1: introductions stopped. The feedback Romano received came through Long. What
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Speaker 1: reached her was curated. What did not reach her was
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Speaker 1: not discussed. In twenty twenty two, a woman named Diane
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Speaker 1: Stall came forward. She was fifty three in two thousand four.
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Speaker 1: She had been a doctoral student at a western Pennsylvania
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Speaker 1: university when Long visited as a guest scholar. Stall described
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Speaker 1: a pattern warmth, then isolation, then a seminar paper she
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Speaker 1: had written, appearing later under Long's name. She told investigators
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Speaker 1: Long had taught her not to trust her own memory.
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Speaker 1: Stall testified at Long's sentencing review. Pennsylvania prosecutors determined the
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Speaker 1: statute of limitations precluded charges for those events. Long was
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Speaker 1: not tried for what happened in two thousand four, but
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Speaker 1: Stall's account entered the sentencing record, and it recontextualized every
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Speaker 1: choice Long had made at ardenmore not as opportunism that
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Speaker 1: found Romano, but as a method that had found her
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Speaker 1: the way it had found some someone else fifteen years before,
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Speaker 1: and perhaps others in between. The coffee spill story was
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Speaker 1: not improvisation.
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Speaker 2: The authorization form, the blue cover.
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Speaker 1: The acknowledgments line, these were not panic. They were the
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Speaker 1: final step in a sequence that had started with praise,
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Speaker 1: and praise is the hardest thing in.
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Speaker 2: The world to investigate.
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Speaker 1: Within six weeks of his appeal failing, in twenty twenty two,
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Speaker 1: Long gave a recorded statement to a journalist. He described
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Speaker 1: his actions as a misunderstanding of professional norms. He described
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Speaker 1: Romano as ambitious in ways that sometimes required management. He
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Speaker 1: did not use the word theft. He had managed her
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Speaker 1: ambition for four years. He had simply never planned for
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Speaker 1: a retired postal supervisor with binoculars and the documented habit
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Speaker 1: of looking up. The jury returned its verdict in February
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Speaker 1: of twenty twenty, guilty on all counts, theft of intellectual property, fraud,
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Speaker 1: wire fraud, all counts. The deliberation had not been long.
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Speaker 1: At sentencing, the court imposed four years in a state
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Speaker 1: correctional facility. Long was eligible for supervised release after two
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Speaker 1: and a half years.
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Speaker 2: He served thirty one months.
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Speaker 1: Frank Oqefort filed the appeal in twenty twenty two. The
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Speaker 1: appellate court rejected it in language that court watchers described
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Speaker 1: as brief and unambiguous. The prosecutorial overreach argument did not
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Speaker 1: find purchase. The conviction held on every charge. Within six
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Speaker 1: weeks of that ruling, Long sat down with a journalist
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Speaker 1: and gave a recorded statement. He said his actions reflected
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Speaker 1: a misunderstanding of professional norms. He said Romano had been
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Speaker 1: ambitious in ways that sometimes required management. He did not
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Speaker 1: use the word theft, not once. That sentence is worth
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Speaker 1: pausing on a jury had found beyond a reasonable doubt
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Speaker 1: that he had taken something. He had served more than
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Speaker 1: two and a half years in a directional facility, and
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Speaker 1: the word he chose on record was misunderstanding. Donna Brooks,
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Speaker 1: the licensed clinical social worker who had begun working with
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Speaker 1: Romano in July of twenty nineteen, provided a formal statement
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Speaker 1: that became part of the criminal case. Her documentation of
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Speaker 1: Long's methods, the praise cycle, the isolation, the systematic replacement
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Speaker 1: of Romano's professional judgment with his own, gave investigators a
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Speaker 1: clinical framework for what the physical evidence already showed. The
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Speaker 1: blue bound manuscript in the tree was the end of
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Speaker 1: the sequence. Brooks's statement helped establish what the beginning looked like.
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Speaker 1: The manuscript itself was authenticated. The University press accepted it
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Speaker 1: under Jennifer Romano's name. It was published in twenty twenty one,
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Speaker 1: two years after Long had walked it into Owen Tate's
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Speaker 1: bindery with a story about coffee. Felicia Drummond, the intake
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Speaker 1: coordinator who had logged it under Long's departmental address in
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Speaker 1: May of twenty nineteen, was not a witness against him.
18:03
Speaker 1: She had processed what she received. She had no reason
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Speaker 1: to doubt the submission the forty seven thousand dollars Long
18:10
Speaker 1: had drawn from two grant applications listing Romano's unpublished research
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Speaker 1: under his name. That money had already been spent. The
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Speaker 1: record does not show it was recovered. Diane Stall's account
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Speaker 1: entered the sentencing record. Pennsylvania prosecutors reviewed it and determined
18:28
Speaker 1: the statute of limitations precluded charges for events that had
18:32
Speaker 1: occurred in two thousand four. Long was not tried for
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Speaker 1: what Stall described, but the sentencing judge heard it, and
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Speaker 1: what it established in that court room was a trajectory,
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Speaker 1: not a single act of opportunism, but a method with
18:46
Speaker 1: a history. Romano still walks the Ardenmore campus path on
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Speaker 1: week day mornings, according to available accounts, whether she pauses
18:56
Speaker 1: at the Founder's Fountain, she has not said publicly. There
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Speaker 1: is something specific about this case that does not resolve cleanly.
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Speaker 1: Even with a conviction on every count. Richard Long received
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Speaker 1: four years. He served thirty one months. The appellate court
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Speaker 1: rejected his argument without ceremony. Those are facts. They are
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Speaker 1: also in some way insufficient to the shape of what
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Speaker 1: he did. Jennifer Romano spent fourteen months writing two hundred
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Speaker 1: forty pages. She spent four years before that being methodically
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Speaker 1: separated from her own professional instincts, her sense of what
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Speaker 1: her work was worth, who her colleagues were, what her
19:35
Speaker 1: own memory could be trusted to hold. Long did not
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Speaker 1: take a manuscript. He took the internal architecture she used
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Speaker 1: to evaluate herself. The manuscript was evidence of that, it was.
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Speaker 2: Not the whole of it.
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Speaker 1: Donna Brooks spent months documenting what that architecture looked like
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Speaker 1: after Long had finished with it. What emerges from her
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Speaker 1: statement is not a portrait of a crime committed in
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Speaker 1: a bindery. It is a portrait of a person who
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Speaker 1: had been taught carefully and over years to doubt the
20:03
Speaker 1: accuracy of her own perception. The blue cover in the
20:08
Speaker 1: tree was the thing Kimberly Whitley found on a Tuesday
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Speaker 1: morning in July what Romano had to find and find
20:18
Speaker 1: again was harder to hold in her hands. Diane Stall
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Speaker 1: said Long had taught her not to trust her own memory.
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Speaker 1: She said this in twenty twenty two, eighteen years after
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Speaker 1: the seminar paper. She described that she remembered clearly enough
20:33
Speaker 1: to say it, that her account was coherent enough to
20:36
Speaker 1: enter a sentencing record. Is the detail that Land's hardest.
20:41
Speaker 1: Long's method depended on replacement. Replace the feedback, replace the judgment,
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Speaker 1: Replace the authour's name on the cover. What he did
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Speaker 1: not plan for, ever, was the persistence of the people
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Speaker 1: he had replaced. He did not plan for Whitley's binoculars.
20:57
Speaker 1: He did not plan for Stall's memory. He did not
20:59
Speaker 1: plan for Romano continuing to walk that path. The manuscript
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Speaker 1: was published in twenty twenty one under Jennifer Romano's name
21:09
Speaker 1: by the university press that had originally received it under his.
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Speaker 1: That is the record the work exists, attributed correctly in print.
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Speaker 1: Long described her after his appeal failed, as ambitious in
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Speaker 1: ways that sometimes required management. The book is the answer
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Speaker 1: to that sentence. It required nothing from him. It was
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Speaker 1: finished before he ever walked it into the bindery.
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Speaker 2: She wrote it. It is hers.
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Speaker 1: That was always true, and the four years it took
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Speaker 1: to make it officially true do not change the fact
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Speaker 1: that preceded them. Some things survive the people who try
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Speaker 1: to erase them.
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Speaker 2: This one did.
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