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The Man Who Stole a Scholar's Life: Inside the Holloway Theft · Narcisist Psychology

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At seven forty in the morning on July fourteen, two
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: thoy nineteen, a well service contractor named Dwayne Baker stepped
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: into a shed on a quiet residential property on Aldermore
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: Road in Callister Township, Indiana. He was there to check
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: a water softener. What he found instead was a cardboard
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: banker's box sitting on the shelf above it, stuffed with
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: forty three printed academic papers annotated in two different ink
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: colors in handwriting that belonged to no one who lived there.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: The shed's hasp had been carefully unscrewed and left to hang.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: That box would eventually become federal evidence, but first it
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: would force a question that took investigators months to fully answer.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: How does a man with no university appointment, no office,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: no salary, and no legitimate access to anyone's research end
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: up with five years of stolen academic work stored ten
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: feet from his victim's back door. This is the story
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: of how one person dismantled another person's reality so completely
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: that the victim apologized to the man who was robbing him.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Ryan Wilson was forty four years old in the summer
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: of two thousand fourteen. He was an associate professor of
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: cognitive science at Vanthorpe University in Indiana, living in a
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: house on Aldermore Road in a small community called Callister Township.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: By every external measure, he was doing well. He had
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: doctoral students, an active research program, and a reputation for
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: genuine intellectual generosity. Colleagues described him as the kind of
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: professor who remembered the details of your work months after
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: a single conversation. He also had a habit that would
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: later seem in hindsight almost unbearably ordinary. Every morning, he
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: walked four miles along the same route through Callister Township,
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: passing a wide oak tree that sat near the midpoint
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: of the loop. It was the kind of small grounding
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: ritual that busy academics build to hold their days together.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: Nothing about it was remarkable. It would become remarkable later.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Ryan was working on a monograph. It was a long
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: form academic project, the kind of book length argument that
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: takes years to build and requires sustained collaboration to sharpen.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: He had been developing it for some time. What he needed,
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: or believed he needed, was an outside intellectual partner, someone
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: who could read across disciplines, push back on the argument
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: help him see the shape of the whole thing. Someone
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: who was not already embedded in the institutional politics of Vanthorpe.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: In September of two thousand fourteen, had a faculty reception
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: at Vanthorpe. Ryan met Leon Harris. Leon was forty one
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: that summer. He had a Master of Fine Arts degree
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: from a program that would later lose its accreditation. His
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: professional history included stints as a grant's administrator and a
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: freelance technical editor. He had audited courses at three different universities.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: He had no formal academic appointment anywhere, but he moved
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: through academic spaces with the ease of someone who understood
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: exactly how those spaces worked. He knew the language, the hierarchies,
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: the anxieties. He knew what an associate professor building a
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: major project actually needed to hear. A junior lecturer named
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: Brian Kowalski brought Leon to that September reception. Later, Kowalski
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: would describe their acquaintance as limited, but by the end
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: of the evening, Leon and Ryan had talked for a
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: long time. Leon had read widely. He asked good questions.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: He seemed according to later accounts, genuinely excited by Ryan's research.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: What followed was a courtship. There is no other word
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: for it. Leon began attending departmental events. He had dinners
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: at Ryan's home on Aldermore Road. He positioned himself as
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: the ideal collaborator for the monograph, someone who could contribute
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: without competing, who had no institutional agenda of his own.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: By twenty fifteen, Leon had an informal desk in Ryan's
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: anti room. Ryan told university administrators that Leon was a
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: visiting researcher collaborating on the monograph. None of that was true,
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: but it was what Ryan believed, and by the time
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: the first warning signs appeared, Ryan had already been shaped
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: slowly and methodically to doubt himself rather than the man
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: sitting across from him. There was something else already in
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: motion by then, something Ryan did not know existed. In
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: twenty thirteen, more than a year before Leon walked into
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: that faculty reception, someone purchased a prepaid debit card at
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: a pharmacy in Indianapolis. That card was used to register
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: a website. The website was called The Holloway Theft. It
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: was hosted on an untraceable repository and credited entirely to
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: a scholar named Emmett Holloway, the founding chair of a
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: program at van Thorpe. Emmett Holloway had been dead for
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: approximately eleven years. The Holloway theft existed before Ryan Wilson
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: knew Leon Harris's name. That detail matters more than almost
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: anything else in this case. Leon did not build the
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: infrastructure after meeting Ryan. He built it first. The prepaid card,
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: the untraceable domain, the dead man's name above the masthead.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: All of it was in place by two thy thirteen.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: Leon walked into that September faculty reception with a website
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: already running. What he needed was a subject. Ryan was
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: the subject. The theft began accumulating content slowly, the way
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: sediment builds. Early posts were a general commentary on methodology
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: and links to published work in cognitive science, the kind
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: of thing that looked at a glance like a hobbyist
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: curator keeping a field's memory alive. Nothing that would alarm anyone,
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: nothing that required close reading to accept. But here is
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: the thing about the theft's early posts. When investigators later
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: mapped submission dates against publication dates against publication dates for
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: the graduate students in Ryan's department. A pattern emerged that
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: had been invisible in real time. The theft was not
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: commenting on published work. In several documented cases, it was
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: commenting on work that had not yet been published, work
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: that existed only in draft shared inside Ryan's research group.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: Marcus Webb was a second year doctoral student in twenty fifteen.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: He noticed something that autumn. A citation in the theft
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: referred to a methodological framework he had been developing in
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: a seminar paper. The paper had never been distributed outside
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: the department. Ryan. When Marcus raised it, offered a gentle explanation.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: Parallel development was common in active fields, great minds converging independently.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: Marcus accepted that he had no reason not to. Ryan
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: was his adviser. Priya ne'er noticed the same anomaly that
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: same season. A fellowship methodology she had designed specific enough
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: that parallel development was statistically improbable, appeared in a theft
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: post attributed to Emmett Holloway. Priya did not report him,
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: even she was a third year student. The theft was authoritative,
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: the founding chair's name was on it. To challenge it,
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: would have meant challenging a dead man's legacy and implicitly
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: the department's institutional memory. Two students, two separate anomalies, both
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: swallowed in silence. Meanwhile, the monograph continued. Leon's role as
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: collaborator deepened. By twenty sixteen, he had an informal desk
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: in Ryan's ante room. He attended meetings. He knew which
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: grants were pending, which invitations Ryan had received, which junior
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: researchers were rising in the department. He had access not
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: to systems, not to credentials, but to the texture of
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: Ryan's professional life. That texture was enough. Then came the
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: injury in January of twenty seventeen, Ryan torah knee ligament.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: The recovery was significant, weeks of limited mobility, difficulty getting
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: to campus. Leon offered to help manage correspondence. It seemed
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: like exactly the kind of thing a trusted collaborator would do.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Ryan granted Leon access to his university email account. Leon
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: used that access for three months. What he did with
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: it was not spectacular, no single dramatic act. What investigators
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: later reconstructed from server logs was a pattern of quiet intervention.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: Certain messages were forwarded to addresses that traced back eventually
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: to Leon. Certain invitations were declined on Ryan's behalf. Two
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: of those declined invitations, when Peterson later mapped them against
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: the theft's timeline, would have placed Ryan in direct contact
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: with people who might have identified the theft as fraudulent.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: Leon did not block a floodgate. He redirected a current
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: one message at a time. The shed on Ryan's property
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: completed the picture of how physical documents traveled. Leon visited
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: Aldermore Road seven times over eighteen months. On one of
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: those visits, confirmed by Dwayne Baker's later account of the
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: property's maintenance history, Leon unscrewed the hasp on the shed door,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: carefully left it hanging. A contractor would not notice. A
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: homeowner rarely inspects a shed hasp, But a door that
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: appears locked while opening freely is something different. It is
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: a passage. Marcus Webb came back in early two twenty eighteen.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: He had not let the two thousand fifteen anomaly go.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: He had kept his seminar paper, He had kept notes,
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: and what he brought to Ryan that morning was not
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: a suspicion. It was a verbatim paragraph lifted from his prospectus,
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: word for word, dated months before the theft post that
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: contained it, placed next to that theft post on the
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: same sheet of paper. There was no innocent explanation for
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: what Marcus was showing him. Ryan apologized that response. An
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: apology rather than an investigation, is the moment this case
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: pivots on. Not because Ryan was complicit, the evidence is
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: clear that he was not, but because five years of careful,
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: methodical erosion had done its work. Ryan had been shaped,
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: encounter by encounter to absorb anomalies as his own failure,
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: rather than as evidence of external interference. When the proof
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: of his first instinct was not outrage, it was contrition.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: Marcus left the program four months later. Leon by that
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: point had introduced a postdoctoral researcher named Norah Sloane into
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: Ryan's circle Spring of twenty seventeen. Nora was real. The
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: introduction was genuine enough. What was not genuine was a
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: comment Leon told Ryan that Nora had made appointed criticism
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: about Ryan's handling of graduate students, his management of intellectual credit,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: the kind of thing that, if true, would sting, and
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: that a person holds privately and worries about alone. Norah
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: Sloane later stated she had made no such comment. She
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: had made a general observation about hierarchies in academic departments,
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: nothing critical of Ryan. Leon had taken a sentence spoken
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: in passing and rebuilt it into a targeted accusation. That
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: is the architecture of the method. It did not require
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: dramatic acts. It required calibration. Find what a person fears
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: about themselves, apply pressure there quietly, using sources they trust,
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: and repeat until the pressure feels internal. Ryan had begun
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: to doubt his own judgment about the students, his own
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: credit practices, his own memory of conversations. When the proof
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: of theft arrived in twenty eighteen, he apologized that apology
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: was not weakness. It was the logical output of five
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: years of engineered self doubt. Picture the Holloway theft as
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: a structure built to answer one question before that question
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: could be asked. If a graduate student noticed their work
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: appearing under a dead man's name, the theft's own authority
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: answered the challenge. Emme at Holloway was a foundational figure.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: This was his repository. This was his repository, and parallel
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: development was always possible to active feel Ryan had already
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: offered that explanation in good faith because it was the
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: explanation Leon had made available to him. If that scenario holds, everything,
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: the theft claimed is simply a tragic coincidence a scholar's
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: legacy repository that happened to anticipate work being developed inside
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: one department. But that version collapses when you look at
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: the submission dates. Grant Peterson, the former financial crimes investigator
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: hired by Vanthorpe's council, mapped forty three printed papers against
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: their publication records and the theft's posting history. In case
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: after case, theft commentary preceded public availability of the work
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: being discussed. The only people with access to that work
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: before publication were inside Ryan's department, and the only person
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: with informal, sustained unsupervised access to Ryan's ante room, his email,
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: and his property across that entire period was Leon Harris.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: A second scenario rewrites Leon's role. In this version, Leon
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: is not an architect. He is an opportunist who noticed
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: a poorly secured repository and began inserting himself into it.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: The plan is improvised, reactive, not premeditated. The prepaid debit
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: card purchased in Indianapolis in twenty thirteen, destroys that reading entirely.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: The card predates Leon's introduction to Ryan by more than
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: a year. The theft existed before the relationship. Leon did
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: not find an opportunity. He manufactured one, then walked into
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: a faculty reception to find the person who would fill it.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: Paula Ouxner, a former junior researcher in northern Ohio, came
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: forward in August of twenty nineteen after seeing Leon's photograph.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: She described a near identical operation in two thousand and nine.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: The same slow proximity, the same informal access, the same
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: pattern of documents and ideas appearing in places they should
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: not have been. That operation ended when Leon was asked
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: to leave over expense irregularities, no criminal charges. He moved on.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: He refined the method. What Leon built at Van Thorpe
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: was not improvised. It was version two of something he
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: had already tested. The Holloway theft was not a scheme
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: that grew in the dark. It was infrastructure laid down
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: deliberately waiting for the right subject to arrive. Leon Harris
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: was arrested on July twenty second two Thy nineteen, sixteen
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: days after Dwaine Baker found the Banker's box in Ryan
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: Wilson's shed, federal agents had enough. The box was not
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: the only cash Leon had built, but it was the
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: one he had not retrieved in time. When investigators reached him,
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: Leon cooperated. He confirmed the location of a storage unit
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: in Bloomington containing everything every post the Holloway Theft had
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: ever published, every source document he had drawn from, forwarded
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: e mails from Ryan's account, and credentials for four additional
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: accounts at institutions not yet named in any headline. He
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: had not been running one operation, he had been running five.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: The charges covered wire fraud, identity fraud against a deceased
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: individual's estate, and theft of intellectual property across multiple counts.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: Leon pleaded guilty in February of two THY twenty. The
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: sentence was six years federal. Within forty eight hours of
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: his arrest, the Holloway Theft website went dark. Eleven years
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: of fabricated, scholarly commentary built on the borrowed name of
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: a man who had been dead since two thousand eight,
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: disappeared from the Internet in two days. The Banker's Box
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: forty three papers, two ink colors, one set of unfamiliar
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: annotations entered the Federal Evidence Archive. It is still there.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: What the investigation confirmed was not just scope but sequence.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: Grant Peterson, working from twelve student interviews and a chain
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: of posting dates mapped against submission records, had already established
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: the workflow before Leon said a word. The theft had
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: functioned as a kind of shadow peer review, one that
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: Leon controlled entirely, one whose commentary could be used to
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: shape how Ryan interpreted his own student's work. The goal
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: was not to steal a single paper, It was to
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: occupy a position inside the intellectual ecosystem of an entire
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: department indefinitely. PAULA. Oxner's testimony in August of twenty nineteen
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: confirmed what the prepaid card had already implied. Leon had
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: done this before. The two thousand nine operation in northern
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: Ohio followed the same architecture, slow proximity, informal access ideas,
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: migrating from private documents into the spaces where attribution became plausible.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: That operation ended when he was asked to leave over
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: expense irregularities. No criminal charges were filed. He spent the
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: next four years building a more durable version of the
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: same machine. Prior schemes were confirmed at two institutions before
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Van Thorpe. The court record does not name them. What
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: it establishes is that by the time Leon walked into
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: a faculty reception in September of two thousand fourteen and
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: introduced himself to Ryan Wilson, he was not experiment. He
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: was executing a tested method on a more sophisticated target.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: The university issued a formal statement in spring of twenty twenty.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: Graduate students whose work had been compromised were acknowledged by
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: name Preonnaire's earlier fellowship methodology. The one Elaine Morrow had
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: recognized in the theft in June of twenty nineteen was
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: publicly credited to her. Marcus Webb, who had tried to
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: raise the alarm in two thousand fifteen and returned with
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: direct evidence in two thousand eighteen, completed his dissertation at
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: a different institution. The program he left did not follow
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: him there. Ryan Wilson took a sabbatical in the fall
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: of two thousand nineteen. He gave one interview to a
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: journalist some time after Leon's guilty plea. He did not
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: discuss the details of the case at length. He said
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: he had returned to his morning walks four miles the
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: same route passed the wide oak on the Committee Road.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: What Leon Harris understood, and what makes this case genuinely
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: difficult to set aside, is that he did not primarily
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: steal ideas. He stole the cognitive ground on which Ryan
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: Wilson stood to evaluate those ideas. By the time the
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: theft was running at full capacity, Ryan had been conditioned
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: to doubt his own judgment in a specific and targeted way.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: Students noticed discrepancies and brought them to him. He apologized.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: A postoc named Norah Sloane was introduced as a social lever,
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: and a criticism Leon had fabricated was placed in her mouth.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: Ryan withdrew his e mail During three months of recovery
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: from a knee injury, was accessible to the one person
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: who most needed it to remain unmonitored. Every door that
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: might have let light in was managed quietly from the inside.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: There is a particular kind of damage that does not
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: leave a visible mark. Ryan never lost his position. His
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: name never appeared on a retraction notice. From the outside.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: His career continued, but the five years between two thousand
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: fourteen and two thousand nineteen were years in which his
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: professional judgment was systematically undermined by some one he trusted
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: enough to give a key to his shed. Marcus Webb
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: lost more than four years of a doctoral programme before
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: he could complete his work somewhere else. Preonaire spent years
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: carrying a suspicion she could not fully articulate. Nora Sloan
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: had a statement attributed to her that she never made
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: about a colleague she respected. None of them were targets
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: in the way Ryan was. They were instruments. The distinction
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: is real, and it is also cold comfort. The case
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: troubles something deeper than the question of what Leon took.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: It troubles the question of what he used to take it, specifically,
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: the ordinary trust that makes intellectual communities function. The theft
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: worked because pere commentary is supposed to be credible. The
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: informal desk worked because collaborative presence is supposed to be collegial.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: The email access worked because injury is supposed to create allowance.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Leon did not exploit weaknesses. He exploited the normal operating
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: assumptions of a world built on good faith. There is
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: something in this case that resists easy resolution. Even after
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: the sentence is handed down. Six years federal is a
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: consequent on. The storage unit in Bloomington is cataloged, the
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: website is gone. The name Emmett Holloway has been returned
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: to the quiet of a university archive where it belongs.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: But Ryan Wilson walks four miles every morning past a
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: wide oak tree on a road named for a committee
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: that once debated ideas in a room he trusted. The
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: walk is the same, the route is the same. What
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: he thinks about on that road is not in any
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: court record. This show is made by Obo Media