At a time when the soon-to-be president of the United States is a felonious man-child constitutionally incapable of speaking the truth...
At a time when vast swaths of the American people either don't care that their leaders are lying to them or are unable to distinguish truth from lies...
At a time when a new conspiracy theory is born every minute...
...it seems absurd, especially on the first day of this consequential year, to expend any energy writing about two liars of little consequence.
While there's nothing I can do to change anybody's mind about Donald Trump, perhaps I can still get through to the handful of people who give credence to Elliot Mintz and David Whelan.
If those names mean nothing to you, I applaud your ability to ignore celebrity gossip and conspiracy theories involving the murder of well-known individuals. But having written a book, Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, that touches on both topics, I've had occasion to encounter both Mintz and Whelan.
Elliot Mintz is a professional liar who would walked over his own grandmother for John Lennon and Yoko Ono (as G. Gordon Liddy said he'd do for Richard Nixon). Critics have panned his memoir, We All Shine On, for its grotesque display of sycophancy towards the ex-Beatle and his wife (see the Irish Independent). The Mexican news agency Amexi picked up "A Masterpiece of Propaganda," my review of the book, and ran it as a feature, "Refuta Robert Rosen las memorias sobre John y Yoko en 'We All Shine On', de Elliot Mintz," detailing my refutation of the lies that permeate the book.
David "Don't Call Me a Conspiracy Theorist" Whelan believes a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Mark David Chapman to be a Manchurian patsy—that he did not shoot Lennon and that there was a second shooter, a professional assassin, who got away. Similar conspiracy theories, in circulation for 44 years, have come to nothing. Whelan is aware that his quest to prove this theory is pointless but chooses to continue.
I believe that Chapman, suffering from severe mental illness, shot Lennon.
My issue with Whelan is the lies he weaves into his interviews and blog posts (I've not read his book), especially when information surfaces that casts doubt on his theories. Three months ago, I wrote about his research techniques after we both recorded an episode of Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles (SATB). I learned after the show that Whelan had made a number of false statements. This is what I wrote at the time:
Did John Lennon's Killer Ask Him for a Job?
SATB 297 was broadcast last week. I said on the show that Whelan came to my attention when he misrepresented himself to Lennon's friend and gardener, Michael "Mike Tree" Medeiros, as a fact checker for 72 Films, the production company that made Murder Without a Trial. (Medeiros had been interviewed for the film.) So I knew Whelan was capable of lying, but I wasn't prepared for his style of conversation—interrupt, interrupt, interrupt, and attempt to never stop talking. Bury the listener under too much information and disinformation. Create confusion and doubt rather than illumination and clarity. It's the same game all conspiracy theorists play.
Reading Whelan's blog is like drowning in a cesspool. The hatred towards me that comes across in his writing is extraordinary. His efforts to discredit me read like a cry for help. When it comes to his critique of my work on SATB, he's wrong when he says there's no record of Chapman saying to a psychiatrist that he felt "like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round," as I wrote in Nowhere Man. (There's an easily accessible record.) He's wrong when he says he knows I wasn't at Chapman's sentencing hearing because I didn't explicitly say in Nowhere Man, "I was there." (I wrote the story in the third person.) He's wrong when he says my description of Chapman looking proud of what he did can't be true because nobody else described him that way. (That's how he looked as police marched him out of the courtroom.)
What else does he say on his blog, in his book, and in his interviews that isn't true? I don't know, but my guess would be plenty more.
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