In death, Jason Arday has become two people. To many readers of legacy newspapers, the late Cambridge University academic is a proven fabulist. The life story on which he built his career, of being nonverbal until 11 because of autism, and then learning to read at 18 and becoming a professor, has “no precedent in medical literature,” as The New York Times delicately put it. Among many other extraordinary claims, his tale of being menaced by a knife-wielding man at Cambridge could not be corroborated, and neither could the story that his family had received a pig’s head as an act of racist intimidation. “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” he told a Guardian reporter who challenged him.That is one reality. However, another one dominates left-wing new media, activist nonprofits, and visual social networks such as Instagram and TikTok. There, the prevailing narrative is that Arday did nothing seriously wrong and Britain’s right-wing media hounded an exceptional Black scholar to his death on August 14 for no reason except racism. Well-wishers have raised more than $300,000 for his family, and made his upcoming memoir a best seller in Britain. At a rally in central London held in his memory, attendees carried placards reading Rest in Power Professor Jason Arday, even though he had resigned the title days before his death. They wanted to make clear their belief that he was unfairly deprived of his academic status.For some of Arday’s supporters, acknowledging that any of the media scrutiny was justified has become tantamount to siding with his “killers.” He is instead a martyr—the victim of a “lynching”—and the inconvenient fact of his fabulism must be tidied away from the virtual shrine. This is an emotional position rather than a rational one, and its very indefensibility makes it a greater demonstration of tribal loyalty. Insisting that the academic was completely innocent, in the face of all the evidence, sends a strong social signal that you hate the right-wing media and care about racism.The central question in this dispute is whether the treatment of Arday—the subject of more than 200 articles in print this year, according to CNN, and hundreds more online—was proportionate. The smaller his alleged offenses, the more easily one can argue that the media hounded him to death. And so Arday has been recast as a small-time plagiarist; academics have lined up to argue that, You know, even that isn’t a very big deal. The “meaning of plagiarism does not cover mere overlap of sentences,” the academic Jason Stanley asserted in a blog post that also bizarrely noted that he hadn’t paid much attention to the story because he had been on vacation in Europe. Stanley’s blithe dismissal will be news to students who are told the exact opposite early in their courses. Or to Ross Barkan, who was dropped from New York magazine after getting caught recycling other writers’ words.[Graeme Wood: Jason Arday’s final self-delusion]Another popular declaration is that Arday “was cleared of plagiarism” by Liverpool John Moores University, where he received his doctorate. This is technically true. When concerns were raised about his dissertation, Cambridge University declined to investigate, saying it was a problem for Liverpool John Moores, which had already stated that it stood by his work. Just before Arday’s death, however, Cambridge reversed its position, pledging to investigate, as did other institutions that had employed Arday. (Arday then resigned from Cambridge, adding that the move should not be “mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me.”) Stressing that he was “cleared” misses the point; the exact allegation is that universities’ lack of interest in scrutinizing Arday represented a failure of institutional checks. Now anyone can run Arday’s thesis through plagiarism-detection software themselves and make up their own mind. When Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, a writer who otherwise found the media coverage racist, did so, he concluded that “Arday was definitely guilty.”Keeping a narrow focus on the doctoral thesis is helpful to the pro-Arday side. He also faced a far more serious charge of academic fraud—that he lifted interviewees’ quotations from a 2016 paper in BMJ Open and inserted them into the mouths of people he had supposedly spoken with in his own research, implying outright fabrication of interviews that never occurred. After Cambridge was made aware of this accusation in 2023 by other academics, the journal Social Sciences took an Arday paper offline and then uploaded it again with the offending quotations excised and other direct quotes edited. (Another paper of his in a different journal was also subsequently corrected.) Arday essentially admitted to the misattribution by agreeing to the amendments, although he had earlier told the researcher who raised the issue that questioning him was “bullying and harassment.”The postmortem airbrushing of Arday’s story also ignores how that story twisted and turned while he was alive. When The Guardian confronted him with the implausibility of some of his tall tales, Arday responded by editing them in real time: Yes, he had once claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, an exceptional feat for an endurance athlete, but what he actually meant was that he took daylong rest breaks in between. Yes, he had claimed to have raised more than £5 million for charity, but actually this was with the help of “many fundraising collectives” whose participants he could not name because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.The Arday partisans have seized on the thinnest of straws. Defending his philanthropic record, the Byline Times, a British website that bills itself as offering “what the papers don’t say,” implied that the relevant charities’ huge fundraising capacity made his claims credible. “A Byline Times analysis of the publicly identifiable charities Arday was associated with for two decades found that they had a combined gross income of approximately £1.4 billion to £1.5 billion,” it reported, “putting his £5 million collective fundraising claim at well under 1% of their overall income.” That sensation you can feel is your brain melting out through your ears and trickling down your neck. The same analysis would uphold my claim to have, say, just donated six fighter jets to the U.S. government, because they cost a minuscule fraction of the nearly $1 trillion defense budget. Why would you doubt me?One of the biggest promoters of the revisionist narrative is the Good Law Project, a nonprofit chiefly known in Britain for its patchy record of challenging legal decisions, and for the unforgettable viral incident in which its founder, Jolyon Maugham, voluntarily confessed to having beaten a fox to death with a baseball bat while wearing his wife’s kimono. The Good Law Project intervened on Arday’s behalf early in the news cycle, describing the initial coverage as a “malicious” witch hunt based on “fake accusations of plagiarism.” It mustered an open letter in his defense.What followed was a classic Streisand effect: The newspapers defended themselves by seeking further corroboration of Arday’s fabulism. As the allegations mounted, various signatories disappeared from the letter, indicating that they found the evidence concerning. By August 8, Maugham was distancing himself, saying that his decision to “carry—a deliberately neutral verb—an open letter in support of Dr Arday” relied on Cambridge’s judgment. He stated that he had not personally evaluated Arday’s broader trustworthiness. “It is expedient for me to say, but it is also true for me to say, that: I only last night returned from ‘holiday,’” he wrote.After Arday’s death, though, Maugham also offered a new statement, in which he had in fact been closely involved with the letter, and furthermore had intervened in the hope of dissuading the left-wing Guardian from publishing its own damning exposé of Arday. The stated rationale was that the academic was vulnerable, that the right was already attacking him, and that Arday believed (without offering any evidence) that the Guardian reporter Lanre Bakare had a beef with him.[Read: Icarus in the faculty lounge]Some people seem to think this was reasonable—that the subjects of unflattering articles should get to veto their publication. Journalism cannot work this way. Maugham’s failed attempt to spike a story on Arday’s behalf became yet more fodder for the narrative of the evil, racist press versus Jason the Martyr. Never mind that Bakare is himself of African descent, or that, as a note hastily appended to Maugham’s statement acknowledged, Arday had initially approached Bakare with his story about the pig’s head and the marauding knifeman.The academic had wanted his story in the public domain—but only if the journalist endorsed it. Bakare’s real offense was finding no evidence for Arday’s outlandish claims, and saying so.Why dwell on this depressing, convoluted saga? Many people will be thinking: The poor guy quit, and now he is dead. First, because Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, is still advertised for sale on Amazon UK with absolutely no mention of the controversy surrounding its wild claims. (Arday’s family wanted to continue with publication.) “That oft-used word ‘inspirational’ feels wholly inadequate to describe his incredible story of grit and resilience,” an endorsement sourced from the industry publication The Bookseller declares.The word incredible is the correct one: My colleague Dan Engber reported how several of the most eye-catching claims in the book’s proposal were swapped for different, but equally dramatic, claims in the finished text. (Arday’s publisher did not respond to his questions about the changes.) As Engber wrote:The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.Nor does the book describe the time that Arday, then a teenager, was struck by a car and spent several months in a coma.A second reason that the story still resonates is that Arday’s death—the version of it in which he is a complete innocent, hounded by feral, racist journalists—is now being used for political purposes in Britain. The Good Law Project and its allies have demanded the resignation of Cambridge’s vice-chancellor for failing to support Arday; the defenestration of various journalists who covered the story or edited the newspapers in which it appeared; and a public inquiry into Arday’s death, with the desired outcome being tighter restrictions on what the press can publish. Groups affiliated with Amnesty UK have even endorsed “Arday’s Law,” whereby the number of news articles on any person would be capped. This proposal is nonsensical. Do activists really believe that, if The New York Times has used up the entire press’s monthly Trump-scandal quota, everyone else should fall silent?The Arday case is endlessly debatable because it contains so many double-edged elements. Yes, the academic—one of relatively few Black professors in Britain—was subject to extra scrutiny because of his race. Equally, though, Arday absolutely traded on his identity and his life story. “In his keynotes, Arday focuses on how his identity as a Black autistic man has shaped his experiences in the academic world,” the blurb on his (since-deleted) profile at the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau reads.[Read: The truths that failed Jason Arday]Undeniably, many of Arday’s detractors treated him not as a fallible human but as a stand-in for the debate over diversity, equity, and inclusion. The academic whose Substack post kicked off the coverage, Nathan Cofnas, is a “race realist” who reveled in the fact that he had taken down someone he saw as the beneficiary of a corrupt, anti-white system. When I asked Cofnas why he had decided to immolate his career by arguing that Black people are academically inferior to white people, he told me that “wokism is the ideology of taking the equality thesis seriously” and that “the only way to defeat the destructive ideology of wokism is to show that it is based on a false empirical premise.”A few days before we spoke over email, Cofnas was suspended by Ghent University, in Belgium, where he is a postdoctoral scholar, because of the negative publicity he had generated. This news caused widespread rejoicing on the left: A lot of onlookers who were until that moment very opposed to people losing academic jobs amid media storms suddenly decided that this phenomenon was, in fact, good. (An open letter is currently in circulation defending Cofnas.)Without question, the media coverage of Arday was harsh and high-volume. But much of that volume came from competing outlets breaking fresh news, as more and more of Arday’s extraordinary claims crumbled under scrutiny. Some commentators have argued that coverage ought to have stopped after his resignation. I feel differently; the reporting should (and I think would) have stopped if he admitted to the fabulism. But Arday died still maintaining that he had never lied, and his memoir is on sale, untroubled by corrections to anecdotes that now seem enormously implausible.Unfortunately, unlike Arday’s fabrications, anti-Black racism in Britain is only too real. But you can believe in that without believing in Jason Arday.