The story of JT LeRoy is the stuff of literary legend. This is the woman who played the man who became a transsexual and fooled the world for six years.
The author, who identified as gender-fluid, burst on to the scene in the late 1990s with confrontational tales that hinted at a troubled past, becoming a wunderkind seemingly overnight. Celebrities such as Shirley Manson and Winona Ryder were quick to count the talented writer among their closest friends.
LeRoy’s second novel was swiftly adapted into a film that premiered at Cannes. But in 2005, all the goodwill came crashing down following the bombshell that the author wasn’t real – but was in fact the creation of Laura Albert, a Brooklyn mother who had been posing as LeRoy’s manager, she had asked her sister in law Savannah Knoop to pose as LeRoy in a fake wig hat and sunglasses.
