An early-evening email from PW Daily notified us that James Frey’s going to be on today’s episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show to do a more extensive job of licking her boots in person than he did over the phone on Larry King’s show when the scandal first broke. Well, okay, more likely it’ll just be an hour of hand wringing, with guest appearances by Nan Talese and what Oprah’s site calls “some of the country’s leading journalists”…but not, as implied in the headline, either of the GalleyCats. I’m betting it’s because I made that crack to PRWeek about how she saved his ass with that phone call.
But if Sarah or I were to finagle our way onto the set, I’d know some of the questions I’d want to finally get out there. For example, if Frey trotted his mom out to ward off his critics again, I’d ask her what Larry King didn’t: “So, your son says he was ‘dating’ some girl who got killed in a wreck, and that her parents blamed him, and the cops interrogated him about it, and that he got into a ton of fights about it with his classmates. I assume you were around at the time; did you notice any of that?”
And if Judge Alan Green, who’s now outed himself as the “federal judge” Frey befriended in rehab, were somehow on the guest list, I’d ask a question that for whatever reason didn’t get into Edward Wyatt’s NYT article: “According to James Frey, you played a significant role in getting prosecutors in Ohio to reduce his criminal sentence from three years in prison to three months in county lockup. We all know James didn’t spend any three months in jail. Care to tell us exactly what, if anything, you ever did for him?”
Well, one of us will be around Thursday night or Friday morning to comment on what actually transpired, but until then, Gawker has a sneak preview. Definitely not what most of us were expecting…