New York Post’s False Reporting

Things move slowly in prison compared to the free world due to prison rule, etc.; because of that I did not see the copy of the NYP article that was written about the cannibal in myself until over a week after the public received it. It is riddled with lies and foolishness. I called Jamie Schram (the reporter who did the phone interview) and demanded that he print a retraction due to the lies and misrepresentation in it. He asked me to read the lies to him. I began with the headline after each lie. I told him I never said that. One example is in the interview he asked me what I thought about Dalmer and what was my first impression of him? I told him I did not have one and his article said Scarver didn’t think much of Dalmer, He twisted my words. Mr. Schram said that what I called lies are actually “lead-in statements.” I told him they were lies that mislead readers. He began yelling. In the middle of his rant, I told him prison calls are recorded by officials, so evidence that he lied exist. He quieted down enough for me to ask him if anyone else that he interviewed ever said that he lied on them. He answered yes. I asked him how many people had accused him of this? He said he did not know the exact amount. I asked him for his supervisor’s name; he said that his supervisor would also refuse to print a retraction, because his supervisor is his editor and took part in writing the article. In his rant, Schram implied that he told one lie simply because I would not answer all of his interview questions.

Eventually, he relented and put his editor Eric Lenkowitz on the phone. I explained the situation to him; he asked me about the lies. I explained that I never said that I hated or despised anyone. I was never fired from any job while free. I never said I feared for my safety. I did not say that I believed it was no accident that I ended up alone with the two deceased nor that the officials wanted either of them dead. Lenkowitz said that these are not lies because they did not put quotation marks around these statements.

I made many mistakes in my life. The worst of them happened over 20 years ago when I was a youth. I take full responsibility for them. When Schram wrote me a year ago and asked me to do an interview, I told him I did not feel that speaking to him about the cannibal (in me) would do anyone any good, that I turned my life around, and if it didn’t benefit our struggle for the tools of effective rehabilitation programs I had nothing to say. For months he kept asking and gave me his word that he would equally cover his interests (which was Dalmer) and my interest (the need for effective rehabilitation tools and program opportunities). He lied about this as well. As his falsified article spells out, it says nothing about our struggle for the tools to improve ourselves. It is overwhelmingly about his fixation on Dalmer.

In conclusion, I am shocked that I have received as many positive responses on the web site because there was nothing good in that article to respond to. To reiterate, I made many major mistakes in my life and the quest for the reason why people cold snap as well as for the means of preventing such criminal ideation has been central to my personal rehabilitation program.

It is unfortunate that people like Schram and Lenkowitz (in a position of power) would rather relish in a sensationalized story about a cannibal dead for over 20 years rather than a story about fallen citizens (i.e. prisoners) who take responsibility for past behavior and who are fighting for the tools necessary to better ourselves.

In light of the facts, (and the prison’s phone records) Schram’s article says more about himself and the New York Post than it says about anyone else. The other people who call Schram a liar, as Schram said himself admitted in the phone recordings, should be interviewed about him and asked why they, too, accuse him of lying about them.