Nein, es wahrheit.

The book is finished, locked. 700 pages, counting title page, table of contents, and index. For the coloring and picture book crowd, sorry, Bernie Wrightson wasn't available to do a graphic novel version of the prose, very sorry. There will be no photos. Unlike Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, this is the real deal, a real historical account, and therefore, a part of the primary record of the case. No, this is true crime writing done with honesty, rather than being written by some shady cop, compromised D.A., or some other banal, money grubbing piece of shit.

"What a ride!" Jeane once emailed me, from Chicago, at O'Hare Airport between flights. This was fucking depraved in the context of what we'd been saying back-and-forth and when I was certain she was out of her fucking mind and suicidal. No one will ever know what this woman has put me through, and yet, I still pity her and mourn her death, for she was human, and they, her prosecutors and the U.S. Courts let her die.

Let me make this clear: You do not know as much as you think you do about this horrible case, the one that left a woman hanging by the neck by her own hand. I will terminate any conversation and/or interview the moment I detect someone's assuming that some mythical government operatives murdered Deborah Jeane Palfrey, because not only is it not factually true, it's completely baseless. Not one individual with an asshole (what they see in the mirror every morning) and an opinion (that has no value) has presented any solid evidence that Jeane was murdered. Her longest running legal counselor during most of the proceedings, Montgomery Blair Sibley, doesn't believe this "She were suicided" theory either, at least last I checked. Blair had a great deal of direct contact with Jeane, and I think he knows very well that there were some telltale signs. Maybe we miss things, I don't know, but I didn't from the moment I spoke with Palfrey on the telephone, this was someone rocketing towards imminent death. The book will address all of this in extremely graphic detail. Expect to shocked. No one will ever be as shocked as I was when I looked at the entire case and my experiences being involved in it, working for more than a few months doing general research for Jeane, advising her occasionally, offering my opinion when she hit me with questions, very specific ones mind you, and you should feel lucky for that. This book drained me of the last vestiges of my youth, and a whole lot more, but it was worth it. For a brief moment, we all charged the castles, and I'm not fucking around when I write castles, because we have a system of them in the US. (And yes, we can thank the American South for a lot of this.)

This book is bigger than me, and so are its themes. They're eternal ones. Until you confront power directly as I and others have, you just don't know the feeling of ecstasy it can bring, of liberation, a feeling of incredible elation that can only be called freedom. You have to liberate yourself, and we have to liberate each other. We still have a choice in America: Is going to be democracy, or tyranny? Jeane's case collided with the war on terror, she was in the thick of it, I am convinced. This wasn't merely a sex scandal, this was very big, bigger than you can possibly imagine. I can only hope that this account will stand as a document of the case and the era it took place in, a piece of the puzzle, part of a mosaic of our shared history, because this is a story that affects everyone directly, first in our pocketbooks. It's also a political testament. To have been part of a historical event was everything rolled into one. In the beginning, was the word.