The Journalist And The Voyeur: It’s Not So Easy When You’re The One Being Watched

Summary

Chameleon: “The Journalist and the Voyeur: It’s Not So Easy When You’re the One Being Watched”

Podcast: Chameleon
Host: Josh Dean
Episode Date: April 23, 2026
Production: Campside Media | Audiochuck

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the tangled, stranger-than-fiction tale behind journalist Gay Talese’s reporting on Gerald Foos—the motel owner who claimed decades of spying on guests through secret attic vents. Host Josh Dean, with guests including investigative reporter Paul Farhi and director Miles Kane, explores the consequences of believing a single, unreliable source, the ethical complications of true crime journalism, and what happens when a legendary journalist becomes part of the story’s deception.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to the Voyeur’s Motel Story

• Gay Talese, a celebrated narrative journalist, investigated Gerald Foos, an Aurora, Colorado motel owner who built hidden observation vents to spy on guests (02:11–03:47).
• Foos kept detailed diaries of his voyeuristic observations, which ultimately became a New Yorker article, a book (“The Voyeur’s Motel”), and a Netflix documentary.

Notable Quote:

“I know a married man and father of two who bought a 21-room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur... Never once during all those years was he caught.”
– Josh Dean reading from Talese’s original piece (03:02)

2. The Motivation & Dynamic Between Source and Journalist

• Foos’s motivation: Desired notoriety as a “sex researcher,” hoping to reframe his compulsions as sociological work (05:16–06:24).
• Talese’s attraction: Saw in Foos the promise of a unique, shocking story; Foos saw Talese as his route to fame.

Notable Quotes:

“I was actually a researcher... I did something that no one else had ever accomplished or ever did.”
– Gerald Foos (06:01)
“Foos was this hero of his... he saw [Talese] as his chance at fame.”
– Miles Kane, co-director, “Voyeur” (05:16)

3. Cracks in the Story: Paul Farhi Investigates

• Paul Farhi (Washington Post) was skeptical of the story’s reliance on a single, self-interested source (07:18–08:11).
• Farhi found glaring inconsistencies, notably with a supposed murder Foos claimed to witness. The real murder happened 10 miles away, at a different time and hotel, suggesting Foos had conflated or fabricated the account (09:29–10:50).
• Further investigation revealed that Foos had sold the motel before the dates claimed in his diaries—making some of his “observations” impossible (13:06–13:49).

Notable Quotes:

“Well, the records simply weren’t lost. I was able to find, very simply that there was a murder that fits the description... but it occurred about 10 miles away... about eight days before the murder that Gerald Foos says occurred at his motel.”
– Paul Farhi (10:50)
“Some things described in the book could not have happened at all because he wasn’t even at the motel.”
– Paul Farhi (13:37)

4. Journalistic Ethics and the Single-Source Trap

• Talese admitted to observing a couple through the attic vent—raising further ethical questions (15:28–15:44).
• Farhi critiques the heavy reliance on an unreliable, single source:
  “The old rule in journalism, as Gay Talese knows very well, is if your mother says she loves you, go check it out and get another source.” (14:35)
• The central premise was true (Foos was a voyeur), but many details were unverifiable or false.
• Even the New Yorker and Grove Atlantic (publisher) ultimately stood by the story’s core, while acknowledging the source’s unreliability (21:57–23:09).

5. The Diaries and Big Fish Tales

• Foos’s diaries were polished, often grandiose, with “strange charts” comparing sexual statistics—a pseudo-scientific veneer that masked embellishment (23:09–25:19).
• Miles Kane likens Foos’s life stories to those in “Big Fish,” suggesting self-mythologizing is central to his identity.

Notable Quote:

“These are kind of big fish tales... he presented that [the diaries] as fact. Every word here is my experience. And while I don’t think Gay totally believed that, it was intriguing...”
– Miles Kane (23:44)

6. When the Journalist Gets Conned

• After being confronted by Farhi’s reporting, Talese momentarily disavowed his book’s credibility, only to later walk back (14:06–14:56, 25:19–26:40).
• The story highlights what happens when journalists want a story to be true:
  “There’s another element here, I think, that every journalist is susceptible to, which is I want this story to be true. It’s such a good story. And please don’t tell me that reality is going to intrude on my great story.”
  – Paul Farhi (36:02)

7. The Subject’s Self-Image and Grandiosity

• Foos appeared to genuinely believe his own stories, possibly blurring fantasy and reality.
• His wife, Anita, offered the bluntest verdict:
  “Gerald, you’re a pervert. We all know this score.” (29:01)

Notable Moment:

• The directors recall showing the finished documentary to both subjects separately, seeing Foos take pleasure in his own myths being brought to life, even as the narrative falls apart (40:36–41:40).

8. Cautionary Journalism Lessons

• Farhi underscores the dangers of reporting from a single, uncorroborated source, urging the need to “keep turning over the past and examining what you think is true before you tell people it’s true” (43:03–44:01).
• Dean and guests reflect on the broader issue of being complicit in a source’s con, especially when the narrative is irresistible (34:57–35:33).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the ethical breach:
  “If I wanted to write about bank robbers, I’m not going to go along with bank robbers to rob a bank. But that’s effectively what Gay Talese had done in this book.”
  – Paul Farhi (15:44)

• On being conned by con men:
  “The problem with good stories is sometimes they’re not as good as you think they are. And when you blow past the things that should make you stop and say, hold on, you are now complicit in the con.”
  – Paul Farhi (34:57)

• On memory and self-delusion:
  “I do believe that he honestly believed all his assertions. We all do that... Did it actually happen the way you remember it? That often is where the thing falls apart.”
  – Paul Farhi (41:50)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:11–03:47 — Introduction to Talese’s article and Foos’s voyeuristic activities
• 05:16–06:24 — Foos’s motives and self-perception
• 07:18–10:10 — Paul Farhi’s skepticism and murder investigation
• 13:06–13:49 — Discovery of property sale undermining Foos’s claims
• 15:28–15:44 — Talese’s own participation in voyeurism
• 23:09–25:19 — The role and fabrication of Foos’s diaries
• 29:01–29:10 — Anita Foos’s blunt assessment of her husband
• 34:57–35:33 — Farhi on the risk of journalists becoming part of the con
• 36:02 — The seduction of wanting a great story to be true

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Structure & Relationship of the Story

• The Voyeur’s Motel is as much a story about the stories we choose to believe as about the acts described within—a meditation on trust, ethics, journalistic diligence, and the power dynamics between celebrated writers and self-mythologizing subjects.
• Both Talese and Foos become “watched” in their own ways, each desiring and ultimately resenting the scrutiny (44:56–45:49).

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Conclusion & Final Reflections

Chameleon’s episode is an exploration of how journalists can be seduced by their sources, the reputational risks involved, the vital importance of verification, and the human impulse to embellish. The relationship between Talese and Foos becomes its own kind of con, raising uncomfortable questions about credibility, complicity, and what we risk in pursuit of extraordinary narratives.

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For listeners seeking a nuanced critique of media, storytelling, and the dance of deception between journalist and subject, this is essential listening.

Transcript

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[Josh Dean]

hello.

[Paul Farhi]

What is.

[Josh Dean]

What do you want me to say?

[Interviewer/Host]

What's going on?

[Rasha Pecorero]

And it's just Chameleon, Chameleon, Chameleon Weekly.

[Narrator/Voiceover]

A lot of reporters think, you know, when they leave the story, it's all over. Sometimes it's just beginning.

[Josh Dean]

Gay Tales is one of the most famous narrative journalists of all time, and he was well into the twilight of an illustrious career when he turned his attention to a whale of a story. His white whale of a story. One he'd been chasing for a good chunk of his career. It would start with a feature in the New Yorker, followed by a book, and then a NETFLIX documentary called Voyeur, which you're hearing a little bit of right now.

[Narrator/Voiceover]

I'm pursuing a story about a man named Gerald Foose who decided he wanted to buy a motel for the express purpose of using it to watch everything that was being done in Private, in

[Josh Dean]

other words, to be a peeping Tom, a voyeur. The voyeur's Motel Tales 13,000 word piece about this man, Gerald Foos, appeared in the April 4, 2016 issue of the New Yorker and began like this. I know a married man and father of two who bought a 21 room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur. With the assistance of his wife, he cut rectangular holes measuring 6 by 14 inches in the ceilings of more than a dozen rooms. Then he covered the openings with louvered aluminum screens that looked like ventilation grills but were actually observation vents that allowed him, while he knelt in the attic, to see his guests in the rooms below. He watched them for decades while keeping an exhaustive written history of what he saw and heard. Never once during all those years was he caught.

[Narrator/Voiceover]

I mean, it's just, you can't make this up. You can't make it up.

[Josh Dean]

It had actually all begun more than 30 years earlier, back in January of 1980, with a letter from this guy in Denver, Gerald Foos. Foos had heard that Talese was working on a book about sex in America called Thy Neighbor's Wife. The voyeurism, which he described in detail, was his method of gathering data of his own. He'd bought a motel called the Manor House in the Denver suburb Aurora back in the 1960s to conduct his research. Tales flew to Denver to meet this man who offered to take the writer to the motel to confirm what he was saying on the condition that he could only report on it anonymously. So Talese did go to the motel. He met Foos, then wife, and even went up on the secret catwalk above the rooms where he observed one couple in action. But Talese didn't write about it at the time because he wasn't willing to grant this apparent deviant, a man who'd been violating the privacy of motel customers for a decade, plus the luxury of anonymity. The two stayed sporadically in touch. And it took Gerald Foose more than three decades to get comfortable going on the record about his perversions. Foos was getting up in years. Both men were now in their 80s and he was ready to be acknowledged for his work. That's what Miles Kane, who co directed the Voyeur doc with Josh Corey, thinks

[Miles Kane]

gay Tales was this hero of his. And also, I think seemingly he saw gay as his chance at fame or notoriety. And I think it's clear that ever since he reached out to him in 1980, you know, his pitch was I'M not a pervert and an addict. You write about sex and taboo and it's considered high literary commentary. I want to be part of that canon. I'm a sex researcher. I have invaluable sociological research. So he really saw gay as this really important figure and potential catalyst to his own fame or notoriety.

[Josh Dean]

You know, here's Foos in his own words.

[Interviewer/Host]

I think I was attempting to gain some kind of notoriety because I did something that no one else had ever accomplished or ever did. I hope that they don't. The only thing that they have in their mind is the fact that I may be a pervert and a peeping Tom, because I wasn't that I was actually a researcher.

[Josh Dean]

Taliza's story made quite a splash. It became news, especially in Denver.

[Paul Farhi]

This one is just chilling. An Aurora motel owner watched his guests in some of the most intimate moments without them even knowing this. Now this wasn't just once. It went on for decades.

[Josh Dean]

Foos apparently began watching guests in 1966, the New Yorker magazine article says.

[Narrator/Voiceover]

Between Thanksgiving and January of his first

[Josh Dean]

year, Foos observed 46 sex acts. He kept notes. They were very polite, very organized couple with male companion, he said about one threesome. Steven Spielberg optioned the rights to Talese's article and forthcoming book, and a prestige director, the Oscar winner Sam Mendez, agreed to direct a film adaptation. But someone else read the voyeur story and also couldn't stop thinking about it. Paul Fari, an investigative reporter at the Washington Post.

[Paul Farhi]

I grew up reading Gay Tales. Great admiration for him. I think he's a great journalist, a legend. And reading this I was a bit surprised because it was based on the say so of this one guy, Gerald Foose. That isn't to say that a single source story is necessarily wrong, but a single source story is often distorted in some ways because it based on the memory and the say so of one individual. And so much of this was dependent on Gerald Fuss's recollections, his diaries, his journal. And it seemed quite a bit credulous to me that a guy as good as Gay Talese would take this guy at face value.

[Josh Dean]

This is Chameleon, a show about people who choose to ignore the line between truth and fiction. And I'm Josh Dean. This week, the story of the journalist and the voyeur and what it often means when something seems too good to be true.

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[Josh Dean]

Chameleon Chameleon this is Chameleon Weekly. Palfrey devoured all 13,000 words at the Voyeur's Motel and was riveted. This was incredible stuff, possibly too incredible. He fixated in particular on the story's most outrageous and disturbing omission.

[Paul Farhi]

He writes that a young woman was strangled by a man in one of the motel rooms and that he witnessed this.

[Josh Dean]

Not just that either. As Foos told it, he'd observed the man selling drugs from the room, drugs that he had hidden in a heating vent in the wall, and Foos didn't approve. So when the man left, he entered, retrieved the drugs and flushed them. Later, Foos heard the man fighting with a woman and went to his perch where he saw the altercation get physical. The man, he says, strangled her, though he claimed that she was still alive when he slipped out. Later, a maid found the woman dead in the room.

[Paul Farhi]

He says that he went to the police and told them anonymously that he had witnessed this murder, and the police checked it out.

[Josh Dean]

Tale writes that he tried to verify the story and had spoken to various police officers in Aurora, but none of them could find any record of the case. The coroner's office also had no records.

[Paul Farhi]

He reported instead of pausing and saying that maybe Gerald Foose is not the most credible source. Gay Tolis writes this off as the records were probably lost.

[Josh Dean]

That didn't sit right with Paul Fari. He decided to pick up the task himself. He made some calls.

[Paul Farhi]

Well, the records simply weren't lost. I was able to find, very simply that there was a murder that fits the description of the one that Gerald Clus passed off. It occurred about 10 miles away in Denver in a hotel in Denver about eight days before the murder that Gerald Foose says occurred at his motel. In fact, the circumstances of the murder were very similar to what Joe Foose described. Now, how could it be that there's a record of a murder in a hotel 10 miles away that fits the exact same description of the one Gerald Foose described? Well, the answer to that is Joe Foose probably made up the story and use the actual murder in Denver as a description of something that he witnessed. So that was a complete red flag to me. I wrote a story about this missing murder and left it at that.

[Josh Dean]

Fari reached out to Tales for comment by email and the author declined. He said that he was busy and worried about being misunderstood. This voyeur story is over with me, he said. I did my best as a reporter. I wrote as well as I could. Fari also reached out to Gerald Foos, who first declined to comment, then said he was, quote, aware of the other murder and that the cops supposedly told him that the murder Forry was talking about had nothing to do with the one he claimed to have witnessed in his motel. Three months later, Tolese's book, also called the Voyeur's Motel, was published and Paul Farry read that too.

[Paul Farhi]

And there are significant other red flags in the account. I set out to write another story about what was wrong with and some of the red flags inherent in the book because at this point, after reading it, I don't necessarily believe much of the account of Joe Foose. And I am also starting to wonder whether Gay Talese let him run on without ever checking anything that he says he witnessed and experienced. As part of this book.

[Josh Dean]

Fari went back to the murder. He called the Aurora Police Department again and talked to a different detective.

[Paul Farhi]

And the first thing he says to me is, I can't believe you guys in the media are still writing about this because we found records in the property database in Aurora that indicated that Foose didn't own the motel after 1980, that he had sold it. And I was immediately stopped by this

[Josh Dean]

because Foos, in his diary and in Tales's telling, claimed to have been using the motel for spying on customers. Throughout that period, some of the things

[Paul Farhi]

described in the book could not have happened at all because he wasn't even at the motel, couldn't have had access to the motel, and that he was just basically making up stuff about what he was witnessing.

[Josh Dean]

This Tafari was proof that Foos was a fabulist who was in some cases fully making things up.

[Paul Farhi]

And again, De Talese had accepted it without real shoe leather reporting. To check into the credibility of this

[Josh Dean]

account, Fari reached back out to Talese by phone. This time I should not have believed a word the author told Fari after being shown the property records of the motel's sale. I'm not going to promote this book. How dare I promote it when its credibility is down the toilet, which I thought was rather strong because the central premise of the book was true. Gerald Foose did buy a motel to spy on people, and did it for many, many years. Talese had witnessed that himself.

[Paul Farhi]

He said, the source of my book is certifiably unreliable. He's a dishonorable man. I did the best I could on this book, but maybe it wasn't enough. And to that I would say, yes, it wasn't enough. Because, you know, the old rule in journalism, as gay Talies knows very well, is if your mother says she loves you, go check it out and get another source.

[Josh Dean]

What seemed clear to Fari is that Talese had cut corners or at least had put way too much faith in the credibility of his main source, his only source, a man who had pitched himself as the subject of a book to one of the most famous writers in America.

[Paul Farhi]

He didn't really do a lot of reporting. He had met Gerald Foose just once in 1980. He had gone to the motel, had seen the catwalk, and in fact had gone up into it and spied on various people at the motel to effectively check out the story.

[Josh Dean]

Which is, by the way, also a little problematic because Tales didn't just tour the catwalk and confirm the existence of the viewing port into the rooms below. He, by his own admission, watched a couple in one of the rooms having sex.

[Paul Farhi]

I would say that's a breach of ethical behavior. If I wanted to write about bank robbers, I'm not going to go along with bank robbers to rob a bank. But that's effectively what Gates Elise had done in this book.

[Josh Dean]

This was hardly the biggest problem with the Voyage Motel. The biggest problem was Gerald Foose.

[Paul Farhi]

Do I think that Foos made up the whole story? No, I don't. I think there were many parts of it that were legitimate that he had witnessed over time. But he's not a credible source, and there's reason to question his entire story.

[Josh Dean]

Gaetaliz grapples with this very issue at times. In the Voyeur documentary.

[Narrator/Voiceover]

You have no trust between your source and yourself. You're in real trouble.

[Josh Dean]

And he lays out the arrangement as he sees it quite plainly.

[Narrator/Voiceover]

We have a deal. This man, Gerald Foose, and I have a deal. That is for me to tell the truth and him to live with it.

[Josh Dean]

One of the most telling moments in the doc is when Foos, who is an eccentric obsessive across the board, takes Talese into his basement to show off his baseball card collection, literally millions of cards arranged in boxes that fill the room. That collection, he tells Talese, is worth a fortune. And then he picks up a card that he claims is worth $500,000 or more.

[Narrator/Voiceover]

He has these prices he keeps quoting, and I don't know, is this guy nuts? But on the other hand, I don't know. I'm not a collector. How do I know what these things are worth? How do I know if this guy is totally exaggerating? I don't know. If I reflect that he's a braggart, then it might reflect on all that I believed of what he saw. I can definitely testify to the accuracy of the room, of the. I mean, the attic. I know that was. I saw it, I was there. But the rest of it I'm getting from him. And he's my single source. And you're unwise to have one source.

[Josh Dean]

Fari found one more very obvious lie in the book. Foos told Talese that his son had once lived in the same apartment as the most infamous former resident of Aurora, Colorado, James Holmes, the mass shooter who killed 12 people in a movie theater during a showing of the Dark Knight rises back in 2012.

[Paul Farhi]

Check the property records. That didn't happen, and I'm not saying that terribly relevant to the story of the Voyers Motel per se, but again, it reflects on the credibility of the main source that he was a liar. Basically.

[Josh Dean]

Talese did spot some of this himself. He acknowledged in both the excerpt and the book having found inconsistencies in Foo's story, starting with the journal.

[Paul Farhi]

For instance, one of the entries was dated 1966, which should have stopped him and said, hold on a second, how could it be 1966? You didn't buy the motel until 1969. He notes at times in a sort of boiled plate fashion that A, I couldn't check out everything that Foose told me, and B, some of it I have my doubts about.

[Josh Dean]

I have no doubt that Foos was an epic voyeur, Talese wrote, but he could sometimes be an inaccurate and unreliable narrator. I cannot vouch for every detail that he recounts in his manuscript.

[Paul Farhi]

Instead of just a paragraph of doubt, it should have been pages upon pages of doubt.

[Josh Dean]

Fari also confronted Gerald Fuze with his findings that certain key assertions in the book were just not true had been proven as such.

[Paul Farhi]

First of all, he said, I've never told a lie. I've never knowingly told a lie, so any accusation to the contrary is untrue. But he said that after selling the motel, he had lived in it and therefore had access to the catwalk during the period where he didn't own it, which was disputed by the guy he

[Josh Dean]

sold the motel to Earl Ballard is that guy's name.

[Paul Farhi]

I spoke with him as well. He said now Foose was not on the property. He had no access to the property. Foose is a liar.

[Josh Dean]

Not that this guy is the most credible source either.

[Paul Farhi]

The guy he sold it to was a co criminal, I guess you'd say. He had gone into the catwalk with Foose back in the 1970s. He himself was a voyeur and had some sort of falling out or troubled history with Foos.

[Josh Dean]

Fari's reporting on the voyeur's motel got a lot of attention at the time in 2016, and that was gratifying. But the idea that he was investigating and to some extent embarrassing a man whose work and career he admired felt less great.

[Paul Farhi]

I have to tell you, I kind of felt sorry for him because again, he's a legend. And here I am, more or less a nobody calling him up and saying, hey legend, your work is shoddy. When you see what he missed, which was so easy to find, you wonder how come. And then here's the worst part of it, I think, is it makes you reflect on what he has written previously. Some of the best new journalism work from the 1960s on. Was he a shoddy reporter altogether or was just this one a one off that he swung and missed on? I don't know, and I don't want to trash his reputation, but I will say narrowly in this case, he certainly had a lot to defend.

[Josh Dean]

So what did Gerald Foos actually do? We'll get into that question after the break.

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[Josh Dean]

You're listening to Chameleon, the weekly. You could make a case that Gates Lees isn't the only one who should have caught Gerald Foos in his lies. That excerpt was published in the New Yorker, a magazine that prides itself on its rigorous fact checking, but editor David Remnick stood by the story, saying this to the New York Times in the form of a statement. The central fact of the piece that Gerald Foos was in the late 60s and 70s. A voyeur spying on the guests in his motel is not in doubt in the article. The fact that he could sometimes prove an unreliable and inaccurate narrator is also something that Gay Talese makes clear to the reader repeatedly and is part of the way Foos is characterized throughout the article. Grove Atlantic, Talese's publisher, also came out in support. So while Talese had temporarily disowned the book in his first conversation with Fari, he ultimately walked that back and everyone tale's the New Yorker and Grove Atlantic adopted the same position. The central premise of the book is true, but the main source also can't be totally trusted, nor can his notebooks. Here's how Miles Cain, co director of the Doc, looks at those diaries, the

[Miles Kane]

diaries that we see and that Gay uses and we're kind of using as a source document. There was a sense that this was sort of a repackaged publication that he had consolidated from his years of writing in pencil. And I think it was kind of clear and not necessarily a bad thing, but there was a reality that you felt these are kind of big fish tales.

[Josh Dean]

Big Fish, if you don't know, is a reference to a 2003 Tim Burton movie based on a 1998 novel about a dying father who tells his son colorful and wildly exaggerated stories about his life.

[Miles Kane]

Like everything has kind of been considered. And then what he chose to put in the diaries were kind of, let's call it a best of, but it was, it was in a scientific looking format. Name, age, race, like all these kind of facts and figures and then a description of the things he saw. And then occasionally these strange charts of, you know, comparing how many male orgasms to female orgasms or just weird stuff that's like, okay, I mean, maybe a sociologist could do something with this. But then how did you collect this? It was. It's obviously a flawed document, but fascinating. I mean, he and Gay kind of as these shadow yin and yang characters who in this scenario of this Voyer's motel story need each other for various reasons. We have to frame that this guy is not 100%. But I think what the trap was were the voyeur's attempt at putting these things in black and white. You know, the diaries. It's like he presented that as this is fact. Every word here is my experience. And while I don't think Gay totally believed that, it was intriguing to talk about this, this sort of wellspring, this diary that already was sort of a bit of a poison pill, you know, it was like, ooh, the diaries. But they're not all correct. But you should believe a lot of it because I think he definitely did this stuff. It was just like a bit of a trap.

[Josh Dean]

Once more, Talese decided to stand by his book. He took his case to the public. He did a series of media spots and made these same points that most of the book takes place before Foos sold the hotel. He also claimed to have called Earl Ballard, the guy who bought it, after Farry made him aware of the sale and was told that Foos did still have at least sporadic access to that catwalk. But the murder, that was trickier. Here's what he told WNYC when a host pressed him on the question of why, if he believed that Foos was confessing to having witnessed a murder, he didn't immediately report it.

[Narrator/Voiceover]

How do I justify this to you or to anybody? Well, as a reporter, I protect sources. I once dealt with the mafia for six, seven years. I protect sources. I was dealing with killers and I wasn't calling the cops. My whole life, though, not to just. But let me tell you, has always been kind of a reporter. I'm less a person than I am a reporter. I keep secrets, respect. When people tell me it's off the record, it's off the record. And I was off the record for 32 years with this voyeur, Gerald Foos. I kept my word to the voyeur, who was a despicable guy. But I've dealt with despicable people, including killers in the movie before. I've been through this. That's no excuse, but that's the way I am.

[Josh Dean]

A journalist's job is to report, and to the extent it's possible, be objective, of course, that's almost impossible in practice. Every decision you make when writing a story influences the reader's perspective. And I certainly didn't expect Paul Farhi, who is not a psychologist, to speak for Gerald Foos. But I did wonder if he had an operating theory for why Foos. The man's story, even without the lies, was outlandish. It would have warranted a book. But he just couldn't stop at the truth.

[Paul Farhi]

This guy Foose wanted to be a big deal. I think he contacted Talise right after the publication of Thy Neighbor's Wife, which was a big bestseller. Foose contacts him after this and he calls himself a sex researcher. Well, it's a bit of an inflated title. He's not a sex researcher, he's a voyeur. He's a peeping tom. I don't know if it's a misdemeanor or a felony, but he committed it over and over again according to his own account. So there's a kind of grandiosity to this guy Foos.

[Josh Dean]

A grandiosity that covers for the darker truth. Gerald Foos wanted to be recognized as an important man. Someone who had studied sex in America and had a body of work to contribute to the science, I guess. But that's not what Gerald Foos actually was. Here's the film's co director, Josh Corey.

[Anonymous Parent]

There's a great moment, it's a quiet moment in the documentary where Gerald and Anita are sitting at the table and after everything has come out and Gerald's reflecting and he's like, you know, with all this information out there, people are just gonna think some sort of a pervert.

[Interviewer/Host]

This is pointing direct fingers at the devoyer as being just nothing but a creep.

[Paul Farhi]

Well, huh, you are.

[Interviewer/Host]

Oh God, Dana H. Well, I guess so.

[Anonymous Parent]

Yes, he enjoyed these things, but he wasn't a pervert. He was a researcher. And it's a sly he told himself and this lie he pitched to gay and through the telling of that over many years it just became more and more fabricated and embellished and bigger than

[Miles Kane]

life and perfect for you know who else than your partner? His wife Anita. The one who can break through and be like Gerald, you're a pervert.

[Anonymous Parent]

We all know this score.

[Miles Kane]

He's like, you got me. Yeah, I am. I am.

[Josh Dean]

It's very likely that Gerald Foos has always been a fabulist. But Miles Kane thinks the gay tales factor mattered a lot here. Foos had sought this journalist out specifically. So we don't just have a source who's prone to exaggeration. We have a source who also needs to impress the journalist he idolizes. The journalist he hand selected to talk to.

[Miles Kane]

He was enamored with gay talese and the writing. And I think there's a feeling of well, I better give this guy some good stuff. Not in even I want to lie to him, but just I got to put my best foot forward. If you're a guy who actually spent years up in this motel, probably watching mostly just people's boring private lives, but occasionally getting these sexual scenes. Yeah, I think the urge is like cut out everything else. Let me pull out the most intriguing tantalizing thing because that's what people, especially this writer is going to want to hear. So there was a certain sense of like, almost like him trying to brand himself, brand this whole story of like into the most interesting and tantalizing material,

[Josh Dean]

including some material that wasn't true, like a murder that Foos hadn't just witnessed. A murder that, as he was telling it, he may have helped set in motion.

[Miles Kane]

It's such an intriguing story. It's amazing. It's sort of like narratively it brings it to this moral edge where you think as bad as watching people what happens when. And obviously gay also keyed into that of what an amazing narrative twist.

[Josh Dean]

You know, I mean, I get it. A twist like this that the voyeur witnessed not just lots of sex, but also a murder is such a stakes raiser. But you have to be extra wary when the circumstances are that only he saw it. That's what Paul Farry keeps coming back to.

[Paul Farhi]

When you predicate a story on a single source, in many ways you have to take their word for it. These events happen because I witnessed them. And I am telling you that I witnessed them. It isn't to say that your account is wrong, but here's the problem with a single source account. Your memory fades. Your understanding of events is rather siloed. Your basic credibility is in question to the extent that it requires corroboration. It requires reporting that suggests you are actually did experience the things you experienced.

[Josh Dean]

This is one of the trickiest parts of reporting on sensitive stories. Paul raised the example of the flood of Me Too stories that followed in the wake of the New York Times investigation into the crimes of Harvey Weinstein. Those stories were almost all based on accounts from women who'd been abused, typically in private with no witnesses. In nearly every case, it's an allegation you can't objectively prove. There are no witnesses.

[Paul Farhi]

So if person A says, this person sexually harassed me on this date and these events occurred, what evidence can you marshal to suggest that this person's story, if not absolutely true, is certainly credible?

[Josh Dean]

That's a journalist's responsibility. What do you do? You look for contemporaneous accounts. Did the accuser tell anyone at the time? A friend or a family member? Did she write it down in an email or diary?

[Paul Farhi]

Now go back to the Voyager's motel. Did Talis check out this guy's story? Well, not very well, as it turns out. He took his word for it. That's where you get into danger, dangerous territory. Is he making up stuff? Quite possibly he was. What was he making up? Well, you know, for instance, the murder. The murder was easily checked. Those records exist forever. And if the central dramatic moment of this book is predicated on something that didn't happen. It bears on all the other events that he says did occur.

[Josh Dean]

What's most surprising to me about this story isn't that an odd man, a guy who buys a motel specifically to become a peeping tom, who calls himself a sex researcher might be a bit of a fabulist. It's that the journalist who decided to devote a book to that man didn't see the cracks in his story and drive a wedge into them. Because a book that tells Foos's story will also pick apart his lies is, in my opinion, still a very worthy project. It's honestly a lot more layered and interesting.

[Paul Farhi]

You would get deeper into the character of this man. It's like, what motivates him. Not only is he a Voyer, which is kind of a, you know, oddly fascinating kind of instinct, but what motivates him to be a liar about the weird thing he's doing. And the whole ball of wax becomes a kind of dive into the deeper character and psychosis, if you will, personality, at least of an individual. And I think actually Gay Talese is quite equipped as a reporter to do that kind of story.

[Josh Dean]

Anyone who listens to this show regularly knows that these are the questions we ask every week. Obviously, Chameleon exists in part to tell holy shit. Stranger than fiction stories, but it's also a larger project, I guess, a journey into the lives and to the extent that we can see in there the minds of the world's most compelling liars.

[Paul Farhi]

Why do we like con men? We like con men because they trick us in interesting ways. They play to our prejudices. They play to titillation. They play to greed. As a reporter, they play to a desire for a good story. We all want good stories. The problem with good stories is sometimes they're not as good as you think they are. And when you blow past the things that should make you stop and say, hold on, you are now complicit in the con. And that's not what journalists and journalism should be.

[Josh Dean]

And that gets at what's most interesting about the Voyeur documentary. It's really about the relationship between a journalist and his source.

[Miles Kane]

He and Gay, kind of as these shadow yin and yang characters who kind of in this scenario of this Voyer's motel story, need each other for various

[Josh Dean]

reasons, you know, and the negotiations the two go into in the creation of a story, one that they both have a vested interest in.

[Paul Farhi]

There's another element here, I think, that every journalist is susceptible to, which is I want this story to be true. It's Such a good story. And please don't tell me that reality is going to intrude on my great story. That impulse is very, very dangerous. And that's why there are editors and readers, frankly, to tell you that you got to get over yourself, that you have to do more than just root for the story. You've got to root for the facts underlying the story. But we're all driven by wanting the story to be as good as it can be. And we don't really want the facts to get in the way sometimes. And it's not because we're untruthful. It's because it's so good. You don't want things to stop it from being as good as it is. But that's a very dangerous instinct and you have to overcome it.

[Josh Dean]

Paul Fari isn't perfect. No reporter is. We all make mistakes. And understanding that is actually a key to doing this job responsibly.

[Paul Farhi]

I got to tell you, on the eve of my story being published, I still have that sensation of, oh God, did I get something wrong? You have that anxiety in the hours before publication that you've screwed up something very, very badly and it makes you nervous. But I would also say that's a really good instinct because maybe you did screw up something and maybe you missed something in the reporting that's going to come back to bite you. In the Internet age, stories can go not just to the readers of a printed newspaper, which is a relatively tight and small world, but to the entire world. The entire world will see your story. And believe me, there's no reporter who knows more than the crowd knows.

[Josh Dean]

Myles Cain and Josh Corey went to Denver to be there filming with Gerald Foos and his second wife, Anita. When the New Yorker story first dropped, Gerald was excited, the talk of the town.

[Miles Kane]

And within seconds of it publishing, he's starting to regret his decision. You know, and we're watching this on

[Josh Dean]

camera because surprise people didn't immediately celebrate Gerald Foos or his work as a sex researcher.

[Miles Kane]

I think the film's perspective is for the first half of the movie, Gay Tales is your protagonist. He's the one you trust. Gerald's this kind of wild card and a little gross seeming or, you know, he's got quite a history and yeah, not trusting of him. And then emotionally it really does kind of, if not flip. You really do start to. We started to empathize with Gerald and Anita especially being there with them when they were at their, literally their most vulnerable. I mean, they were starting to get death threat, phone Calls, you know, it blew up. Which for most of us is like, well, what did you. What did you expect? I mean, they weren't going to have a parade, you know.

[Josh Dean]

The film observed Gerald Fu seeing the biggest of his lies for the first time after 36 years of anticipation. The lie about who he really was.

[Anonymous Parent]

I mean, I think he's a pervert in the attic who spent a great period of time jerking off and being weird. That's what I think of him.

[Josh Dean]

The film also observed Gaetelese grappling with a truth that seemed to be nearly as painful. Piers attacking the thing he cared about the most, his journalism. Gerald worshiped Gay until he actually read the story he'd been waiting to see for decades. One of the things that upset him is that Talese talked about his baseball card collection and even suggested that maybe one motive for going public was to increase the value of that collection. He gets angry about this on screen.

[Interviewer/Host]

You don't write about a man's money. I mean, I'm really mad at Gay. I'm mad as hell at him because he should have consulted me. I'm the guy, not him. He's made this think point, hey, I'm the big star here. You know, I'm the big star. You know, I've written all these books.

[Miles Kane]

It was a wild experience. And again, just exactly what we wanted, which was, let's make a story about this voyeur and this journalist, but also, let's. Let's make a story about the journalistic process unfolding in real time, which you don't get to see often.

[Josh Dean]

Miles and Josh screened the film for both of its main characters separately. They showed it to Gaye first in

[Miles Kane]

New York at the end of the screening. His review was. It was tough but fair, which we

[Anonymous Parent]

felt was not as good as you're gonna get.

[Josh Dean]

Then they went back to Denver to screen it for Gerald and Anita. Gerald had had time by this point to get through the blowback. The threats had subsided. Miles sat right next to the voyeur in an otherwise empty theater, and he seemed to really enjoy a movie that isn't exactly flattering.

[Miles Kane]

Gerald tells a great story. I mean, these are big fish tales at this point, so he has them dialed in. In the film, we sort of echo that telling of it, and it's sort of larger than life, and we use these miniatures, but you see all these, you know, two men dressed in sheep costumes and all this stuff he claims he saw. And we fully visualize it almost for him, even though we knew the whole thing. Was going to sort of come apart at the seams a bit. So for him, I think it was like, yeah, watching this amazing. His words brought to life.

[Josh Dean]

It may even have made his exaggerations seem truer in his own mind because as Paul Farry points out, it's possible that Foos wasn't even lying intentionally.

[Paul Farhi]

I do believe that he honestly believed all his assertions. We all do that. We all think that we did something that we're proud of or that we experience that we know intimately. Did it actually happen? The way you remember it that often is, is where the thing falls apart. I'll tell you just one quick anecdote in my own life. I did an interview back in college with George Carlin.

[Josh Dean]

Carlin was one of the most famous and influential stand up comics of the 70s and 80s. He died in 2008.

[Paul Farhi]

He was another idol of mine for the school paper and it was recorded and syndicated. A couple years ago I was watching HBO documentary on George Carlin's life by Judd Apatow. And toward the end of the first episode he's being interviewed. And for a second I'm stopped by this voice. And within about four or five seconds I realized who this voice is interviewing him, it's me.

[Josh Dean]

Judd Apatow had found this recording in Carlin's archive, One of probably hundreds of hours of interviews from the comedian's life.

[Paul Farhi]

And I said, yeah, I remember that interview so clearly. I did it when I was a senior in college and we did it outside on the lawn by the school steps and blah, blah, blah. Someone went into the archives and found the story that I had written based on this interview. It wasn't when I was a senior, it was when I was a sophomore. It was two years earlier. And other details that I quote unquote remembered about this interview were completely contradicted by the real time story that I had written after I had done the interview. So even in my own life, you mess up details. And that was a moment to say, don't just trust, but verify things you think are true. And there's a limit to how far you'll go. You drive yourself crazy, but nevertheless, it's a very good instinct to keep turning over the past and examining what you think is true before you tell people it's true.

[Josh Dean]

After Paul Fary's stories and the controversy over the book's accuracy, Gay Talese sat for an interview with New York magazine writer Boris Kochka in a room with Talese's wife and two representatives of his publisher. He was alternately humbled and cantankerous. And at the end, when a publicist told him it was time to stop, Tale had one final thing to say to the you're gonna tell me tomorrow whenever you read this guy's stuff. See, I told you. Keep your fucking mouth shut and don't try to explain. But I'm sorry. Kill the interviews from now on and you could this might be the last one. I don't care. I'm sick of having to be both honest and have to shape up to this piece. PR level of being careful. I'm not careful. If I was careful, I wouldn't have written anything at all. It made me think of the end of the voyeur doc, which gives its final words to gay talies too.

[Narrator/Voiceover]

When I got permission for you to come down the first day you arrived, he started talking freely. I thought, does he know what he's doing? Does he know what he's doing? He opened up his home to you, his bedroom to you, his wife to you. He liked the publicity of the camera. The camera turned him on. And there it was, the reverse procedure. He's now being watched

[Josh Dean]

for very different reasons. Both men learned the same lesson. Be careful what you wish for. Scrutiny is very rarely comfortable. Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Audio Chuck. It's written and hosted by me, Josh Dean, and produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Siminoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimmack. Themed by Ewin lytramuin and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Matt Sher and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help. If you have any feedback, tips or story ideas, you can email [e-mail] or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 201-743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

[Ashley Flowers]

I think Chuck would approve.

[Miles Kane]

So good, so good, so good.

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[Josh Dean]

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[Ashley Flowers]

Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers and on my podcast the Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. Because these stories deserve to be heard and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers, are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to the Deck now. Wherever you get your podcasts.