Barret also appears to have taken significant poetic license with the woman who leads and ends her story, a person who is identified as Sloane and has since hired an attorney. After the story’s publication theinterrogating some of Barrett’s premises and found that, for instance, the writer erroneously mentioned a son that Sloane didn’t have and reported overhearing a conversation about “that kid Mohammed” at a tournament where no Mohammeds were to be found.
In response to these criticisms and the eventual retraction of the piece, Barrett invoked one standard defense and one unbelievable one: Even if a number of the story’s details were misstated, she wrote, the basic premise was true. The invention of Sloane’s son, she has said, was part of her attempt to mask the identity of a source—an oversight Sloane, though an attorney, has said the writer actually encouraged her to do.
There’s certainly a place for pseudonymous sourcing, and the magazine world does tend to encourage narrative flourish—but those conventions weren’t really established so Sloan could talk shit without impacting her kids’ college recruitment chances.With Sloan, as in her broader defense of the story, Barret vaguely harnesses cliches about journalism to make her mistakes appear routine.
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