Michael Crichton Exacts "Revenge"

4th\SW Quadrant The Year-End Mega Matric


By The Carpetbagger Report

TNR’s Michael Crowley wrote a terrific-but-scathing cover story in March, blasting novelist Michael Crichton for his climate-change denials, partisanship, anti-intellectualism, and general hackery. With this background in mind, Crowley was apparently taken aback when he picked up Crichton’s new novel and found a character named “Mick Crowley.”

Here’s an excerpt (warning: this is unpleasant, graphic stuff):

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. …

It turned out Crowley’s taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]–as was his custom–tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child’s mother as “fantasizing feminist fundamentalists” who had made up the whole thing from “their sick, twisted imaginations.” This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley’s penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler’s rectum.)

(The real-life Michael Crowley is also a Washington journalist and also graduated from Yale.)