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| Heidi J. T. Exner |
About two-thirds into the documentary, the discussion turns to his brush with the forged Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy letters. It is a sharp case study in what happens when a powerful narrative gets out ahead of the evidence, and how to course correct without pretending the danger never existed. It struck me that this scandal serves as a cautionary tale and a rough ethical blueprint for lawyers, who live with the same tension between aggressive storytelling and disciplined truth-seeking.
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Yet in both fields, the same narrative-building power that makes them effective can also distort objectivity when professionals shape facts to fit a preferred storyline rather than allowing the evidence to lead. This tension between advocacy and truth-seeking runs through both professions and directly affects their credibility.
Parallel advocacy roles
Both investigative reporters and lawyers start from a similar discipline, and facts must precede advocacy. Each gathers documents, interviews witnesses, tests competing explanations and then synthesizes evidence into a coherent account intended for an audience: a judge or jury in one case, the public in the other.
Both roles also rely heavily on legal and institutional information systems, such as court records, regulatory filings and investigative reports, which help organize complex information and make patterns of misconduct visible. This creates an interdependent relationship where law generates discoverable facts and journalism translates them into accessible narratives, reinforcing accountability in both courts and the “court of public opinion.”
Despite their investigative posture, lawyers and journalists both end up as advocates, though for different principles and forums. A litigator crafts arguments and selects evidence to advance a client’s interests within procedural and ethical constraints, while a journalist crafts stories and frames issues to inform or sometimes to nudge public perception and debate.
In practice, each profession can shift paradigms, using stories of individual clients or sources to illuminate broader systemic problems, from corruption to discrimination. The power to trigger legal reform or social change comes precisely from this move from raw fact to a compelling framed narrative, which is precisely the point at which bias risk intensifies.
Confirmation bias — that is, our tendency to seek, emphasize and interpret information that supports existing beliefs — affects both journalists and lawyers at every stage of their work. For journalists, it can influence which stories are pitched, which sources are deemed credible, which documents get read and how quotes are selected or contextualized.
For lawyers, confirmation bias can drive early judgments about a client’s case or an opponent’s motives, shaping which facts are pursued and how evidence is interpreted, which in turn is how judges and jurors weigh evidence. Once a tentative narrative of “what really happened” crystallizes in either profession, subsequent facts tend to be filtered through that storyline rather than allowed to challenge it.
Bias versus truth-seeking
Both journalists and lawyers operate under professional ideals that emphasize accuracy, fairness and a duty to present inconvenient facts, not only helpful ones. Journalism ethics call for transparency about assumptions, rigorous verification and engagement with competing viewpoints, while legal ethics require truthful representations of law and fact, even when precedent cuts against a client’s preferred position.
These foundational ethical principles become compromised when work is driven primarily by a preselected conclusion. For example, when a reporter is determined to prove a specific villain, or when a lawyer is intent on a particular theory of the case regardless of evidentiary weakness. In both fields, integrity depends on methods that deliberately test the opposite hypothesis, seek disconfirming evidence and resist pressure, whether it is commercial, ideological or client-driven, to treat narrative as more important than verifiable reality.
When advocacy eclipses impartial inquiry, the consequences extend beyond individual stories or cases and erode trust in institutions that depend on being seen as fundamentally fair. Biased reporting reshapes how audiences perceive events and actors, just as biased legal reasoning or selective presentation of facts can undermine the perceived legitimacy of verdicts and the justice system itself.
Because both journalists and lawyers help citizens process complex information and allocate blame or responsibility, their shared challenge is to harness narrative as a vehicle for truth rather than a substitute for it. The closer they can align advocacy with disciplined fact finding, the more they fulfill their overlapping roles as guardians of accountability rather than mere partisans in a contest of stories.
In a 1997 Time article, Hersh recalled that when he first saw the Kennedy-Monroe papers in a document dealer’s office in 1994, “my tongue was out to my knees.” The documents seemed to prove that Kennedy had secretly set up a $600,000 trust for Marilyn Monroe’s mother to buy Monroe’s silence, perfectly reinforcing Hersh’s larger thesis about the “dark side” of Camelot.
The material was more than colour; it was narrative gold that appeared to lock together sex, power, money and a cover-up in one neat package. That is exactly the kind of exciting story arc that both journalists and litigators are most at risk of over-believing when it confirms what they are already primed to think is true.
Professional damage control and the lawyer’s mirror
To his credit, Hersh did not simply slam the documents into print. He shopped them to experts, sought corroboration from Kennedy aides and Marilyn Monroe’s circle, and ultimately pulled the forged material from his book The Dark Side of Camelot before publication when his doubts hardened into a clear “no.”
He also cooperated with investigators once the forger, Lawrence X. Cusack III, was prosecuted for defrauding investors with the fake Kennedy papers, testifying at length about his dealings with Cusack and his own verification efforts. That is the responsible side of the ledger: he re-interrogated the evidence, reversed course and accepted that the scoop was dead, even though it was central to the narrative he hoped to tell.
However, his profession did not give him a free pass. Reviewers and rival journalists asked why a Pulitzer-winning investigator had gotten so close to running with documents that, in retrospect, looked like a hoaxer’s fantasy of Kennedy’s sins, and some framed the episode as a cautionary tale about self-deception in pursuit of a blockbuster.
Critics pointed to Hersh’s eagerness — lining up TV deals, structuring a book around the papers and pressing skeptical sources with lines like, “The Kennedys will never be able to disprove it” — as evidence that his narrative ambitions were pulling him away from strict objectivity. Even after he cut the forged material, the fiasco tainted the launch of the book and invited broader attacks on his sourcing and standards. In other words, it called his professional integrity into question.
What Hersh experienced maps cleanly onto the pressures lawyers face when a set of documents or a key witness seems to “make” the case. A litigator who thinks “This email thread is the case” or “This client story explains everything” is standing in the same spot Hersh occupied in that dealer’s office, awash in confirmation and vulnerable to blindness.
The Hersh episode underlines three hard truths for lawyers:
- The more a piece of evidence fits the narrative you want, the more ruthlessly it needs to be tested. Handwriting experts, chain of custody checks, adversarial cross-examination of your own witness — this is the legal equivalent of Hersh’s belated skepticism.
- Reversing course is embarrassing but survivable; doubling down on shaky “golden” evidence is what destroys reputations. Hersh sacrificed a sensational chapter; a lawyer who refuses to back off compromised evidence risks sanctions, malpractice or worse.
- Even when you do the right thing in the end, your earlier attraction to the too-perfect story will be scrutinized, so build a paper trail of your verification efforts and your internal doubts.
Hersh’s ordeal is a warning shot that no amount of talent or levels of achievement will inoculate one against narrative-driven bias. If anything, a track record of big hits can make it harder to admit that this time the story is rotten at the core. But could it also serve as a rough blueprint for legal professionals trying to stay honest in the grey zone between advocacy and objectivity? Perhaps it is a prime reminder to chase the story hard, interrogate the evidence harder and be willing to kill our own “perfect” narratives, in public, if necessary, if the facts fall apart. There is no room for hubris when one is owning a misstep, after all.
In both the newsroom and the courtroom, credibility hangs not on never being fooled, but on how fast, and how openly, we correct course when we find ourselves led astray.
Heidi J. T. Exner is an award-winning white-collar crime fighter and she is passionate about making the world a better place. Heidi is the founding partner of Ethical Edge PI & Corporate Advisors, the founder and chair of the Exner Foundation, and she serves on JURIST’s Alumni Board and the Policy & Advocacy Committee at the Canadian Blockchain Consortium. She welcomes you to find her on LinkedIn or check out her biography page on Ethical Edge’s website.
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