Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

In various blogs I’ve posted on this site, I’ve charged Wilbert Rideau with misrepresentations, fact distortions, lying by omission and outright lying throughout his career as an award-winning prison journalist. His supporters charge that I am envious and resentful of his success and acclaim. “He’s just trying to smear me,” Rideau protests.

I do not have to smear Wilbert Rideau. The facts will do that.

His recently released memoir, In The Place of Justice (Random House 2010), contains enough of those facts. For example, one factual error concerns the late Baton Rouge Catholic Diocese Bishop Joseph Sullivan. Rideau could not even get the bishop’s name right in his memoir, referring to him as the “Very Reverend John Sullivan.”

The real Bishop Joseph Sullivan took issue with an article titled “Religion in Prison” which appeared in the January/February 1981 edition of the prison’s newsmagazine, The Angolite of which Rideau was co-editor at the time. The article, written by Rideau, charged that the Catholic Church in Louisiana had “turned a cold shoulder to the imprisoned, literally abandoning ministry to them” as stated in the memoir.

Rideau said Bishop Sullivan was so “offended by my article on the church [that he] took his complaint and political clout to Governor Edwards, but Phelps stood firm.”

In 1989 Random House, his current publisher, entered into a contract with Rideau and his then Angolite co-editor Ron Wikberg to publish an anthology of Angolite articles under the title Life Sentences. The Random House anthology was actually a rip-off of a previously published anthology titled The Wall is Strong (University of Southwestern Louisiana 1988) whose lead “author” was a USL criminal justice professor named Burk Foster. Four articles I had written for The Angolite appeared in that criminal justice textbook—one of which carried by byline in The Angolite and for which I had won the 1980 ABA Silver Gavel Award. I was not given byline credit or attribution for it or the three articles.

I sued Foster and Rideau in federal court. The professor apologized and removed my articles from the textbook, telling me he had relied upon Rideau’s selection process for the Angolite articles which ultimately appeared in The Wall Is Strong. It was during the discovery process of this lawsuit that I learned Rideau and Wikberg had the Random House contract. I suspected Rideau had probably done the same thing with Random House that he had done with Foster—submit articles I had written for The Angolite without giving me credit. I was right. He had.

I also learned that he had submitted the “Religion in Prison” article, and in a 1989 letter to Random House editor Julia Grau, Rideau discussed the “impact” of that article. He said Bishop Sullivan had pressured Gov. Dave Treen to force Corrections Secretary C. Paul Phelps to shut down the prison magazine—and when Phelps refused to acquiesce, Gov. Treen fired him. (That was another Rideau lie, but it is the subject of another blog.)

But in his memoir Rideau claims Bishop Sullivan pressured Gov. Edwin Edwards who was not even in office in 1981 when the “Religion in Prison” article was published. Random House “fact checkers” did not catch either this factual error or the error of naming the wrong Catholic bishop in its proofreading stages before the publication of In The Place of Justice. A charge leveled in a major prison “memoir” that a Catholic bishop “took his complaint and political clout” to a governor should at least warrant a cursory check to make sure the author had the right bishop and the right governor. Rideau got both wrong—the bishop and the governor.

It’s a classic example of how Rideau is repeatedly “loose with the facts.”

Sadly, Rideau said the “Very Reverend John Sullivan” was “later discovered to have been a not-so-reverend pedophile.” The Wikipedia page on Reverend John Joseph Sullivan does not reveal anything about him being a “pedophile.” In effect, Rideau labeled the wrong Catholic bishop as a pedophile. This is even more tragic because there is information in the public record that the Catholic Diocese of Baton Rouge settled a lawsuit for $225,000 relating to “pedophile” charges against the late Bishop Joseph Sullivan.

I understand Rideau’s history of being “loose with the facts.” That’s his nature. But Random House should be held to a higher standard: the publishing house had a professional obligation to “fact check” the work of the famed prison journalist, particularly since I had chronicled his history of deception to them in 1989. I assume the publishing house is so enamored with Rideau and his stature that it did not feel a need to “fact check” him.

One final tweak on Rideau’s being “loose with the facts.” He said I was a 24-year-old skinny kid when he first met me in the Baton Rouge jail in 1965. I was 20 years old—not 24.

Of course, I’m sure the mainstream media will forgive these “factual errors” as “innocent mistakes.” That is the defense Rideau used to justify his literary theft of my award-winning work in The Wall is Strong. The media forgave him of that “professional indiscretion.”