clients of a prolific ghostwriter are now worried sick as she is embroiled in plagiarism scandal

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

Giving Up the Ghostwriter
For over a decade, Kristin Loberg has quietly co-authored a long list of bestselling books for medical superstars like David Agus and Sanjay Gupta. Now she’s embroiled in a growing plagiarism scandal that has her celebrity clients worried sick

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He didn’t sleep. He addressed the issue with his staff. And he ran all his books through a plagiarism checker.

It was bad. He discovered more than 25 passages in 2012’s The End of Illness that plagiarized Dr. David Perlmutter’s Grain Brain. But Perlmutter’s book hit bookshelves a year after Agus’s book did. It turned out Agus’ books were not only full of plagiarism but were being plagiarized too. By Loberg. Who also ghostwrote Grain Brain.

So Perlmutter, after reading about Loberg’s misadventures with Agus, ran all the books he’d written with her through the plagiarism software. It spit out a giant list. Perlmutter issued a statement on his website apologizing for all the plagiarism. Sanjay Gupta is about to do the same. As, undoubtedly, are a whole lot of people that Loberg has worked with.

It’s beginning to look like Loberg might be the biggest serial plagiarist of all time.

Agus says he dictated the substance of the book; Loberg added the color. She assured him that she had run the books through plagiarism software multiple times. She assured all her authors the same thing. It was in her contract.

https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/ghostwriter-kristin-loberg-plagerism-steven-agus-sanjay-gupta/


https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-03-06/book-of-animal-secrets-by-david-agus-usc-is-rife-with-plagiarism

We found 95 instances of plagiarism in a USC scientist’s new book. Sales have been suspended

The publication of a new book by Dr. David Agus, the media-friendly USC oncologist who leads the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, was shaping up to be a high-profile event.

Agus promoted “The Book of Animal Secrets: Nature’s Lessons for a Long and Happy Life” with appearances on CBS News, where he serves as a medical contributor, and “The Howard Stern Show,” where he is a frequent guest. Entrepreneur Arianna Huffington hosted a dinner party at her home in his honor. The title hit No. 1 on Amazon’s list of top-selling books about animals a week before its March 7 publication.


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The book also leans heavily on uncredited material from smaller and lesser-known outlets. A section in the book on queen ants appears to use several sentences from an Indiana newspaper column by a retired medical writer. Long sections of a chapter on the cardiac health of giraffes appear to have been lifted from a 2016 blog post on the website of a South African safari company titled, “The Ten Craziest Facts You Should Know About a Giraffe.”

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The book also takes sentences written or spoken by other scientists and presents them as Agus’ original thoughts.

“At the moment, even in mice which have been genetically engineered to have the plaques associated with Alzheimer’s Disease, there are no tangles and very little damage to brain cells,” Simon Lovestone, a professor of translational neuroscience at the University of Oxford, said in a 2017 interview with Oxford University’s news service about a study he led. “This makes it difficult to find new targets for curing the disease, as well as studying how a potential drug can change the disease. But if altered insulin signaling can make an animal more susceptible to Alzheimer’s Disease, we might be able [to] produce mice that are a true model of the disease, which we can then test to find new treatments.”

Those sentences appear nearly verbatim in Agus’ book, with no mention of Lovestone or the university’s news release.

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“It’s very bad. The examples I’m looking at look like literally copy-paste jobs,” said Bik, who described them as “patchwork plagiarism.”

[Hortensis]

1. "Patchwork plagiarism." Sounds like she got bored with success.

Sociopath? Amused by turning plagiarized victims into plagiarists and vice versa?

Maybe they'll form a club.

[Old Crank]

2. A lesson to be learned.

Write your own damn book.....

[tanyev]

5. +1

[mopinko]

8. beat me to it.

or hire a real writer to help you, not do it for you.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

10. I'm not surprised the celebrities used ghostwriter, I'm surprised that a scientist did

part of team that wrote research articles in my distant past...had to painstakingly write those things.

[delisen]

3. How much of these books are written by the celebrity authors?

Maybe a celebrity author is just another type of influencer, getting paid to shill a product. Apparently these writers were too careless to even bother to check up themselves that their contractor was not stealing the works of real writers.

Publishers apparently are also irresponsible……..and then marketers are hired to lie to us and claim all these entities are hardworking geniuses and individuals and companies of great value. What a bubble. What a wastes of resources these junk books are.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

4. Article says that publishers can't run the book through the plagarism software themselves

..because it's the contracted responsibility of the ghost writer

[NJCher]

6. I didn't read it that way

It just says it’s in her contract that she do it.

He (meaning the author) might have to buy the software, but more likely, his institution would have it. There is no reason he couldn’t have done it if he was being hyper vigilant. Most likely he simply trusted her, as most people would if this person had a working relationship with the publisher.

I think that’s odd. It’s like having the student run their own paper through the software, which sometimes they do. Some professors schedule a lab and have the students do it and give them the report.

I never did it that way, but it doesn’t mean I couldn’t have.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

9. got it. thanks for the correction

[mopinko]

7. how conveeeeeenient.

jebus. what a mess.

[NJCher]

12. Yes, taking the easy path

To success. Publications give one prestige. They are a step to becoming a doctor quoted on tv. Then you can charge higher fees. You can negotiate a bigger salary with your hospitals.

As stated, what a mess.

I thought about being a ghost writer, but I discarded the idea because I have my own things to say, and I don’t want to say them as another person. I want to say them as me, which is probably why I have so many posts on this forum. 🤩

[mopinko]

14. i've written for candidates and orgs,

i’m a pretty good money grubber and speech writer. never got paid. i can do it. but as you say, have plenty of things to say myself.

[OneGrassRoot]

16. As a previous ghostwriter, I'd say MANY...

I'd say the vast majority of celebrity authors have relied heavily on ghostwriters. Indeed, many of them are approached about writing a book by publishers because, since the 90s, publishers pretty much only want authors who have a built-in platform/audience. That is most definitely the case since the rise of social media. It's a sure thing. So they probably connect the celeb with the ghostwriter, with neither the celeb nor the publisher ever really intending for the celeb to be the author. It's next to impossible for an unknown author to get a deal with an advance so many dream of, not unless they have created and nurtured an influential presence in some niche market already.

It's all quite frustrating and has been for about 20 years. The rise of self-publishing was encouraging but all of the vanity publishers that arose (often subsidiaries of traditional publishing houses) just made it so EVERYONE had a book to sell. If it is being done because you have a message or story that you want to share and you'd do it even if you have to pay, that's cool, of course. But for anyone who has aspirations of actually making a living by writing books, the prospects have been dismal for a while. Not impossible, but dismal.

I started with Macmillan in the 80s as an editor and was involved in the industry in various ways until about 2015, including being a ghostwriter for articles and a few books (not for any celebrity).

[Kingofalldems]

11. Heard Agus on the Stern show a few times.

A pompous ass IMO so glad this was publicized.

[NJCher]

13. Heh

Not surprised, then. What goes around comes around.

On edit: there is a clip of him with Stern at YouTube. He quotes some rather startling figures. If they are true, great. But they might not be, in which case he is spreading misinformation.

Just what we need: more distrust.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

15. his balloon just got popped big time

[BWdem4life]

17. See, this is why we need AI.