He was arrested at JFK airport in New York and charged on January 7, 2022 with “electronic fraud”. Accused of usurping the identities of various personalities from the publishing world, Filippo Bernardini, 30, a former London employee of the American publishing house Simon & Schuster, admitted on Friday 6 January before the federal justice system in New York the theft of more than a thousand manuscripts of famous writers thanks to an ingenious identity theft scheme.
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What purpose? That of obtaining, between the summer of 2016 and January 2022, more than a thousand drafts of novels and other literary works by prestigious authors before their publication. “Filippo Bernardini used his knowledge in the publishing industry to create a system to steal valuable works from authors and threaten” so this world of the issue, explains the federal prosecutor of Manhattan parquet, Damian Williams.
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The defendant decided to plead guilty. The young Italian faces 20 years in prison and has already repaid $88,000 (€82,000) under this guilty plea procedure, which spared him a criminal trial.
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Employed at Simon & Schuster in London as “rights coordinator”he admitted to having been sending unpublished manuscripts for more than five years, sometimes from well-known authors or their representatives, writing to them from fake e-mail addresses of publishers or literary agents.
Defense of intellectual property
Filippo Bernardini created “more than 160 Internet domains” sometimes changing a single letter in his e-mail address and taking the known identities of his interlocutors to better deceive them.
The publisher Simon & Schuster, which fired one of its employees a year ago, assured in an email on Friday 6 January that the “the protection of the authors’ intellectual property was of the utmost importance” and thanked the United States Federal Police, the “FBI, and the Department of Justice”.
Reasons still mysterious
The publishing world has been buzzing for years with rumors of spoofing attempts, not always successful and mysterious because the thefts apparently weren’t followed by ransom demands or pirated releases of the books.
In 2021, New York Magazine revealed how the Swedish publishers of the Millenium thriller series were contacted in 2017 by a so-called colleague in Italy asking them to send him a secure link giving access to the manuscript, then in translation. .
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In 2019, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s literary agent revealed that evidence for the sequel to “The Scarlet Maiden”, “Will”, had also been targeted. Writers such as Sally Rooney and Ian McEwan have also been approached, according to the New York Times.
The sentence of Filippo Bernardini will be pronounced by the American federal justice on April 5, 2023.
