A man suspected of defrauding hundreds of writers, including Margaret Atwood and Belgian author Saskia De Coster, in order to obtain their unpublished manuscripts was arrested at New York airport on Wednesday. According to the US Department of Justice, the man in question is 29-year-old Italian Filippo Bernardini. The latter claims to be innocent.
Bernardini had passed himself off “for years for a publisher to fraudulently obtain hundreds of unpublished manuscriptsThe US Department of Justice said. It did this by registering 160 fake domain names and email addresses that looked like the names of real publishing houses.
Hundreds of authors approached
He had for example replaced the “m” from “penguinrandomhouse.com“by the letters”r” and “n“written consecutively to form the address”penguinrandornhouse.com“and thus approach hundreds of writers, asking them to send him their unpublished works, reports the Dutch daily De Volkskrant.
Last year, Dutch author Hanna Bervoets wrote about how she discovered that a crook got hold of her manuscript. But other international writers such as Margaret Atwood, Sally Rooney and actor Ethan Hawke were also victims of Filippo Bernardini.
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Belgian writer Saskia De Coster also received a suspicious email, probably from the same “manuscript thief“. Between 2016 and 2021, the Italian was able to capture hundreds of unseen stories.
Filippo Bernardini appeared before the judge on Thursday and declared himself innocent. After paying a bond of 300,000 dollars (265,000 euros) and handing over his passport, he was allowed to leave the court. If found guilty, he faces up to 20 years in prison.
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