Skepticism Falls On Bestselling Author

Oprah said James Frey's novel of drug addiction, jail and crime her awake at night. Its publisher calls it "intense, unpredictable, and instantly engaging." It sat for 15 weeks at the top of the New York Times' paperback nonfiction bestseller list.

But was the dramatic life of James Frey simply a fiction of the imagination of James Frey?

The investigative Web site The Smoking Gun posted a series of official documents and conducted interviews with Frey and others that suggest many of the most dramatic points in his book are far from true to life.

Most notably, Frey writes in "A Million Little Pieces" that during an attempt to win back a college girlfriend, he drove back to his college town in Ohio. He had been drinking, and had smoked "as much crack as I could," Frey wrote. Then: "I was staring at her and not paying attention to the road and I drove up onto a sidewalk and hit a Cop who was standing there." He explains, using several expletives, that police backup came. When Frey refused to get out of his car, "They opened the door, I started swinging, and they beat my a-- with billy clubs and arrested me."

The Smoking Gun tracked down a 1992 police report explains of Frey: "He was polite and cooperative at all times. He was later released on $733.00 cash bond." There report was written for illegal parking, not hitting an officer. No drugs, obscenities or struggle are mentioned.

When The Smoking Gun reporters tracked down the sergeant who arrested Frey, they asked him "if he had ever been hit by an automobile during his 17 years on the force. 'No,' he said. Would that necessarily have been something he would recall? 'I think I'd remember that, yup,' he answered, laughing," the Web site reports.

Also, Frey portrays himself as a bad kid in high school, to the point where other kids' parents would say "Stay away from Jimmy Frey. He's trouble," Frey told Oprah, when appearing on her show for a show on her book club, according to The Smoking Gun.

But when reporters from The Smoking Gun interviewed one of Frey's classmates who lived across the street from Frey, he said: "I never saw anything that stood out."

"Frey was a "normal guy" who didn't get in any more trouble than the average St. Joseph teen," the reporters concluded from talking to Paul Santarlas.

Amazon.com sales rank #69. At 3 p.m. Monday, his books "A Million Little Pieces" and "My Friend Leonard" were ranked #1 and #3, subsequently, in Amazon's sales rankings. Also serving the surge its popularity, Oprah included Frey's first book as the 56th title in Oprah's Book Club series.

"Frey's tall tales would, of course, be pretty funny if so many people didn't actually believe them," The Smoking Gun Web site reads.

Why would The Smoking Gun, which usually publishes mug shots, meaty rap sheets of mobsters and gangsters and previously unpublished government documents, take aim at Frey?

"We received an e-mail from a reader in November asking us to get a mug shot of Frey, since the reader had just finished (his book)," said The Smoking Gun editor William Bastone. "When our initial inquiries turned up nothing, our curiosity was piqued and we took a careful look at the book and tried to confirm or disprove anything for which we thought there might be a public record — police report, court files, etc."

Lawyers hired by Frey wrote a letter to The Smoking Gun and Court Television (which owns The Smoking Gun), claiming: "Simply put, the fact that you have been unable to locate or obtain access to certain records or documents (some of which may no longer exist because they have been expunged) does not make my client a liar,"

"If you publish a Story which directly states of insinuates that my client is a liar, and that his book about certain aspects of his life has been falsified, you will be exposed to substantial liability," read the letter from Martin D. Sinter of the Los Angeles law firm Lavely & Singer.