My article about Bill Condon’s biopic of sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey appears in the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times on Sunday, 3 October 2005.
UPDATE, 4 November 2004: In my article about the movie Kinsey, I wrote that Fritz von Balluseck (Friedrich von Balluseck), a pedophile and former Nazi with whom Kinsey corresponded, was “tried for murder.” This is probably not true. German newspaper articles from 1956 and 1957 indicate that von Balluseck was for a time a suspect in the murder of a girl named Liselotte Hass and that several months later he was convicted of sexual abuse of a number of children, but I have not found any evidence that he was ever tried for murder. I am working with the Times on a correction, but it is taking much longer to prove that I was wrong than it did to make the error in the first place (it’s the famous difficulty of proving a negative), and so I’m posting this provisional correction in hopes that journalists working on pieces on Kinsey in time for the movie’s release by Fox Searchlight next week will land here through Google and avoid repeating my mistake.
FURTHER UPDATE, 17 November 2004: The Berlin Landesarchiv has the legal records of von Balluseck, and they confirmed this morning that von Balluseck was not charged with or tried for the murder of Liselotte Hass. I’ve alerted the Times, and a correction will be forthcoming.