Michael Finkel
American journalist (b. 1968)
Michael Finkel (born 1969) is a journalist and memoirist, who has written non-fiction books about criminals and marginals.
His autobiographical novel about his strange relationship with the killer Christian Longo who took his identity was made into a film True Story in 2015, and his role was played by Jonah Hill.
Career
In 1990 Finkel took a job with Skiing magazine, and wrote about sports for Sports Illustrated and National Geographic Adventure. He later worked for The New York Times Magazine.
Finkel was a writer for The New York Times until 2002, when he was discovered to have created a composite protagonist for a story on the slave trade within Africa. The story, published in 2001 and titled "Is Youssouf Malé A Slave?", purported to profile an adolescent West African boy, Youssouf Malé, who had sold himself into slavery on a cocoa plantation in the Ivory Coast. The story as published included photographs, including one described as being that of Malé. However, after publication, an official from Save the Children contacted Finkel to say that the boy pictured was not Malé. Upon questioning by his editors, Finkel admitted that the boy profiled in the article was a composite of several boys he had interviewed, including one named Youssouf Malé. Finkel was subsequently fired.
“Michael Finkel” enters the record as american journalist (b. 1968). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Michael, Finkel and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Michael Finkel” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Michael, Finkel and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15979649. VIAF identifies the subject as 15051330. The Library of Congress control number is n99038287. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969, 2015, 1990 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michael Finkel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.