Higher Liar, Pants on Fire!

Yesterday, I got a phone message from Barbara Allen, the new O'Colly adviser. She said something along the lines of "I've got a situation here that I wanted to talk to you about."

Of course, I was interested immediately...and a little bit obsessed and worried. Neurotic much? What could it be? I gave them my newsroom key back, didn't I? I never fired someone that could now claim sexual harassment, did I?

As it turns out, I wrote a story many months ago for my public affairs reporting class. And this article was published on the front page of the O'Colly. Go me!

In this article (which is supremely bad-ass, let me tell you what), I write about MB, an OSU student who was charged with felony marihuana possession after OSU police found 1/5 of an ounce in his dorm room. Felony because he was on a college campus, and Oklahoma law allows police to charge felony possession if the person is within 1000 feet of a school or park.

I used the public arrest record to find his name, and then found MB on facebook. I figured he would be perfect to talk to, since he was a member of the NORML facebook group and all. We facebook messaged a few times before I called him for an interview.

Flash forward to the present. Seems MB's mom found the article and asked him about it. He claimed he never knew the article would be printed in the O'Colly and that I tricked him. So his mommy called the O'Colly to have them correct this error. She even forwarded our facebook messages that showed I never mentioned the O'Colly when I contacted him.

Too bad I ALSO have those messages. Here are a few key messages that dear ole MB forgot to show Mommy:

MB: Dec. 6, 6:00pm "hey, hope that info helped ya out. You think you could email me the final report or somethin, I'm just curious to see what ya find out about this. Thanks"
Me: Dec. 10, 12:00 pm "Yeah, the story is going to run on Wednesday in the paper, hopefully. If not, I can send you a final result."
MB: Dec. 16, 12:22 am "hey, i never got a chance to get the paper on wed. ive been checking the website and it doesn't seem like it has been uploaded yet. if it's not going to get on there can you send it to me. mb@okstate.edu, thanks"

Me: Dec. 16, 1:29 am "sure, i'll send it to you now. the version in the paper was cut down a little bit, so i'll send the full story. thanks again for all your help!"


Umm, maybe this would be a good time to 'fess up to Mommy? Just claim you were too high to remember giving the interview. Heck, that might even be the truth.