(New York) It was a mystery that had shaken the literary world for years: the FBI arrested an employee of the American publishing house Simon & Schuster, on suspicion of having stolen hundreds of author’s manuscripts before their publication. , but whose motivations remain to be clarified.
Presented in court in New York on Thursday, the day after his arrest at JFK airport, Filippo Bernardini, a 29-year-old Italian, was charged with electronic fraud and aggravated identity theft, crimes punishable by 22 years in prison .
He was placed on a $ 300,000 bail, “guarantee on his property,” and was placed in “house arrest” with “curfew,” a spokesman for the federal prosecutor told AFP. Manhattan.
Employed in London at Simon & Schuster, as “rights coordinator”, he is suspected of having received between 2016 and 2021 “hundreds of unpublished manuscripts”, sometimes from famous authors or their representatives, in Writing to them with fake e-mail addresses of managers of publishing houses or literary agents, details the indictment disseminated by the American justice.
From Millenium to Atwood
The technique was well established, the suspect changing a letter in an innocuous way in his address and taking identities known to his interlocutors to better deceive them.
For years, the publishing world has been rustling with these attempts at usurpation, sometimes unsuccessful, sometimes successful, all the more mysterious as the thefts did not seem to be followed by demands for ransoms or wild publication of works.
In August 2021, the New York Magazine had told how the Swedish editors of the world-famous thriller series Millenium had been approached in 2017 by one of their so-called colleague in Italy, to send him a secure link giving access to the manuscript, then being translated before its release.
In 2019, the literary agent for Canadian writer Margaret Atwood revealed that the proofs of the highly anticipated sequel to The scarlet maid, Wills, had also been targeted.
According to the indictment, which attributes to Bernardini the registration of “160 fraudulent internet domains”, a Pulitzer Prize winner had forwarded “his forthcoming manuscript” to him, believing he was his publisher, the indictment. Writers like Sally Rooney and Ian McEwan, and actor Ethan Hawke have also been approached, according to the New York Times.
What motivations?
For the moment, the motivations of Filippo Bernardini, who pleaded not guilty during his first appearance, remain unclear. If the indictment specifies that he carefully stored his loot in the same electronic box, it does not indicate what he did with the recovered works, and whether he derived a financial benefit from them. The act does not evoke possible complicity either.
Little information has leaked out about the suspect. According to screenshots from a LinkedIn profile which was no longer available on Friday, “Filippo B.”, “rights coordinator” at Simon & Schuster, identifies himself as a Chinese language graduate at the Università Cattolica (Milan) and publishing at UCL (London), a career he owes to his “obsession with writing and languages”.
The case is in any case embarrassing for the American publishing house based in New York, which counts Stephen King among its most prestigious authors.
The company announced to have “suspended” its employee, “pending further information on the case”, saying “shocked and horrified” by the actions of the suspect.
“Protecting the intellectual property of our authors is of the utmost importance to Simon & Schuster and the publishing industry as a whole,” adds the company, which thanks the FBI.