Lance Armstrong faces lawsuit over lies in memoirs

Memoirs are always partly an attempt on the part of the author to portray themselves in the best light, but in the case of Lance Armstrong a group of California book buyers is testing in court whether its acceptable for writers to lie outright. They are asking for $5m (£3.2m) to compensate them for buying books by disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong which they thought told his true story, when in fact much of what was written later turned out to be mendacious.The doping scandal that engufled Armstrong prompted John Crace to ask if his books be rebranded as fiction. Penguin Group, which published It’s Not About the Bike in 2001, and Random House, which put out Every Second Counts in 2003, moved to strike out the US lawsuit, arguing that the books and related marketing materials are not “commercial speech”, and are therefore protected under the First Amendment. They also pointed out that the group of consumers failed to identify specific lies which they relied on when purchasing the books, the American Lawyer reported. In 2000, It’s Not About the Bike became a New York Times bestseller.It is not the first time that US readers have gone after authors and their publishers for allegedly peddling fiction as truth. Readers in the states of New York, California and Illinois in 2006 won a lawsuit claiming they had been defrauded by author James Frey and his publisher Random House Group in his memoir A Million Little Pieces, resulting in anyone who bought the book before Frey confessed to making some of it up, being able to claim a full refund. The total settlement was to be no more than $2.35m, to cover the cost of customer refunds, lawyers’ fees for both sides and a donation to charity.Frey, who was found to have invented or wildly embellished details of his supposedly degenerate lifestyle, sold 3.5m copies of his book after an appearance on hit TV chat show Oprah, later going back on the presenter’s couch to apologise.Amstrong built up his own personal legend of being a cancer survivor who kept on fighting back to win seven Tours de France, amassing a personal fortune estimated at $125m. He also took to Oprah’s couch to explain himself: this January, he admitted to cheating, in an interview which opened the door for the readers’ lawsuit. A complaint was filed on 22 January by Rob Stutzman and Jonathan Wheeler, accusing Armstrong and his publishers of marketing the books as “true and honest” works of non-fiction, and saying that they would not have bought It’s Not About the Bike or Every Second Counts had they known the truth.Armstrong stopped contesting allegations of drug use in August 2012 and in October of that year was stripped of all seven Tour de France victories, receiving a lifetime ban from the International Cycling Union after it accepted the findings of the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s investigation into systematic doping.