One of the most reclusive writers in the world has been forced to step into the public eye because of what she claims was a carefully orchestrated swindle. Harper Lee, author of the American classic To Kill a Mockingbird, filed suit in a Manhattan court against a man she says stole rights to her book. Lee’s lawsuit details how Samuel Pinkus, the son-in-law of her longtime agent Eugene Winick, tricked Lee into transferring the copyright on her 1960 masterpiece. In 2002 Eugene Winick was ill and Pinkus began folding some of his father-in-law’s clients into his own literary agency. In 2007 Pinkus took advantage of Lee’s failing eyesight and hearing to transfer Lee’s rights to himself, assuming irrevocable interest in the income derived from To Kill A Mockingbird, and offering no payment to the author. Lee signed the crucial papers when she was recuperating from a stroke. In 2012 she took legal action and regained the copyright, but Pinkus still derives income from sales of the book though he is no longer Lee’s agent. The lawsuit says Lee has no memory of agreeing to anything, and frankly, any neutral observer would find it hard to disbelieve her.

Since this is a website, not a court, we’ll just say what other stories about this haven’t yet—Samuel Pinkus thought Harper Lee was going to die and stole her book. With Lee dead, and very little likelihood such a private individual would have discussed the matter with anyone, there would have been nobody to dispute his ownership of a revered, Pulitzer Prize-winning gold mine. When she recovered and realized what had happened, Pinkus scrambled to give the copyright back but had arranged to keep raking money off the top in perpetuity—his backup plan. Pinkus, naturally, has had no comment on the lawsuit, and presumably won’t until the Manhattan court has to decide whether his scam will stand. In this age of trillion dollar bank swindles, naked buy-offs of elected officials, and rampant court corruption, we don’t have high hopes for Ms. Lee. In fact, we suspect that in the aforementioned circles Samuel Pinkus is being hailed as a genius.

Upcoming on Sunday is the eightieth anniversary of the first modern sighting of the Loch Ness monster, which occurred April 14, 1933 when a couple claimed to have seen what they described as an enormous animal in the loch. In honor of the occasion, yesterday at the Edinburgh International Science Festival in Scotland, Nessie scholars held a symposium debating the creature’s existence. The photo above, shot by Robert Wilson on April 19, 1934, remains arguably the most famous Nessie image, and for years was touted as proof something large lived in the loch, until 1984 when the British Journal of Photography published an analysis by Stewart Campbell concluding that the object in the water measured three feet—not nearly long enough to be the famed Nessie. Years later, a big game hunter named Marmaduke Wetherell, just below, was fingered as the brain behind an elaborate hoax resulting in the photo. But true believers have disputed the account.

Subsequent sightings and photos have all been inconclusive, which means of course that nothing was decided at the Edinburgh symposium. Those who believe in the creature have no hard evidence to prove their position, and those who disbelieve can’t prove it doesn’t exist. The latter isn’t a surprise, as it’s logically impossible to prove anything doesn’t exist, whether monsters and deities, Kang and Kodos of Rigel IV, or the chair you're sitting on right now. Doubtless those involved in the symposium knew that, which means the event was probably just a good excuse to shoot the shit for an afternoon then adjourn to the raucous Edinburgh bars. From there it’s just a few pints until someone drops his pants and screeches, “Watch out! The monster is out of the loch!” So be forewarned—the next Nessie photo you see will probably be someone’s pale cock, and if photo analysis proves it’s three feet long that’ll be one proud scientist.

If you live in the U.S, today you’re probably celebrating Thanksgiving, maybe watching some football. But people where we live don’t know from Thanksgiving, so with nothing else to do today we decided to go back through some of the old posts on the website to make sure all the external links were still working. Interestingly, we noticed that the first two dead links cycled around for a few moments, then sent us to functioning pages that had nothing to do with the original articles. For instance, a link in our post on Lee Harvey Oswald’s coffin sent us to the front page of The Huffington Post. Is having dead links on your website now the equivalent of leaving your sunglasses in a restaurant? They’re okay to steal because they’ve been temporarily forgotten? Well, not in our universe. In the next couple of days we’re going to ferret out all the dead links on Pulp Intl. and redirect them to relevant content. We’d be surprised if there are even half a dozen, but we’ll fix them

You can add Norway to the list of countries with a mysterious sea serpent. Or not. Last week Andreas Solvik and two friends were in a small boat on Lake Hornindalsvatnet in the southwestern part of country when they saw a disturbance on the water. Solvik snapped the photo you see above. We’ve taken a good look it and we gotta say, what we think Solvik saw was a disturbance in his bank account and he cooked up a hoax to make a few kroner on the side. Lake Hornindalsvatnet actually does have a legend about a kjempeorm, or monster, associated with it, and because it’s the deepest lake in Europe, there’s a feeling among some locals that a monster might be able to survive uncaptured, but only among laymen. When a local scientist was asked for his take, he theorized that because the area has an extensive logging industry, what Solvik photographed and what people have seen for many years are probably either logs, or masses of sawdust that sat on the lakeshore for a while collecting algae before finally floating into deeper water. That's an interesting theory, but we don’t think Andreas Solvik photographed something that turned out to be wood. We think he Photoshopped something that he hoped would turn into money. Check below and see what you think.

Yesterday, an Argentinian memorabilia dealer named Mikel Barsa attempted to auction what he says is an 8mm porn reel starring Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe. According to Barsa, who represents anonymous sellers that priced the film at $480,000 but got nothing when no bidders emerged, Monroe was broke at the time and had no choice but to parlay sex for money. This would have been presumably 1946 or 1947, when Monroe was indeed known to be broke and had indeed posed nude. However spokespeople for Monroe’s estate have come forward and pronounced the porno a fraud. But they would say that, wouldn't they? So we got hold of a low-rez copy of the flick in order to assess it ourselves. In it the alleged Monroe strips, plays with a dildo, and engages in a little 69 with a male partner before moving on to the main event. Afterward the pair have a smoke and a laugh. It doesn’t take a photographic expert to see that the woman involved doesn't resemble Monroe very closely. The hairline is wrong, the facial proportions are way out in left field, the breasts are not the ones that so thrilled Playboy readers when she appeared as the magazine's first centerfold, and there’s what looks like a hysterectomy scar we’re pretty sure Monroe didn’t have. We’ve posted some screen captures below so you can see for yourself how obvious this scam is. But don’t be too hard on Mr. Barsa and his associates. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again—in a culture that values money above all things, you can’t be surprised what people will do to get it. 

In a tangled case that has implications for privacy laws and the traditional methods by which tabloids do business, British model and reality television contestant Imogen Thomas was yesterday accused of trying to blackmail a Premier League footballer for up to £100,000. Thomas was in court, backed by the daily tabloid The Sun, trying to have a gag order lifted so that she could name in print the married footballer with whom she had an affair from September to December of 2010. The same judge who had issued the initial injunction said during yesterday’s hearing he would not lift the order because evidence seemed to strongly suggest the possibility that Thomas was blackmailing the footballer. He stopped short of calling her a cold-hearted money vampire, but not much. In the end, his ruling was so harsh that legal observers wonder if it signals the end of one of the most traditional practices of the tabloid press—outing cheaters. At the heart of the ruling is whether the right to privacy, as guaranteed by article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, is outweighed by article 10, which guarantees freedom of expression. Yesterday the judge made it clear that he thought the naming of cheaters had no social value, and he pointed out that Sun lawyers had “not even argued that publication would serve the public interest.” The decision has the nation’s philandering footballers—and one unknown wandering penis in particular—cheering. But we think the celebration will be short lived. Why? Because as long as the man who was riding in Imogen Thomas’s dinghy goes unnamed, every married player in the Premiership has to live under suspicion. We don’tmean from the public or the tabloids—we mean from their wives. A few months of that unpleasantness and the next petition to the high court to name the anonymous footballer will come from the other players, just so they can say to their wives, “See? Wasn’t me.” 

Australian film star Paul Hogan, who charmed the cinema world twenty-four years ago playing Mick “Crocodile” Dundee, was in his native Australia for his mother’s funeral this week when he received another piece of bad news. Australian tax authorities had issued an order preventing the grieving star from leaving the country until he settles a bill for outstanding taxes. According to their records—and as we all know, the tax office’s records are the only ones that matter—Hogan owes on a whopping $38 million. Seems he relocated to Los Angeles shortly after his film franchise took off and never bothered to pay taxes in his native country. Authorities say he squirreled his cash away in offshore bank accounts. The exact amount they are demanding hasn’t been disclosed, but it’s safe to say this is going to be the biggest croc Hogan ever wrestled. 

How much cash do they claim was made on this scam? Two million dollars. That’s a 2 with six zeros after it. If true, this is sad on two levels: first, that a former NBA player who probably had a thousand other opportunities went this route; and second, that jobseekers who were being crushed by a recession had no choice but to feed on the corpses of people who had already been crushed before them. Vincent has had no comment thus far, but his attorney has described the former basketballer as a “legitimate businessman engaged in legal activities”, which we think is like claiming to be a “legitimate cigarette marketing executive”, or a “legitimate geologist for a mining company that blows the tops off pristine Appalachian hills and dumps them in valleys, destroying wildlife and contaminating groundwater”. In other words, “legal” isn’t a synonym for moral—at least not in our book. But unfortunately, we didn’t write the book everyone else is playing by—Wall Street did. And it seems as if Vincent may have memorized it chapter and verse.     

Sanchez’s arrest is yet another embarrassment for Mexico, however, it’s also a blow for the U.S., which pretends—publicly at least—that the American demand for drugs is not the true driver of Mexico’s cartel troubles. Often, Mexican politicians will point out this dark symbiosis, but in this instance officials south of the border have so far been circumspect. Current Quintana Roo governor Felix Gonzalez Cantu said only that, “This takes us all by surprise—it is unprecedented.”     

In Britain, a growing scandal has ensnared Rupert Murdoch, head of News International, and Andy Coulson, who was editor of the News International paper News of the World before becoming communications director for Conservative Party leader David Cameron. In short, News of the World hacked into voicemail accounts and computerized police records, and also extracted confidential information from banking computers. Murdoch claims to have known nothing about it, but yesterday a committee of MPs concluded an investigation into the matter by accusing News International execs of engaging in “obfuscation” and suffering from “collective amnesia.”

While Murdoch has taken some heat for the mess, the investigation into the hacking has increasingly turned toward Andy Coulson, who, while editor of News of the World, employed four private investigators to dig up dirt on public figures. Nineteen victims of the hacking have been identified, but records show that ninety-one were targeted. To make matters worse, Scotland Yard resisted investigating the matter, has refused to comply with Freedom of Information requests concerning the investigation, and failed to notify those whose cellphone pin codes were found in possession of one of News of the World’s PIs. This means that public figures who suspect being targeted by News of the World have been forced to launch their own investigations to discover whether they were victims.

If all this seems to point toward a culture of criminality within News of the World, also consider that the paper recently paid a £792,000 settlement to a reporter who experienced harassment at the hands of Coulson, and last year paid out another large settlement to Professional Footballers Association head Gordon Taylor for illegally intercepting his phone records. Back then News International and Rupert Murdoch issued statements assuring the public that the reporter responsible for the phone tampering, Clive Goodman, was an “aberration” within the company. Now, half a year later, a bipartisan committee of MPs has described the hacking as having taken place “on an industrial scale.”

Perhaps most interesting is the fact that, while Murdoch claims to have no knowledge of these matters, his newspapers, which he touts as exemplars of balanced reporting, hid the story in their Thursday editions. While The Guardian and other papers devoted multiple pages to what is one of the biggest scandals of the year and quoted directly from the official report, Murdoch’s Sun buried 135 words on the matter between an ad and a weather map of Ireland, his Times printed a mere 230 words, and his Daily Telegraph was able to manage only 325.