Did you catch Steve
Kroft's 60 Minutes report in April questioning experiences in Afghanistan and Pakistan Greg Mortenson related in his bestsellers Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools, as well as the way funds are allocated to his international charity Central Asia Institute?
At that time, Mortenson was canceling appearances and dodging Kroft's interrogation. Mortenson later responded to some of the discrepancies. But when it comes to one local appearance, the author is still pulling a no show.
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The Daily Pilot reports that Mortenson's agent at publishing house
Penguin yanked the author from his scheduled Saturday appearance at the OASIS Senior Center in Corona del Mar as part of the Newport Beach Public Library Foundation's Martin W. Witte Distinguished Speakers Lecture Series. The advice to cancel apparently came from Mortenson's lawyer, and the author has reportedly scrubbed all speaking engagements for the rest of this
year.
The 60 Minutes segment was actually based on the account of another author, Jon Krakauer, who challenged some of Mortenson's assertions in the exposé “Three Cups of Deceit.” Krakauer, mountaineers and several people
who knew Mortenson during his Afghanistan and Pakistan trips questioned for the CBS news program the timing of events Mortenson purported, whether the author was really kidnapped by the Taliban as he asserted and, most damning of all, whether schools his nonprofit raised money for were ever built or, if they were, ever operated when cameras were not around after the ribbon cuttings. Some were abandoned by the time 60 Minutes' cameras pulled up.
Mortenson apparently told Montana's Bozeman Daily Chronicle that he compressed some events in his life story for the sake of storytelling. And he defended his charity's work, saying he has donated more than $100,000 of his own money to the institute and
did some speaking engagements for free. The Corona del Mar appearance was not one of those. He'd been contracted to receive $38,000, and the nonprofit library foundation would have lost a $19,000 deposit if it cancelled, even
after the exposés.
Now, with Penguin pulling the plug, the money will be returned to the foundation, as will the price of tickets to the 150 who'd already purchased seats to hear Mortenson's tales.
Here is the 60 Minutes report:
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.