This is a true story.

Last week, my work was plagiarized by a fellow “writer” with over 130K followers on LinkedIn.

Plagiarism is a huge problem in our industry — and every day, it’s becoming easier to perpetrate and harder to spot, especially in a creative discipline, where most concepts can’t be owned and “originality” is literally born out of connection, the combining of old things in new ways.

Writers who write about advertising and creativity, like me, are largely talking about the same things, the same principles and techniques, many of which have also been passed down, taught to us by previous generations, the shoulders we stand on.

So “what” we write about is not as protected as “how” we write about it, the style and approach we use to engage and teach The Reader.

The “how” is uniquely ours, and it must be respected.

That said, you can’t really plagiarize the “what” — it’s usually too old, too many people before you have already written about it, talked about it, taught it.

But you can absolutely plagiarize the “how” — it’s as easy as copy/pasting someone else’s writing, verbatim, and passing it off as your own without attribution or credit. And that is exactly what happened to me.

Last week’s incident was not an unintentional citation mistake, which, while still wrong, can and will happen to the best of us. We’re all human and imperfect, so when confronting plagiarism, it’s important to consider its source, the offender, their history and their response.

The Plagiarist’s history, in this case, is that of constantly and unabashedly aggrandizing himself and his influence among his #writing peers — and doing so without paying credence to those who came before him, which only makes his actions more suspect.

And The Plagiarist’s response to the indictment is more egregious than the crime itself: completely unacceptable from anyone, much less a “teacher” of the craft with tens of thousands of followers. If you did something wrong, own it. Don’t gaslight and minimize and then rationalize it to your audience. The Plagiarist does all this and more — and you’re about to see it and marvel at his behavior.

Plagiarism is not murder. It’s a mistake, a lapse in judgement. We all make mistakes. But to make them right, we must own them — and vow to do better, vow to be better. If we don’t, it’s not a mistake. It’s a mindset, a culture, one that has no place in our community.

And even though The Plagiarist has a platform — and therefore deserves exponentially more shame for what he did — I opted to conceal his identity. I don’t hate this person. And I don’t want this to be his scarlet letter, a character-defining incident. I’d much rather use his actions as an anonymous example of what not to do and how not to respond.

Because I do hate his actions, which I’ve curated chronologically in this piece. And I think there’s much to learn from this incident and his handling of it, which is a scourge on the #copywriting and #marketing and #creativity communities — here on LinkedIn and everywhere else writers go to honestly share their work. What you’re about to read sheds light on the exact behavior and thinking and justifications being used to excuse and even normalize plagiarism by lazy, immoral people. And it cannot be tolerated.

It must be called out and condemned.

Please join me in fighting the normalization of plagiarism by reposting this essay or contributing to the conversation in the comments.

Our community should be talking about this.

And speaking of community, I was overwhelmed and genuinely moved by all the messages I received about this incident from the folks who caught it.

Thank you all for caring about me and my work.

🫶🏼

You open an email from a friend.

It’s very short, one word:

“Plagiarism?”

There’s a link. You click it. It brings you to this post:

It is, unfortunately, your work, copy/pasted and presented by someone else as their own. This person will be known as “The Plagiarist” from now on.

Behold, The Plagiarist’s work:

The Plagiarist bills himself as a copywriter and mostly shares thinly-veiled humble brags masquerading as trite advice about writing and personal branding.

He has a substantial audience — over 130K people — which he grew by investing heavily in the “pod” commenting trend (now-bubble).

You notice the post has over 1100 comments. Not bad. (Granted, hundreds of these comments were systematically left by The Plagiarist himself, a tactic designed to artificially amplify the reach of the post.)

You share the incident with a few people in your industry, writers you admire and respect, mentors, friends. Many have been writing professionally for twice as long as you have. Some have even been in this line of work longer than you’ve been alive! You are indeed standing on their shoulders.

“Are you surprised?” says a friend, “this guy’s a known charlatan.”

Many things like this are said about The Plagiarist. He is called a “snake-oil peddler” and a “con-artist” and “utterly talentless.” And everyone agrees it is a conscious, blatant theft.

“He’s passing off something he did not write as his own, verbatim,” my friend tells me. “When it comes to blatant plagiarism like this, there is no moral win in taking the high road and ignoring it. He’ll just do it again to you or someone else.”

This is true, so you message The Plagiarist:

You, too, are “shocked” by The Plagiarist’s spectacular gaslighting.

You do your best to explain the reality (because perhaps, you assume, The Plagiarist is one of those people who create and live inside their own reality):

Given the evidence against him, reading The Plagiarist’s denial leaves you seriously questioning his mental health.

“He’s probably got a diseased ego,” a friend tells me. “He probably isn’t capable of allowing himself to accept responsibility, much less feel shame.”

Who knows? You’re not a psychologist and don’t intend to play one. But you don’t need a medical degree to see The Plagiarist is a liar: he never does edit the original post to provide proper credit. Instead, he edits the copy he initially stole.

Very sly.

Behold, what this master of craft came up with:

lol. Nailed it.

The only commitment he does, for lack of a better word, “keep”, is publishing a completely insincere apology comment, which is then buried in the comments of a completely separate post.

So tens of thousands of people read the plagiarism but probably less than 1% of those folks see him own up to it?

Is this what writing is now? Is this acceptable behavior in our community:

Stealing someone else’s work and if you get caught, simply hiding a half-assed, skeptical and self-aggrandizing “apology” comment in a separate thread?

Better than nothing, you suppose. Or is it?

Behold, The Plagiarist’s atonement:

Not only does he misrepresent his true sentiments from your conversation (so much for “staying sincere”), he also minimizes his actions, and manipulates the situation to make himself look somehow innocent, somehow victimized, even.

Mr. Plagiarist, mate, it’s simple: you copy/pasted someone else’s writing — something you did not write — and passed it off as your own, verbatim. Who cares who wrote it and when. Someone wrote it. And you took it without a shred of attribution. This is called intellectual theft, plagiarism, and it’s perhaps the worst indictment on a writer’s character and skill. Kids get expelled from college for plagiarism. It is a huge deal.

(And by the way, a swipe file is a repository of once-well-timed approaches and angles. It's a tool for learning and inspiration, not some copy catalogue you can casually pluck from.)

You are stunned by The Plagiarist’s capacity for gaslighting and denial.

You send the so-called “apology” to your friends, who marvel at it:

“Why wouldn’t he just hold his hands up and admit it rather than trying to gaslight you?” one says. “Calling your message ‘weird’ and using words like ‘apparently’ and still then denying he knew anything about it. And ‘stay safe and sincere’ — what?”

They are also in awe of his denial-ridden, self-aggrandizing color commentary, including:

You think: he’s negating his entire “apology” here.

You think: he’s not taking any accountability whatsoever.

You think: based on his denials, this was not a voluntary apology.

You think: so how many times has he done this before!?

“You know,” says your friend, “he’s not normal.”

You purse your lips.

“It’s called the ‘typical mind’ fallacy,” he says. “Ever heard of this?”

You say you’ve not.

“It’s where we think other people’s minds work like ours, on a basic level, but they don’t,” he says. “There are people whose minds are anomalies, who have no credence for the integrity of workmanship and originality and creation. Like, the games this guy was playing with you — denying it and then being subversive about it, and all that shit — this is not a normal person,” he says. “There are people like this who have absolutely zero respect for origination. And so my point is, you can’t reason with them.”

You thank your friend for the wisdom.

It reminds you:

This situation is not about The Plagiarist or the pithy copy he stole.

The bigger issue is that his reasoning advances the normalization of plagiarism — an epidemic in our industry — by displaying how to minimize it, how to excuse it (which is wrong when anyone does it, much less someone who gives writing advice to over 130K followers every day).

Writing and plagiarizing don’t mix, I’m afraid.

So how can someone be a writing teacher and also an unrepentant plagiarist? It sets a dangerous example, which aspiring copywriters and marketers may misguidedly take into their work, into the industry we all share.

Please join me in fighting the normalization of plagiarism by reposting this essay or contributing to the conversation in the comments. Doing so spreads the message and supports writers everywhere.

Thank you, so much.