Our friends at the Good Law Project

The one I remember was the man who faked his own death in a canoe accident in northern Scotland and went off to live in hiding for years. I think his wife was in on it? He was eventually rumbled and had to face legal consequences and more importantly make amends with his children, I cannot imagine what they went through.

Thats true... but he wasn't public.. If that makes sense.

JA and the others I mentioned specifically use their "illnesses/trauma" to gain public perception, and therefore his downfall was specifically related to his public persona.

John Darwin from Northumberland - the story was made into a TV series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JohnDarwindisappearancecase

Also Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos.

Here's a fun list of fraudsters on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fraudsters

It includes a certain New York real estate developer found to have fraudulently overstated his wealth. I wonder where he is now? 🤔

Refugio 🤣 He is so insufferable

Bloody hell, Trump is just like Arday!? Lay off him you mean bullies, he might kill himself.

Put in a post for which he is manifestly unqualified, exposed to the public, constantly telling easily disprovable lies to enhance and maintain his status, surrounded by grifters.

I've actually forgotten which one that sentence was about!

My big takeaway from the Arday affair is that there are a lot of people who seem to think that the way to write an essay is to copy and paste other people's work, and then do a little bit of re-writing to make it your own. And that the only thing Arday did wrong was that he didn't do quite enough of the re-writing.

I've read several articles that are interesting but would probably upset the GLP

This one, in Quillette, is interesting because it fills in a little about Nathan Cofnas

https://quillette.com/2026/08/14/institutional-failures-in-the-garden-of-great-intellects-cofnas-arday-cambridge/

Kathleen Stock is always a good read

https://archive.ph/ocm8e

https://unherd.com/2026/08/the-jason-arday-delusion/

I think someone mentioned Milli Vanilli upthread?

https://archive.ph/D3ywL

https://spectator.com/article/what-cambridge-should-have-learned-from-the-milli-vanilli-fiasco/

However, the idea that it can be turned into a weapon, used to threaten others and to become immune to criticism, is frankly a greater danger to society

See the “kids are going to kill themselves if you deny them puberty blockers, you bigots” as a good example of how dangerous this is to society.

Piece from Private Eye, worth expanding and reading if only for the line "The Good Law Project, seeing a fire, poured petrol on it"

I'd never heard the Milli Vanilli story! They were just some pop band from way back when to me.

There's the case of Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy.
Media scrutiny, books, TV documentaries, films - 'witch hunts', as some might call them.
She went from being named one of the most influential people in the USA/Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship/ etc etc etc, to getting 11 years in prison for fraud and having to pay over $200 million in restitution.

Indeed - my thoughts exactly. Suicide is awful. I cannot imagine the depths of despair a person must have reached to chose this path or how deeply traumatic it must be to those left behind… but we cannot be afraid to say NO to PBs, to firing an underperforming employee, to calling out lies in case this happens.

My DH sat next to a colleague for 3 years who died by suicide. He did it on the day he was due for sentencing at court for having 3000+ child sexual images on his computer. Are we supposed to feel sorry for him and refrain from arrest and prosecuting ‘in case’ suicide is a risk? Where does it stop? Unless a person as an individual has systematically, directly and intentionally abused another to such an extent that they have driven them to be vulnerable enough to do this (am thinking of the case in the news about the bastard to who abused his partner and was found guilty of contributing to her then ending her life), then we cannot go down this route of attributing responsibility to the world and society at large.

Vulnerable people live amongst us and whilst we should be sensitive to that, we can’t take that blame on board for simply asking to verify or clarify truth, for questioning a system that enabled misconduct.

ETA to remove ‘commit suicide’ as I understand this can be a distressing way of expressing the act of choosing to end one’s life to those who have suffered a bereavement through this means. Apologies.

Looks like someone trying to start a race war. Interesting search history & interesting friends I imagine. Wonder who's pulling his strings.

ETA to remove ‘commit suicide’ as I understand this can be a distressing way of expressing the act of choosing to end one’s life to those who have suffered a bereavement through this means. Apologies.

When my family member killed himself, I went online to donate to a mental health charity in his memory. The front page was a big lecture about how people shouldn't refer to suicide using XYZ language. You should absolutely be using ABC language instead. It actually added to my distress, that the thing they thought most important about suicide was to police the language around it. Needless to say they did not get my money.

Stephen Bush on Bluesky

https://bsky.app/profile/stephenkb.bsky.social/post/3mtffc2xqns22

So many people in this wretched affair are incapable of registering the idea that the black people involved are in fact real people, rather than being rhetorical props for whatever unrelated point they wish to make.

Initially applied to Arday, now at the black journalists who reported on him

I think JM is upset about reports by black journalists because he can't just simplistically say that a white journalist was racist. He does deny them, including Arday, agency.

This looks very interesting, but I can't read this. Is it anywhere other than in paper print? Or can it be enlarged or photographed in smaller segments perhaps? Sorry. And thank you for posting it @BackToLurk

"Where would you be in there wasn't a white man around to explain it to you?"
"Continually startled by mirrors?"

made me smile.

There is a simplistic messaging out, which says,

white person commits plagiarism: not much done
black person commits plagiarism: hounded to death

which seems to be ignoring, deliberately or not, what actually gave the story legs and media interest - marathons, non-verbal, brain tumour, appearing in the Seven Up series, and on, and on.

Try this: https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FHQJy-QoXMAE7Z_e.jpg

It's well worth giving that Private Eye summary a look. It captures a great deal while not being overly long.

In fact it's almost like a controlled experiment. When the concerns were merely about academic misconduct, such as plagiarism and misappropriation of data from other publications, it was indeed a very niche affair. It was people like Dave Harris at Plymouth, veteran social researcher Martyn Hammersley, Jack Grove at Times Higher Education and so on. Messrs Carter Ruck were successful in keeping the lid on it, at least initially. So it was a relatively localised concern among a handful of academics.

What gave journalists grist to their mills was all the collateral claims about money raised for charity, marathons run, 600 mile endurance feats, threats and intimidation faced down (including a masked man with a knife whom nobody else could see) developmental disabilities miraculously overcome and much else besides. That was the magic ingredient, which was added relatively late in the affair. It wasn't even the legacy media. They're already subject to a good deal of policy and legislation. So regulating the press still further would achieve little other than ensuring that even less useful or credible information would be published than there is at the moment. The online world, at least as I followed the story, was much more lurid. People were a lot less shy about calling him a narcissist, fantasist, plagiarist and so on. That's a lot more difficult to regulate because so much comes from outside the UK.

Maybe, but at some point weren't people going to start wondering why somebody in such a high profile position wasn't producing anything noteworthy, if for no other reason than that they wanted his job?

I don't know much about Cambridge, but my impression of other universities is that funding is being cut, departments are being closed and people are being let go all over the place. It seems like a bad time to be, at best, average.

(And that's before you get on to the questions about his back story).

The guy who brought Arday's plagiarism into the public eye, after he tried to squash it, Nathan Cofnas has been suspended by the University of Ghent and is being investigated.

I don't like the sound of him but I've not read either his expose of Arday or the work that eventially got him out of Cambridge. Though I believe no complaints were upheld? I don't know if it's just spin by people who see racism everywhere, or if he's actually racist. However, I hope this isn't a performative gesture by Ghent, something to appease the mob. Can everything that followed upto Arday's suicide and the resulting hysteria really be laid at his door? The controversial work he did prior to all that must have been known by Ghent. For them to retrospectively discipline him for it, if that's what they're doing, seems rather unjust. Perhaps he's been posting Tiktok's once everything blew up of him chuckling while stroking a long haired white cat?