😀
I know exactly the type you’re taking about…
I think people are labouring under a delusion about publishers, fact-checking, and ‘due diligence’. This wasn’t a book written to advocate a particular treatment for a disease — ‘Do this and you’ll be cured!’ Or a history, based on credible sources about events that objectively happened. It was presented as a memoir, a subjective account of events in someone’s own life. The commissioning editor’s main concern is ‘Will this sell?’
The main concern of Penguin RH’s legal team would have been ‘Is anyone this book presents negatively going to bring a lawsuit against us?’ They will have gone over the text with a finetooth comb to check whether the ‘friend’ whose business the couple supposedly invested in was identifiable, but @EnidSpyton is right. Publishers don’t ’fact check’ memoirs because they’re presented as ‘Here’s my version of what happened’.
As I said on the other thread, a friend of mine published a memoir with a big UK publisher recently, and despite it presenting horrifying events, the legal department was only really interested in whether a mention of a practice associated with someone high profile was potentially actionable. Verifying would, in any case, have been practically impossible in her case.
Which is not to say Penguin RH aren’t in a pickle in the same way they were when James Frey’s drug rehab memoir A Million Little Pieces was outed as ‘heavily embellished’. They offered a refund to anyone who could prove they’d bought a copy before the revelations, on the assumption that it was non-fiction.
I imagine the book will continue to sell, but will be re-labelled. Actually, some ‘fake’ memoirs that have been long outed continue to sell. Go Ask Alice (supposed real diary of a teenage runaway and drug addict’) was written by a middle-aged Mormon and still sells.