Mom is promoting her nonspeaking autistic son’s novel. The talk show made the error of showing up close the letter board as he “spelled” – gibberish.
At the time of this posting, she has promoted her son’s novel in two outlets that I know of plus “The Today Show.”
The segment on “Today” is currently only on their site, where there’s no slow-mo feature on the video.
They figured the real-time poking of the letter board, even showed up close, would get past enough viewers that they wouldn’t have to worry about the backlash about someone using their autistic son as a prop to promote their own novel.
What they didn’t count on was that a highly discerning, justice-oriented autistic writer (myself) would post that, indeed, the young man’s finger – in three separate clips on the video – tapped out random letters.
The ones in this article’s title are what he actually pointed to. I was able to collect this data two ways:
- Viewing one to three taps at a time before pausing (this wasn’t easy, but doable nevertheless)
- Pausing after each tap so as not to miss any taps in between (tricky but doable)
This required numerous fast-backwarding, but the evidence was as clear as crystal: In all three segments, the man taps at random letters, albeit with a noticeable cadence.
This is not shorthand. The letter board is not a court reporter stenographer machine. It’s a simple letter board that you can pick up at an office supply store or order off of Amazon.
Two Additional Striking Red Flags for Fraud to Promote a Book
I’ve been earning income as a nonfiction writer for many, many years. What nonfiction writer, though, doesn’t dream of one day writing a novel and seeing it on bookstands?
Imagine that the hunger for this is so intense in a woman who studied English in college (the man’s mother), that she’d be willing to pen a novel but promote it as being authored by her autistic son who has very limited speech. Anything is possible!
Now call me a Debbie Downer if you will, but how do we explain the random letter pointing? And there’s even more evidence that this whole thing is made up to promote someone else’s book.
First, as the segment in the “Today” video shows the up close of this man’s finger hitting various letters, Mom is heard “reading” what he’s spelling out.
As she reads aloud, her words are captioned in a blurb beside the footage of his rhythmic finger tapping. But there’s a marked incongruity between her speech and his letter pointing.
In the first close-up he taps out T-J-B-F-H-V-N-V-X-A. In the time that he begins and ends this nonsensical sequence, his mother has read the following:
“…to finally be in the room where the learning was happening.” Now there’s a big problem here. How do only 10 letters translate to a 48-word phrase?
Mom’s recitation of this exact phrase pretty much begins as he taps “T” and ends as he taps “A.” Now you might think that perhaps this is just a filming gimmick — which of course, makes zero sense anyways.
But it happens three times total. The longer stream of random letters (in this post’s title) was accompanied by the mother’s spoken translation, which again, was synched to start when he tapped the first letter in that sequence (“W”) and ended right as he tapped the last( “B”).
This segment begins at 3:19. Mom’s recitation has way more letters than the 17-letter string of random letters. View it for yourself and prove me wrong.
At 3:55 it happens again with H-O-O-C-A-W-C-F-D-Z-A. Except this time, the cameraman afterward then shows the son zoomed out slightly, where the viewer can very clearly see that he is jabbing at the letter board. But there’s something else that screams fraud:
Secondly, as the young man is jabbing away, his eyes are somewhat sideways and upward – all through at least five taps – and then he shifts his gaze to a mix of frontward and upward, all while continuing to tap. This alone is proof he is not spelling.
Go ahead, try it: Get a flat letter board and see what you can spell WHILE your eyes are maintaining an upward/straight-ahead gaze and a side/upward gaze. Prove to me that this is possible. I’ll patiently wait.
I’m typing this post touch-style on a laptop keyboard, and for the life of me, I can’t visually, without touch, locate the letters if my eyes are trained even a miniscule away from the keys. Yes, I can find them via touch, but not via vision using an index finger.
If I mimic the man’s two eye positions during that footage, I can’t identify a single letter. It was 100% guesswork. For the heck of it I tried to spell “dog” while keeping my eyes right where the man kept his. I got F-N-J.
Profile of the Man Tapping the Letter Board
There are two brief side scenes of him typing. Of course, you can’t make out the letters, but what you can make out is that, beginning at 2:24, the jabbing is clearly random, starting with him tapping the same spot four times in a row.
What word has the same letters four in a row? Oh, I can think of a few: “grrrr” and “ahhhh.”
After that same spot 4x in a row, he veers away for several different taps, then comes back to that same spot for three times in a row. How could the “Today” show director think nobody would notice this? The link to the video is at the end of this post.
My Motive
Why am I exposing this? Why not just let the mom bask in the glory of getting her novel promoted through made-up claims about her autistic son?
Because I hate fraud. I hate dishonesty. I hate lying. I hate how this screams a mother using her autistic son – who may have no idea what’s going on and is simply rote-trained to rhythmically tap randomly at the letters – as a prop to promote her own novel. It’s JUST NOT RIGHT. Here is my first post about this man’s story.
Link to “Today Show”
Here is the “Today” segment. Bet they’ll never get it on YouTube because YouTube has a one-quarter speed option!
