# Michael Finkel

michael finkel (born 1968) is an American journalist and memoirist, who has written the books True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa (2005) and The Stranger in the Woods: The extraordinary story of the last true hermit (2017). == Career == Finkel was a writer for The New York Times until 2002, when he was discovered to have used interviews with multiple people to create a composite protagonist, Youssouf Malé, for a story he had written on the Arabic slave trade within Africa, "Is Youssouf Malé A Slave?" Finkel had originally pitched a child slavery story to The New York Times, but his subsequent reporting did not uncover proof of enslavement, although he did encounter teenagers working for meager wages in difficult conditions.The story Finkel submitted purported to profile an adolescent West African boy, Youssouf Malé, who sold himself into slavery on a cocoa plantation in the Ivory Coast. The story as published included photographs, including one described as being that of Malé.