Marion True, Getty Curator Talks

Thanks for your email & interest in the piece. As for how it came to be: there was this bizarre situation in which a person who was the object of relentless negative coverage in the international press—press that was largely informed (sometimes misinformed) by one side—has basically been silent during the entire duration of the investigation and trial against her.

She was also estranged from the Getty, which itself has maintained a remarkable reticence about her situation. So she was ready to tell her story.

As for the reporting, it was pretty complex; I spent time with her in Greece, France, and the US--probably a total of a week over the course of several months. I also did a lot of reporting in Italy, where there is a surprising amount of discord about her and where the story turns out to be a good deal more ambiguous than it has often seemed.

I think one of the things I came away with was that—regardless of what you think about what she did or didn’t do 10, 15 or 20 years ago—here is a woman with strong convictions, who believed in what she was doing, who worked extremely hard for her institution. And her reputation, her career, the life she had has been totally destroyed. Despite the fact that the conspiracy case is still going on (and the cases in Greece now seem likely to be dropped), she has long ago been convicted by the press. And the Italians are saying now that the case isn’t really about her anyway, that she was just a convenient way to go after museums. And there are a lot of questions we can ask about this.