Simon and Schuster (Atria Imprint) pulls Stef Willen’s book right before publication.

Simon and Schuster (Atria Imprint) pulls Stef Willen’s book right before publication.

Awhile back, editors at Atria ( a Simon and Schuster imprint) had to cut their losses. They had been alerted that a memoir ironically titled, Total Loss An Inventory of Disaster Theirs and Mine was not so much a memoir as a compilation of inventions and fantasies, or if we are to be more bold, it was all a bunch of lies. The book was close to release- January of 2017. It was 304 pages long. It was given an ISBN number and booksellers like Amazon were putting it up on their websites with a nifty editor’s description. The editor’s description was crafted with care and it looked like Total Loss could drum up a lot of sales.

The Donald Maas agency, the agency that sold the property to Simon and Schuster, even made it their business to celebrate the sale on their website. They spoke of a bidding war that garnered a great advance, though they were coy about the exact amount. A bidding war culminating in a sale to this most venerable publishing house. This all must have seemed magnificently surreal to the scribe,Stef Willen, a struggling actress and writer who had until 2008 seen no professional success. Now the small preceding successes since 2008 had resulted in a big book deal. It would have been life changing.

What the editors and public did not know is that all the successes that Willen was professing were acheived by her gleeful participation in a series of malicious and life destroying actions against innocent others. Willen had behaved sociopathically towards others seeking their own successes. She had exploited, betrayed and tried to destroy three people who had invited her into their home. She had formulated a series of false accusations that led good law abiding people to be decimated by a legal system where the fix was in from the start. That story is too long and can be found here http://alisablogq.blogspot.com/2017/07/dismissed-in-interests-of-justice.html

In doing so and in agreeing to persist in doing so she soon won the favor(literally) of a guy named Nick Kroll.

Nick Kroll has used his father’s fortune and connections to acheive a measure of celebrity and some reading this might recognize his name. Nick Kroll follows his father’s model in many ways. But I’ll just focus on one tactic that they ascribe to religiously. Jules Kroll and his impressionable failson are big believers in how if you grant favors you can expect payback. It’s human nature to want to repay and the Kroll have manipulated that tendency to great effect. Nick Kroll admits it on a podcast. He speaks of how nice he is to stewardesses cause he knows down the road that he’ll be paid back for doing so. Huh? I have never been nice to anyone expecting payback but that is what he said.

From studying his father I saw many instances where it’s clear he learned that from his father.

In 2007, Willen was living in others peoples places. She was working for 14 dollars an hour for a high strung advice columnist named Amy Alkon. She despised Ms. Alkon and bemoaned Alkon’s success often. She spoke of how hard it was to witness the talented(her and I) going nowhere and the talentless(Alkon) doing great. Her biggest cause of angst however seemed to be that she’d lost all her friends, when someone named Tig had cut all ties with her. She told me once that something has to change as she couldn’t take it much more. In short, she was angst ridden, in dire straits and desperate to gain the success she was sure she deserved.

She found a solution. To get back into the graces of this Tig person she’d pretend she was in danger. She’d call upon this then estranged Tig to help her as she knew what would work on someone like Notaro. Pretend she is being abused even stalked is how Willen would get back all those friends and oppotunies when Notaro broke off all contact.

What would transpire would come to span many years and many court cases, both criminal and civil. Stef Willen would make up stories and tell police and judges lies that she knew would ruin lives. But her lies otherwise were working like a charm for her bottom line. These lies would impress Nick Kroll as he used his fathers power to fix all the court cases.

In 2009, while Willen( and now Kroll and Notaro’s victims) stewed in epic degrees of injustice, that would include a loss of so much money, time, liberty, peace of mind and more, Willen was scoring the successes she’d so long felt she deserved.

First up she sat with Ira Glass from NPR’s prestigious This American Life broadcast. There she closed out the show with an unamusing and completely improbable story of her working as a production assistant for a reality show and going on Craiglist and offering a job to some sucker as her assistant. Glass had to coach her as the story went nowhere. At one point, Willen posited the moral of the story, she used and abused some poor guy on Craiglist cause she felt low about herself and putting him below her was a way to feel beter about herself. In other words, she’s a shameless sociopath who is showing up on this big time show for no understandable reason. I’d learn the reason. Jules Kroll donates a fortune to NPR and to Ira Glass. That is the sole reason Willen and then Tig Notaro(when she decided to get fame by faking cancer- but that’s another story)were to be featured there.

Nick Kroll and his family also gave a lot of money to Mcsweeneys over the years and Nick held sway over its editor, John Hodgman. Yearly, Mcsweeneys was running a column contest and in 2011, Notaro and Kroll made sure Willen got the votes to win it.

If anyone reads that column knowing that Willen is liar it’s obvious that each column entry rings false. But no one was yet paying attention. The victims of her lies were too distracted by losing all their money and suffering debilitating abuses in the courts. Stef Willen however was thriving. Not only did she get to put This American Life on her then previously less than sparse resume but now she’d boast being a Mcweeney’s columnist. Soon Nick Kroll would also make it so the L.A Press Club was awarding her for that column though there is nothing in it that would be considered as press and in fact, it was the work of a ruthless fabulist.

She didn’t have to make lemonade at of lemons at this point. More like delicious cherries to make a cherry pie. She shrewdly and with the help of Alkon( who she also manipulated into believing she was in danger), Notaro, and Kroll was able to secure an agent and then a book deal by touting these seeming bona fides/ill gottten gains.

And so it came to be that her “memoir” Total Loss was set to be published in January of 2017, to the disgust and dismay of those she’d falsely accused and harmed beyond imagination. It seemed to them like a joke too cruel to stand.

Throughout 2016, her victims were amazed and even amused to find out that Willen had left a trail of evidence of her lying disorder. To Ira Glass, she said she’s never risen past being a production assistant. In Mcsweeneys, she said she’d been an associate producer. In one column, she said that she quit because she didn’t want to be a producer. In a column that followed, a column that she’d written a few weeks later, she said that she desperately wanted to be a producer but bad phone reception ruined her chances.

More lies were found. Her online bio boasted of many acting classes and short films. Danielle Wexler’s editor’s description said she’d gone to Hollywood without any training whatsoever. She couldn’t even get her college major straight. If one reads her column and looks at it with a discerning eye they will see that so many stories ring all wrong.

So I sent that all to the editor, Danielle Wexler. She blocked me on twitter. I then sent it to every editor at Simon and Schuster. I saw on my stat counter that CBS was on the blog where the lies were set out for many hours. I soon learned that this was Simon and Schuster’s IP adress.

A few weeks later, Willen’s author page on the Simon and Schuster website was gone. The book never came out. A total loss. A gain for me and her other victims. A win that was so long in the making.

More on that here https://medium.com/@henyaspitzberg/simon-and-schuster-dodges-a-bullet-by-cancelling-the-memoir-of-chronic-liar-and-creep-stef-willen-9a1ee021a5ce

The title of this piece never was a headline in any publication. But I wish it was because, Stef Willen, deserved public humiliation and prison for her crimes.