JT LeRoy: Exclusive interview with the woman behind the most audacious literary hoax of all time

Ifirst met JT LeRoy in a hotel room in San Francisco in 2000. I'd been commissioned by a magazine to photograph the cult American author of such celebrated and disturbing coming-of-age tales as Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. I contacted him through the web address on the flap on his novel. He'd been in The Face a few months earlier, heavily disguised in a blond wig and dark glasses, and that was how he arrived at the hotel.

He'd asked if he could bring along his friend Emily, whom he described as his "outreach worker". Emily and her boyfriend Astor had, he explained, taken him in from his life on the street as a junkie hustler. Both JT LeRoy books, taken by many as autobiographical, told in unflinching detail of child prostitution, sexual abuse and degradation, seen through the eyes of its young victims.

They arrived with JT looking disturbed, a mass of nervous energy, animal-like moans and twitching. Emily gently coaxed him through the shoot by using some props she'd brought along with her - like a Bible and a Barbie doll. By the end he was jumping up and down on the bed with a fairy wand. Emily, who was noticeably pregnant, spoke with a broad Leeds accent, and dressed in a hippie, thrift-store kind of way, with a crude brusque manner and a navvy's vocabulary.

Even at this stage in JT's career, rumours were rife that he had not written his own books, that he was girl, and that Emily was carrying his baby. The waters around them were so muddy it seemed impossible to see what might not be true.

JT emailed afterwards to say he liked the pictures and so we kept in touch. I read his stories and found them compelling. He would call me in the early hours of the morning in his little boy's voice to tell me which magazine might want to use my photos of him. In 2004 he was in London with his friend, the Italian actress and director Asia Argento, to promote Argento's film adaptation of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. He had asked for me to take photographs.

We met at the Charlotte Street Hotel. He was now even more celebrated - Gus van Sant had used his original screenplay as the basis for his 2003 film Elephant - and so had a much larger entourage of publicists, hairdressers, stylists and film company cronies. Little JT looked uncomfortable in the middle of it. I thought I spotted Emily, looking very different, and went up to her. "Hello, I'm Laura," she said, without a trace of a Leeds accent.

"I thought your name was Emily," I replied. "We've met before."

"No, that's not me." She was emphatic.

At Foyles, I watched Laura, in front of an audience packed with tattooed goths and punks, heckle Marianne Faithful as she read from JT's work. JT then got up to read, mumbling so quietly it was barely audible. He trod on the microphone stand and it hit him in the face.

Back in San Francisco I'd asked Emily if I could take her picture, but she fiercely resisted. This time, however, Laura happily posed with Asia Argento as the two of them tended to JT's twisted ankle by laying on their healing hands. When I took the pictures to the magazine, they put a chinagraph X over Laura's lost, trance-like expression. JT was the star. Laura was an over-eager nobody.

Subsequently the phone calls continued. JT was trusting, but I never pushed him about his strange world. Who would dare question an abused child? By January 2006, however, I could read all the answers, it seemed, in the New York Times. It unmasked JT LeRoy. Playing the role of the male JT for face-to-face interviews, photo shoots and readings, had been a young woman, Savannah Knoop. Writing the books and answering the phone as JT was an older woman, Laura Albert. Knoop was the half-sister of Laura's then partner, Geoffrey Knoop, also known as Astor. Emily/Laura was, I realised actually Laura Albert. So the real author had been looking on while someone else took the credit for her work.

I phoned JT. After announcing myself to the security screener, it was Laura Albert not JT who picked up. She asked if I was alone or if I was recording the call. Though she wouldn't confirm or deny the New York Times story, she sounded almost relieved. "If we'd had a party and I'd brought two bottles of wine, and we had a great night and got a little drunk and had fun, then after I told you there was no alcohol in the wine, hey, we still had fun, didn't we?"

Others took a different view. The fall-out from the JT LeRoy affair has been the talk of literary circles in the United States ever since. Some say that Laura Albert never claimed the books were anything other than fiction, that the books were always catalogued as fiction and put in the fiction section, and that they are still as valuable as they ever were thought to be. Others, though, say she is a trickster who misled publishers, readers and the celebrities like Madonna, Tatum O'Neal, Lou Reed, Carrie Fisher and Winona Ryder, who flocked to rub shoulders with the damaged JT LeRoy.

Late last month, the argument reached the courts. Laura was ordered by a Manhattan jury to pay £60,000 in damages to an American film company, Antidote Films, which had bought up the rights to Sarah. It sued her for fraud because, it said, she didn't come clean with them and admit that JT didn't actually exist.

Given how much trouble it caused her to give "author interviews", Laura is now reluctant to talk in public. Since her unmasking, she has agreed to just one question-and-answer session with the literary journal, The Paris Review, where she admitted the basic truth of the New York Times story.

However, our friendship has continued, usually by phone, between London and her home in San Francisco, where she lives alone with her seven-year-old son, sometimes called Trevor, other times Thor. Astor is gone, but she won't discuss it or bad-mouth him.

She is always Laura now. And, though devastated by the (omega) court's judgement, and fearful that Antidote may now press its claim for costs to be awarded against her up to an estimated £1 million, she is defiant and unapologetic. "Our culture is one in which if a celebrity makes a mistake they immediately apologise and say, 'I'm going into rehab'. I won't do that. I can't apologise for JT. I loved him. He was part of me."

What some call simple fraud, she describes as the result of her own multiple personalities which predate the books. She tried to explain this to the Manhattan court, but its judgement seemed to reject her position. "It's so difficult to explain," she tells me. "When people think of multiple personalities, they think of Sybil [the central character in a popular 19770s book, later filmed, about an American woman with 16 distinctive personalities]. It's not like that for me. I don't go to sleep and another personality takes over. I'm aware, I'm conscious, but it's like I've moved to the back of the bike and they're driving. I still have to lean into the corners to avoid a crash, but they're in control. JT was the more dominant twin. I was just an appendage. But I loved him, he was a life vest to me, I truly need him to survive. I was never laughing at people thinking 'Ha Ha, I'm fooling them'. I truly believed in JT and so did Savannah. When I met you first in San Francisco and watched you taking pictures, I was watching you take pictures of JT."

Perhaps the gravest charge against Laura is that she deliberately led people to believe that what the books described had actually been experienced by JT. Readers took her novels for memoir and it made the pain they described all the more appalling. It also made them more compelling and enabled her to sell more copies - though the books were always more underground than mainstream successes and reports of the money Laura made from them have been hugely exaggerated.

Laura does concede that she has two things she wants to apologise for in relation to JT LeRoy - "that I am a woman and that I am 15 years older than JT". Even then, she adds caveats. "I grew up believing that a boy's pain was always more valid. I grew up on Mark Twain, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger. Girls were either sluts or saints. I couldn't identify with that. An abused girl must have been flirtatious, somehow deserved it. An abused boy was more transgressive."

On the charge of making it all up - namely that JT LeRoy's books are the work of her own imagination - Laura is characteristically outspoken. "All of JT's life came from me. Do you think I made this stuff up to be the next Danielle Steel? I was molested by a truck driver in Virginia [the same fate that befalls the narrator of Sarah, a 12-year-old boy nicknamed Cherry Vanilla]. I was institutionalised in a psychiatric hospital on my 14th birthday. My life was a catalogue of abuse. My parents gave me up. I was a ward of the state; I lived in a group home - like an orphanage. People think I'm from privilege, that I made up this personality to 'go slumming'. But I grew up on government-issue peanut butter. I learned to hustle. My life was hard. Writing these stories kept me alive, I couldn't do it as me, it was too painful."

The details spill out in any order, but one thing is plain: for 13 years Laura had had telephone counselling with a therapist in San Francisco. He knew her only as Jeremiah Terminator. It was he who suggested that JT might write down those adolescent experiences as a way of facing up to them. That's when Laura started producing short stories. One found its way to an editor. When "Baby Doll" was published in a collection in 1997, its startling tale of a boy who dons women's clothes to seduce his mother's boyfriend set off the whole JT LeRoy episode.

"My life," Laura recalls, "was a minefield and it disfigured me, I couldn't fit in anywhere. Writing a page as JT kept me alive for another day. But anytime I got close to writing about 'my' pain it was like an aeroplane losing cabin pressure. The oxygen masks would descend. I cut off and the other personality took over. Even my life with JT was difficult. He would talk shit about me. Imagine how difficult that was for me. I couldn't even get my own creation to like me." She laughs. It happens rarely right now.

The court case preys on her mind. "When I was writing Sarah before JT, before a book deal, I had a terrible feeling. In the story "Cherry Vanilla", an abused child is made into a saint, a religion is built around him, then he's exposed, ruined, hunted, chased through the woods, and I knew... I knew" - she's choking back real tears of fury - "I knew it was the future, that this was what's going to happen to me. And I'm right. If I'm forced to pay the film company's legal bills, they will be able take the copyright of my books, anything I've ever written, or will ever write. They will take my babies."

Laura sees her treatment since the unmasking of JT LeRoy as what she calls "a first-amendment issue". Any writer using a pseudonym could now be in trouble, she claims.

She has no time for those who say that she went so much further than any other writer employing a pen name and who have labelled her "the greatest literary hoaxer of all time". "It was never about making money through telling a story about the abuse," she protests. "It was never about the celebrities. They came looking for me, not the other way round."

A few "names", she reports, have stood by her - including the creators of the hit US TV western series Deadwood on which she is currently working as a script writer, as Laura Albert. She says that JT has finally been removed from her - and possibly from the world. She says, with great sadness, that she may never publish again. But in her recent pictures, Laura Albert looks different. She is beautiful. She is confident. She is as far removed as can be from the crude Emily and brittle Laura I once met among JT LeRoy's hangers-on. She is herself.

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