There is today nothing more from St. Martin’s Press than a resolute “no comment.”

FishbowlNY had been inquiring about how the recent Lianne MacDougall (a.k.a. Lianne Spiderbaby) plagiarism scandal has impacted the publisher’s plans for the North American release later this year or in early 2014 of the embattled writer’s first book, Grindhouse Girls: Cinema’s Hardest Working Women. In a Twitter reply posted late last month, St. Martin’s stated that MacDougall had ended the book project from her end. But that tweet has since been deleted.

Author-journalist Mike White, whose extensive cataloging of MacDougall’s film-review plagiarism was largely responsible for breaking the story, obtained what he claims are excerpts from the Grindhouse Girls intro and first chapter. He compared and contrasted various sentences to other sources, although the case for plagiarism here seems far less strong than it was for the Spiderbaby film reviews.

In an interview published this spring, MacDougall said she had a publisher in Germany and was shopping the book to other international markets. If she has indeed withdrawn the book, the move could eventually stand as an early concrete step towards personal and artistic redemption.

P.S. An author and title search for MacDougall’s book on the St. Martin’s Press website returned zero matching results.

Previously on FishbowlNY:
After Plagiarism Victory Over Lianne Spiderbaby, This Writer Isn’t Celebrating
Kiwi Writer Plagiarized by Lianne Spiderbaby ‘Kind of Flattered’