True Story

The true story of a disgraced journalist, the accused murderer who stole his identity, and their complex friendship—now a major motion picture.

In 2001, Mike Finkel was on top of the world: young, talented, and recently promoted to a plum job at the New York Times Magazine. Then he made an irremediable slip: Under pressure to keep producing blockbuster stories, he fabricated parts of an article. Caught and excommunicated from the Times, he retreated to his home in Montana, swearing off any contact with the media. Then he got a call from the San Francisco Chronicle—and Mike was thrust back into the news cycle in a way no one could have anticipated.


In Waldport, Oregon, Christian Longo had killed his young wife and three children and dumped their bodies into the bay. With a stolen credit card, he fled south, making his way to Cancun, where he lived for several weeks under an assumed identity: Michael Finkel, journalist for the New York Times.

True Story is the tale of a bizarre collision between fact and fiction, and a meditation on the slippery nature of truth. When Finkel contacts Longo in jail, they begin a close and complex relationship. Over the course of a year, Finkel's dogged pursuit of the true story pays off only at the end, in the gripping trial scenes in which Longo, after a lifetime of deception, finally tells the whole truth. Or so he says.