Naomi Wolf's 'Outrages' Book Exposed On Air By BBC As Full Of Major Errors About Victorians

Author, activist Naomi Wolf is living the worst nightmare for a writer. She did not properly investigate the term "death recorded", a key research term in her new book 'Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, '

The error is a whopper, one that goes to a core premise of her book, which deals with people not only being imprisoned for 'illegal love acts' but -- according to Naomi -- being executed.

Wolf was interviewed on BBC Radio Thurs. where she apparently sat with interviewer Matthew Sweet , as he read to Wolf the definition of “death recorded,” a 19th-century English legal term. “Death recorded” means that a convict was pardoned for his crimes rather than given the death sentence.

The legal term means the exact opposite of what Naomi assumed. The error speaks volumes about her lack of scholarship and a book that is on sale as we speak.

Apparently Wolf was also negligent in applying sodomy laws only to gays, when the laws also applied to abuse of children.

In her defense of the sodomy laws and execution, Naomi cited on Twitter a 1978 article in The Historical Journal that refers to over 50 executions in Britain under sodomy law in the early 19th century. This cited research didn't specify between sodomy and child abuse, and did nothing to clear up confusion around execution. AND, the author of that piece, A.D. Harvey, later became notorious for fabricating a meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky. So the author Wolf cites is suspect before one digs into confusion around the term "executions".

What a mess! The interviewer Matthew Sweet, is an expert on the Victorian era and all the falsehoods around it. AOC shares an in-depth book review of Sweet’s 2001 book 'Inventing the Victorians', which ironically scoffs at members of the Bloomsbury groups, educated liberals who came after the Victorians and obsessed to make them evil people. Sound familiar? via New York Magazine