'Vanity Fair' Muses: Is There More to 'Da Vinci' Plagiarism?

by Rachel Deahl, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 6/6/2006

Dan Brown and Random House may have been vindicated twice in the courts, but that hasn't stopped Vanity Fair from trying to reopen the plagiarism case against the publishing conglomerate and its star author.

A cover story set to go on stands tomorrow by former Newsweek writer (and, ironically, Random House author) Seth Mnookin called The Da Vinci Clone reexamines the lawsuit writer Lewis Perdue filed in the U.S. claiming his 2000 novel, Daughter of God, was strikingly similar to The Da Vinci Code. In what's mostly a looking-back meditation on Perdue's case—which he lost on April 11—Mnookin, who did a small piece about Perdue’s claims in 2003 for Newsweek, uncovers some odd footnotes to the drama surrounding the case against Brown.

The most interesting and eyebrow-raising tidbit involves "mysterious" e-mails Perdue received from someone called Ahamedd Saaddodeen. Perdue told Mnookin he thought the messages were being sent by Brown's wife (and chief researcher), Blythe. Skeptical, Mnookin ultimately finds, through "an independent database search," that "on at least one credit report" Saaddodeen and Blythe Brown share the first five digits of their social security numbers and a few addresses "from 1979 until very recently."

Although Mnookin's story here may be more about a man who lost everything trying to prove he was wronged in print—Perdue sank his life's savings into the legal battle—it also highlights the fact that Perdue may not have lost simply because he didn't have a case. Aside from the David and Goliath nature of the legal battle, the difficulty of proving more subtle forms of plagiarism is raised. When someone isn't lifting passages word-for-word Kaavya Viswanathan style it's decidedly harder to prove literary theft.