Regret the Error

City Pages, a weekly in Minneapolis/St. Paul, highlighted this remarkable Editor’s Note from the Minnesota Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Minnesota:

Editor’s note: Some of the claims made by Charles Carlson included in this article were later found to be untrue. Several months after this story was printed, Carlson admitted he had lied about officiating tennis in the Beijing Olympics, and had also lied about growing up in England and having a personal connection to the Clintons. Hillary Clinton never shared her crème brulee torte with him. Carlson grew up in the United States–not in England. Carlson claims he was a communications director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, but The Minnesota Daily has been unable to independently verify this. See a Daily article about Carlson on March 2 for details about these inaccuracies.

It comes six months after the Daily published a a rather fawning piece about Carlson. The Note was published in conjunction with a Daily report that detailed Carlson’s troubled relationship with the truth. From the original Daily piece about him:

He was a Beijing Olympics tennis official and is a University graduate student, GLBT rights advocate and director of operations at a Minneapolis architecture firm. Is there anything Charles Carlson doesn’t do?

Um, tell the truth? From the Daily’s investigation into his background:

Just days before DFL caucusing begins for Minneapolis City Council elections, Charles Carlson — University of Minnesota student and Minnesota representative at the Democratic National Convention — said he will announce Monday his withdrawal from the Ward 2 council member race following a series of lies regarding his past and his qualifications.
An investigation by The Minnesota Daily found that Carlson lied on several occasions concerning items such as his college education at Princeton University and where he grew up.
Carlson, who speaks with an English accent, previously claimed he grew up in Ramsgate, England, but admitted recently that he grew up in the United States.
The Daily confirmed that Carlson attended elementary school, middle schools and high schools throughout Minnesota, including Northfield High School, where a former classmate said Carlson did not have an accent. Also, the classmate did not have any knowledge of Carlson previously living in England.
In a Feb. 1 Daily article, Carlson said his English background would help him connect with the 2nd Ward’s immigrant population.
Carlson also provided the Daily with two fraudulent transcripts to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and Princeton University. These schools, along with two other English schools he claimed to have attended, had no record of Carlson.
Carlson said he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia affective disorder, which impacts an individual’s ability to accurately judge reality…

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