“Dear Prudie” is something of an institution and, in the age of the internet, interesting letters are viral fodder. When I reached out to Slate in late September, the publication’s director of media relations told me their audience had spent more than four million minutes reading “Dear Prudence” the week before. That’s fair enough, Slate isn’t exactly NBC News (although they seem to have similar standards). Regardless, it’s still easy to assume most letters are real and unedited, and that it doesn’t matter even if they’re fake and modified. To recap, if Madison is correct, the revelations here are that “Dear Prudie” seems to be very poorly vetted and that Slate occasionally makes big changes to the letters. But we believe fake letters make up a very small percentage of our mailbag.” She added that they “take measures to scan for fakes, but a few may slip through–and, after reading the Gawker post, we do certainly appreciate Bennett’s persistence and creativity. We do edit them for length, clarity and spelling and grammar, but don’t change the meaning or substance of any question that is submitted.” The outlet’s director of media relations replied, “Slate does not change the substance of letter writers’ questions.
In late September, I asked Slate if Bennett’s posts were “changed in substantive ways,” as he alleged. In the case of “My Daughter Is Pretending to Be Demonically Possessed… and I Can’t Take It Anymore!,” that meant when it ran on the “Prudie” podcast the letter “had been stripped of its caveats to allow Prudie to deliver a sermon about nurturing childhood creativity,” according to Madison.
“Sometimes,” wrote Madison, “my work was altered in ways that changed its substance.” Not only did nearly half of Madison’s outrageous letters end up in “Prudie,” he claims Slate made major modifications to the submissions without his consent. “I used burner email accounts to submit around 25 letters to Dear Prudence, at least 12 of which were answered on either the printed column or the podcast,” he wrote last month. In a recent confessional essay for Gawker, writer Bennett Madison chronicled his two years of sending fake letters to Prudie.
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