The Case of Carly Fleischmann, Her Speech Therapists, and the Media: Factitious Heroism By Proxy, Factitious Heroism, and Folie À Plusieurs Dan Howitt Harvard
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract From 2008 - 2018, Carly Fleischmann, who has extreme non- verbal autism, was portrayed by her two speech therapists, via a multitude of variations of surreptitious fraud, as being able to type-communicate with keyboards and icon-touch-pads at a normal level, if not advanced level. She was portrayed as such on an array of major television programs, as well as on her YouTube channel, which purportedly shows her conducting in-person interviews with an array of celebrities. Her two speech therapists, in succeeding for approximately ten years with this, engaged in what I refer to as “Factitious Heroism By Proxy”1, as they accomplished persuading innumerable millions of people that Carly is an extremely rare hero of autism. Moreover, the speech therapists, in doing the aforementioned, concurrently engaged in Factitious Heroism, because they accomplished persuading innumerable millions of people that they are the heroes who are in part responsible for Carly's heroism. Unlike my case on Tito and Soma Mukhopadhyay2, while Carly's speech therapists engage in a multitude of variations of surreptitious fraud, 1 Howitt, D. (2021). “The Case of Tito and Soma Mukhopadhyay: Simultaneous Factitious Heroism By Proxy and Factitious Heroism”, https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/p6t4y. 2 Ibid. 1 the fraud was not so masterful that Nobel level scientists, other elite scientists, elite physicians, elite journalists, innumerable millions of other people, etc., would not be able to observe at least some of it.