Imagine that you were formerly a professor at a university, and you are an entrepreneur now. One day, a company that you have no affiliation with (other than its CEO is your husband) gets an email from a reporter from Business Insider which says that they have found five examples of plagiarism in your 2010 dissertation. The communication person brings this to your attention and lets you know that you are being given to 12 pm to respond. You are concerned about these allegations because even being accused of plagiarism can destroy your career and life which depend entirely on intellectual property and your reputation. In the university context, plagiarism allegations are adjudicated by administrative boards in a process that takes months. Here, a business publication has determined that you are a plagiarist, and has given you only a few hours to respond before they tell the entire world that you are plagiarist. So you have no choice to respond as quickly as you can with whatever documents you can get your hands on. After a few hours of review, you determine that it appears that in four paragraphs of your 330-page dissertation, you cited the author and the source correctly, but you omitted eight quotation marks. In the other instance, it appears that you paraphrased the author correctly, but you failed to cite him. You featured the author in multiple other places in your dissertation and you cited him the eight other times, but somehow you missed this one. Business Insider then runs the story with the headline: John Doe's Celebrity Academic Wife Jane Doe's Dissertation is Marred by Plagiarism You immediately respond to the story with a post on X in which you acknowledge the missing quotation marks for the four paragraphs, and the missing attribution for the sentence, and you apologize for your mistake. Business Insider immediately runs another story entitled: Jane Doe Admits to Plagiarizing in her Doctoral Dissertation after Business Insider Report This immediately becomes global news because your husband is a high-profile person and you are one of the most acclaimed designers in the world with recent retrospectives at MoMA, and SFMoMA. The next day, at 5:19pm on Friday night, the same reporter sends an email to your husband's communication person, which says that Business Insider has identified 28 additional plagiarism allegations identified from "a thorough review of [your] published work." The email is 12 pages long and has 6,961 words. The first 15 examples identified as plagiarism are all from Wikipedia entries for definitions of words and terms that you used in your dissertation, which include weaving, computer graphics, optimization, heat flux, sustainable design, computer-aided design, and other similar terms. You are not even sure whether or not this is plagiarism. You honestly don't know as you have never seen Wikipedia cited as a source. The other examples that are deemed plagiarism and included in the remaining 13 examples by Business Insider include multiple excerpts of text from software manuals for Rhino 3-D modeling software, from hardware manufacture websites including Stratasys in the description of their 3-D printer used in their website,, which prints some of your designs, from patent applications where the linked reference is unrelated to your dissertation, and may in fact be a reference to your own patent, but you have no time to check. There is no time to run down these references, let alone read the 6,961 word email. Many of the manuals are no longer available and a substantial number of the references the reporter has given you do not appear to be correct. In fact, until this moment when you are writing this post, you never had a chance to read the email in its entirety. At 6:51pm, one hour and 32 minutes from the time stamp on the reporter's email, Business Insider publishes a story entitled: Academic Celebrity Jane Doe plagiarized from WikiPedia, Scholars, a Textbook, and Other Sources Without any Attribution This becomes the number one story in the world with global headlines effectively all of which say: Bill Ackman's Wife Jane Doe Admits to Plagiarism No one reads any further than the headline. Who reads articles these days anyway? It is now the number one trending item on X with 35,600 posts versus number two which is the Princess of Wales with 3,174 posts. Does this seem like fair journalism to you? Does this seem like a fair way to determine whether a professor plagiarized in her dissertation 15 years ago? Does this seem like a fair way to destroy the reputation of one of the most talented and famous designer/scientists in the world, even if she is married to billionaire?