Annie asked Michael Finkel:

While I did find the story of Christopher Knight interesting I am disgusted by your behavior. You are a horrible person and I hope your family are ashamed of you for your behavior. Will you be honest in your little bio here about your harassment?

Michael Finkel It would be easy, of course, to simply delete your question and move on to the next one, but I feel that you raise a valid concern. How far should a journalist push a subject in order to get a story? Mr. Knight is clearly a sensitive person who lived a radically unusual life, and I wondered and worried the entire time we were in contact how much to bother him for his story. One of the questions I raise in my book -- in fact, it's alluded to in the very final paragraph -- is that this story may have been better off not being written at all.

It's one of the conundrums of the tale, and rather than avoiding it, I addressed it head on; there is a bit of reader (and writer) discomfort baked into the whole project. It would have been much easier to simply eliminate the moments where Knight asked me to leave him alone -- many journalists would have cut those sections out of the book, but I left them in.

You ask if I will be honest in my response -- my answer is that I was utterly open in my book, to the point where I've upset you and other readers. I was fully aware of this risk, but I did not want to whitewash anything, so I left everything in.

I began my correspondence with Mr. Knight in what I felt was the most respectful and unobtrusive way possible -- I sent him a letter. Knight received dozens, perhaps hundreds, of letters, and he responded to very few. He decided to respond to me. I told him in the first paragraph of my letter that I was a journalist (in fact, I included some of my previous articles for him to read), so he was well aware of my profession from the start.

Of course I was unsure how much to push for the story, and I even addressed these concerns with the arresting officer, Terry Hughes. Officer Hughes told me that I should not worry too much -- Mr. Knight, after all, committed about 1,000 felonies while in the woods, and certainly harassed many dozens of families (some of them for decades).

Still, I tried to be as respectful of Mr. Knight's wishes while at the same time I was deeply fascinated by his story. Perhaps I pushed a bit too much. That is possible. I admit to all in my book, exposing myself to the sort of criticism your question entails.

I'm glad that you found the story of Mr. Knight interesting. I posit that in order to collect the material for an intriguing story I had to press Mr. Knight for answers he may have been hesitant to divulge. I have never before encountered a person remotely like Mr. Knight -- I'm sure I made several missteps in my encounters with him. Journalism can be a tricky enterprise, and in this case there was very little chance that my encounters with Mr. Knight would go smoothly. They did not. This discomfort is part of the story.

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