Former Trump Exec Denies Drugging Competitor

The trouble with writing a book about lies and liars is that it may be tough to verify your source material. You can see this perfectly clearly in Vanity Fair contributor Vicky Ward’s The Liar's Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World's Toughest Tycoons (Wiley), which will be out August 20.

Former trump exec, Abe Wallach, denies ever drugging a rival to help make a real estate deal happen. From The Real Deal:

In the book, which is about the sale of the GM building, Ward recounted a story in which Wallach allegedly drugged a rival during a long-haul flight to Asia. 

“I swear on the grave of my parents, that story is not true,” Wallach told The Real Deal.  

Instead, he explained, Ward took the story from Wallach’s written memoirs. The memoirs, he said, contained embellished and, in some cases, fabricated stories that he inserted in order to entice a publisher to someday buy his manuscript. “The key thing most publishers told me was, ‘You need to jazz up the book,’” he recalled. “So I started looking at what I could do to jazz it up.”  

Wallach said he showed Ward his draft to help her piece together some of the facts for “Liar’s Ball.” He claims that she quoted portions of his book, but presented his stories as truthful, which some are not. And, he said, she got the story about the sleeping pills from a chapter on the Plaza Hotel, not the GM building.