Swiss journalist Tom Kummer published fabricated interviews from the rich and famous from 1995-1999. The subjects of the interviews included the personalities Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Ivana Trump, and many others; none of which he had actually met much less interviewed. All the interviews were conversations with himself in the privacy of his own apartment. He labeled his style as borderline journalism which some call by the oxymoronic phrase: interpretative journalism.

Mandy De Waal in a story about Kummer for the Daily Maverick states, ‘Kummer’s face-to-face interviews with mega-stars like Sharon Stone, Sean Penn, Kim Basinger and Christina Ricci were revelatory to the point of being almost too good to be true. When Tyson told Kummer he had eaten cockroaches in prison as a source of protein it was beyond sensational – it was unbelievable. That was because Kummer had made that all up… Kummer’s celebrity interviews were nothing more than the product of his imagination and he was nothing more than a lying fake who had never even met any of those celebrities.’

Source:  Tom Kummer by Mandy De Waal 2011, Daily Maverick. Graphic: Photo of Tom Kummer by Christian Werner, 2021.