Mike Daisey Is Sorry, Really, This Time

Even after “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” Mike Daisey’s one-man staged attack on Apple’s manufacturing practices, turned out to be troublingly fact-challenged, the monologist bafflingly continued to stand by his play for a time, chalking the liberties he took with the truth up to a kind of dramatic license. No longer.

On Sunday, Daisey backed all the way down, posting a full apology on his blog, “His Secret Fortress on the Web.”  —KA

Mike Daisey:

And I would like to apologize to my colleagues in the theater, especially those who work in non-fiction and documentary fields. What you do is essential to our civic discourse. If I have made your path more difficult, or the truth of your work harder for audiences to discern, I am sorry.

I would also like to apologize to the journalists I gave interviews to in which I exaggerated my own experiences. In my drive to tell this story and have it be heard, I lost my grounding. Things came out of my mouth that just weren’t true, and over time, I couldn’t even hear the difference myself.

To human rights advocates and those who have been doing the hard work of bringing attention to these kinds of labor issues for years, if my failures have made your jobs harder, I apologize. If I had done my job properly, with the skills I have honed for years, I could have avoided this. Instead, I blinded myself, and lost sight of the people I wanted most to help.

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AP/The Public Theater, Stan Barouh

Agony, ecstasy, Daisey: Monologist Mike Daisey takes to the New York stage in “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in October 2011.