In the Freud Archives and the Masson case
Articles Malcolm published in The New Yorker and in her subsequent book In The Freud Archives (1984) offered, according to the book's dust jacket, "the narrative of an unlikely, tragic/comic encounter among three men." They were psychoanalyst Kurt R. Eissler, psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and independent Freud scholar Peter J. Swales. The book triggered a legal challenge by Masson, the former project director for the Sigmund Freud Archives. In his 1984 lawsuit, Masson claimed that Malcolm had libeled him by fabricating quotations she attributed to him.
In August 1989, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco agreed with a lower court in dismissing without full trial a libel lawsuit that Masson had filed against Malcolm, The New Yorker and Alfred A. Knopf.
Malcolm claimed that Masson had called himself an "intellectual gigolo". She also claimed that he said he wanted to turn the Freud estate into a haven of "sex, women, and fun" and claimed that he was, "after Freud, the greatest analyst that ever lived." Malcolm was unable to produce all the disputed material on tape. Masson then appealed to the Supreme Court, which did not decide the case in his favour, but held that the case could go forward for trial by jury to decide whether what Malcolm had written was true and, if not, whether any untruths had been malicious.
After a decade of proceedings, a jury finally decided in Malcolm's favor on November 2, 1994.
In August 1995, Malcolm said that she had discovered a misplaced notebook containing three of the disputed quotes, swearing "an affidavit under penalty of perjury that the notes were genuine."
