Filippo Bernardini, 30, was arrested at New York JFK airport and charged on January 7, 2022 with electronic fraud, accused of having usurped the identity of several personalities from the publishing world.

What purpose?

That of obtaining, between the summer of 2016 and last January, more than a thousand proofs of novels and other literary works by prestigious authors before their publication.

"Filippo Bernardini used his knowledge within the publishing industry to set up a system to steal valuable works from authors and thus threaten" this world of publishing, thundered the federal prosecutor of the Manhattan District Attorney Damian Williams in a statement announcing the defendant's guilty plea.

The young Italian man faces 20 years in prison and has already returned 88,000 dollars as part of this guilty plea procedure, which spares him a criminal trial.

He will know his sentence on April 5.

Employed at Simon & Schuster in London as a "rights coordinator", he admitted to having been given unpublished manuscripts for more than five years, sometimes from famous authors or their representatives, by writing to them from false e-mail addresses of publishers or literary agents.

Mr. Bernardini has created "more than 160 internet domains" by sometimes changing a single letter in his email address and by taking identities known to his interlocutors to better deceive them.

Publisher Simon & Schuster, which fired its employee a year ago, assured in an email on Friday that the "protection of the authors' intellectual property was of the utmost importance" and thanked the American federal police, the "FBI, and the Department of Justice".

The publishing world had been buzzing for years with rumors of spoofing attempts, not always successful and mysterious as the thefts were reportedly not followed by ransom demands or pirated releases of the books.

In 2021, New York Magazine revealed how the Swedish editors of the thriller series Millenium were approached in 2017 by a so-called colleague in Italy asking them to send him a secure link giving access to the manuscript, then being translated. .

In 2019, the literary agent of Canadian writer Margaret Atwood revealed that the proofs of the sequel to "The Scarlet Handmaid", "The Testaments", had also been targeted.

Writers like Sally Rooney and Ian McEwan have also been approached, according to the New York Times.

© 2023 AFP