I was so shocked reading this news about Neale Donald Walsch, the best-selling author of the book, “Conversations with God“. The plagiarism claim came about when a woman from California read in the Internet her own real story of the “Christmas Love Anecdote” after googling it on the search engine. The blog of the famous author was one of the results returned, and as the woman, namely Candy Chand, read his anecdote, and she recognized it as something familiar until she realized it was her own story used by Walsch himself in one of his articles. The anecdote was first used by Chand in a spiritual magazine in 1999 and she copyrighted it in 2005 because many uncredited version surfaced on the net. The story was then published as an illustrated Children’s book last Christmas.

Upon her discovery, Candy Chand immediately contacted Walsch and the spiritual website that hosts his blog at Beliefnet.com. Walsch said yesterday in his blog that he was “truly mystified” about what happened and apologized. He said he had been telling the story for years in public talks and “somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience.”

“As a published author myself, I would never use another author’s words as my own,” Walsch wrote. “Yet I have apparently done just that — although with no deliberate intent to do so”

Beliefnet said in a statement:

“Walsch failed to properly credit and attribute material from another author. As a result, Mr. Walsch has decided to remove himself from Beliefnet’s blogging roster, a decision we will support in order to protect the mission and integrity of our site and community. As a faith-based web portal, Beliefnet will continue to hold ourselves and our writers to the highest standards of trust.”

The controversial story was a personal experience of Candy Chand of her own son participating in a Christmas Pageant. The Children were supposed to spell the words “Christmas Love” when a kid held the letter “M” upside down and read as “Christwas Love”. The Incident happened two decades ago and only now did Candy Chand caught the plagiarizer red handed, unfortunately enough, was even the author of a best selling book. Walsch however was guilty because he used the anecdote in verbatim (word for word) as Candy Chand has written in her copyrighted version.

This just shows that we bloggers should always be careful in mentioning stories from unknown sources. We must always verify the true source of the story especially if they are in verbatim, and include its source as a footnote.

Source: Yahoo News (ayan natakot tuloy ako haha!)