User:Propaniac/kaavya

TV interview
On April 26, 2006, Viswanathan appeared on The Today Show with Katie Couric. In the interview with Couric, she maintained her innocence, saying that any and all similarities were "completely unintentional" and that she must have "internalized" those details without realizing it.

She also claimed to have attempted to contact author McCafferty (of whom she admitted to being "a big fan") after the scandal. McCafferty later denied this in an interview with People Magazine, saying, "To my knowledge, this is not the case."

Additional accusations
On May 1, the New York Times ran a story giving national prominence to claims on the Sepia Mutiny blog that Viswanathan may have lifted text from Salman Rushdie's 1990 novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

May 2 brought two additional charges. The New York Times alleged "striking similarities" between passages in Opal Mehta and those in a "chick-lit" novel called Can You Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella.

Viswanathan and her publisher declined to comment on these allegations. In addition, The Harvard Crimson alleged that Viswanathan appeared to have borrowed passages from Meg Cabot's 2000 novel The Princess Diaries.

Viswanathan again declined to comment.

On May 3, the Harvard Independent noted passages in Opal Mehta similar to Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier, another young adult novel about an Indian-American teenager. They cite "uncanny resemblance in imagery, sentence structure, and paragraph organization" between the two books.

As the Crimson noted, it is not clear the extent to which the similarity between Viswanathan's text and that in other books should be deemed plagiarism, and to what degree it can be explained by her use of tropes common to the "chick lit" genre.