Speaking Deceit to Power and the Powerless. The Death of Co-Author of ‘Three Cups of Tea’ Is Ruled Suicide

David Relin may be the saddest victim of Greg Mortenson's blend of tea lies that duped the feel-good public, politicians, press and schools. All were looking for an excuse to love the tribes near the Taliban (rather than honor the US Troops at war) and donate to phantom classrooms in the Afghan tribal hinterlands. m/r

The Death of Co-Author of ‘Three Cups of Tea’ Is Ruled Suicide - The Daily Beast
Dec 6, 2012 - Michael Daly

Friends and colleagues mourn the death of David Oliver Relin, who was widely considered innocent of the lying of which his co-author Greg Mortenson was accused, writes Michael Daly.

determination that David Oliver Relin took his life on Nov. 15 by stepping in front of a freight train outside Portland, Ore.

The 49-year-old coauthor of the bestseller-turned-controversy Three Cups of Tea is said to have driven to the Corbett Hill Road exit of Interstate 84 and left his car in a parking area beside the railroad tracks that run along the Columbia River.

Relin was so proud of Three Cups of Tea that he dedicated it to his late father, Lloyd Relin, a prominent Rochester attorney who won a landmark bankruptcy case before the Supreme Court and died in 1986. Imagine how the son must have felt last year, when both 60 Minutes and author Jon Krakauer charged Greg Mortenson, Relin’s co-author and the focus of the book, with fabricating significant parts of the story and using charity donations related to the book for his own benefit.

“The first eight chapters of Three Cups of Tea are an intricately wrought work of fiction presented as fact,” Krakauer wrote with palpable indignation in an e-book called Three Cups of Deceit. “And by no means was this an isolated act of deceit. It turns out that Mortenson’s books and public statements are permeated with falsehoods.”

Mortenson did not respond to requests for comment  ...

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