I love Maureen Dowd as a writer, but as a fact checker? She just can’t be bothered.

The controversial New York Times columnist just wrote a piece in Vanity Fair about Tina Fey where she makes a big deal about how Tina hates bad boys and has never even tried dating one. The only problem with that is a man named David Leone gave an interview with The National Enquirer about how he went to the Snowball Dance is high school with Tina that pretty publicly disproves Dowd’s assertion. Here’s Leone’s story:

“It started out very promising… I picked her up at her parents’ house and was sur­prised and delighted to see how she’d transformed her­self from a plain Jane into a jaw-dropping knockout.

She always wore frumpy clothes to school that were too big, but now she had on this black-and-white dress that really had me going.

After the dance, we went to a Houlihan’s restaurant. Tina never had a boyfriend I knew of in high school, whereas I guess you could say I was something of a player.

At the restaurant, I came over to her side of the car and standing there, asked if I could kiss her. She said yes, but when I tried to give her a full-mouth French kiss, she recoiled and slapped me!

We still had dinner, but that certainly put a bit of a damper on the evening.”

Anyway, Tina Fey, while admitting to initially not remembering the guy, conceded on October 28th in Conan O’Brien appearance that the story was true; even filling in some of the details (video excerpt here). Now maybe it’s just me, but managing to get slapped on a first date and selling the story of the date to The National Enquirer probably qualifies David Leone as a “bad boy”.

Look, granted it’s not an especially important fact, but Maureen Dowd literally starts off a four page article with the sentence, “Tina Fey has never dated a bad boy.” A writer for the New York Times doesn’t even have the patience to fact check her opening sentence?

Via here, here, and Maureen Dowd’s article here