The Washington Post has printed a letter from Lott responding to two Washington Post articles, one about his survey, and one about Mary Rosh. Lott makes several false claims in his letter:
- that the Post did not print a letter from "an academic who wanted to correct a statement attributed to him that was the opposite of what he had written." You can check the two articles and see for yourself that the only statements attributed to an academic were those attributed to Lott, and he has not disputed those ones.
- "Academics have confirmed ... discussions that I had back in 1996 and 1997 regarding the survey". If you examine Mustard's statement you will find that Mustard is only sure that he heard about the survey in 1999, after Duncan raised questions about the origin of the 98% statistic.
- Lott changes his story about his reason for using Mary Rosh:
"I originally used my own name but switched after receiving threatening and obnoxious telephone calls from other Internet posters."
Unfortunately for Lott, Google groups has saved his John Lott postings. I checked, and every followup to his postings was polite. It is not in the slightest bit credible that someone who violently disagreed with one of his postings would phone instead of posting themselves or emailing. Note further that Lott also posted under his own name while operating the Mary Rosh pseudonym. Nor does it make sense that Lott would only mention this now, months after Mary Rosh was first unmasked.