Is that stuff about Ben Franklin true?
Yes.

What about the part with the moon men hoax?
Yes.

And the hoax with the zoo animals?
Yes!

What about the thing with William Randolph–
It's all true! It's true, I tell you! It's all there on historical record! Leave me alone!

Now at the end of the interlude (p. 180), Scott refers to a trick that a group of Washington publicists pulled off in 1990. What's that about?
In October of that year, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named "Nayirah" had given tearful testimony to Congress about Iraqi soliders who had entered the hospital she worked at and proceeded to pull 312 babies from their incubators, leaving them on the floor to die. It was a terrible image, one that got major play in the news media. A number of U.S. senators cited Nayirah's testimony as a significant factor in their decision to support a war resolution, which had passed in the Senate by a mere handful of votes.

Here's the problem: the whole thing was a hoax. Nayirah never worked at a hospital. In fact, she was the daughter to the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Her testimony was part of a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign conducted by PR firm Hill & Knowlton. The Kuwaiti royal family had hired Hill & Knowlton to drum up government and public support for a war, and they did their job admirably. And by "admirably," of course, I mean "shamefully."

For more information, you can go here, here, here and here.

Scott claims he knew one of the perpetrators of that particular endeavor quite well. Who's he referring to?
He is of course referring to his old mentor/lover Drea.

And that's the job that "took her down" and "destroyed her from the inside out"?
Yes. Even publicists have souls, and Drea wasn't accustomed to her campaigns ending with a six-figure body count. It was enough to send her into a fit of remorse. I was originally going to work the tale into the later chapters of SLICK, but I just couldn't find the right place to squeeze it in.

Did the publicists involved in the real-life hoax suffer fits of remorse?
Actually, some did. At the time, Hill & Knowlton was one of the largest PR firms in the world. But in the early 1990s they suffered a crippling wave of employee walkouts. Some of it, I'm told, had to do with the "Nayirah" incident. Others say that campaign was just the tip of the iceberg.

It should be noted that the woman who spearheaded the "Nayirah" hoax, Lauri Fitz-Pegado, did not go the way of Drea. In fact, just last year she helped promote a book about the "rescue" of Private Jessica Lynch.