Tom Kummer (born 14 January 1961) is a Swiss journalist who published numerous celebrity profiles in Germany and Switzerland. Kummer never even met his subjects. His primary publisher, Süddeutsche Zeitung issued a public apology for running Kummer's stories, calling them "a betrayal of monumental proportions". His work was also published in Der Spiegel, Stern, the Tagesanzeiger, the Berner Zeitung, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Because of the timespan in which his bogus reporting appeared in print, he has earned comparisons to Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass. Celebrities profiled Tom Kummer published fake interviews with the following celebrities: Courtney Love Mike Tyson Sharon Stone Brad Pitt Kim Basinger Christina Ricci Tom Hanks Liv Tyler Bruce Willis Robert Redford Kevin Costner Snoop Doggy Dogg Whitney Houston Ivana Trump Sean Penn Pamela Anderson Style In his profile of Mike Tyson, Kummer quotes the boxer talking about eating cockroaches with bread in prison in order to get more protein. Sharon Stone confesses her sexual fantasies to Kummer, and she expresses a desire to "irritate men from wholly different classes of society". In Kummer's profile of Kim Basinger, she reveals that she gave Alec Baldwin see-through underwear. Courtney Love describes herself as "depressed, empty, and stupid." She also says, "There are seagulls on the Riviera, slurping ice-cooled gin and tonics," and, "Minotauruses are eating the genitals of the moon." Kummer has Brad Pitt saying, "sometimes, something will be hanging out of my nose for days." Bruce Willis tells Kummer, "I understood pretty early on that we do not advance through morality, but immorality, vices, cynicism." Kummer was fond of injecting references to other writers in his profiles, often by having a celebrity quote an author. He discusses Neuromancer with Pamela Anderson. He has Sean Penn quote Kierkegaard and Mike Tyson quote Nietzsche. Discovery Marie Claire sought out Kummer for an interview at the height of his success. He told the magazine that his secret was to demand no less than 45 minutes with his subject. According to Katie Roiphe, "What eventually betrayed [Kummer] was his inability to be banal, his desire to put ideas into people's mouths that they would never actually utter." Holger Hoetzel, a journalist with Focus magazine, uncovered Kummer's fraud. Hoetzel was suspicious of Kummer's access to such famous celebrities, and along with many of his foreign correspondent colleagues, he was being hounded by his editors to match Kummer's efforts. One reporter