 In September 2004, media sources around the world (including "The Times", "The Observer", "The New York Times", and the Associated Press) reported allegations that Lavery had plagiarized significant portions (nearly 675 words) of the play from a 1997 "The New Yorker" article by Malcolm Gladwell about psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, and from Lewis' own book "Guilty by Reason of Insanity" (1998).Lewis claimed that "Frozen" was based in large part on her life and that the play lifted both themes and verbatim passages from both sources.However, after interviewing Lavery, Gladwell wrote a second "New Yorker" article in which he characterized Lavery's appropriation as "permissible borrowing."