Joe McGinniss's new book, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, hits bookstores next week, but its controversial claims about the former Alaska governor are already making waves.
In the book, McGinniss writes that Palin had a one-night stand in 1987 with future NBA basketball player Glen Rice nine months before she married her husband Todd. He quotes a friend who said Palin "had a fetish for black guys for a while."
"She was a gorgeous woman. Super nice. I was blown away by her," Rice tells McGinniss in the book, NBC reports. "Afterward, she was a big crush that I had."
McGinniss's book also alleges that Palin had an extramarital affair with her husband's business partner, Brad Hanson, in the mid-1990s, and snorted cocaine off a 55-gallon oil drum while snowboarding.
"An utter fraud. An absolute and utter fraud," McGinniss calls Palin in an interview about the book with NBC.
"At best, she's a hypocrite," McGinniss tells NBC's Savannah Guthrie. "At worst, she's a vindictive hypocrite."
McGinniss famously moved into a house next door to Palin's Wasilla, Alaska home to write his book -- prompting the Palins to accuse him of stalking them. They built a high fence along their property to protect their privacy.
In response to McGinniss's book, Todd Palin gave a statement to NBC saying that McGinniss "spent the last year interviewing marginal figures with an axe to grind in order to churn out a hit piece to satisfy his own creepy obsession with my wife."
"I'd ask the fathers and husbands of America to consider our privacy when one summer day I found this guy on the deck of the rental property, just 18 feet away next door to us, staring like a creep at my wife while she mowed the lawn in her shorts," Palin said.
McGinniss says that anything he learned about Palin by living next door did not make it into the book, but he does become a character in the story himself.
The New York Times writes in its review:
Soon Mr. McGinniss is settling in to enjoy the fuss his mere presence has created. "Normally, for a news story to continue beyond the first 24-hour news cycle, something newsworthy must occur," he writes loftily, but "The Rogue" is filled with proof to the contrary. What was his hate mail like? He quotes it. What did Glenn Beck call him? That’s here too. Who took umbrage at this venom and chose to help him? One man offered him a hideout, despite Mr. McGinniss's slight skepticism about his motives. "But you don’t know me," Mr. McGinniss protested.
McGinniss's book is scheduled to hit bookstores on Tuesday, Sept. 20.