Joe McGinniss fires back at allegations that he is a "stalker".

From the New York Times:

Reached at his newly rented home, Mr. McGinniss said it’s actually a large lake, Lake Lucille, and said that he had no plans to take pictures or intrude on the family. “They are the ones who took a picture of me and posted it on the Web,” he said.

Mr. McGinniss has been called a stalker by many on various Web sites, but he doesn’t see it that way.

“I am not taking video or photos and I found two people in my yard who were walking over trying to take a picture over the fence and I told them that they had to leave, so in a way, I am serving as a kind of a buffer.”

Mr. McGinniss said that he had planned on moving to either Wasilla or Anchorage this summer to finish reporting for his book when a friend of a friend told him the house was available. He said the house, which the Palin’s had previously rented and renovated but never occupied, was a bargain at $1,500 a month with a lake side views.

His view of the Palin’s house is changing though. The Associated Press reported that the Palin’s are putting up a 14-foot fence.

“I am not sitting here with binoculars trained on her yard,” he said. The author said that after Ms. Palin wrote a post about his presence on her Facebook page, he received thousands of angry emails and a few death threats, but plans on staying through the summer. Mr. McGinniss, the author of a number of bestsellers, including “The Selling of the President,” “Blind Faith” and “Fatal Vision,” didn’t expect his new neighbors to bake him a batch of cookies, but he had hoped for a kind of détente even though he wrote a very rugged article about Ms. Palin for the now-shuttered Portfolio magazine in 2008.

“I had hoped for a mutual respect and benign neglect, but on Monday, Todd,” Ms. Palin’s husband, “came over to introduce himself and I told him who I was and he sort of freaked out,” he said.

“I am writing a book about Sarah Palin,” he said. “Why not live right next to the story? Unless I do something that is an active violation of their privacy, where is the harm?”

Well good I am glad that Mr. McGinniss finally found a reporter who has the journalistic integrity NOT to take the things that Sarah Palin says at face value.

Update:  For those of you who are feeling kind of helpless and want to show Joe McGinniss a little support there is a Facebook page just for you.