THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 74 NOVEMBER 13, 2019
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GIC.National Interest, whose honorary
chairman is Henry Kissinger.
Debat’s highest-profile gig,
though, was as a frequent on-air
consultant for ABC News, where
starting after the Sept. 11 attacks
he provided commentary and
contributed to War on Terror-
related reporting, including by its
chief investigative correspondent,
Brian Ross.
Then, in 2007, Debat’s profes-
sional life imploded. He was
exposed for falsifying his résumé
with such fictional entries as a
Ph.D. from the Sorbonne. “I didn’t
need a Ph.D. for anything that
I did,” he says. “So that’s what
makes it particularly stupid.”
He also was accused of faking a
series of interviews with famous
figures including Kofi Annan,
Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates,
Alan Greenspan and then-presi-
dential candidate Barack Obama.
In the aftermath, Bergquist
claimed that he had subcon-
tracted out the work to a third
party and was himself duped,
though follow-up inquiries failed
to corroborate this.
According to a 2007 investiga-
tion on Debat in Mother Jones,
his work at ABC led the network
to report that the U.S. had been
supporting an Iranian ethnic
minority group to attack the
Tehran regime. But subsequent
reporting didn’t bear this out: The
leader of the group objected to
ABC’s story and the Iranian for-
eign ministry lodged a complaint
with the U.N. asserting that the
TV report was proof that the U.S.
was attempting to destabilize its
government. Bergquist stands by
this reporting: “Multiple sources
had given me an extreme amount
of detail about this operation.”
Media covering l’affaire Debat
described him as a “fraud”
(Talking Points Memo) and “flim-
flam man” (NPR). Some observers
wondered whether he was a lone-
wolf fabulist, or an instrument of
disinformation for more shadowy
figures. While Bergquist now
acknowledges his “mistakes,” he
contends the armchair psycholo-
gizing of his behavior was out
of line.
“A lot of the commentary
was, ‘He’s a con man,’ ” he says,
explaining that the description
is unfair. “It’s to say, ‘This guy is
constitutionally a liar and con-
stitutionally a fraud’ versus ‘This
guy did some really sleazy stuff.’ ”
Bergquist points to the conclu-
sion of ABC’s probe of his work.
David Westin, then the president
of its news division, issued a
memo noting that “none of these
discrepancies would rise to the
level of a formal, on-air retrac-
tion because none of them was
material to the substance of our
report.” Critics countered that the
network’s self-inquiry had been
a sham. To this, Bergquist scoffs,
pointing to ABC’s axing of Ross
in 2018 after issues arose with his
former boss’ work.
Regardless, the episode shone
a harsh light on the common
TV news practice of employing
ideological partisans for on-air
commentary and (often uncred-
ited) back-channel reporting.
Debat soon lost all his gigs and
disappeared, not just from his
appearances on Jim Lehrer’s
NewsHour and C-SPAN, but
from D.C.
“What happened to me was
horrific,” says Bergquist. “I lost
everything. But it gave me a
phenomenal opportunity to be
reborn. That guy was left behind.”SHORTLY AFTER BERGQUIST’S
public collapse, he met the
woman who’d eventually become
his wife. She had a 5-year-old
daughter. “You can imaginequickly promoted at Singularity
(where he was still using his
surname, Debat), someone wrote
an anonymous letter to his supe-
riors, “and they fired me. My son
was a week old.” At that point he
took his wife’s surname and, he
says, resolved to be more up-front
about his checkered history.
After a period in the consulting
wilderness, he was hired at L.A.-
based pop culture polling website
Ranker. Its CEO, Clark Benson,confirms that Bergquist was suit-
ably candid about his past.
The current director of the ETC,
Ken Williams, met Bergquist in
2014, when the think tank was
working with raw data provided
from Ranker. Bergquist later
pitched Williams on a project of
his own, to explore the ways in
which Hollywood could benefit
from the new computational
methodologies known in the AI
community as machine learn-
ing. Soon, with the ETC board’s
approval, Bergquist began as a
pro bono consultant, running the
center’s newly minted data and
analytics project. Bergquist didn’t
then tell Williams about his past.
“If he had come in off the street
and that was on his résumé,”
acknowledges Williams, “I can’t
say that I would have been quite
so supportive.”
The ETC maintains a symbi-
otic relationship with Holly wood
akin to the close ties between
the MIT Media Lab and Siliconbecoming a father in the worst
recession since the ’30s, with my
Google results,” he says. “Those
were very difficult years.” The
new family moved to California,
where he started going by his
middle name, Yves, and went
back to school, receiving an MBA
from what is now the Middlebury
Institute of International Studies
at Monterey. While there, he
learned of the nearby Singularity
University, the futurist RayKurzweil’s then-nascent graduate
program, where he was brought
on as a teaching fellow and was
first exposed to the frontiers of
artificial intelligence.
By the account of Bergquist —
who claims he’s spent years in
therapy “unpacking” his trans-
gressions, believing they stem
from the insecurity of a fresh
émigré from France looking for
an edge in the nation’s careerist
capital — AI appealed to him for
its contrast to his prior profes-
sion. “It’s an area where you’re
accountable to specific metrics,”
he says. “In my previous life,
you’re accountable to opinion.
‘I think that al-Qaida is this,
so we should fight it like that.’
With machine learning, you are
accountable to your models. They
either work or they don’t. You
can’t bullshit your way out of it.”
Bergquist learned that his
past would follow him. “I didn’t
start out telling people,” he says,
explaining that after he wasBefore he started going by the name Yves Bergquist and became a regular on the
Hollywood technology speaking circuit (right), Alexis Debat was a national security
expert employed by ABC News who fled D.C. after padding his résumé and allegedly
fictionalizing interviews with Bill Gates and Barack Obama.“I think people
deserve a
second chance
if they’ve
earned it, and I
thought Yves
earned it,” says
Ken Williams,
head of the
Entertainment
Technology
Center, housed at
USC’s Robert
Zemeckis Center
for Digital Arts.