Harvard Business School Professor Ben Edelman may have gone way, way too far over a $4 billing mistake at Brookline Chinese restaurant Sichuan Garden. But on Wednesday evening, Boston.com posted an article claiming it appeared that Edelman—after apologizing for his actions on his website—may have taken things into far more shameful territory by sending a message to the restaurant containing a racial slur (the full article is embedded at the end of this post).

More than an hour after it went live, though, Boston.com retracted the article and posted this message:

In its time online, the article—which had Boston.com deputy editor Hilary Sargent as the lead author—gained a huge amount of buzz on the Web, including more than 500 tweets and 900 Facebook shares:

Still, a number of people I follow on Twitter immediately questioned the legitimacy of the messages posted by Boston.com. And it turns out they were right to do so, of course—raising the question of why Boston.com and its own deputy editor were not more skeptical.

I can add that it really didn't take much heavy lifting to figure out how this could have been faked—the restaurant's contact form could've been used to send the racist message while making it look like it was from Edelman's (easily findable) email address:

Hmm so the restaurant contact form lets you enter any email: http://t.co/ZLTyRAcsdf & the ben@benedelman.org address isn't a secret @lilsarg

— Kyle Alspach (@KyleAlspach) December 11, 2014

@lilsarg the email is on the first page of this filing, for instance: http://t.co/Jno0KY0Das

— Kyle Alspach (@KyleAlspach) December 11, 2014

Others had beaten me to it, alerting Sargent to that possibility while also pointing out other things that didn't smell right about this. Here’s a screengrab of an exchange between New York Times reporter Josh Barro and Sargent (Sargent has since deleted her second tweet in this thread):

Fingers crossed, this is the last time we’ll have to discuss any new information in the HBS Prof-Chinese Restaurant saga of 2014. But for Boston.com, I’m guessing that, after this incident, the conversation about how to handle sensitive stories like this one is about to begin.

Disclosure: From February through September of this year I worked for the Boston Globe’s BetaBoston site, a (much smaller) sister site of Boston Globe Media-owned Boston.com, and in that role I had a fair amount of interaction with Boston.com.

See related:

A Boston.com Editor Designed a T-Shirt Mocking the Harvard Prof. in #TakeoutGate

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