2024-07-13 07:01:53
Do you remember Michael Born? The film forger? Günther Jauch stumbled upon his fraud scandal while working for the RTL magazine “stern TV”.
“Fortunately, we forget a lot,” said Günther Jauch in 2010 for the 20-year anniversary show of “stern TV” when looking back into the past. The Born affair of the 1990s was not what he was referring to. It remains unforgettable – and yet was ignored for years. Neither in the show “20 Years of Stern TV” nor in the anniversary edition five years later was there any mention of the film forger Michael Born and perhaps the biggest German TV fraud scandal. Jauch and Born – this personal involvement remains a constellation of silence.
Will the false story of the past fade from the collective memory? It’s difficult to say. One thing is clear: it’s still worth telling today. And not because the story is meant to fuel conspiracy myths – “stern TV” is produced by the company “i&u TV”, whose sole shareholder is Günther Jauch. Rather, the way the affair was handled shows how well the principle of repression works – right up to the present day.
This is what happened: Günther Jauch started his job as a “stern TV” presenter in 1990. From September 1992 to September 1994, in addition to his presenter duties, he also served as editor-in-chief for the TV magazine. During this time, “stern TV” broadcast reports by freelance reporter Michael Born. These included a report on child slaves in India who wove carpets for Ikea and a report on a Ku Klux Klan meeting in the Eifel. Both films later turned out to be fakes: the children were part of a staged production and Born re-enacted the alleged Ku Klux Klan meeting with friends.
In a conversation with NDR journalist Anja Reschke in 2011, Born said: “We built them a world that only exists in their heads.” He wanted to be understood as a forger who was driven. He died in Graz in 2019 at the age of 60.
Born was exposed because, according to a police report, the voice of the alleged Ku Klux Klan speaker was, with a 60 percent probability, identical to the voice of the alleged drug courier from Guadeloupe – another story by Born, involving drug trafficking from the Caribbean island to the French mainland. The public prosecutor’s office then persuaded one of Born’s employees to make a comprehensive confession.
In 1996, a sensational trial took place. The prosecution accused him of 32 falsified documents, 16 of which were proven. In December 1996, the court sentenced Born to four years in prison for 17 cases of completed fraud and three cases of attempted fraud. He was released in 1997 and lived in Greece from 2002 onwards.
Born’s boss at the time, Günther Jauch, was called to the trial as a witness. Most of Born’s TV fakes were broadcast on “stern TV” and ended up on television under Jauch’s responsibility. When he was questioned, he already suspected that he would “have to take responsibility for it,” as court reporter Volker Lilienthal wrote at the time for the “Zeit”. “During this time, I bore journalistic responsibility for what was broadcast on ‘stern TV’,” Jauch admitted in court.
But Günther Jauch did not admit guilt. He meandered when asked how he had fulfilled his journalistic duty of care as editor-in-chief: “First and foremost, you pay attention to whether a story is consistent.” The then 40-year-old thus revealed his understanding of his role: As editor-in-chief, he did not have to check whether a story was true, but only whether it was consistent. In other words: whether the viewer could follow the story. The fact that he shirked responsibility for the forgeries was considered scandalous in 1996, mainly because of one sentence: “I have basically never been in an editing room.”