A Wellington anthropologist who single-handedly destroyed the reputation of American \Earthmother\ Margaret Mead, one of the 20th century's towering intellectuals, has himself been accused of being obsessive, a bully and, worst of all, faking his key evidence.Derek Freeman, who died in 2001 aged 85, won international attention in 1998 with his book The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead in which he claimed there was never \another example of such wholesale self-deception in the history of behavioural sciences\.It was argued that teenage Samoan girls tricked Mead into believing they led relaxed and sexually free lives. She had been hoaxed as the result of her youth, gullibility and lack of knowledge of Samoan culture, Freeman said.Mead's 1928 best seller, Coming of Age in Samoa, was the most widely read anthropology book for decades and in the United States was key to debate on family, adolescence, gender, social norms and attitudes.Freeman's critique was widely accepted and destroyed the reputation of Mead, who had died in 1978 aged 77. It also left the study of anthropology badly savaged.Now some remarkable detective work through Freeman's own papers reveals it was he who was hoaxing the world.Freeman had found an 86-year-old woman, Fa'apua Fa'amu, whom he described as Mead's key informant 50 years earlier, along with another girl, Fofoa. He had her swear on the Bible that when she had told Mead \we spend the nights with boys\ she was joking.\That a Polynesian prank should have produced such a result in centres of higher learning throughout the Western world is deeply comic