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The Helen Keller story doesn't add up

Elephants in Rooms - Ken LaCorte

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"I've wondered this my whole life. I finally got serious and dug into the facts as best I could." --Ken

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CORRECTION: The image at 1:56 when I say "Edison" is actually Keller with British politician Wilfred Paling.

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VIDEO CHAPTERS
0:00 - Intro
1:13 - The Legend
3:57 - Keller's Condition
5:19 - More Helen Kellers? (1)
8:30 - More Helen Kellers? (2)
9:44 - The Miracle Worker

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20 Comments

@ElephantsInRooms Creator 6 months ago (edited) Pinned

You need a VPN. Private Internet Access is offering 83% off, and 4 months free at https://www.piavpn.com/ElephantsInRooms

CORRECTION: The image at 1:56 when I say "Edison" is actually Keller with British politician Wilfred Paling.

@PeteRIII79 6 months ago

I’m also deaf and blind so my suspicions were raised listening to this whilst driving to my work as an air traffic controller this morning

@doublebit55 6 months ago

I got sent to in school suspension in 5th grade for saying I thought the story was fake.

@texasdazzlers 6 months ago (edited)

From someone who knows ASL and has worked with the deaf for years, I can tell you nobody is more suspicious of Helen Keller than my deaf friends/acquaintances. The majority of those that were born profoundly deaf or lost their hearing at a young age really struggle with reading and writing above a third grade level. It has nothing to do with intelligence but rather the simple fact that much of learning to read and write a spoken language depends on hearing it. The idea that HK was able to express herself so eloquently in a language that she had no memory of hearing at a time when there were few resources or technology is…really something.

@juliesmith5123 3 months ago

So Anne Sullivan saw an opportunity and pounced on it. She used hellen as a puppet to gain fame and security.

@TheHappyHousewife89 6 months ago

The fact that her works changed immediately upon her caregiver changing sold it for me.

@DillonHeverin 6 months ago

Helen Keller: “I like peanut butter!”

Ann Sullivan: “It is not blindness nor deafness which bring me my darkest hours..”

@jishwah1889 6 months ago

HK is one those stories you’re told as a kid that feels unbelievable but can’t question without some form of punishment

@sageisrage 4 months ago

As a kid, I always thought it didn’t make sense but I didn’t care enough to say anything.

@misfitsailor 5 months ago

After watching this, I no longer believe that Helen Keller landed on the moon.

@dptfo 6 months ago

“Have you ever told a lie and it escalated “

@pewpew192 6 months ago

Hellen Keller fraud check was not on my 2026 bingo card...

@Son_of_Patmos 4 months ago

Always found it interesting how her entire manner of writing changed when her caretaker died.

@melikeymalarky4460 6 months ago

Hellen Keller wasn't the fraud. It was her handlers.

@kickpublishing 6 months ago

Scary to think she might have basically been little more than a locked-in ventriloquist puppet for a narcissistic sociopath

@mashizzung9990 6 months ago

The fact that Sullivan admitted to "heavily paraphrasing" suggests that the output we call "Helen Keller" was, at the very least, a joint product, though it was marketed as a solo achievement.

@WendyDarling1974 2 months ago (edited)

So many red flags. Even if Keller was a child prodigy without disabilities there’d be parts of the story that don’t add up, certainly without more objective documentation than their teacher.

@muellerme 6 months ago

I work with disabled college students in Northern California and there’s a student I worked with who has receptive and expressive language disorders. Talking face to face is particularly challenging: slow, repeating, clarifying, needing to really listen to understand his short, choppy sentences. But his writing was amazing. I was floored. Really elegant. Then it came out that his parents were “editing” his papers. It was a bit of a scandal. Thanks for the video. I had no idea about some of this nuance to her story.