Tim Steller's column: Famed novelist groomed underage Tucson girl, story reveals

And yet, if you believe the details of the story she lays out, he was one.

Not just any groomer, but one of the most famous American authors of the last century, grooming her poolside in Tucson.

A story published in Vanity Fair magazine this month says it started here in 1976. Novelist Cormac McCarthy was 42, unappreciated in the literary world and staying at the Desert Inn, when he began a relationship with a 16-year-old foster child here.

When the girl, now a 65-year-old Tucson-area resident, was 17, he took her to New Mexico, Texas and across northern Mexico, the woman says. That’s also, she said, when they had sex for the first time.

If these details are true — and one of McCarthy’s friends confirmed the relationship in the story, as do his letters — then McCarthy clearly committed a crime, or crimes. But he died in June 2023, so there is no perpetrator left to hold accountable.

Beside that, the former foster child, Tucsonan Augusta Britt, also denies being a victim. She denies it even though she acknowledged in the story that his early, sometimes erotic letters made her feel uncomfortable and that she felt “violated” by the way he later mined her life for material.

The writer of this month’s story, Vincenzo Barney, describes Britt as McCarthy’s “secret muse,” inspiring many characters through a series of his novels.

“I know we joke around, calling Cormac a groomer,” Barney quotes Britt as saying in the Vanity Fair story. “But that’s a defense mechanism of mine. I loved him more than anything. He kept me safe, gave me protection. He was everything to me.”

Here’s my imagining of how the story could have played out after the piece was published if McCarthy were still alive and returned to Tucson, a frequent haunt, interspersed with analysis of the Vanity Fair piece, which takes place largely in Tucson.

Sunday, March 9, 2025:

Police arrested famed novelist Cormac McCarthy Saturday in Tucson on charges he had a sexual relationship with a teen girl here in the 1970s.

McCarthy, 91, was staying at the Arizona Inn when police arrested him and took him to the Pima County jail on a single count of sexual conduct with a minor. He was processed at the jail and released on his own recognizance.

Police spokesman Francisco Martinez said the charge originated with a November 2024 account in Vanity Fair magazine in which a Tucson-area resident discussed her relationship as a teen with McCarthy. At the time their relationship began, McCarthy was 42 and the woman, then a Tucson foster child, was 16. She acknowledged having sex with him at age 17.

At the time, McCarthy was a struggling novelist. Later, he won a MacArthur Fellowship and garnered honors that included the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His novel “No Country for Old Men” was adapted into a movie that won four Academy Awards.

The romantic Southwest

Barney, who wrote the Vanity Fair piece, is a Cormac McCarthy fan in his 20s, a 2018 graduate of Bennington College in Vermont. It’s no wonder he projected a romanticism on the Tucson area when he spent months here over the last year, interviewing and staying with Britt.

McCarthy is most famous for his brutal novels about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, brimming with violence but also reflecting a stoic romanticism about the region. Barney appeared to pick up on that.

“Behind her, framed between the posts of Scout’s stall, the Catalina Mountains loom burnt green, brushed upward with the impressionistic confidence of a child’s paint stroke,” he says in describing Britt at the stable where she cares for her horses.

“Two eyes are not sufficient for a sunset in the West,” he writes at another point. “That’s because there is more than one sunset, more than can be seen in a single field of vision. After a monsoon, the sky is Sistine. To the west, lightning races the tousled embroidery of clouds in pink gilt. Turning on my heels, there are Iliads and Edens of violet cloudwork parted by the slimmest blue streamlets of sky.”

In an interview with Slate after the Vanity Fair story was published, Barney said, “As is the Southwestern custom, she bought me my first pair of cowboy boots, which I had surgically attached to my feet this summer.”

Tuesday, March 11, 2025:

Pima County Attorney Laura Cooper defended the arrest of famed novelist Cormac McCarthy at a press conference Monday.

Tucson police arrested McCarthy, 91, at the Arizona Inn after what Cooper said was “ample consultation” with her office and a grand jury indictment.

“Evidence presented to the grand jury convinced them there is probable cause that the author, Mr. McCarthy, committed the felony of sexual conduct with a minor,” Cooper said. “The fact that the victim told a magazine she did not consider him a ‘groomer’ doesn’t change the underlying facts.”

The state, she went on, “has a compelling interest in pursuing crimes against children no matter how much time has passed.”

Credibility questions

To fully accept Barney’s account, you have to swallow hard-to-believe anecdotes and erroneous details.

The Desert Inn, for example, is placed both on Miracle Mile and on Tucson’s “south side,” when in fact it was at 1 North Freeway, near Congress and I-10.

And Barney writes, “Whenever McCarthy was back in town, he’d see Britt, leaving cab or phone money for her between the third and fourth Wall Street Journal in the Denny’s on Miracle Mile.” But there wasn’t a Denny’s on Miracle Mile then — the closest one was at 555 N. Freeway, where there is still a Denny’s today.

In the opening paragraphs of the story, Barney quotes Britt as saying she carried in a holster a Colt revolver she had stolen from a foster parent while visiting the Desert Inn. It’s the kind of Old West detail a young writer might have been eager to believe, but a local person might have wanted to check out.

He quotes Britt as saying that she recognized McCarthy from a beat-up paperback copy of his book The Orchard Keeper, which she was reading. But that paperback does not feature a photo of McCarthy, a book sleuth noted in a post on X, the former Twitter.

This year, the writer says, Britt found a burglar in her home in the Catalina Foothills, McCarthy’s letters to her strewn across her table, and shot him in the kneecap with a nonlethal pistol. I checked with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, and they have not received a report of such an incident.

Tuesday, May 20, 2025:

Federal authorities announced Monday they are taking over the case against famed novelist Cormac McCarthy, who was arrested in Tucson in March.

Pima County prosecutors dismissed their case against McCarthy in court filings Friday. In a statement, Pima County Attorney Laura Cooper said, “federal prosecutors have a clearer path to conviction.”

The alleged victim in the case, a 65-year-old Tucson woman, described the relationship for the first time in an article in Vanity Fair magazine published in November 2024. But she mocked the idea that he was a “groomer” even though the relationship began when she was 16 and he was 42.

U.S. Attorney Gary Resendez said in a press release: “A crime is a crime, no matter when it occurred or how the alleged victim explains it. We must send a message that crimes against children will be prosecuted.”

The new charges filed in federal court accuse McCarthy of transporting a minor across state or foreign borders for the purpose of sexual activity, a felony. McCarthy, a Santa Fe resident, will be sent a summons to appear in Tucson’s U.S. District Court.

What if it’s worse?

The story as Britt told it is bad enough. The bare bones of it are that McCarthy, a man in his early 40s, took advantage of a troubled and vulnerable Tucson girl, age 16, and took her to Mexico when she was 17.

But what if it’s worse?

The New York Times quoted this week a letter by American writer Guy Davenport in which he said, “Cormac McCarthy has just run off to Mexico with a teenage popsy, abandoning a beautiful British ballerina of a wife.”

Davenport sent that letter to fellow writer Hugh Kenner in 1974, two years before Britt said she and McCarthy met, the Times reported. So, likely there was either another teen before Britt, or the events she described could have happened even earlier.

Nevertheless, Britt refuses to be labeled as what, from the outside, it appears she clearly was: The victim of a groomer.

He got not just sex out of her but companionship and, perhaps most importantly, material. Britt told Barney that McCarthy proposed to her at the Arizona Inn but later got cold feet. Still, she said, he used their real-life dialogue surrounding his proposal in a later screenplay, The Counselor.

Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025:

Federal prosecutors dropped the criminal case against famed novelist Cormac McCarthy Friday.

In documents filed at Tucson’s U.S. District Court, the government did not elaborate on its reasons for dismissing charges of transporting a minor across state or international borders for sex.

Federal prosecutors planned to use the letters written to the alleged victim and the accounts of some of McCarthy’s friends, published first in a November 2024 Vanity Fair article, to make their case, but they also tried to compel the testimony of the alleged victim, a Tucson-area resident.

Defense attorneys for McCarthy labeled the article “Southwestern fantasy pawned off on a gullible young writer from the Northeast.”

In court filings, the alleged victim said she would not cooperate with the prosecution.