BELLESILES UPDATE: Chronicle Review Admits Bellesiles’s Story is False — Blames Student, not Bellesiles. Bellesiles is a demonstrated scholarly fraud, and doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt that many people are giving him. Once you’ve been busted for making stuff up, you need to be sure that what you publish is reasonably accurate. Bellesiles illustrates, once again, that he cares more about the narrative than about being sure his facts are correct, though I suppose that passing on other people’s fabrications is arguably a modest improvement over creating his own.