Celia Ingrid Farber (born c. 1965) is an American print journalist and author who has covered a range of topics for magazines including Spin, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Harper's, Interview, Salon, Gear, New York Press, Media Post, The New York Post and Sunday Herald, and is best known for her controversial beliefs about HIV and AIDS, and a 1998 report on O. J. Simpson's post-trial life.
Farber claims that she never expresses her own views about whether HIV causes AIDS and instead merely reports that some people disagree with the mainstream scientific viewpoint.
[2][4][5][6][7] In 1987, at the encouragement of Bob Guccione Jr., her editor at Spin magazine, Farber began exploring questions related to the role of the HIV virus in AIDS.
[3] She wrote and edited a monthly column in Spin titled "Words From the Front" from 1987 to 1995,[8] which was focused on the subject of AIDS denialism.
[9] She says that her interest in the field was sparked when, as an intern at Spin, she heard of AL-721, a lipid mixture derived from eggs that was proposed as an anti-HIV drug.
She stated, "I was very young, and I believed instantly in the mythological fantasy that there was a quote 'cure' for AIDS that was being suppressed by the government and by the pharmaceutical industry.
[12] Seth Kalichmann, an HIV researcher, has stated this Harper's column "represented a breakthrough of HIV/AIDS denialism into mainstream media".
Interviewed by Discover magazine in connection with her book's publication, she stated that she felt many of the older mainstream ideas about HIV were proven wrong and defended the decision to devote her reporting to the AIDS-denialist viewpoint as important for journalistic reasons.
Ultimately, the jury found that Spin editors had created a "hostile environment" and awarded $90,000 to the plaintiff; the remainder of the charges, including those of sexual favoritism, were rejected.