"Plagiarizing Other People's Trauma" ?

A middle class white female, Margaret Seltzer (a.k.a. Margaret B. Jones), was raised in a California suburb. She attended an Episcopalian school, and went on to spend some time at the University of Oregon. At some point, she decided to assume a new identity. She claimed Native American ancestry, that she grew up in South Central L. A., that she was passed from foster family to foster family, that she was a drug-runner for a notorious gang, and so on. Then Seltzer publishes her “experiences” as Love and Consequences.

This last week, Seltzer’s sister revealed that the story is fraudulent. Seltzer concocted everything she related as lived experience; she even made up an anti-gang foundation that she claims to be associated with (and publicized on the book’s jacket). And no, she did not graduate from the University of Oregon with a degree in Ethnic Studies.

People are outraged--but for differing reasons. I offer two opinion pieces of the work (there are hundreds available, of course--see Google--but I found these intriguing):

“Stolen Suffering," by Daniel Mendelsohn at The New York Times, argues that Seltzer has appropriated people’s pain for psychological and financial benefit (this blog post's title comes from Mendelsohn's article).

“Fine Line Separates Memoir, Novel” by Gordon Sayre, at The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR), argues that what matters is whether the work is well-researched, that Selzter communicates on behalf of excluded voices, and that we might consider why we want to read about other people’s pain.

So then, is it only a matter of marketing here? Or has Seltzer done more than misfire in presenting Love and Consequences as an autobiography? Has she committed some great intellectual, social, or cultural sin? Is authenticity important?
More on this later.