An advance manuscript of Pope Francis’s upcoming autobiography has been stolen and illegally leaked online, where it was available for more than a week before being taken down by law enforcement.
The theft sent the publishing world into a behind-closed-doors frenzy and sparked legal action, but until now no one has publicly acknowledged that the file ended up floating in the darkest corners of the Internet. Even the Holy See claimed to be unaware of the leak. “We have no information regarding the diffusion of the text,” a Vatican spokesman said. AIR MAIL was able to locate and download the file. The Italian publisher, Mondadori, confirmed its authenticity. Presumably in damage control over the leak, the publishers have decided to allow excerpts of the book to run early around the world.
This is the story of how the Pope’s book was leaked, reconstructed through documents and interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the case. But this story also intersects with that of Filippo Bernardini, a compulsive manuscript collector and shrewd online impersonator who—despite already being convicted in court for his crimes—continues to stalk the publishing world.
That is, unless someone else is beating him at his own game.
On a Wing and a Prayer
The highly anticipated book, Hope: The Autobiography, will be out on January 14 in more than 80 countries, and it is the result of a monumental publishing operation with few parallels in the industry. Since the book was originally written in Italian, the Milan-based publishing house Mondadori is leading the project, and it has partnered with major publishers around the world, including the global conglomerate Penguin Random House.
It is from the German branch of this publishing giant that the file was reportedly stolen, through a scheme closely resembling the modus operandi of Bernardini, an infamous serial book thief convicted in March of last year, in New York, after stealing more than a thousand unpublished books, including the works of high-profile writers such as Sally Rooney, Ian McEwan, and Margaret Atwood.
The book, which is more than 300 pages long, is the result of extensive conversations between the Pope and the Italian editor and writer Carlo Musso over the course of six years. It promises to include a “wealth of revelations, anecdotes and illuminating thoughts,” and its confidentiality was heavily guarded by the publishers, who decided not to allow any press before its release date in order to avoid leaks.
Last October, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the consortium of publishers behind what many expected to be the most prominent and profitable book of the year officially announced the publication of Hope, claiming Pope Francis “originally intended this exceptional book to appear only after his death” but that the 2025 Jubilee Year “moved him to make this precious legacy available now.”
Presumably the Pope didn’t mean now now.
Cardinal Sins
In the late morning of Wednesday, December 4, an employee at Kösel-Verlag, the imprint at Penguin Random House Germany set to publish the Pope’s autobiography, got an e-mail. It claimed to be from Carlo Musso, and the tone was friendly:
How are you? Did you get the new PDF from Kösel? We fixed a couple of things. I realized the Spanish translator didn’t have the new text.
Let us know,
Carlo
It seemed like a plausible request. The Italian publisher provided its international partners with an unproofed manuscript of the book in the fall to allow them to work on their translations; in the meantime, Musso was still going through the last editing rounds. The German employee replied 15 minutes later, describing the text they were working from. Musso wrote back:
I can’t figure out what version it is. It’s easier if you send me the file you have, and I’ll check if it’s the final one.
Talk to you soon,
Carlo
At that point, the employee sent over the file. After all, they were sharing a book with its co-author, right?
Wrong. The person behind those e-mails wasn’t Musso but someone pretending to be him. That person created a spoof e-mail address cleverly similar to the real one—it contained his first and last name followed by two numbers, just like Musso’s, but the figures were different from those in Musso’s true e-mail address. A few hours later, the manuscript sent by the German publisher was uploaded into a major book-piracy portal.
Musso’s impersonator was evidently very busy on December 4. That day, he also reached out to the book’s English translator, asking them to send him the text to check something. And he e-mailed a press officer at Mondadori, claiming to seek advice about a request for an interview from the books section of an Italian newspaper.
The latter message raised a red flag. Musso typically discussed these things over the phone, and often in group calls with high-ranking officials in the publishing house, given the sensitivity of the project. What’s more, on Musso’s request, Mondadori had already decided against doing any interviews before the publication date—and it’s not like this one was coming from Oprah Winfrey or Joe Rogan. Why would he even consider a request like that?, the press officer wondered. She alerted the company leadership about a potential scam.
Mondadori immediately issued an alert to all employees and international partners about scammers trying to obtain manuscripts and confidential information.That’s when the German employee understood what had happened. They had been tricked by a clever fraudster.
Penguin Random House Germany reported the incident to Mondadori, and the Italian publisher filed a complaint for identity theft and the theft of the manuscript with the police in Novara, Italy. This account has been confirmed by several sources with knowledge of the story, as well as by the head of P.R. at Kösel-Verlag, who stated: “Fraudsters have obtained a version of the Italian manuscript of ‘HOPE’ through criminal activity. Kösel-Verlag has reported the incident to the authorities, and legal proceedings are underway.”
That’s when the German employee understood what had happened. They had been tricked by a clever fraudster.
The case calls to mind a long series of manuscript thefts that shook the books world from 2016 to 2022, when the fraudster Bernardini was arrested in New York. The 32-year-old Italian, who’d interned in various positions in publishing in London and New York, had gotten his hands on more than a thousand unpublished manuscripts, according to court records.
Bernardini leveraged his familiarity with the literary world to set up an elaborate scheme involving hundreds of fake e-mail accounts and Internet domains designed to impersonate real people and entities in publishing. The names of the accounts typically included hard-to-spot typos that went largely unnoticed, and with that trick he solicited manuscripts and gained access to book-scouting-companies’ databases, a gold mine for extreme collectors such as Bernardini.
Why did he do it? Not for financial gain, a judge concluded in March of last year—Bernardini never profited from the manuscripts he stole. There were, seemingly, other motivations at play. According to his court testimony—Bernardini pleaded guilty to one charge of wire fraud on March 23, 2023, and was condemned to pay $88,000 in restitution—he just loved the feeling of being “one of the fewest to cherish [books] before anyone else.”
At the same time, he harbored resentment for being excluded from the publishing industry following his string of unsuccessful internships. “I had a burning desire to feel like I was still one of these publishing professionals and read these new books,” he wrote in a letter to the judge, and “started cosplaying what people in publishing were doing as editors or literary agents.”
In the case of the Pope’s autobiography, many of the Bernardini signatures are there—impersonation, strategically placed typos, no obvious motives. There is no trace of a possible profit by the thief or of attempted blackmail against the publishers involved. But leaking the file on the Web right after having obtained it defies Bernardini’s original pattern.
When contacted, Piero Bernardini, Filippo’s father, who lives in Umbria, stated that he didn’t want to discuss the case before speaking to Filippo, which he says doesn’t happen often these days. (He says Filippo is currently living in London.) But when I brought up the Pope’s book, Piero categorically denied that his son might be involved in such an egregious theft. “I’d stake my life on it,” he said.
Filippo Bernardini himself, meanwhile, finally responded to Air Mail’s repeated requests for comment early this morning. He confirmed that he was “the one and only manuscript thief” but did not address the Pope leak. The reason for his delayed response, Bernardini said, was that he was “busy stealing manuscripts like he has for years.” He went on to say that “he deserves being jailed for life because he’s a criminal.” Curiously, he misspelled his first name as “Fillippo” in the e-mail he sent to Air Mail.
Filippo Bernardini himself confirmed that he was “the one and only manuscript thief.” The reason for his delayed response, he said, was that he was “busy stealing manuscripts like he has for years.”
Filippo Bernardini has been described by friends and relatives as a lonely, bullied child who grew up gay in a conservative part of Italy and took refuge in books. At the age of 16, he even wrote a clearly autobiographical book, under the name Filippo B., about a young man who is tormented by his schoolmates and rejected by his parents for being gay.
He first escaped to Milan to attend college, and then to London and New York to try to make a name for himself in the literary world. He was apparently heartbroken when Andrew Nurnberg Associates, a literary agency specializing in selling translation rights, didn’t consider his application for a full-time position following his internship there. During his trial, Bernardini received a mental-health evaluation, and though the results are redacted, the picture that emerges is that of a troubled young man.
Whatever the case may be, after the long-sought manuscript thief was finally caught, the attempts to obtain unpublished books haven’t really stopped. Pope Francis might be just the most eminent victim of a well-oiled criminal mechanism that has kept on running.
About half a dozen publishers, agents, and literary scouts confirmed that impersonators and fraudsters using techniques resembling Bernardini’s have continued to stalk them. The activities peaked last October, coinciding with the Frankfurt Book Fair, where new manuscripts and galleys are exchanged and traded on the biggest publishing marketplace.
Around that time, the agency of the acclaimed Italian novelist Teresa Ciabatti received an e-mail from someone claiming to be her. She appeared to be confused about what version of her new novel, Donnaregina—scheduled to be published by Mondadori in the spring of 2025—she had last shared with the agent and casually suggested that the agent send her the file, just to double-check. The attempt didn’t work, because around the same time, the fake Ciabatti was contacting other writers and friends of the author using the same e-mail account, arousing suspicions.
Meanwhile, Bernardini has allegedly been contacting industry bigwigs using his own name, via e-mail and social media. (He has since deleted his accounts on Instagram and X.) A new stalking pattern emerged, one in which Bernardini would allegedly send authors a few pages of their own unpublished novels, as if to prove he was still able to obtain them. These messages typically ended with a slew of middle-finger emojis, sometimes accompanied by a link to some piracy platform to show that the sender had leaked the manuscript online.
Bernardini allegedly did this as recently as last month with several writers, ranging from a debut novelist whose name is not known to anyone but those who worked on the book, to acclaimed crime writer Sandrone Dazieri, whose next novel, Uccidi i Ricchi (Kill the Rich), is due to be published in February by Rizzoli in Italy.
Last May, the literary agent Kent D. Wolf wrote on X that the same thing had happened to one of his writers, and others in the book industry have confirmed that similar things happened to them as well. Curiously, most of these messages, signed by “Filippo Bernardini,” came from an e-mail address in which his last name is misspelled as “bemardini.” (The letters r and n are replaced with an m, an almost invisible typo and a signature Bernardini move.)
Among the recipients of the middle-finger emojis was the Italian author Vincenzo Latronico, who was contacted by Bernardini in July of last year—just a few months after Bernardini pleaded guilty in court—on X. An account presumably belonging to the real Bernadini, which has since been deleted and is unable to be verified, sent Latronico a photo of a page from his book La Chiave di Berlino (The Berlin Key), which at that point had not yet been published.
A bitter exchange ensued. “Despite the fact that you have tried to ruin me and my career in every way,” the message read—a bizarre comment given that it was Bernardini who presumably targeted Latronico in the first place—“I still have many friends in publishing … who ask me for opinions.” The message ended with an ominous—and, again, totally bizarre—statement by Bernardini: “He who sows hatred, reaps hatred.”
So is Filippo Bernardini behind the theft of the Pope’s book? There is no evidence to suggest that he is, so perhaps a copycat is imitating the actions of the original manuscript thief. Or maybe, Bernardini is just impersonating a different version of himself.
Mattia Ferraresi is the managing editor at the Italian newspaper Domani
