The Star Forced to Delete Caroline Mutokos Article After Claims of Plagiarism

Caroline Mutoko has been accused enough times of plagiarism. Sometimes her ego makes it hard for her to admit when she is wrong and accept that she stole a whole article for her weekly column.

But its the recent case of plagiarism which has drawn the wrath of her followers and Facebook users after they noticed that the columnist stole half of an article which appeared on the Huffington Post without acknowledging the source. After hoping that the hawkeyed Kenyans would go away, Mutoko was forced to pretend that she was acknowledging that she borrowed from the Huffington Post article.

She never did the same in the Monday article which was in response to Njoki Chege’s fat shaming article. Her explanation didn’t convince most readers and so The Star decided to delete the article from its website.

Neither The Star nor Caroline Mutoko herself acknowledged that the article was not Caroline Mutoko’s original work. In fact, considering that Caroline Mutoko “borrowed” another section of the article from a lady known as Patricia Mbela, it’s safe to say that Mutoko didn’t contribute more than two paragraphs of the article.

Maybe she didn’t inform Patricia until after publication of the article. This raises the question of whether Kenyan media invest in checking the originality of articles submitted by various columnists who are paid as must as Ksh 30,000 per article contributed.

It is not clear why Caroline Mutoko waited till Thursday to acknowledge “what inspired” her Monday column on fat shaming.