Ayelet Waldman reacted publicly for the first time today about the recent JT LeRoy revelations, saying she was conned.

Waldman, in a Salon article, says she had talked on the phone on several occasions with a man claiming to be LeRoy. While she suspected for a time it was a hoax, Waldman says she was still suckered in.

“There was something strangely seductive about that breathy voice on the phone,” Waldman writes. “He was fun to talk to; the sheer magnitude of his self-absorption was entertaining. And there was the whole celebrity thing. He was like a breathing version of Us Magazine. He’d just hung up with Julianne Moore, Courtney Love was telling him a story, Gus Van Sant was giving him a hard time about his script.”

The New York Times published new evidence Monday that San Francisco author LeRoy is a 40-year-old, middle-class woman instead of a former male hooker.

LeRoy had first called Waldman’s home to speak with her husband, Michael Chabon, for an interview, but Waldman says Chabon didn’t like him.

“After their first interaction — an aborted interview of Michael by Leroy for the magazine Bomb back when JT was known as ‘Terminator’ — Michael refused to have anything to do with him,” Waldman says. “But I let myself be sucked in.”

Waldman says she eventually came to realize LeRoy was a fraud after he’d told her he’d had a speedy sex change operation where the doctors made it “no big deal just to take off the stump.”

“My first thought was, Jesus Christ, ouch. My second was, bullshit,” Waldman says. “Not even I was gullible enough to buy that.”

Waldman says she realized LeRoy probably only talked to her so he could be associated to Chabon, which would help boost his literary reputation. However, Waldman continued to talk to LeRoy on the phone because, whoever he was, he seemed to need help, Waldman says.

In the end, though, Waldman says she’s “not as troubled by this particular thing.”

“It probably did little harm, except to the egos of those of us who were fooled, and it probably did some good, if the books themselves found an audience among the very people JT was pretending to be,” she says.