So You've Been Publicly Shamed (PSY8)

by Jon Ronson

  Whenever Dylan read about himself in the newspaper, he made the same observation: ‘God, I’m glad I’m not me,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I’m not that.’

  In D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Dont Look Back (the missing apostrophe was the director’s idea), Dylan reads an article about himself: ‘Puffing heavily on a cigarette, he smokes eighty a day …’ Dylan laughs. ‘God, I’m glad I’m not me.’

  How did Jonah Lehrer know that Dylan said this whenever he read about himself in the paper, Michael thought. Where did ‘whenever‘ come from? Plus, ‘God, I’m glad I’m not me,’ is verifiable. But ‘I’m glad I’m not that‘? When did he say, ‘I’m glad I’m not THAT’? Where did Jonah Lehrer get ‘I’m glad I’m not THAT‘ from?

  And so Michael Moynihan emailed Jonah Lehrer.

  ‘I picked up your book and as an obsessive Dylan nerd eagerly read the first chapter … I’m pretty familiar with the Dylan canon and there were a few quotes I was slightly confused by and couldn’t locate …’

  This was Michael’s first email to Jonah Lehrer. He was reading it to me back home in his Fort Greene living room. His wife Joanna sat with us. There were baby toys scattered around.

  By the time Michael emailed Jonah on 7 July he’d pinpointed six suspicious Dylan quotes, including ‘It’s just this sense that you’ve got something to say’, ‘I’m glad I’m not that‘, and this angry retort to prying journalists: ‘I’ve got nothing to say about these things I write. I just write them. There’s no great message. Stop asking me to explain.’

  Dylan did once verifiably say in Dont Look Back, ‘I’ve got nothing to say about these things I write. I just write them. There’s no great message.’

  But there was no ‘Stop asking me to explain.’

  Michael mentioned to Jonah his deadline - he was blogging for the Washington Post for ten days - and then he pressed Send.

  Jonah emailed Michael back twice the next day. His emails sounded friendly, professional, businesslike, maybe a little superior. His air was that of a smart young academic understanding Michael’s questions and promising to answer them during an appropriate moment in his schedule. Which would be in eleven days. He was on vacation in Northern California for ten days. His files were at his home, a seven-hour drive away. He didn’t want to disrupt his vacation by driving fourteen hours to his house to check his files. If Michael could wait ten days Jonah would send him detailed footnotes.

  Michael smiled when he read out that part of Jonah’s email to me. Eleven days was quite the convenient vacation length given the duration of Michael’s Washington Post contract.

  Still, Jonah said he’d try to answer Michael’s questions off the top of his head.

  ‘And this,’ Michael said, ‘was where it all began to unravel for him. This is where he makes his first underplayed lie. He’s hesitating. “Do I make this lie?”’

  Jonah made the lie.

  ‘I got a little bit of help,’ he wrote, ‘from one of Dylan’s managers.’

  This manager had given Jonah access to hitherto unreleased original transcripts of Dylan interviews. If there were any discrepancies with common references on the Web, that was why.

  Jonah’s emails continued in this vein for several paragraphs: Dylan had told a radio interviewer to ‘stop asking me to explain’ in 1995. The interview was transcribed within the pages of a rare multi-volume anthology called The Fiddler Now Upspoke: A Collection of Bob Dylan’s Interviews, Press Conferences and the Like from Throughout the Master’s Career. And so on. Then Jonah thanked Michael for his interest, signed off, and at the bottom of the email were the words, ‘Sent from my iPhone.’

  ‘Sent from his iPhone,’ Michael said. ‘A rather lengthy email to send from an iPhone. Slightly panicky. Sweaty thumbs, you know?’

  Who knew if Jonah Lehrer really was on vacation? But Michael had to take him at his word. So they had a lull. The lull made publication in the Washington Post blog impossible, given the digging Michael would need to do. The Fiddler Now Upspoke was a nightmare source: ‘Eleven volumes, twelve volumes, fifteen volumes. Individual ones cost $150, $200.’

  Jonah Lehrer presumably thought Michael hadn’t the wherewithal to trace, purchase and scrutinize an anthology as epic and obscure as The Fiddler Now Upspoke. But he underestimated the nature of Michael’s tenacity. There was something about Michael that reminded me of the Cyborg in Terminator 2, the one that was even more dogged than Arnold Schwarzenegger, running faster than the fastest car. As Michael’s wife Joanna told me, ‘Michael is the guarder of social rules.’ She turned to him. ‘You’re a nice guy as long as everyone else …’ She trailed off.

  ‘When I go out in the world,’ Michael said, ‘if someone throws some garbage on the street, it’s the most senseless thing to me. I lose my mind. Why are you doing this?’

  ‘And it’s for hours,’ Joanna said. ‘We’re out on a nice walk and it’s a half-an-hour rant …’

  ‘I see things collapsing,’ Michael said.

  And so Michael tracked down an electronic version of The Fiddler Now Upspoke. Well, it wasn’t an actual electronic version, ‘but a complete archive of all known Dylan interviews called “Every Mind-Polluting Word”,’ Michael told me, ‘basically a digital version Fiddler, that a fan put together and dumped online.’ It turned out that Bob Dylan had only given one radio interview in 1995 and at no time during it had he told the interviewer to ‘Stop asking me to explain.’

  On 11 July Michael was in the park with his wife and daughter. It was hot. His daughter was running in and out of the fountain. Michael’s phone rang. The voice said, ‘This is Jonah Lehrer.’

  I know Jonah Lehrer’s voice now. If you had to describe it in a word, that word would be ‘measured’.

  ‘We had a really nice talk,’ Michael said, ‘about Dylan, about journalism. I told him I wasn’t trying to make a name for myself with this. I said I’d been grinding away at this for years and I’m just - you know - I do what I do and I feed my family and everything’s OK.’

  The way Michael said the word OK made it sound like he meant ‘barely OK’. It was the vocal equivalent of a worried head glancing down at the floor.

  ‘I told him I’m not one of those young Gawker guys going, “Find me a target I can burn in the public square and then people will know who I am.” And Jonah said, “I really appreciate that.”’

  Michael liked Jonah. ‘I got along with him. It was really nice. It was a really nice conversation.’ They said their goodbyes. A few minutes later Jonah emailed Michael to thank him once again for being so decent and not like one of those Gawker guys who delight in humiliation. They didn’t make them like Michael any more.

  After that Michael went quiet so he could dig around on Jonah some more.

  These were the good days. Michael felt like Hercule Poirot. Jonah’s claim that he’d had a little bit of help from one of Dylan’s managers had sounded suspiciously vague, Michael had thought. And, indeed, it turned out that Bob Dylan only had one manager. His name was Jeff Rosen. And although Jeff Rosen’s email address was hard to come by, Michael came by it.

  Michael emailed him. Had Jeff Rosen ever spoken to Jonah Lehrer? Jeff Rosen replied that he never had.

  So Michael emailed Jonah to say he had some more questions.

  Jonah replied sounding surprised. Was Michael still going to write something? He assumed Michael wasn’t going to write anything.

  Michael shook his head with incredulity when he recounted this part to me. Jonah had obviously convinced himself that he’d sweet-talked Michael out of investigating him. But no. ‘Bad liars always think they’re good at it,’ Michael said to me. ‘They’re always confident they’re defeating you.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Jeff Rosen,’ Michael told Jonah.

  And that, Michael said, is when Jonah lost it. ‘He just lost it. I’ve never seen anyone like it.’

  *

  Jonah started repeatedly telephoning Michael, pleading with him not to publish. Sometimes Michael
would silence his iPhone for a while. Then he’d return to find so many missed calls from Jonah he would take a screenshot because nobody would otherwise have believed it. I asked Michael at what point it stopped being fun and he replied, ‘When your quarry starts panicking.’ He paused. ‘It’s like being out in the woods hunting and you’re, “This feels great!” And then you shoot the animal and it’s lying there twitching and wants its head to be bashed in and you’re, “I don’t want to be the person to do this. This is fucking horrible.”’

  Michael got a call from Jonah’s agent, Andrew Wylie. He represents not just Jonah but Bob Dylan and Salman Rushdie and David Bowie and David Byrne and David Rockefeller and V. S. Naipaul and Vanity Fair and Martin Amis and Bill Gates and King Abdullah II of Jordan and Al Gore. Actually Andrew Wylie didn’t phone Michael. ‘He got in touch with somebody who got in touch with me to tell me to call him,’ Michael said. ‘Which I thought was very Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He’s thought to be the most powerful literary agent in the United States and I’m a schlub, I’m a nobody. So I called him. I laid out the case. He said, “If you publish this you’re going to ruin a guy’s life. Do you think this is a big enough deal to ruin a guy’s life?”’

  ‘How did you reply?’ I asked.

  ‘I said, “I’ll think about it,”’ Michael said. ‘I guess Andrew Wylie is a bazillionaire because he’s very perceptive, because I got a call from Jonah who said, “So Andrew Wylie says you’re going to go ahead and publish.”’

  On the afternoon of the last day - Sunday, 29 July - Michael was walking down Flatbush Avenue, on the telephone to Jonah, shouting at him, ‘“I need you to go on the record. You have to do it, Jonah. You have to go on the record.” My arms were going crazy. I was so angry and so frustrated. All the time he was wasting. All his lies. And he was simpering.’ Finally something in Jonah’s voice made Michael know that it was going to happen. ‘So I ran into Duane Reade, and I bought a fucking Hello Kitty notebook and a pen and for twenty-five seconds he said, “I panicked. And I’m deeply sorry for lying.” And there you go,’ said Michael. ‘It’s done.’

  Twenty-six days, and it took Michael forty minutes to write the story. He’d still not worked out how to make money from journalism. He’d agreed to give the scoop to the small Jewish Tablet magazine. Knowing how lucky they were, Tablet paid Michael quadruple what they usually pay, but it was quadruple not much: $2,200 - which is all he’d ever make from the story.

  Forty minutes to write it, and what felt to him like nine packets of cigarettes.

  ‘If anything Jonah Lehrer nearly killed me, I smoked so many fucking cigarettes out on the fire escape. Smoking, smoking, smoking. When you have the ability to press Send on something and really, really affect the outcome of the rest of that person’s life. And the phone was ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing. There were twenty-odd missed calls from Jonah that Sunday night. Twenty-four missed calls, twenty-five missed calls. I’d never seen anyone like it.’

  ‘He kept phoning,’ Michael’s wife Joanna said. ‘It was so sad. I don’t understand why he thought it was a good idea to keep phoning.’

  ‘It was the worst night of his life,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure,’ Michael said.

  Finally Michael picked up the phone. ‘I said, “Jonah, you have to stop calling me. This is almost to the point of harassment.” I felt like I was talking him off the ledge. I said, “Tell me you’re not going to do anything stupid.” It was that level of panic. So much so that I thought maybe I should pull back from this. He was, “Please, please, please,” like a child’s toy breaking, droning, running out of batteries. “Please, please, please …”’

  Michael asked me if I’d ever been in that position. Had I ever stumbled on a piece of information that, if published, would destroy someone? Actually destroy them.

  I thought for a while. ‘Destroy someone?’ I said. I paused. ‘No. I don’t think so. I’m not sure.’

  ‘Don’t ever do it,’ he said.

  He said he honestly considered not pressing Send that night. Jonah had a baby daughter the same age as Michael’s baby daughter. Michael said he couldn’t kid himself. He understood what pressing Send would mean to Jonah’s life: ‘What we do, when we fuck up, we don’t lose our job. We lose our vocation.’

  Michael was thinking of former journalists like the New Republic‘s Stephen Glass. Glass was the author of a then-celebrated 1998 story, ‘Hack Heaven’, about a fifteen-year-old schoolboy hacker who was offered a job with a software company he’d hacked into. Glass wrote about being a fly on the wall in the company’s offices - Jukt Micronics - as the boy negotiated his terms:

  ‘I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Men comic number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy - and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money! Show me the money!’ Across the table, executives … are listening and trying ever so delicately to oblige. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ one of the suits says tentatively to the pimply teenager. ‘Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you.’

  - Stephen Glass, ‘Washington Scene: Hack Heaven’, New Republic, 18 May 1998

  But there was no conference room, no Jukt Micronics, no schoolboy hacker. A Forbes Digital journalist, Adam Penenberg, annoyed that the New Republic had scooped him on his own turf, did some digging and discovered that Glass had invented it all. Glass was fired. He enrolled in law school, earned a degree magna cum laude - ‘with very great honour’ - applied in 2014 to practise law in California, and was refused. Glass’s shaming was following him around wherever he went, like Pig-Pen’s cloud of dirt. In some ways he and Jonah Lehrer were eerily alike - young, nerdy, Jewish, preternaturally successful journalists on a roll who made things up. But Glass had invented entire scenarios, casts of characters, reams of dialogue. Jonah’s ‘I’m glad I’m not that’ at the end of ‘I’m glad I’m not me’ was stupid and wrong, but a world that doled out punishments as merciless as that would be an unfathomable one to me. I thought Michael was being overdramatic to believe that pressing Send would sentence Jonah to Stephen Glass-level oblivion.

  In the end it was all academic for Michael. He said he felt as trapped in this story as Jonah was. It was like they were both in a car with failed brakes, hurtling helplessly towards this ending together. How could Michael not press Send? What would people think if the story got out? That he’d covered it up for career advancement? ‘I would have been the spineless so-called journalist who buckled to Andrew Wylie. I never would have worked again.’

  Plus, Michael said, something had happened a few hours earlier that he felt made it impossible for him to bury the story. After Jonah had confessed over the phone to Michael he was shaking, so he went to a cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to calm down. It was the Cafe Regular Du Nord. As he sat outside he ran into a fellow writer, Vanity Fair‘s Dana Vachon.

  ‘I’m doing this story and this guy just fucking confessed to me that it’s all phoney,’ Michael told him.

  ‘Who?’ Dana Vachon replied.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ Michael said.

  That second Michael’s phone rang. The screen flashed up the words JONAH LEHRER.

  ‘Oh,’ Dana Vachon said. ‘Jonah Lehrer.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ Michael said. ‘You can’t say anything!’

  So now Dana Vachon knew. Michael’s editors at Tablet magazine knew. Andrew Wylie knew. It was not going to stay contained.

  So Michael pressed Send.

  Michael had one final telephone conversation with Jonah after they both knew it was over. It was just a few hours before the story appeared. Michael had barely slept that night. He was exhausted. He said to Jonah, ‘I just want you to know that it makes me feel like shit to do this.’

  ‘And Jonah paused,’ Michael told me. ‘And then he said to me, no joke, he said, “You know, I really don’t care how you feel.”’ Michael shook his head. ‘It was icy.’

  Then Jonah said
to Michael, ‘I really, really regret …’

  ‘Regret what?’ Michael thought. ‘Cheating? Lying?’

  ‘I really regret ever responding to your email,’ Jonah said.

  ‘And my response to him,’ Michael said, ‘was basically silence.’

  That night Michael was ‘shattered. I felt horrible. I’m not a fucking monster. I was crushed and depressed. My wife can confirm this.’ He replayed in his mind their telephone conversations. Suddenly he felt suspicious. Maybe the icy Jonah from that final conversation had been the real Jonah all along. Maybe Jonah had been playing Michael all that time, ‘cranking the emotions’ to guilt-trip him. Maybe Jonah had assessed Michael as ‘pliable and easy to manipulate’. When Michael had told Jonah that he’d spoken to Jeff Rosen, Jonah’s reply had been, ‘Then I guess you’re a better journalist than me.’ That suddenly sounded incredibly condescending to Michael, like he saw Michael as just ‘some putz, piddling around trying to pick up freelance work’. Maybe everything Jonah had done during the previous weeks was in fact devious and very well plotted.

  I wondered: had Jonah really been devious, or just terrified? Was Michael conjuring up words like devious in an attempt to feel less bad? Devious is creepy. Terrified is human.

  ‘Having a phone conversation with somebody is like reading a novel,’ Michael said. ‘Your mind creates a scenario. I sort of knew what he looked like from his author jacket photos, but I’d never seen him move. I didn’t know his gait. I didn’t know his clothes. Well, I knew he posed in his hipster glasses. But over those four weeks I was imagining this character. I was picturing his house. A little house. He’s a journalist. I’m a journalist. I’m a fucking schlub. I pay my rent. I’m fine, I’m happy, but I’m not doing great …’

  This was about the third time Michael had described himself to me as a ‘schlub’ or some such. I suppose he knew that highlighting this aspect of himself made for the most dramatic, likeable retelling of the collision between the two men. The nobody blogger and the crooked VIP. David and Goliath. But I wondered if he was doing it for more than just storytelling reasons. All the stuff he said about how it wasn’t his fault that he stumbled onto the story, how he made no money from it, how the stress nearly killed him, how he was actually trapped into it by Andrew Wylie and Dana Vachon … it suddenly hit me: Michael was traumatized by what he had done. When he’d said to me, ‘Don’t ever do it’ - don’t ever press Send on a story that would destroy someone - it wasn’t a figure of speech. He meant it.