by Jon Ronson
‘The $20,000 …’ I said.
‘It was absolutely a mistake,’ he said. ‘I didn’t ask for it. It was offered. They just gave it to me. I mean, what else do you want? I …’ Jonah paused. ‘Look, I got bills to pay. I haven’t earned a penny in seven months. I was flying high, I was making lots of money. And all of a sudden you’re making no money …’
Jonah had finally agreed to a lengthier interview. He sounded exhausted, like he’d been inside some spinning-machine designed by aliens to test the effects of stress on humans. For a smart man everything he’d done from the moment Michael first emailed him had been a giant miscalculation. He’d been like a balloon becoming popped, shooting wildly in all directions, lying frantically to Michael, before slumping, the air all gone, in the middle of one of modern times’ most terrible shamings.
‘A friend forwarded me a blog post by Jerry Coyne from the University of Chicago,’ Jonah said, ‘an eminent guy, I interviewed him on occasion. He wrote a blog post about me where he called me a sociopath.’
I sense that Lehrer is a bit of a sociopath. Yes, shows of contrition are often phony, meant to convince a gullible public (as in Lance Armstrong’s case) that they’re good to go again. But Lehrer can’t even be bothered to fake an apology that sounds meaningful. Call me uncharitable, but if I were a magazine editor, I’d never hire him.
- Jerry Coyne, quoted on richardbowker.com, 18 February 2013
‘I thought of you,’ Jonah said. ‘I thought, that’s an interesting question for Jon. Jon’s spent some time with me. Maybe I am a sociopath.’
The question didn’t surprise me. Ever since I published a book about psychopaths people have been asking me if they’re one (or, if not them, their boss or their ex-boyfriend or Lance Armstrong). Perhaps Jonah was honestly intrigued by the possibility that he was one, but I didn’t think so. I think he knew he wasn’t, and he had a different reason for wanting to have this conversation. Academics shouldn’t diagnose people from afar as sociopaths. It was a stupid thing for Jerry Coyne to have done. I think Jonah wanted us to bitch about his stupidity for a moment. It would be a way for him to recover some self-esteem - to do a bit of shaming of someone else. Jonah was at rock bottom, so I was happy to go along with it. I told Jonah that he didn’t seem like someone who had no conscience.
‘Who the hell knows what a conscience is,’ Jonah replied. ‘If a conscience is living in a world defined by regrets, then yeah, I’ve got a conscience. My very first thought every morning is what I’ve done wrong. That sounds self-pitying and I’d like you not to use that quote, but there’s no other way around it.’
‘If it felt really important to use that quote, could I?’ I asked him.
Jonah sighed. ‘I mean it depends how you use it, but I’d prefer you not use it,’ he replied.
I did use the quote, because it seemed important, given that so many people imagine Jonah has some neurological lack of conscience.
‘Regrets of the sort I have are all-consuming,’ Jonah continued. ‘I think about what I’ve done to the people I love. What I’ve put my wife through. What I’ve put my brother through. What I’ve put my parents through. That is haunting. Long after I get over the loss of my status, and the loss of my career, which I enjoyed, I will never …’ Jonah trailed off. ‘Life is short. And I have caused tremendous pain to the people I love. I don’t know what that feeling’s called. Remorse sounds about right. There’s a tremendous amount of remorse. And as time passes that isn’t going away. It is miserable and haunting.’
I heard Jonah’s baby daughter crying in the background. We talked about the ‘slippery slope’ that led to the fake Dylan quotes. It began with the self-plagiarism - with Jonah reusing his own paragraphs in different stories. I told him I didn’t consider that the crime of the century. ‘Frank Sinatra doesn’t only sing “My Way” once,’ I said.
‘The self-plagiarism should have been a warning sign,’ Jonah said. ‘It should have been a sign that I was stretched then. If I needed to recycle my own material, why was I bothering to write this blog post in the first place? Look, we can debate the ethics of it. And I’ve certainly heard lots of debate about this. But at the time I didn’t think it was wrong. If I’d thought it was wrong I would have taken some trouble to hide my tracks.’ He paused. ‘It should have been a huge flashing neon sign telling me, “You are getting careless.” You’re taking shortcuts and not noticing and shortcuts become habits and you excuse them because you’re too busy. I wasn’t turning anything down.’
‘What would have been wrong with turning things down?’ I asked.
‘It was some toxic mixture of insecurity and ambition,’ said Jonah. ‘I always felt like a fad. I felt like I was going to be hot for a second and then I would disappear. So I had to act while I could. And there was just some deep-seated … I sound like I’m on a couch with my shrink … some very dangerous and reckless ambition. You combine insecurity and ambition and you get an inability to say no to things. And then one day you get an email saying there’s these four [six] Dylan quotes and they can’t be explained, and they can’t be found anywhere else, and you realize you made them up in your book proposal three years before, and you were too lazy, too stupid, to ever check. I can only wish, and I wish this profoundly, I’d had the temerity, the courage, to do a fact check on my last book. But as anyone who does a fact check knows, they’re not particularly fun things to go through. Your story gets a little flatter. You’re forced to grapple with all your mistakes, conscious and unconscious …’
‘So you forgot that the fake quotes were in the book?’ I asked.
‘Forget gets me off the hook too easily,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t want to remember. So I made no effort to. I wrote well. So why check?’
‘So you were sloppy?’
‘I don’t want to just blame sloppiness,’ he said. ‘It was sloppiness and deception. Sloppiness and lies. I lied to cover up the sloppiness.’
I’d been thinking that when I told Jonah his speech was fantastic it was probably a bad steer. In truth, I’d needed to read it three or four times on the plane because the words kept swirling around on the page, and I didn’t know whether that was a reflection of attention deficiency on my part or abstruse phrasing on Jonah’s. But like all journalists I really love a scoop - a scoop keeps at bay the scream of failure - and I thought that telling him it was fantastic was my best chance of winning the interview.
‘I worked really hard on it,’ Jonah said. ‘I was looking at the Twitter stream during it and the things people were saying … Some people saw the FBI analogies as the worst possible thing in the world. But that’s not some deceptive trick. That’s the way I make sense of the world. That’s how I think. Clearly it was a mistake. But …’ He trailed off.
‘That Twitter stream!’ I said.
‘I was trying to apologize, and to see the response to it live … I didn’t know if I was going to get through that. I had to turn off some emotional switch in me. I think I had to shut down.’
‘What are the tweets you remember most?’
‘It wasn’t the totally off-the-wall cruel ones, because those are so easy to discount,’ he said. ‘It’s the ones that mixed in a little tenderness with the shiv.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t want to …’
Jonah said he couldn’t judge why people ‘got so mad’ about his apology. I said I thought it was because it sounded too much like a Jonah Lehrer speech from the old days. People wanted to see him altered somehow. Not being overtly cowed gave the audience permission to envisage him dramatically, a monster immune to shame.
‘They didn’t want you to intellectualize it,’ I said. ‘They wanted you to be emotional. If you’d been more emotional they’d have gone for it more.’
Jonah sighed. ‘That may have been a better strategy,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t a strategy I wanted to rehearse on stage. It was not something I wanted to share with the universe, with everyone on Twitter. I didn’t want
to talk about how this had ruined me. That’s something for me to deal with, and for my loved ones to help me through. But that’s not something I wanted to get up on stage in front of the Internet and talk about.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Oh, gosh, I don’t know,’ said Jonah. ‘Could you do that?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think I could. And I think that would mean I’d survive better than you.’
‘So what would Jon Ronson’s apology speech be?’ Jonah said. ‘What would you say?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’d say … OK … I … Hello. I’m Jon Ronson and I want to apologize for …’ I trailed off. What would I say? I cleared my throat. ‘I just want everyone to know that I’m really upset …’
Jonah was listening patiently down the line. I stopped. Even though I was just play-acting, I felt wiped out. And I hadn’t really even got anywhere in my attempt.
‘What happened to you is my worst nightmare,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ Jonah replied. ‘It was mine too.’
*
Four more months passed. The winter became the early summer. Then, unexpectedly, Andrew Wylie began shopping a new Jonah Lehrer book proposal around New York City’s publishers. A Book About Love. The proposal was immediately leaked to the New York Times. In it Jonah described the moment he felt ‘the shiver of a voicemail message’:
I have been found out. I puke into a recycling bin. And then I start to cry. Why was I crying? I had been caught in a lie, a desperate attempt to conceal my mistakes. And now it was clear that, within 24 hours, my fall would begin. I would lose my job and my reputation. My private shame would become public.
Jonah left St Louis and returned to Los Angeles, his suit and shirt ‘stained with sweat and vomit’:
I open the front door and take off my dirty shirt and weep on the shoulder of my wife. My wife is caring but confused: How the hell could I be so reckless? I have no good answers.
- Jonah Lehrer’s book proposal, as leaked to the New York Times, 6 June 2013
New York’s media community declared itself resolutely indifferent to Jonah’s suffering. ‘“Recycling bin” is a hilarious choice of detail for the compulsive plagiarist,’ wrote Gawker’s Tom Scocca. ‘And, obviously: Bring us two witnesses who saw you puke when and where you claim you puked. Or don’t bother.’
And then, to my amazement, Slate‘s Daniel Engber announced that he had spent a day combing through Jonah’s proposal and believed he had uncovered plagiarism within it.
Surely Jonah hadn’t been that insanely reckless?
On reading Engber’s article more closely, things didn’t seem quite so clear-cut. ‘A chapter on the secret to having a happy marriage,’ Engber wrote, ‘comes close to copying a recent essay on the same subject by Adam Gopnik, Lehrer’s one-time colleague at the New Yorker.’
Gopnik: In 1838, when Darwin was first thinking of marriage, he made an irresistible series of notes on the subject - a scientific-seeming list of marriage pros and cons … In favor of marriage, he included the acquisition of a ‘constant companion and friend in old age’ and, memorably and conclusively, decided that a wife would be ‘better than a dog anyhow’.
Lehrer: In July 1838, Charles Darwin considered the possibility of marriage in his scientific notebook. His thoughts quickly took the shape of a list, a balance sheet of reasons to ‘marry’ and ‘not marry’. The pros of wedlock were straightforward: Darwin cited the possibility of children (‘if it please God’), the health benefits of attachment and the pleasure of having a ‘constant companion (& friend in old age)’. A wife, he wrote, was probably ‘better than a dog anyhow’.
Gopnik: And the Darwins went on to have something close to an ideal marriage.
Lehrer: This might seem like an inauspicious start to a relationship, but the Darwins went on to have a nearly ideal marriage.
And so on, for a few paragraphs. Engber wasn’t totally sure this counted as plagiarism, ‘or if he modified his words to stop just short of doing so’. Or maybe both men had drawn from the same source: ‘In the footnotes Lehrer cites page 661 of Desmond and Moore’s 1991 biography of Darwin. Anyone who has a copy of that book is invited to check the wordings.’
But even if it wasn’t plagiarism, Engber was ‘convinced that Lehrer hasn’t changed his ways at all. He’s set his course as clearly as can be. He’ll recycle and repeat, he’ll puke his gritty guts out.’
No matter what transgressions Jonah had or hadn’t committed - it seemed to me - he couldn’t win. But his Book About Love will be published by Simon & Schuster around the same time that this book will, and so we’ll all learn at once if it will win him some redemption.
4
GOD THAT WAS AWESOME
During the months that followed it became routine. Everyday people, some with young children, were getting annihilated for tweeting some badly worded joke to their hundred-or-so followers. I’d meet them in restaurants and airport cafes - spectral figures wandering the earth like the living dead in the businesswear of their former lives. It was happening with such regularity it didn’t even seem coincidental that one of them, Justine Sacco, had been working in the same office building as Michael Moynihan until three weeks earlier, when, passing through Heathrow airport, she wrote a tweet that came out badly.
It was 20 December 2013. For the previous two days she’d been tweeting little acerbic jokes to her 170 followers about her holiday travels. She was like a social media Sally Bowles, decadent and flighty and blissfully unaware that serious politics were looming. There was her joke about the German man on the plane from New York: ‘Weird German dude: You’re in first class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant. - Inner monologue as I inhale BO. Thank god for pharmaceuticals.‘ Then the layover at Heathrow: ‘Chili - cucumber sandwiches - bad teeth. Back in London!‘ Then the final leg: ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!’
She chuckled to herself, pressed Send, and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter.
‘I got nothing,’ she told me. ‘No replies.’
I imagined her feeling a bit deflated about this - that sad feeling when nobody congratulates you for being funny, that black silence when the Internet doesn’t talk back. She boarded the plane. It was an eleven-hour flight. She slept. When it landed she turned on her phone. Straight away there was a text from someone she hadn’t spoken to since high school: ‘I’m so sorry to see what’s happening.’
She looked at it, baffled.
‘And then my phone started to explode,’ she said.
We were having this conversation three weeks later at - her choice of location - the Cookshop restaurant in New York City. It was the very same restaurant where Michael had recounted to me the tale of Jonah’s destruction. It was becoming for me the Restaurant of Stories of Obliterated Lives. But it was only a half-coincidence. It was close to the building where they both worked. Michael had been offered a job at the Daily Beast as a result of his great Jonah scoop and Justine had an office upstairs, running the PR department for the magazine’s publishers IAC - who also owned Vimeo and OkCupid and Match.com. The reason why she wanted to meet me here, and why she was wearing her expensive-looking work clothes, was because at 6 p.m. she was due in there to clear out her desk.
As she sat on the runway at Cape Town Airport, a second text popped up: ‘You need to call me immediately.’ It was from her best friend, Hannah. ‘You’re the number-one worldwide trend on Twitter right now.’
‘In light of @JustineSacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @care today‘ and, ‘How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!‘ and, ‘No words for that horribly disgusting, racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified‘ and, ‘I’m an IAC employee and I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever‘ and, ‘Everyone go report this cunt @JustineSacco‘ and, from her employers, IAC, ‘T
his is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight‘ and, ‘Fascinated by the @JustineSacco train wreck. It’s global and she’s apparently *still on the plane*‘ and, ‘All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail‘ and, ‘Oh man, @JustineSacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands‘ and, ‘Looks like @JustineSacco lands in about 9mins, this should be interesting‘ and, ‘We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired‘ and then, after Hannah frantically deleted Justine’s Twitter account, ‘Sorry @JustineSacco - your tweet lives on forever‘ and so on for a total of a hundred thousand tweets, according to calculations by the website Buzzfeed, until weeks later: ‘Man, remember Justine Sacco? #HasJustineLandedYet. God that was awesome. MILLIONS of people waiting for her to land.’
I once asked a car crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smash-up. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything was smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture - like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy.
Over the years I’ve sat across tables from a lot of people whose lives had been destroyed. Usually the people who did the destroying were the government, or the military, or Big Business, or, as with Jonah Lehrer, basically themselves (at least at first with Jonah - we took over as he tried to apologize). Justine Sacco felt like the first person I had ever interviewed who had been destroyed by us.
*
Google has an engine - Google AdWords - that tells you how many times your name has been searched for during any given month. In October 2013 Justine was googled thirty times. In November 2013 she was googled thirty times. During the eleven days between 20 December and the end of December she was googled 1,220,000 times.
