by Jon Ronson
‘I wanted to scream, “It was just about a sign,”’ Lindsey said.
Lindsey doesn’t know how it spread. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever know,’ she said. ‘We have a feeling that somebody at work found it. We had kind of revitalized that campus. There was animosity that came from that. They saw us as young irreverent idiots.’
By the time she went to bed that night - ‘which was admittedly at 4 a.m.’ - a Fire Lindsey Stone Facebook page had been created. It attracted 12,000 likes. Lindsey read every comment. ‘I really became obsessed with reading everything about myself.’
The next day camera crews had gathered outside her front door. Her father tried talking to them. He had a cigarette in his hand. The family dog had followed him out. As he tried to explain that Lindsey wasn’t a terrible person, he noticed the cameras move from his face down to the cigarette and the dog, like they were a family of hillbillies - smoking separatists down a lane with guard dogs.
LIFE was inundated with emails demanding their jobs and so Lindsey was called into work. But she wasn’t allowed inside the building. Her boss met her in the parking lot and told her to hand over her keys.
‘Literally overnight everything I knew and loved was gone,’ Lindsey said.
And that’s when she fell into a depression, became an insomniac, and barely left home for a year.
*
Company Praised For Firing Woman Who Took Disrespectful Photo Next To Soldier’s Grave
A company is being applauded for firing a woman who made a vulgar gesture next to a soldier’s burial site, sparking nationwide outrage … Vitriol toward Lindsey Stone hasn’t relented since she lost her job … Commentators suggested ‘she should be shot’ or exiled from the United States … Stone, who issued a statement of apology, has refused to show her face since the backlash, her parents told CBS Boston.
- Rheana Murray, New York Daily News, 22 November 2012, as seen on page one of the Google.com results for the search term ‘Lindsey Stone’
During the year that followed the Washington DC trip, Lindsey scanned Craigslist for carer work but nobody ever replied to her applications. She lurked online, watching all the other Lindsey Stones get destroyed. ‘I felt so terrible for Justine Sacco,’ she said, ‘and that girl at Halloween who dressed like the Boston Marathon victim.’
And then her life suddenly got much better. She was offered a job caring for children with autism.
‘But I’m terrified,’ she said.
‘That your bosses will find out?’
‘Yeah.’
Psychologists try and remind anxiety sufferers that ‘what if’ worries are irrational ones. If you find yourself thinking, ‘What if I just came across as racist?’ the ‘what if’ is evidence that nothing bad actually happened. It’s just thoughts swirling frantically around. But Lindsey’s ‘what if’ worry - ‘What if my new company googles me?’ - was extremely plausible. In the tempest of her anxiety attacks there was no driftwood to hold onto. Her worst-case scenario was a likely one. And the photograph was everywhere. It had become so iconic and ubiquitous amongst swathes of US veterans and right-wingers and anti-feminists that one man had even turned it into patriotic wallpaper, superimposing onto the wall behind Lindsey’s shrieking face and upturned finger a picture of a military funeral, complete with a coffin draped in the American flag.
Lindsey had wanted the job so much she’d been ‘nervous about even applying. And I wasn’t sure how to address it on my resume. Why the abrupt departure from LIFE? I was conflicted on whether to say to them, “Just so you know, I am this Lindsey Stone.” Because I knew it was just a mouse click away.’
Before the job interview the question had haunted her. Should she tell them? She was ‘insanely nervous’ about making the wrong decision. She left it until the moment of the interview. And then the interview was over and she found that she hadn’t mentioned it.
‘It just didn’t feel right,’ she said. ‘People who have gotten to know me don’t see Arlington as a big deal. And so I wanted to give them the opportunity to know me before I say to them, “This is what you’ll get if you google me.”’
She’d been in the job four months, and she still hadn’t told them.
‘And obviously you can’t ask them, “Have you noticed it and decided it’s not a problem?”’ I said.
‘Right,’ said Lindsey.
‘So you feel trapped in a paranoid silence,’ I said.
‘I love this job so much,’ Lindsey said. ‘I love these kids. One of the parents paid me a really high compliment the other day. I’ve only been working with her son for a month and she was like, “The moment I met you, seeing the way you are with my son, and the way you treat people, you were meant to work in this field.” But I see everything with a heavy heart because I wait for the other shoe to drop. What if she found out? Would she feel the same way?’ Lindsey could never just be happy and relaxed. The terror was always there. ‘It really impacts the way you view the world. Since it happened I haven’t tried to date anybody. How much do you let a new person into your life? Do they already know? The place I’m working at now - I was under the impression nobody knew. But someone made a comment the other day and I think they knew.’
‘What was the comment?’
‘Oh, we were talking about something and he tossed off a comment like, “Oh, it’s not like I’m going to plaster that all over the Internet.” Then he quickly said, “Just kidding. I would never do that to somebody. I would never do that to you.”’
‘So you don’t know for sure that he knew.’
‘Exactly,’ Lindsey said. ‘But his hurried follow-up … I don’t know.’ She paused. ‘That fear. It impacts you.’
But now, suddenly, something had happened that could make all Lindsey’s problems vanish. It was something almost magical, and it was my doing. I had set in motion a mysterious and fairytale-like set of events for her. I’d never in my life been in a situation like this. It was new for both of us. It felt good - but there was a chance it wasn’t good.
*
It all started when I chanced upon the story of two former philosophy classmates from Harvard - Graeme Wood and Phineas Upham. There was something quite Michael Moynihan and Jonah Lehrer about them. At Harvard - as Graeme Wood would later write - Phineas ‘dressed preppy and was a member of the Harvard chapter of the Ayn Rand cult. I wasn’t poor, but no one in my family knew how heavy a bag with $300,000 in it felt.’
What Graeme Wood meant was that in 2010 - twelve years after leaving Harvard - Phineas Upham and his mother Nancy were arrested on tax evasion charges. The indictment read that they conspired to hide $11 million in a Swiss bank account and then sneak the money back to America in cash. Graeme was intrigued by the news and so he set up a Google alert to ‘keep abreast of developments’.
The scandal was over fast. Nancy pleaded guilty, was fined $5.5 million and received a three-year suspended sentence. Soon after that, Graeme received a Google news alert about Phineas:
US Drops Case of Man Accused of Helping Mom Hide Money
The office of US Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan has dropped an October 2010 indictment charging Samuel Phineas Upham with one count of conspiracy to commit tax fraud and three counts of aiding in the preparation of false tax returns.
‘The government has concluded that further prosecution of the defendant would not be in the interests of justice,’ prosecutors said in a May 18 filing in federal court in New York.
- David Voreacos, Bloomberg Business Week, 23 May 2012
All charges against Phineas had been dropped. And so that was that. Except Graeme never bothered to cancel his Phineas Upham Google alert. Which was how he began to notice the strange accolades. Phineas was suddenly garnering a lot of them. He was appointed ‘Head Finance Curator of Venture Cap Monthly‘, whatever that meant. ‘Charity News Forum’ voted him ‘Philanthropist of the Month’. He started writing for a magazine Graeme had never heard of called Philanthropy Chronicle. He published a collec
tion of essays. He even created a magazine to ‘bring philosophy writing to underprivileged youth by making it part of non-profit educational programs in developing nations’.
But, as Graeme would write, ‘something was wrong with these sites, which in every case looked flimsy and temporary, especially when you got beyond the first page’.
When I went to the street address listed for the [Philanthropy Chronicle] magazine’s offices, I discovered that 64 Prince Street did not exist - or, rather, that it is a back entrance next to an Indian restaurant.
What had begun as a schadenfreude-motivated Phineas Upham Google alert had led Graeme into the mysterious world of ‘black-ops reputation management’. The purpose of the fake sites was obvious - to push reports about the tax evasion charges so far down the search results they’d effectively vanish. Nobody had heard of the European Court of Justice’s Right to be Forgotten ruling at that point - it was still two years from existing - but somebody was evidently fashioning a clumsy home-made US-based version for Phineas Upham.
Graeme had a skill most people don’t. He knew how to obtain clues from HTML codes. So he dug into them, ‘looking for evidence of a common author’. And he found it. The fake sites were the work of a man named Bryce Tom, head of a business called Metal Rabbit Media. He was a young Californian living in New York City.
The two men met in a cafe, Graeme thrilled to have exposed the mother lode, Bryce Tom evidently plagued with anxiety:
‘This could be very bad for me,’ he said, visibly shaken. ‘No one’s going to want my business.’ We stared at each other in uneasy silence for a few minutes, and I fetched him a non-alcoholic sangria to calm him down. When I returned, he had shredded his napkin.
- Graeme Wood, ‘Scrubbed’, New York Magazine, 16 June 2013
I found Graeme’s story strange and enthralling, except for this last part. Bryce Tom had seemed in such despair that he’d been exposed, which made for a melancholy ending.
And now Graeme and I sat opposite each other in a New York City cafe. I told him I hadn’t a clue that people like Bryce Tom existed and I wanted to do some digging of my own. Graeme gave me leads: names of men and women he suspected might be Metal Rabbit clients, like a highly decorated UN peacekeeper who had twice been blown up in suicide bombings. Back home I read articles about how, on both occasions, bleeding from shrapnel wounds, this UN peacekeeper stayed to help the wounded and the dying. The stories were full of eulogies, tributes to his bravery, ‘but his Wikipedia page has been edited by a man I know works for Metal Rabbit’, Graeme had told me. And after an hour of hacking through Google’s undergrowth I found a site accusing the peacekeeper of being a philanderer, cheating on three women at the same time, a ‘low life prick’, and a ‘pathological liar whose behaviour is demonic’. When I emailed him to ask if he was a Metal Rabbit client he obliquely replied that he wasn’t, but ‘I do know the guys.’
Like Graeme Wood, I was having fun exploring the Google search pages nobody ever goes to for secrets that would otherwise go unnoticed, but then I met Justine and heard about Lindsey and I read Graeme’s article a second time and saw a different side to it. It was miserable that 99 per cent of us could never afford a service like Metal Rabbit, intriguing and scandalous that people like Bryce Tom went about their business in such a shadowy manner. Metal Rabbit deserved exposure. But Phineas Upham had been cleared of all charges. Surely he had a right to be forgotten? Didn’t he?
I emailed Bryce Tom. ‘Is Metal Rabbit Media still operational?’
He emailed back. ‘What can I help you with?’
I emailed him back. ‘I’m a journalist …’
I never heard from him again.
*
The Village Pub in Woodside, near Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, looks like no big deal from the outside, but when you get inside you realize it’s massively upmarket and filled with tech billionaires - the restaurant version of the nonthreatening clothes the tech billionaires were wearing. I told my dining companion, Michael Fertik, that he was the only person from the mysterious reputation-management world who had returned my email.
‘That’s because this is a really easy sector in which to be an unappealing, scurrilous operation,’ he said.
‘Scurrilous in what way?’
‘A couple of them are really nasty fucking people,’ Michael said. ‘There’s a guy who has some traction in our space, who runs a company, he’s a convicted rapist. He’s a felony rapist. He went to jail for four years for raping a woman. He started a company to basically obscure that fact about himself, I think.’ Michael told me the name of the man’s company. ‘We’ve built a data file on him,’ he said.
Michael’s competitors were disreputable, he said, and so were some of his potential clients.
‘Very early on, within two weeks of launching our website in 2006 [Michael’s company is called reputation.com] I remember being by myself and getting a couple of signups from guys. So I googled them. They were paedophiles.’
‘Do you remember the paedophiles’ names?’ I asked him.
‘Of course not,’ Michael said. ‘Why do you ask that shit?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Curiosity.’
‘No, it’s prurient curiosity of the type you condemn in your book,’ Michael said.
Michael looked different to our fellow diners. I didn’t recognize any of them but everyone seemed insanely rich - preppy, with faces like luxury yachts, like Martha’s Vineyard in the summertime, WASPy and at peace with the world, practically floating through the restaurant, whereas Michael was a big, angry, coiled-spring Jewish bear of a man. He was born in New York City, attained a degree from the Harvard Law School, and invented the concept of online reputation management while working as a clerk for the Sixth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals in Louisville, Kentucky. This was the mid 2000s. Stories about cyber-bullying and revenge porn were just starting to filter though. And that’s how Michael got the idea.
After he turned the paedophiles down, Michael told me, he noticed he was getting sign-ups from neo-Nazis, albeit repentant former ones - ’”When I was seventeen I was a Nazi. I was an asshole kid. Now I’m in my forties I’m trying to move on but the Internet still thinks that I am a Nazi.”’ They were more sympathetic than the paedophiles but Michael, being Jewish, still didn’t want them as clients. So he drew up a code of conduct. He wouldn’t accept anyone who was under investigation or had been convicted of a felony violent crime, or a felony fraud crime, or any sexually violent crime, or anyone accused - even informally - of a sexual crime against children. And, he said, there was another moral difference between him and his competitors. He wouldn’t invent fake accolades. He’d only put the truth up there. Although, ‘I don’t think it’s incumbent on anyone to do massive fact-checking.’
‘I have no idea what you actually do,’ I had told Michael over the telephone before our dinner. ‘I don’t know how you manipulate Google search results.’
I understood that Michael was offering some kind of stealthier version of the European Court of Justice’s Right to be Forgotten ruling. Plus, unlike the ruling, Michael had a worldwide reach, and not just a European one. As it happened the judgment wasn’t working out well for a lot of its applicants. They were finding themselves less forgotten than ever, given that so many journalists and bloggers had dedicated themselves to outing them. But nobody was scrutinizing the client lists of the online reputation-management companies. Only a few very unlucky people, like Phineas Upham, had been exposed that way.
‘Your work is a total mystery to me,’ I said to Michael. ‘Especially the technological side of it. Maybe I could follow someone though the process?’
‘Sure,’ Michael replied.
And so we planned it out. We’d just need to find a willing client. Which wouldn’t be easy given that my pitch was that I wanted to study something they were frantically attempting to conceal. It was not a winning pitch.
We talked about generic possibilities. Maybe I could convinc
e a victim of ‘revenge porn’, Michael suggested, some woman whose spurned boyfriend had posted naked photographs of her online. Or maybe I could convince a politician who had said some offhand thing and wanted it buried before it devoured them. Or, oh, Michael added, somewhat less generically, maybe I could convince the leader of a religious group who was currently being falsely accused online of murdering his brother.
I coughed. ‘How about the leader of the religious group being falsely accused of murdering his brother?’ I said.
I’ll call the religious leader Gregory. Which is not his real name. Plus I’ve changed some details of his story to make him unidentifiable, for reasons that will become obvious. Gregory’s brother - a member of Gregory’s religious group - had been found dead in a hotel room. A member of Gregory’s flock had been arrested for the murder. The investigating officers had apparently discounted Gregory as a co-conspirator. But message boards were ablaze with speculation that he’d directed it, like some kind of Charles Manson.
Which was where reputation.com had come in. Gregory hadn’t approached them. Their outreach team had noticed the accusations and had pitched him their services. I don’t know how far that conversation had gone. But now Michael talked to Gregory about taking him on as a client pro bono on the condition that I was allowed to witness it all.
Gregory emailed me. He was appreciative of Michael’s offer, he wrote, and might consent to an interview with me - his tone made ‘consent to an interview’ sound like ‘deign to consent to an interview’, I thought - but he was puzzled. Given that my previous books were about such frivolous topics as military psychics and conspiracy theorists, why did I suppose my readers would be interested in the important subject of public shaming?
