by Jon Ronson
‘Oh my God,’ I thought. ‘He’s right.’
Gregory added that he was sorry if he was offending me, but why did I presume that my views on the serious subject of public shaming would be taken seriously by anyone, given that my previous books sounded so implausible?
‘That IS a bit offensive,’ I thought.
Gregory seemed suspicious that the murder-mystery aspect of his story was more captivating to me than the public shaming part. And what could I say? He was right. I was happy to have Gregory’s name purged from the Internet if I could get to hear the intriguing details. I was the Selfish Giant, wanting to keep the lavish garden for myself and my readers, whilst building a tall wall around it so nobody else could look in.
Gregory and I emailed back and forth about thirty times during the days that followed. My emails were breezy. Gregory’s emails alluded darkly to ‘conditions’. I ignored the word ‘conditions’ and carried on being breezy. Finally Gregory wrote that the good news was that he’d decided to grant me an exclusive interview and so he was instructing his lawyer to draw up a contract in which I agreed to portray him in a positive way or else suffer significant financial penalty.
And that was the end of my relationship with Gregory.
Now that I no longer needed to be on my best behaviour in my emails to him, I let it all out. ‘For about a thousand reasons there is no way on earth I would sign a contract promising to be positive or risk significant financial penalty,’ I emailed. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing! I can’t tell you how frowned upon something like that is in journalism. NO ONE does it. If I signed that, you could determine anything negative and take my money! What if, God forbid, you get charged? What if we have a falling-out?’
Gregory wished me the best of luck with my book.
It was frustrating. Michael Fertik was offering free services to a shamed person of my choice and I was finding it difficult to provide him with one who wasn’t unpleasantly overbearing. The fact was, even though Gregory hadn’t been charged with any crime, his weird and controlling emails had made me feel warier of the online reputation-management world. What other cracks were being papered over?
Michael had accused me of ‘prurient curiosity of the type you condemn in your book’ when I’d asked him about the early paedophile sign-ups he’d thwarted. And now the accusation put me in a panic. I didn’t want to write a book that advocated for a less curious world. Prurient curiosity may not be great. But curiosity is. People’s flaws need to be written about. The flaws of some people lead to horrors inflicted on others. And then there are the more human flaws that, when you shine a light on them, de-demonize people who might otherwise be seen as ogres.
But there was a side of Michael’s business I respected - the side that offered salvation to people who’d really done nothing wrong but had been dramatically shamed anyway. Like Justine Sacco. Which is why I now emailed Michael’s publicist Leslie Hobbs suggesting Justine as Gregory’s replacement: ‘I think she’s a deserving case,’ I wrote. ‘She may not go for it. But should I at least put it to her as a possibility?’
Leslie didn’t reply to my email. I sent another one asking why they didn’t want to consider taking Justine on. She didn’t reply to that one either. I took the hint. I didn’t want to lose their goodwill, so I threw Justine on the fire and came up with a new name - a public shamee I’d written to three times and had heard nothing back. Lindsey Stone.
It was the first time I’d ever been in a position to offer an incentive to a reluctant interviewee. I’d witnessed other journalists do it and had always glared at them with hatred from across the room. Twenty years ago I covered the rape trial of a British TV presenter. Journalists on the press bench were shooting him likeable little smiles in the hope of an exclusive interview should he be found not guilty. It was embarrassing. And futile too: on the day of his acquittal a woman in a fur coat appeared in court from nowhere and whisked him away. It turned out that she was from the News of the World. Everyone else - with his or her little likeable smiles - had never stood a chance. This woman had a chequebook.
I still had no chequebook, but without Michael’s inducement I’d have had no chance with Lindsey. And it was quite the inducement.
‘We’ll end up spending hundreds of thousands of bucks on her,’ Michael said. ‘At least a hundred grand. Up to several hundred grand of effort.’
‘Hundreds of thousands?’ I said.
‘Her situation is very dire,’ he said.
‘Why does it cost so much?’ I asked him.
‘Take it up with Google,’ he shrugged. ‘It sucks to be Lindsey Stone.’
I thought Michael was being unbelievably generous.
I didn’t tell Lindsey that she nearly lost out to Justine Sacco and the leader of a religious group who had been falsely accused of murdering his brother. Gregory’s story had over-beguiled me. But Lindsey was perfect. With Lindsey there were no strange caveats, no domineering emails. All she wanted was to work with autistic children and not feel the terror.
‘If Michael takes you on, that photograph might practically vanish,’ I said to her.
‘That would be unbelievable,’ she replied. ‘Or if it just disappeared two pages down Google. Only creepy people check past the second page.’
Lindsey knew it wasn’t perfect. My book would inevitably bring it back up again. But she understood that anything would be better than the way things were now. She was being offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in free services. This was bespoke - a shaming-eradication service that only the super-rich could normally afford. After I left Lindsey’s house, she and Michael talked on the phone. After that, Michael called me.
‘She was nothing but very gracious and responsive and cooperative,’ he said. ‘I think we can proceed.’
*
For scheduling reasons Michael couldn’t start on Lindsey for a few months, and so I took a break. I’ve worked on dark stories before - stories about innocent people losing their lives to the FBI, about banks hounding debtors until they commit suicide - but although I felt sorry for those people I wouldn’t feel the dread snake its way into me in the way these shaming stories had. I’d leave Jonah and Michael and Justine feeling nervous and depressed. And so it was a nice surprise to receive an email from Richard Branson’s sister Vanessa inviting me to appear at a salon of talks at her Marrakech palace / holiday home / hotel, the Riad El Fenn. ‘Other speakers,’ she emailed, ‘include Clive Stafford Smith - human rights lawyer. David Chipperfield - architect. Hans Ulrich Obrist - Serpentine curator. Redha Moali - rags-to-riches Algerian arts entrepreneur.’ I googled her Riad. It ‘combines grandeur and historic architecture with hideaway nooks, terraces and gardens’ and is ‘just five minutes’ walk from the world-famous Djemaa el Fna square and bustling maze of streets that make up the souk’.
And so it was that, four weeks later, I sat reading a book underneath an orange tree in Vanessa Branson’s Marrakech courtyard. Vanessa Branson lay supine on a velvet bed in the corner. Her friends lounged around, drinking herbal teas. One had been the CEO of Sony in Germany, another owned a diamond mine in South Africa. I was feeling tired and jittery and less languid than the others, who were dressed in white linens and seemed carefree.
Then I heard a noise. I looked up from my book. Vanessa Branson was rushing across the courtyard to welcome someone new. He too was dressed in linen and was tall and thin, with the gait of a British man of privilege. He might have been a diplomat. After a few minutes he bounded over to me. ‘I’m Clive Stafford Smith,’ he said.
I knew a little about him from his interview on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs - about how he was all set for a life in British society until one day at his boarding school he saw a drawing in a book of Joan of Arc being burned at the stake and realized she looked like his sister. So in his twenties he became a death row lawyer in Mississippi, and has been defending death row and Guantanamo prisoners ever since. The Desert Island Discs presenter, Sue Lawley, treated him
with baffled amazement, as Queen Victoria would a lord who had gone off to explore darkest Africa. Ten minutes after meeting me, he was walking me through the corridors of Vanessa Branson’s labyrinthine palace telling me why prisons should be abolished.
‘Let me ask you three questions,’ he said. ‘And then you’ll see it my way. Question one. What’s the worst thing that you have ever done to someone? It’s OK. You don’t have to confess it out loud. Question two. What’s the worst criminal act that has ever been committed against you? Question three. Which of the two was the most damaging for the victim?’
The worst criminal act that has ever been committed against me was burglary. How damaging was it? Hardly damaging at all. I felt theoretically violated at the idea of a stranger wandering through my house. But I got the insurance money. I was mugged one time. I was eighteen. The man who mugged me was an alcoholic. He saw me coming out of a supermarket. ‘Give me your alcohol,’ he yelled. He punched me in the face, grabbed my groceries, and ran away. There wasn’t any alcohol in my bag. I was upset for a few weeks, but it passed.
And what was the worst thing I had ever done to someone? It was a terrible thing. It was devastating for them. It wasn’t against the law.
Clive’s point was that the criminal justice system is supposed to repair harm, but most prisoners - young, black - have been incarcerated for acts far less emotionally damaging than the injuries we non-criminals perpetrate upon each other all the time - bad husbands, bad wives, ruthless bosses, bullies, bankers.
I thought about Justine Sacco. How many of the people piling in on her had been emotionally damaged by what they had read? As far as I could tell, only one person was damaged in that pile-on.
‘I’m writing a book about public shaming,’ I told Clive. ‘With citizen justice we’re bringing public shame back in a big way. You’ve spent your life in actual courts. Is it the same there? Is shaming utilized as a kind of default position in real courtrooms too?’
‘Oh yes!’ he replied, quite happily. ‘I do it all the time. I’ve humiliated a lot of people. Especially experts.’
‘What’s your method?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, it’s a very simple game,’ he said. ‘You need to figure out something that’s so esoteric the expert can’t possibly know about it. Maybe it’s something that’s not relevant to the case, but it has to be something they cannot know the answer to. They’ll be incapable of saying they don’t know. So they’ll gradually walk down the garden to the place where they look really stupid.’
‘Why are they incapable of saying they don’t know?’
‘It’s their entire profession,’ Clive said. ‘It’s respect. It’s a big deal being an expert. Imagine the things you can discuss at dinner parties as opposed to the other boring people at the table. You’re the witness who put Ted Bundy away. They’ll do anything to not look stupid. That’s the key thing. And if you can make them look stupid, everything else falls by the wayside.’
Clive made it sound like shaming was as natural as breathing in the court world, and had been forever. And of course I understood that witnesses needed to be grilled, their honesty tested. But it’s odd that so many of us see shaming the way free-market libertarians see capitalism, as a beautiful beast that must be allowed to run free.
Those of us on social media were just starting out on our shaming crusade. In the real courts, according to Clive, it was venerated as a first-line tactic. I wondered - when shaming takes on a disproportionate significance within an august institution, when it entrenches itself over generations, what are the consequences? What does it do to the participants?
12
THE TERROR
A dozen men and women sat around a conference table at the Piccadilly Hotel in Manchester. There was a marine metallurgist, a paediatric nurse, an occupational therapist specializing in brain injuries, a laboratory technician working with the Metropolitan Police drug squad, someone from the tobacco industry, a social worker who visits the homes of parents suspected of abusing or neglecting their children, and so on. These people had just one thing in common: they were rookie court expert witnesses. They were all hoping to make extra money from the court world. Like me, they didn’t know the minutiae of how a day in court worked. None of them had yet been called as an expert. Which was why they had signed up for this ‘courtroom familiarization’ course, organized by the legal training company Bond Solon. I had signed up after my conversation with Clive. I was curious to know if shaming was a significant enough part of the court milieu to merit a mention in a courtroom familiarization course.
It merited a mention straight away. There was a white-board. Our trainer for the day, John, stood next to it. ‘You,’ he told us, by way of introduction, ‘are a bone being dragged over by two dogs that want to win. And if you get between the lawyer and his goal, you’re going to get hurt.’ He surveyed the room. ‘Appreciate what the lawyer is trying to do. The lawyer hopes to drag you down. He’ll call you incompetent, inexperienced. You might start to feel angry, upset. He will try and drag you outside your area of expertise, your circle of facts. How? How will he try to do this?’
There was a silence. Then it dawned on the rookie experts that this wasn’t a rhetorical question.
‘Facial expression?’ the marine metallurgist said.
‘What do you mean?’ said John.
‘Smiling or not smiling,’ the metallurgist said. ‘Looking unmoved. Lulling us into a false sense of security and then pouncing. Looking bored?’
John wrote the suggestions down on the whiteboard.
‘Unnerve us with a disbelieving, patronizing or sarcastic voice?’ asked a social worker.
‘Might they snigger?’ the lab technician asked.
‘No, that would sound unprofessional,’ said John. ‘But they might go for incredulity. They might say, “Really?”’
‘What would happen if I nervously laugh?’ the lab technician said. ‘Sometimes when I’m under pressure I nervously laugh.’
‘Don’t,’ John warned. ‘If you do they’ll say, “Are you finding it funny? My client isn’t.”’
‘Are we allowed to ask them to stop if it gets too much for us?’ the marine metallurgist said.
‘No,’ said John. ‘You aren’t allowed to ask them to stop. Any other guesses?’
‘Pretend to mispronounce your name?’ someone said.
‘Silence?’ someone else said. Everyone cringed at the thought of silence.
‘Should we be concerned about the colour of our clothes?’ asked a care worker. ‘I hear someone wearing brown is considered less believable.’
‘That’s too deep for me,’ said John.
I assumed that by lunchtime John would move away from shaming familiarization to other types of courtroom familiarization. But, really, that never happened. It turned out that shaming was such an integral part of the judicial process the day was pretty much all about it. In the afternoon the experts were taught shame-avoidance techniques. When they first entered the dock, John told them, they should ask the court usher to bring them a glass of water. That would give them a moment to settle their nerves. They mustn’t pour the water themselves, but instead ask the court usher to. When the lawyer asks them a question, they should swivel on their hips and deliver their answer to the judge.
‘They’ll have a much harder time breaking you down that way,’ John said. ‘Oddly enough we like to look at our tormentors. Maybe it’s linked into the Stockholm Syndrome.’
The day ended with a mock cross-examination - a chance for the rookie experts to enact what they had learnt. Matthew, the marine metallurgist, was the first to the fake witness stand. John asked me to pretend to be the judge. Everyone smiled supportively at Matthew. He was a young man, wearing a pink shirt and a pink tie. He was shaking a little. He poured himself a glass of water. The water in the glass shook like a pond during a minor earth tremor.
‘He forgot to ask the usher to pour him a glass of water,’ I thought.
‘Tell
me your qualifications,’ said John, taking the role of the cross-examining lawyer.
‘I have an upper first-class degree, sorry, second-class degree in metallurgy,’ said Matthew, looking John in the eye.
Then he bowed his head, like a geisha.
‘Why is he not turning to face me?’ I thought.
Matthew’s role-play lasted fifteen minutes. His face turned as crimson as a rusted cargo container as he mumbled about corroded coils. His mouth was dry, his voice trembling. He was a wreck.
‘He’s weak,’ I heard myself think. ‘He’s just so weak.’
Then I caught myself. Judging a person on how flustered they appear in the face of a shaming is a truly strange and arbitrary way of forming an opinion on someone.
*
I started to correspond with a woman from the Scottish town of New Cumnock. Her name was Linda Armstrong. One September night Linda’s sixteen-year-old daughter Lindsay was on her way home from a nearby bowling alley when a fourteen-year-old boy from the town followed her off the bus, coaxed her into a park, pushed her to the ground and raped her. At the boy’s trial Lindsay was cross-examined by his lawyer, John Carruthers. Linda sent me a copy of the court transcript. ‘I have never read it,’ she wrote to me, ‘because I couldn’t face it.’
Lindsay Armstrong: He started following behind me and he was asking me out and everything and I kept saying no and then I walked away from him and then he followed behind me and he pulled my arm like that and he started trying to kiss me and everything and I kept shoving him away. I told him to leave me alone and then he shoved me down …
John Carruthers: I wonder if we could see label no. 7 please. Do you recognize those?
Lindsay Armstrong: Uh-huh.
John Carruthers: What are they?
Lindsay Armstrong: My pants.
John Carruthers: Those are the pants that you were wearing that day?
