by Jon Ronson
Lindsay Armstrong: Uh-huh.
John Carruthers: I wonder if you could hold them up to allow people to see them. Would it be fair to describe those pants as flimsy?
Lindsay Armstrong: I don’t think what kind of pants I wear has anything to do with …
John Carruthers: Well, hold them up again. It has got a name, the design of it, hasn’t it? What’s it called? Is it not a thong?
Lindsay Armstrong: Yes.
John Carruthers: I beg your pardon, Miss Armstrong. If I could ask you to hold them up?
Lindsay Armstrong: Sorry.
John Carruthers: Now you can see through those pants, is that correct?
Lindsay Armstrong: Uh-huh.
John Carruthers: What does it say on the front?
Lindsay Armstrong: Little devil.
John Carruthers: Sorry?
Lindsay Armstrong: Little devil.
‘Lindsay told me she was disgusted and very embarrassed about him making her hold up her underwear,’ Linda emailed me. ‘She said she put them back down quickly and he shouted at her to pick them up again. Purely to let the jury see what type of underwear she wore. I think this was probably the most stressful part of the cross-examination for her, as she didn’t ever want to see those clothes again. There was absolutely no need for her to read out what was written on the front of them.’
The boy was found guilty. He was sentenced to four years in a young offenders’ institution (he eventually served two). Three weeks after Lindsay’s cross-examination, her parents found her in her bedroom at 2 a.m. She had put on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and had taken a lethal overdose of antidepressants.
A shaming can be like a distorting mirror at a funfair, taking human nature and making it look monstrous. Of course it was tactics like John Carruthers’ that compelled us to believe we could do justice better on social media. But still: knee-jerk shaming is knee-jerk shaming and I wondered what would happen if we made a point of eschewing the shaming completely - if we refused to shame anyone. Could there be a corner of the justice system trying out an idea like that? It turned out that there was. And it was being run by about the last person you’d expect.
13
RAQUEL IN A POST-SHAMING WORLD
A little boy and his father were eating breakfast at an almost deserted restaurant in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan when they became aware of a man dashing across the floor towards them. He seemed to have something urgent to say. The boy looked anxious at what might happen next. The stranger took a breath.
‘STUDY HARD AT MATH!’ he yelled.
There was a silence. ‘OK,’ the boy said.
At this, the man walked over to me and sat down, pleased to have had the chance to positively motivate a child. His phone rang. ‘Sorry,’ he mouthed. He picked it up. ‘DID YOU DO TEN STRONG POWERFULS LAST NIGHT?’ he hollered down the receiver. ‘WORD OF HONOR? GOOD FOR YOU! LOVE YOU, BYE!’ He put the phone down. Then he smiled, delighted that this was proving such a gold-rush morning for him in terms of imparting inspirational messages.
His name was Jim McGreevey. He used to be the governor of New Jersey. He’d been a severe one too: ‘I never pardoned anyone,’ he told me.
‘How does the pardoning process even work?’ I asked him.
‘The Attorney General’s office makes a recommendation,’ he replied. ‘They contact the local county prosecutor, who contacts the parole officer of the person being considered for a pardon, who makes an official recommendation to the governor. Who was me.’
I pictured the prisoners in their cells, concentrating hard on their letters to Jim, frantically wondering how best to lay out their mitigating circumstances. What would draw Jim in? What would grab the attention of the governor?
‘Can you remember any of their stories?’ I asked Jim.
‘I never read any of them,’ he said.
‘You never even looked?’
Jim shook his head.
‘You were like a hanging judge,’ I said.
‘I was a law-and-order Democrat,’ Jim said.
*
Bill and Hillary Clinton had campaigned for Jim back in 2001. He was young, handsome, married, with two beautiful daughters. He won a landslide victory and took his place at the heart of the New Jersey power elite - ‘as close’, as he’d later describe the state in his memoirs, ‘to Machiavelli’s cut-throat Venetian principality as anywhere on earth’. It was a place where ‘political meetings start with a big bear hug’ so both huggers could surreptitiously check the other for a concealed wire: ‘A New Jersey pat-down among friends.’ Now Jim had a beach house, a helicopter, a staff of cooks, and Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion.
Drumthwacket.
Jim considered himself awesome. He was inviolable. This was just after 9/11. He’d turn up at places like the offices of the Bergen Record - North Jersey’s regional newspaper - and hold forth, lording it over the journalists, making grand pronouncements like: ‘We will not skimp on security. We’ve even employed a security adviser from the Israeli Defence Forces. The best of the best.’ Then he’d swan off, thinking how well it had gone, unaware that the editorial board of the Bergen Record was now wondering why on earth the governor of New Jersey had employed a man from the Israeli Defence Forces to advise on local security.
*
When Jim was a young boy he’d lie in his tent at summer camp and ‘think I was hearing people in other tents call me a faggot and then realize that they were’. Jim stirred his coffee. ‘It’s funny how these things just stay.’
‘They really stay,’ I said. ‘My life at fifteen and sixteen never leaves me.’
We looked at each other then - me and Jim - two middle-aged men in a coffee shop in New York City.
Jim grew up, went to Columbia University, and would some nights walk all the way down from 116th Street to the Meatpacking District to look into the windows of the gay bars. But he couldn’t bring himself to go inside and he’d walk back up to 116th Street.
He grew up to become an assistant prosecutor - ‘a prosecutor’s prosecutor’ - and a town mayor. He read books on how to stop having gay thoughts. As a state assemblyman he voted against gay marriage.
He lost his first election campaign for the governorship by just 27,000 votes. When he was campaigning for the second time he went on a diplomatic junket to Israel where he found himself at a lunch in some rural town. The man sitting next to him introduced himself. His name was Golan, he said, and he worked for the local mayor.
‘I followed your campaign very closely,’ Golan told Jim. ‘Twenty-seven thousand votes is a very narrow margin.’
Jim was, he’d later write, ‘flattered beyond anything I’d ever experienced before. Nobody commits to memory the demographic standings of a politician halfway around the world.’
Jim fell in love with Golan. He told him that if he came to New Jersey he’d give him an important concocted job title like Special Counselor to the Governor. Golan agreed and on his arrival in America demanded an especially opulent office that had already been allocated to another member of Jim’s staff. Jim gave Golan the office.
*
A few weeks after Jim’s visit to the Bergen Record, the newspaper published a profile of the unexpected Israeli staff member, referring to Golan as a ‘sailor’ (he had once been in the Israeli navy) and a ‘poet’ (he’d written a collection of poems in high school). Jim feared they might be using code words but he didn’t know for sure and he couldn’t talk to anyone about it. His staff was acting like nothing was different but that didn’t mean nothing was different.
‘People don’t say things to governors that they don’t think governors want to hear,’ he told me.
Jim distanced himself from Golan. He told him he needed him to quit his job for the good of the administration. Golan was devastated. He had envisaged a great career in US politics and now Jim was throwing him on the fire to save his own career.
A few weeks later a letter arrived for Jim. It was from Golan’s
lawyer. Golan was threatening to sue Jim for sexual assault and harassment.
‘When I got that letter I had this vision of my grandmother’s china cabinet,’ Jim told me. ‘And all the china was just smashing.’
After three years in power, it was over for Jim. He called a press conference. ‘I am a gay American,’ he announced.
He confessed the affair, resigned the governorship, stepped off the stage, checked himself into the Meadows, an Arizona clinic, and was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
*
‘You met James Gilligan?’ Jim said to me in the restaurant. ‘Oh, I love Gilligan. I love Gilligan.’
In fact I had met James Gilligan at the very beginning of my journey - a few days after Jonah Lehrer had made his disastrous apology speech at the Knight Foundation lunch. Gilligan is in late middle age now, with the worried face and wispy hair and wire-rimmed glasses of the East Coast psychiatrist he is. I sat with him in the communal courtyard of his apartment in New York City’s West Village. He’s about the world’s best-informed chronicler of what a shaming can do to our inner lives, which is why he’s so opposed to its renaissance on social media. I wanted to learn how he came to make it his life’s work.
Back in the 1970s, Gilligan told me, he was a young psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School. His days were spent ‘treating middle-class neurotics like you and me’. He was completely uninterested in the strange epidemic that was occurring within Massachusetts’ prisons and mental hospitals ‘of suicides and homicides and riots and hostage-taking and fire-setting and everything you can imagine that was dangerous. Prisoners were getting killed, officers were getting killed, visitors were getting killed. It was completely out of control during the entire decade of the 1970s. There was a murder a month in one prison alone, and a suicide every six weeks.’
Inmates were swallowing razor blades and blinding and castrating themselves and each other. A US District Court judge, W. Arthur Garrity, ordered the Department of Corrections to make sense of the chaos by bringing in a team of investigative psychiatrists. Gilligan was invited to lead the group. He agreed, but he wasn’t enthusiastic. He assumed the perpetrators of the prison violence would be psychopaths.
‘I’d been taught that psychopaths had just been born that way,’ he said, ‘and that they’d only want to manipulate you so you’d get them a reduced sentence.’
He pictured them like they were another species. And that’s exactly how they seemed to him when he first went inside the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
‘One of the first men I met had been a pimp in a slum area of Boston,’ Gilligan said. ‘He killed some of his girls, and he killed other people. He killed several people in the community before he was finally arrested. So they put him in the Charles Street jail to await trial. And he promptly killed one of the inmates there. So they said, “He’s too violent to await trial in the jail. We have to send him to Walpole - the maximum security prison.” And he killed someone there. And that’s when I met him. He looked like a zombie. He was mute, rather paranoid, not overtly psychotic but literally abnormal. Everybody was scared to death of him. I thought, “This guy’s untreatable.” But we needed to keep people safe. So we put him in a locked dormitory building, and during the day I told the staff, “Keep an invisible wall around him. Keep six feet away from him. Don’t crowd him. If you crowd him you might get injured.”’
And that’s how things remained for a while. But eventually the man - and other men like him - loosened up a little to Gilligan. And what they told him came as a great surprise to him.
‘The men would all say that they had died,’ Gilligan said. ‘These were the most incorrigibly violent characters. They would all say that they themselves had died before they started killing other people. What they meant was that their personalities had died. They felt dead inside. They had no capacity for feelings. No emotional feelings. Or even physical feelings. So some would cut themselves. Or they would mutilate themselves in the most horrible ways. Not because they felt guilty - this wasn’t a penance for their sins - but because they wanted to see if they had feelings. They found their inner numbness more tormenting than even the physical pain would be.’
Gilligan filled notepads with observations from his interviews with the men. He wrote, ‘Some have told me that they feel like robots or zombies, that their bodies are empty or filled with straw, not flesh and blood, that instead of having veins and nerves they have ropes or cords. One inmate told me he feels like “food that is decomposing”. These men’s souls did not just die. They have dead souls because their souls were murdered. How did it happen? How were they murdered?’
This was, he felt, the mystery he’d been invited inside Massachusetts’ prisons and mental hospitals to solve.
And one day it hit him. ‘Universal among the violent criminals was the fact that they were keeping a secret,’ Gilligan wrote. ‘A central secret. And that secret was that they felt ashamed - deeply ashamed, chronically ashamed, acutely ashamed.’ It was shame, every time. ‘I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed. As children these men were shot, axed, scalded, beaten, strangled, tortured, drugged, starved, suffocated, set on fire, thrown out of the window, raped, or prostituted by mothers who were their pimps. For others words alone shamed and rejected, insulted and humiliated, dishonoured and disgraced, tore down their self-esteem, and murdered their soul.’ For each of them the shaming ‘occurred on a scale so extreme, so bizarre, and so frequent that one cannot fail to see that the men who occupy the extreme end of the continuum of violent behaviour in adulthood occupied an equally extreme end of the continuum of violent child abuse earlier in life.’
So they grew up and - ‘all violence being a person’s attempt to replace shame with self-esteem’ - they murdered people. One inmate told him, ‘“You wouldn’t believe how much respect you get when you have a gun pointed at some dude’s face.” For men who have lived for a lifetime on a diet of contempt and disdain, the temptation to gain instant respect in this way can be worth far more than the cost of going to prison or even of dying.’
And after they were jailed things only got worse. At Walpole - Massachusetts’ most riot-prone prison during the 1970s - officers intentionally flooded the cells and put insects in the prisoners’ food. They forced inmates to lie face down before they were allowed meals. Sometimes officers would tell prisoners they had a visitor. Prisoners almost never had visitors, so it was exciting to hear. Then the officer would say he didn’t really have a visitor and he was just kidding. And so on.
‘They thought these things would be how to get them to obey,’ Gilligan told me. ‘But it did the exact opposite. It stimulated violence.’
‘Literally every killer told you this?’ I asked. ‘That the feeling of shame was what led them to do it?’
‘It amazed me how universal it was,’ Gilligan replied. ‘Over decades.’
‘What about that pimp from Boston?’ I said. ‘What was his story?’
‘His mother had thought he was possessed by the Devil,’ Gilligan said, ‘so she did voodoo ceremonies and exorcisms in this totally black basement and he was scared to death. He’d shit his pants. He certainly was not loved in any normal sense. His mother had given him this negative identity - that Satan was inside him - so he behaved accordingly.’ Gilligan paused. ‘It took some of them a while to confess it to me. It’s shameful to have to admit you feel ashamed. By the way, we’re saying the word “feeling”. The “feeling” of shame. I think “feeling” is the wrong word.’
It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a ‘feeling’, for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness. [In Dante’s Inferno] the lowest circle of hell was a region not
of flames, but of ice - absolute coldness.
- James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on our Deadliest Epidemic, 1999
‘And finally it struck me,’ Gilligan said to me. ‘Our language tells us this. One of the words we use for overwhelming shame is mortification. “I’m mortified.”’
*
Their bodies are empty or filled with straw, not flesh and blood, that instead of having veins and nerves they have ropes or cords.
As Gilligan said this to me I remembered a moment from Jonah Lehrer’s annihilation. It was when Jonah was standing in front of that giant-screen Twitter feed, trying to apologize. He looked deeply uncomfortable, being the sort of person who finds displays of emotion extremely embarrassing.
‘I hope that when I tell my young daughter the same story I’ve just told you,’ he was saying, ‘I will be a better person …’
‘He is tainted as a writer forever,’ replied the tweets. ‘He has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame.’ ‘Jonah Lehrer is a friggin’ sociopath.’
Later, when Jonah and I talked about that moment he told me he had to ‘turn off some emotional switch in me. I think I had to shut down.’
Jonah had a house in the Hollywood Hills and a wife who loved him. He had enough self-esteem to get him through. But I think that in front of the giant Twitter screen he felt for an instant that same deadness that Gilligan’s prisoners had described. I have felt it too. I know exactly what Jonah and Gilligan meant when they talked about shutting down - that moment pain turns to numbness.
*
James Gilligan has led a distinguished life. President Clinton and the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed him to sit on advisory committees on the causes of violence. Martin Scorsese based Ben Kingsley’s character in Shutter Island on him. But for all his accolades I left Gilligan’s apartment thinking that he hadn’t considered his life’s work a success. There was a time when he might have totally changed the way the United States treated its transgressors. But it didn’t happen.
