So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

  —

  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 toward 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 him, Michael was shaking, so he went to a café in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to calm down. It was the Café 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 phony,” 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 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 e-mail,” 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 his telephone conversations with Jonah. 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 something similar. I suppose he knew that highlighting this aspect of himself made for the most dramatic, likable 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.

  “I was picturing his house, a little house,” Michael continued. “I was transferring my life onto his. His wife’s bustling around, his kid’s in the background, he’s in one of the two bedrooms at the back, sweating.” Michael paused. “And then my friend from the Los Angeles Times sent me a story from 2009 about the purchase of the Julius Shulman house.”

  The Hollywood Hills residence and studio of the late iconic photographer Julius Shulman has sold for $2.25 million. The Midcentury Modern steel-frame house, built in 1950 and designed by Raphael S. Soriano, is a Los Angeles historic landmark. The buyer is bestselling author and lecturer Jonah Lehrer. His book “How We Decide” has been translated into a dozen languages. The writer has an affinity for classic design.

  —LAUREN BEALE, Los Angeles Times, DECEMBER 4, 2010

  The Shulman House. Photograph by Michael K. Wilkinson, reproduced with his permission.

  “It’s unfair,” Michael said. “It’s stupid of me. In some ways it’s unconscionable to begrudge him his success. But it made things a bit different.”

  • • •

  A few weeks after Michael told me his Jonah Lehrer story, I was at a party in London, talking to a man I didn’t know. He was a theater director. He asked me what I was writing about and I told him about Michael and Jonah. Sometimes, when I recount for people the stories I’m working on, I feel a stupid grin on my face as I describe the absurdity of whatever crazy pickle this or that interviewee had got himself into. But not this time. As I related the details to him, the director shivered. And I found myself shivering too. When I finished the story, he said, “It’s about the terror, isn’t it?”

  “The terror of what?” I said.

  “The terror of being found out,” he said.

  He looked as if he felt he were taking a risk even mentioning to me the existence of the terror. He meant that we all have ticking away within us something we fear will badly harm our reputation if it got out—some “I’m glad I’m not that” at the end of an “I’m glad I’m not me.” I think he was right. Maybe our secret is actually nothing horrendous. Maybe nobody would even consider it a big deal if it was exposed. But we can’t take that risk. So we keep it buried. Maybe it’s a work impropriety. Or maybe it’s just a feeling that at any moment we’ll blurt something out during some important meeting that’ll prove to everyone that we aren’t proper professional people or, in fact, functional human beings. I think that even in these days of significant oversharing we keep this particular terror concealed, like people used to with things like masturbation before everyone suddenly got blasé about it online. With masturbation, nobody cares. Whereas our reputation—it’s everything.

  I had leaped into the middle of the Michael–Jonah story because I admired Michael and identified with him. He personified citizen justice, whereas Jonah represented literary fraud in the pop-science world. He made a fortune corrupting an already self-indulgent, bloated genre. I still admired Michael. But suddenly, when the theater director said the words the terror of being found out, I felt like a door had briefly opened before me, revealing some infinite horror land filled with millions of scared-stiff Jonahs. How many people had I banished to that land during my thirty years of journalism? How truly nightmarish it must have been to be Jonah Lehrer.

  Three

  The Wilderness

  Runyon Canyon, West Hollywood. If you were a passing hiker and you didn’t know that Jonah Lehrer had been totally destroyed, you w
ouldn’t have guessed it. He looked like he did in his old author photographs—pleasing to the eye, a little aloof, as if he were thinking higher thoughts and expressing them in a considered manner to his fellow hiker—me. But we weren’t having a considered conversation. For the last hour, Jonah had been repeatedly telling me, in a voice strained to its breaking point, “I don’t belong in your book.”

  And I was repeatedly replying, “Yes, you do.”

  I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I was writing a book about public shaming. He had been publicly shamed. He was ideal.

  Now he suddenly stopped in the middle of the hiking trail and looked intently at me. “I am a terrible story to put in your book,” he said.

  “Why?” I said.

  “What’s that William Dean Howells line?” he said. “‘Americans like a tragedy with a happy ending’?”

  The actual William Dean Howells line is “What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.” I think Jonah was close enough.

  I was here because Jonah’s shaming felt to me like a really important one—the shape of things to come. He was a dishonest, number-one bestselling author who had been exposed by the sort of person who used to be powerless. And despite seeing Jonah’s face etched in panic and misery on the hiking trail, I was sure the renaissance in public shaming was a good thing. Look at who was being laid low—bigoted Daily Mail columnists, monolithic gym chains with pitiless cancellation policies, and, most heinous of all, horrific academic spambot creators. Jonah had written some very good things during his short career. Some of his work had been wonderful. But he had repeatedly transgressed, he had done bad things, and the uncovering of his lies was appropriate.

  Still, as we walked, I felt for Jonah. Close-up, I could see he was suffering terribly. Michael had called his cover-up a “great deception that was very, very well plotted.” But I think it was just chaos, and on that last day before the story broke, Jonah wasn’t “icy” but wrecked.

  “I’m just drenched in shame and regret,” he had e-mailed me before I flew to Los Angeles to meet him. “The shaming process is fucking brutal.”

  Jonah was offering the same dismal prediction about his future as Michael and Andrew Wylie had offered. He was foreseeing a lifetime of ruin. Imagine being thirty-one in a country that venerates redemption and second chances, and convinced your tragedy has no happy ending. But I thought he was being too pessimistic. Surely, after paying some penance, after spending some time in the wilderness, he could convince his readers and peers that he could change his ways. He could find a way back in. I mean, we weren’t monsters.

  • • •

  Science writing had been Jonah Lehrer’s ambition from the start. After he’d agreed to meet me, I found an old interview he gave ten years ago, when he was twenty-one.

  [He] hopes to become a science writer. “Science is too often perceived as cold,” he says. “I want to translate science and show how beautiful it can be.”

  —KRISTIN STERLING, Columbia News, DECEMBER 2002

  That interview was published on the occasion of the announcement that Jonah had been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford as a graduate student for two years. “Each year 32 young Americans are selected as Rhodes Scholars,” according to the Rhodes Scholarship website, “chosen not only for their outstanding scholarly achievements, but for their character, commitment to others and to the common good.”

  Bill Clinton had been a Rhodes Scholar, as had the cosmologist Edwin Hubble, and the film director Terrence Malick. In 2002 only two Columbia students were awarded the accolade—Jonah Lehrer and Cyrus Habib, who is now, ten years on, one of the few fully blind American politicians and the highest-ranking Iranian-American in political office in the United States, serving in the Washington state legislature. Cyrus Habib sounds amazing.

  Jonah began writing his first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, while he was still a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Its premise is that the great neuroscience breakthroughs of today had all been made one hundred years ago by artists like Cézanne and Proust. It was a lovely book. Jonah was smart and he wrote well—which isn’t the same as saying Mussolini made the trains run on time. Jonah wrote good things throughout his short career, essays untainted by transgression. After Proust came How We Decide and, last, Imagine. Along the way, Jonah earned a fortune giving inspirational keynotes at—to name a few of the innumerable conferences he spoke at that I had never heard of—the 2011 International Association of Business Communicators World Conference in San Diego; FUSION, the Eighth Annual Desire2Learn Users Conference in Denver; and the 2012 Grantmakers for Effective Organizations National Conference in Seattle.

  At this last one he told the story of a young athlete—a high jumper who could never clear the bar, however hard he tried. All the other jumpers mocked him. But then he thought counterintuitively about it, invented a new jumping style that would be called the Fosbury Flop, and won the 1968 Olympic gold medal. By now, Jonah was commanding vast speaker fees—tens of thousands of dollars. I suppose he was being rewarded so richly because his messages were inspirational. My talks tend to be more disincentivizing, which, I have noticed, pays less.

  The adjective most often applied to Jonah was “Gladwellian,” Malcolm Gladwell being the New Yorker writer and author of the era’s most successful counterintuitive pop-science book, The Tipping Point. Jonah’s book jackets looked like Malcolm Gladwell’s book jackets. Their jackets looked like Apple computer packaging. Jonah was becoming a sensation. When he switched jobs, it was a news story.

  JONAH LEHRER JUMPS FROM WIRED TO THE NEW YORKER

  Jonah Lehrer, the author of the popular science books “Proust Was a Scientist [sic],” “How We Decide” and 2012’s “Imagine,” has left his post as a contributing editor at Wired for the New Yorker, where he’ll be a staff writer.

  In many ways, Lehrer is a younger, brain-centered version of Gladwell, making him a natural New Yorker fit.

  —CAROLYN KELLOGG, Los Angeles Times, JUNE 7, 2012

  Jonah resigned from The New Yorker after seven weeks in the job, the day Michael’s article appeared. On the Sunday night before publication, Jonah had been giving a keynote at the 2012 Meeting Professionals International’s World Education Congress in St. Louis. The subject of his talk was the importance of human interaction. During the talk—according to a tweet posted by an audience member, the journalist Sarah Braley—Jonah revealed that since the invention of Skype, attendance at meetings had actually gone up by 30 percent. After he left the stage, Sarah found him and asked where that implausible statistic had come from. “A conversation with a Harvard professor,” he replied. But when she requested the professor’s name, he mysteriously refused to divulge it. “I’d have to ask him if it’s all right to tell you,” he explained. She gave Jonah her card but never heard from him, which didn’t surprise her because the next morning he was disgraced and resigned his job.

  In the days that followed, Jonah’s publisher withdrew and pulped every copy of Imagine still in circulation, and offered refunds to all who had bought one. The Dylan quotes had been enough to bring Jonah down. His subsequent panic spiral was definitely enough—Michael wrote in his exposé that Jonah had “stonewalled, misled, and, eventually, outright lied” to him. Internet message boards were replete with comments like “The twerp is such a huge over-achiever that there’s something delightful about seeing him humbled” (The Guardian) and “Save the royalties from your book, blockhead, ’cause you’re gonna need the money” (The New York Times) and “It must be strange to be so full of lies” (Tablet).

  In Brooklyn, Michael was agonizing over whether he’d been right to press send. Although he’d essentially seen his takedown of Jonah as a righteous strike against the pop-science genre—“To make a tight little package where my mother would be like, ‘Ooh, I just read this thing, did you know that X leads to Y,’ you have to fucking cut
corners”—Andrew Wylie’s words were haunting him. Maybe it wasn’t enough to ruin a man’s life over.

  But there was worse to come. Wired magazine asked the journalism professor Charles Seife to study eighteen columns Jonah had written for them. All but one, he reported, revealed “evidence of some journalistic misdeed.” It was mainly Jonah reusing his own sentences in different stories, but that wasn’t all. Imagine if I had failed to put quotation marks around the sentences I lifted earlier from the Rhodes Scholarship website. It was that kind of pervasive sloppiness/plagiarism. Probably the worst infraction was that Jonah had taken some paragraphs from a blog written by Christian Jarrett of the British Psychological Society and passed them off as his own.

  Michael was massively relieved—he told me—that “the rot spidered out to every book, every piece of journalism.”

  —

  Jonah vanished, leaving a final, innocent prehumiliation tweet like a plate of congealing food on the Mary Celeste.

  Fiona Apple’s new album is “astonishing,” rhapsodizes @sfj.

  —@JONAHLEHRER, JUNE 18, 2012

  He ignored all interview requests. He resurfaced only once, to briefly tell Los Angeles magazine’s Amy Wallace that he wasn’t giving any interviews. So it was a great surprise when he responded to my e-mail. He was “happy to be in touch,” he wrote me, and “happy to chat on the phone or whatever.” In the end, we arranged to go hiking in the Hollywood Hills. I flew to Los Angeles even though his final e-mail to me included an unexpected and unsettling sentence toward the end: “I’m not sure I’m ready to be a case study or talk on the record.”

  —

  It seemed appropriate that we were hiking in a desert canyon, because his punishment felt quite biblical, a public shaming followed by a casting out into the wilderness, although that analogy only went so far because biblical wildernesses tend not to be filled with extremely beautiful movie stars and models walking their dogs.