So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

  We walked in silence for a while. Then Jonah listed two more reasons (alongside the “Americans want tragedies with happy endings” one) why I shouldn’t write about him. First, if I was planning to be kind to him, he didn’t deserve it. And, second, a warning: “What I mostly feel is intensely radioactive. So even people who come to me with good intentions, I end up transferring my isotopes onto them.”

  Jonah was saying that spending time with him would ruin me in some unexpected way. “Well, that’s not going to happen to me!” I laughed.

  “Then you’ll be the first,” he said.

  As he said this, a bolt of panic shot into me. It was a frightening thing for someone to say. Still, I kept trying to convince him, on and on, but each line of reasoning seemed to make him more anguished, as if I were a siren trying to lure him to the rocks with my song of possible redemption. He said his worst days were when he allowed himself to hope for a second chance. The best were when he knew it was over forever and his destruction was necessary as a deterrent to others.

  I gave up. Jonah drove me back to my hotel. In the car I stared at my lap, exhausted, like a cold-caller after a long shift.

  Then, suddenly, Jonah said, “I’ve decided to make a public apology.”

  I looked up at him. “Have you?”

  “Next week,” Jonah said. “In Miami. At a Knight lunch.”

  The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation was created by the owners of the Chicago Daily News and The Miami Herald to fund young journalists with innovative ideas. There was to be a conference for the fund organizers, Jonah said, and he’d been asked to deliver the after-lunch keynote on the final day. As an advocate of digital media, the foundation planned to broadcast his speech live on its website.

  “I keep writing and scrapping and rewriting it,” Jonah said. “Would you read it over? Maybe after that we can discuss whether I fit your narrative?”

  • • •

  I am the author of a book on creativity that is best known because it contained several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes. I committed plagiarism on my blog. I lied, repeatedly, to a journalist named Michael Moynihan to cover up the Dylan fabrications.

  I sat on the plane reading Jonah’s apology speech. It was a stark opening—an unembellished declaration of guilt, followed by an account of his shame and regret.

  I think about all the readers I’ve disappointed, people who paid good money for my book and now don’t want it on their shelves.

  I was surprised by his candor. Jonah had insisted on our hike that if he did decide to give me an interview the one off-limit topic would be the shame. It was too private and personal, he said. But by the next sentence, it became clear that the shame was something he intended to deal with as hurriedly as possible on the way to something else. This was, it quickly became clear, an apology speech like no other. He was going to explain his flaws within the context of neuroscience. It was a Jonah Lehrer keynote speech on the unique flaws of smart people like Jonah Lehrer. He began comparing himself to inadvertently imperfect scientists working at the FBI forensics lab. Innocent people had been convicted of terrorism because brilliant FBI scientists were “victims of their hidden brain, undone by flaws so deep-seated they don’t even notice their existence.”

  He gave an example—an Oregon lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, who was falsely accused by the FBI of committing the Madrid bombings of March 2004. A fingerprint had been lifted from a bag of detonators found at the scene. After the FBI fed it into their database, Mayfield’s name came back as a match.

  The detectives soon discovered that Mayfield was a Muslim, married to an Egyptian immigrant, and had represented a convicted terrorist in a child custody dispute.

  The FBI held Mayfield for two weeks before acknowledging that the fingerprint match was “not even close.” In fact, the agency had fallen victim to something known as confirmation bias. It was taking seriously only those pieces of information that confirmed the preexisting belief that Mayfield was the culprit. It was unconsciously filtering out evidence that pointed to his innocence. As a result of the scandal, the FBI implemented rigorous new reforms to root out errors. It would be great—Jonah ended his speech by saying—if something like that could happen with him.

  If I’m lucky enough to write again, I won’t write a thing that isn’t fact-checked and fully footnoted. Because here is what I’ve learned: unless I’m willing to continually grapple with my failings—until I’m forced to fix my first draft, and deal with criticism of the second, and submit the final for a good, independent scrubbing—I won’t create anything worth keeping around.

  This was the happy ending Jonah believed Americans wanted. As I sat on the plane, I realized I had no idea if his speech was good or bad, or if it would go down poorly or well. The FBI stuff was overly tangential and evasive. Jonah wasn’t really like the FBI. As it happens, I’ve done my own research on the perils of confirmation bias and agree with Jonah that it is a powerful bias indeed, often found at the heart of miscarriages of justice. In fact, ever since I first learned about confirmation bias, I’ve been seeing it everywhere. Everywhere. But even a confirmation bias aficionado like me could see that Jonah hadn’t succumbed to it. Deliberately padding out Bob Dylan quotes to fit a thesis about the creative process wasn’t confirmation bias.

  So I found the FBI digression a bit slippery, but there was still a good chance his speech could be like the end of Neil Diamond’s The Jazz Singer, where the disgraced synagogue cantor wins over the congregation by reminding them how beautiful his singing voice is. I e-mailed Jonah to say I thought his speech was fantastic. He sent me an appreciative reply. I asked him if I could come with him to Miami. He said no.

  • • •

  I am the author of a book on creativity that . . . contained several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes . . . I lied to a journalist named Michael Moynihan.

  Jonah was at the Knight Foundation lectern, standing very still. I was watching at home on my computer. In his old lucrative public-speaking days, his voice would rise and fall to emphasize this word or that, but now he sounded flat, like a scared child in front of the class. This was the most important speech of his life. He was begging for a second chance. If things weren’t stressful enough for him, the Knight Foundation had decided to erect a giant screen behind his head that displayed a live Twitter feed. Anyone watching from home could tweet their ongoing opinion of Jonah’s request for forgiveness using the hashtag #infoneeds and their comment would automatically appear, in real time and in gigantic letters, right next to Jonah’s face. A second screen was positioned within his sightline.

  I saw Jonah’s eyes flicker to it.

  Wow. Jonah Lehrer talk dives directly into a listing of failures, errors and mea culpa.

  And that, people, is how you apologize.

  During the preceding seven months, Jonah had been disgraced and ridiculed and cast out. He had shuffled along the canyons of Los Angeles in a never-ending sweat of guilt and shame, a constant clenched pain. And now, suddenly, there was light. I felt as if I were witnessing a kind of miracle. Just like with my spambot men, we knew when to shame and when to stop. It was as if we instinctively understood that Jonah’s punishment had reached an appropriate peak and now it was time to listen to what he had to say.

  And then Jonah moved on to the FBI analogy.

  • • •

  I’d like to tell you a story that has given me a little hope. It’s a story about a mistake and how it was fixed. It’s a story that I was working on at the time my career fell apart. The story is about forensic science.

  It quickly became extremely clear to Jonah, and to me watching at home, that the audience had no interest in his opinions on forensic science. Perhaps they would have had at some point in his career. But not anymore.

  Jonah Lehrer boring people into forgiving him for his plagiarism.

  I am not feeling terribly convinced by the deadpan mea
culpa droning on by @JonahLehrer.

  I can’t handle watching the @JonahLehrer apology. He is boring and unconvincing. Time for something else.

  Jonah carried on. He talked of how, a month before he resigned from his job, he interviewed the behavioral economist Dan Ariely on the subject of how “the human mind is a confabulation machine.”

  “The human mind is a confabulation machine.” Now *that’s* passing the buck.

  Using shoddy Pop-psych to explain inability to even write shoddy Pop-psych from scratch.

  Jonah Lehrer is a friggin’ sociopath.

  Trapped at the lectern, Jonah had twenty minutes of his speech to go, followed by the Q&A.

  I agreed with the tweeter who wrote that Jonah was passing the buck when he said that the human mind was “a confabulation machine.” But by mid-apology, it seemed irrelevant whether the criticisms had legitimacy. They were cascading into his sightline in a torrent. Jonah was being told in the most visceral, instantaneous way that there was no forgiveness for him, no possibility of reentry.

  The only way @JonahLehrer can redeem himself from his failures is by doing completely different work. He is tainted as a writer forever.

  I have zero inclination to forgive or read his future work.

  Rantings of a Delusional, Unrepentant Narcissist.

  Jonah Lehrer’s speech should be titled “Recognizing self-deluded assholes and how to avoid them in the future.”

  Still, he was forced to continue. He had no choice. He had to reach the end. He flatly intoned that he hoped that one day, “when I tell my young daughter the same story I’ve just told you, I will be a better person because of it. More humble.”

  Wait, Jonah Lehrer is speaking at a journalism conference? Did they run out of people who aren’t frauds with interesting stuff to say?

  Jonah Lehrer putting on a great demonstration of the emptiness of pop behavior-psych: a moral defective tries to blame cognitive failure.

  He has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame.

  The speech ended with a polite round of applause from the people in the same room as he was.

  Amid the tidal wave of abuse, there had been some calls for humanity, a few tweeters noting the terrible strangeness of what was unfolding.

  Ugh, Jonah Lehrer is apologizing next to a live Twitter feed of people mocking him. It’s basically a 21st century town square flogging.

  Jonah Lehrer is a real person. Twitter is making me so uncomfortable right now.

  Jonah Lehrer’s crimes are significant, but apologizing in front of a giant-screen Twitter feed seems cruel and unusual punishment.

  But all that was wiped away when someone tweeted: Did Lehrer get paid to be there today?

  Of course he didn’t, I thought.

  And then Knight answered that question.

  Jonah Lehrer was paid $20K to speak about plagiarism at Knight lunch.

  Wish I could get paid $20,000 to say that I’m a lying dirtbag.

  And so on, until late that evening, when this tweet arrived.

  Journalism foundation apologizes for paying $20,000 to disgraced author Jonah Lehrer.

  Jonah e-mailed. “Today was really awful. I’m filled with all sorts of regret.”

  I sent him a sympathetic reply. I said I thought he should donate the $20,000 to charity.

  “Nothing can turn this around,” he replied. “I’ve got to be realistic about that. I shouldn’t have accepted the invitation to speak, but now it’s too late.”

  • • •

  Fuck off, you can’t even do your apology without slotting it into some stupid Jonah framework,” Michael Moynihan said to me over lunch at Cookshop in New York City. Michael shook his head in wonder. “That wasn’t an apology. It was a string of Gladwellian bullshit. He was on autopilot. He was a robot: ‘Let me get this study from some academic.’ All the words he used to describe his dishonesty. It was like a thesaurus had landed on his head.” Michael paused. “Oh!” he said. “Someone sent me a text. I thought he was reading way too much into it. But he pointed out to me that Jonah said, ‘I lied to a journalist CALLED Michael Moynihan.’ I love that. I said, ‘Yeah. I see what you’re saying.’ He didn’t lie to ‘journalist Michael Moynihan.’ That’s the great trick of the language. ‘A journalist CALLED Michael Moynihan.’ ‘Who’s this fucking schlub?’”

  Michael took a bite of his steak. The fact was, his was a great scoop. It was great journalism, and what did Michael get from it? Some congratulatory tweets, which probably give you a bit of a dopamine rush or something, but otherwise nothing: $2,200 plus a veiled insult from Jonah if Michael and his friend weren’t being paranoid about that part.

  Michael shook his head. “Nothing came out of this for me,” he said.

  —

  In fact, it was worse than nothing. Michael had noticed that people were starting to feel scared of him. Fellow journalists. A few days before our lunch, some panicked writer—someone Michael barely knew—had confessed out of the blue that a biography he’d written might have inadvertently veered into plagiarism.

  “Like I adjudicate these things,” said Michael.

  Whether Michael liked it or not, there was fear in the air now because of what had happened to Jonah. But Michael didn’t want to be some witchfinder general, roaming the countryside with writers blurting out declarations of guilt to him, begging his forgiveness for crimes he hadn’t known they’d committed.

  “You turn around and you suddenly realize you’re the head of a pitchfork mob,” Michael said. “And it’s ‘What are these people fucking doing here? Why are they acting like heathens? I don’t want to be associated with this at all. I want to get out of here.’”

  “It was horrible,” I said. “All this time I’d been thinking we were in the middle of some kind of idealistic reimagining of the justice system. But those people were so cold.”

  The response to Jonah’s apology had been brutal and confusing to me. It felt as if the people on Twitter had been invited to be characters in a courtroom drama, and had been allowed to choose their roles, and had all gone for the part of the hanging judge. Or it was even worse than that. They all had gone for the part of the people in the lithographs being ribald at whippings.

  “I’m watching people stabbing and stabbing and stabbing Jonah,” Michael said, “and I’m, ‘HE’S DEAD.’”

  • • •

  The next day I drove from New York to Boston to visit the Massachusetts Archives and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Given how vicious the resurgence of public shaming had suddenly turned, I wondered why that type of punishment had been phased out in the nineteenth century. I had assumed—like most people do, I think—that this demise was due to the migration from villages to cities. Shame became ineffectual because pilloried people could lose themselves in the anonymous crowd as soon as the chastisement was over. Shame had lost its power to shame. That was my assumption. Was it right?

  I parked my car outside the Massachusetts Archives, a slablike Brutalist building on the waterfront near the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Inside were the microfilms that preserve early legal documents handwritten by the Puritan settlers. I took my seat at a microfilm reader and began to carefully scroll through them. For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers. The spindly words swirled on the fraying pages. They really should have spent more time on paragraph breaks back then and less time on the letter f. I began to speed up, scrolling unprofessionally, decades passing before me in seconds, until I suddenly found myself face-to-face with an early American shaming.

  It was July 15, 1742. A woman named Abigail Gilpin, her husband at sea, was found “naked in bed with one John Russell.” They were both to be “whipped at the public whipping post twenty stripes each.” Abigail was not appealing the whipping itself, but was begging th
e judge to “let me have my punishment before the people are stirring. If your honor pleases, take some pity on me for my dear children, who cannot help their mother’s unfortunate failings.”

  The documents don’t reveal whether the judge consented, but straight after that, I found a transcript of a sermon that offered a clue as to why she might have pled for a private whipping. The sermon, by the Reverend Nathan Strong of Hartford, Connecticut, was an entreaty to people to be less exuberant at executions: “Do not go to that place of horror with elevated spirits, and gay hearts, for death is there! Justice and judgment are there! The power of government, displayed in its most awful form, is there . . . The person who can go and look on death merely to gratify an idle humor is destitute both of humanity and piety.”

  After lunch, I traveled the few miles to the Massachusetts Historical Society, a grand old townhouse on Boylston Street. I remembered something Jonah had e-mailed me before I flew to Los Angeles: “The shaming process is fucking brutal.” I thought about the phrase “shaming process.” It was probably reassuring for a shamee to envisage their punishment as a process rather than a free-for-all. If you’re being destroyed, you want to feel that the people tearing you apart at least know what they’re doing. Well, maybe less delicate shamees wouldn’t care how orderly their shaming was, but Jonah struck me as someone for whom structure was important and someone who had only ever wanted to impress people and fit in.

  It turned out that public shaming had once been a process. A book of Delaware laws I discovered at the Massachusetts Historical Society revealed that if Jonah had been found guilty of “lying or publishing false news” in the 1800s, he would have been “fined, placed in the stocks for a period not exceeding four hours, or publicly whipped with not more than forty stripes.” If the judge had chosen a whipping, local newspapers would have published a digest detailing the amount of squirming that had occurred. “Rash and Hayden squirmed considerably during the performance, and their backs were well-scarred,” wrote the Delawarean of an 1876 whipping. If Jonah’s whipper had been deemed to have not whipped hard enough, the reviews would have been scathing. “Suppressed remarks were expressed by large numbers. Many were heard to say that the punishment was a farce. Drunken fights and rows followed in rapid succession,” reported Delaware’s Wilmington Daily Commercial after a disappointing 1873 whipping.