So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

  —

  The common assumption is that public punishments died out in the new great metropolises because they’d been judged useless. Everyone was too busy being industrious to bother to trail some transgressor through the city crowds like some volunteer scarlet letter. But according to the documents I found, that wasn’t it at all. They didn’t fizzle out because they were ineffective. They were stopped because they were far too brutal.

  The movement against public shaming was already in full flow in March 1787 when Benjamin Rush, a United States founding father, wrote a paper calling for their outlawing—the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post, the lot.

  Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death . . . It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth up on any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error.

  —BENJAMIN RUSH, “AN ENQUIRY INTO THE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC PUNISHMENTS UPON CRIMINALS, AND UPON SOCIETY,” MARCH 9, 1787

  In case you consider Rush too much of a bleeding-heart liberal, it’s worth pointing out that his proposition for alternatives to public shaming included taking the criminal into a private room—away from the public gaze—and administering “bodily pain.”

  To ascertain the nature, degrees, and duration of the bodily pain will require some knowledge of the principles of sensation and of the sympathies which occur in the nervous system.

  Public punishments were abolished within fifty years of Rush’s paper, with only Delaware weirdly holding out until 1952 (which is why the Delaware whipping critiques I excerpt were published in the 1870s).

  The New York Times, baffled by Delaware’s obstinacy, tried to argue the state into change in an 1867 editorial.

  If it had previously existed in [the convicted person’s] bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. Without the hope that springs eternal in the human breast, without some desire to reform and become a good citizen, and the feeling that such a thing is possible, no criminal can ever return to honorable courses. The boy of eighteen who is whipped at New Castle [a Delaware whipping post] for larceny is in nine cases out of ten ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows.

  —QUOTED IN ROBERT GRAHAM CALDWELL, Red Hannah: Delaware’s Whipping Post

  As Jonah Lehrer stood in front of that giant-screen Twitter feed on February 12, 2013, he experienced something that had been widely considered appalling in the eighteenth century.

  I left the Massachusetts Historical Society, took out my phone, and asked Twitter, “Has Twitter become a kangaroo court?”

  “Not a kangaroo court,” someone replied quite tersely. “Twitter still can’t impose real sentences. Just commentary. Only unlike you, Jon, we aren’t paid for it.”

  Was he right? It felt like a question that really needed answering because it didn’t seem to be crossing any of our minds to wonder whether the person we had just shamed was okay or in ruins. I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

  • • •

  Lehrer’s intention in submitting himself to a public grilling was to show the world that he’s ready to return to journalism, that we can trust him because he knows now not to trust himself. All he proved is that he’s not wired like the rest of us. If he can figure out why that is, that would be a neuroscience story worth publishing.

  —JEFF BERCOVICI, Forbes, FEBRUARY 12, 2013

  I’ve been banging the drum for Lehrer to quiet his detractors and bank some goodwill by donating that $20,000 to charity . . . Finally, I managed to get him on the phone this afternoon. “I’m not interested in commenting,” he told me. Could he at least say whether he planned to keep the money? “I read your article. I have nothing to say to you,” he said, before hanging up.

  —JEFF BERCOVICI, Forbes, FEBRUARY 13, 2013

  “I’m still not entirely sure what I can give you . . .” Jonah was talking to me on the phone from his home in Los Angeles.

  “The twenty thousand dollars . . .” I said.

  “It was absolutely a mistake,” he said. “I didn’t ask for it. It was offered. They just gave it to me. I mean, what else do you want? I . . .” Jonah paused. “Look, I got bills to pay. I haven’t earned a penny in seven months. I was flying high, I was making lots of money. And all of a sudden you’re making no money.”

  Jonah had finally agreed to a lengthier interview. He sounded exhausted, like he’d been inside some spinning machine designed by aliens to test the effects of stress on humans. For a smart man, everything he’d done from the moment Michael first e-mailed him had been a giant miscalculation. He’d been like a popped balloon shooting wildly in all directions, lying frantically to Michael before slumping, the air all gone, in the middle of one of the most terrible shamings of our time.

  “A friend forwarded me a blog post by Jerry Coyne from the University of Chicago,” Jonah said. “An eminent guy, I interviewed him on occasion. He wrote a blog post about me where he called me a sociopath.”

  I sense that Lehrer is a bit of a sociopath. Yes, shows of contrition are often phony, meant to convince a gullible public (as in Lance Armstrong’s case) that they’re good to go again. But Lehrer can’t even be bothered to fake an apology that sounds meaningful. Call me uncharitable, but if I were a magazine editor, I’d never hire him.

  —JERRY COYNE, QUOTED ON RICHARDBOWKER.COM, FEBRUARY 18, 2013

  “I thought of you,” Jonah said. “I thought, That’s an interesting question for Jon. Jon’s spent some time with me. Maybe I am a sociopath.”

  The question didn’t surprise me. Ever since I published a book about psychopaths, people have been asking me if they’re one (or, if not them, their boss or their ex-boyfriend or Lance Armstrong). Perhaps Jonah was honestly intrigued by the possibility that he was one, but I didn’t think so. I think he knew he wasn’t, and he had a different reason for wanting to have this conversation. Academics shouldn’t diagnose people from afar as sociopaths. It was a stupid thing for Jerry Coyne to have done. I think Jonah wanted us to bitch about his stupidity for a moment. It would be a way for him to recover some self-esteem—to do a bit of shaming of someone else. Jonah was at rock bottom, so I was happy to go along with it. I told Jonah that he didn’t seem like someone who had no conscience.

  “Who the hell knows what a conscience is,” Jonah replied. “If a conscience is living in a world defined by regrets, then, yeah, I’ve got a conscience. My very first thought every morning is what I’ve done wrong. That sounds self-pitying and I’d like you not to use that quote, but there’s no other way around it.”

  “If it felt really important to use that quote, could I?” I asked him.

  Jonah sighed. “I mean, it depends how you use it, but I’d prefer you not use it,” he replied.

  I use the quote here because it seems important, given that so many people imagine Jonah has some neurological lack of conscience.

  “Regrets of the sort I have are all-consuming,” Jonah continued. “I think about what I’ve done to the people I loved. What I’ve put my wife through. What I’ve put my brother through. What I’ve put my parents through. That is haunting. Long after I get over the loss of my status, and the loss of my career, which I enjoyed, I will never . . . Life is short. And I have caused tremendous pain to the people I love. I don’t know what that feeling’s called. Remorse sounds about right. There’s a tremendous amount of remorse. And as time passes, that isn’t going away. It is miserable and haunting.”

  I heard Jonah’s daughter crying in the background. We talked about the “slippery slope” that led
to the fake Dylan quotes. It began with the self-plagiarism—with Jonah reusing his own paragraphs in different stories. I told him I didn’t consider that the crime of the century. “Frank Sinatra doesn’t only sing ‘My Way’ once,” I said.

  “The self-plagiarism should have been a warning sign,” Jonah said. “It should have been a sign that I was stretched. If I needed to recycle my own material, why was I bothering to write this blog post in the first place? Look, we can debate the ethics of it. And I’ve certainly heard lots of debate about this. But at the time I didn’t think it was wrong. If I’d thought it was wrong, I would have taken some trouble to hide my tracks.” He paused. “It should have been a huge flashing neon sign telling me, ‘You are getting careless.’ You’re taking shortcuts and not noticing, and shortcuts become habits, and you excuse them because you’re too busy. I wasn’t turning anything down.”

  “What would have been wrong with turning things down?” I asked.

  “It was some toxic mixture of insecurity and ambition,” said Jonah. “I always felt like a fad. I felt like I was going to be hot for a second and then I would disappear. So I had to act while I could. And there was just some deep-seated . . . I sound like I’m on a couch with my shrink . . . some very dangerous and reckless ambition. You combine insecurity and ambition, and you get an inability to say no to things. And then one day you get an e-mail saying there’s these four [six] Dylan quotes, and they can’t be explained, and they can’t be found anywhere else, and you realize you made them up in your book proposal three years before, and you were too lazy, too stupid, to ever check. I can only wish, and I wish this profoundly, I’d had the temerity, the courage, to do a fact check on my last book. But as anyone who does a fact check knows, they’re not particularly fun things to go through. Your story gets a little flatter. You’re forced to grapple with all your mistakes, conscious and unconscious . . .”

  “So you forgot that the fake quotes were in the book?” I asked Jonah.

  “Forget gets me off the hook too easily,” he replied. “I didn’t want to remember. So I made no effort to. I wrote well. So why check?”

  “So you were sloppy?”

  “I don’t want to just blame sloppiness,” he said. “It was sloppiness and deception. Sloppiness and lies. I lied to cover up the sloppiness.”

  I’d been thinking that when I told Jonah his speech was fantastic it was probably a bad steer. In truth, I’d needed to read it three or four times on the plane because the words kept swirling around on the page, and I didn’t know whether that was a reflection of attention deficiency on my part or abstruse phrasing on Jonah’s. But like all journalists, I really love a scoop—a scoop keeps at bay the scream of failure—and I thought that telling him it was fantastic was my best chance of winning the interview.

  “I worked really hard on it,” Jonah said. “I was looking at the Twitter stream during it and the things people were saying . . . Some people saw the FBI analogies as the worst possible thing in the world. But that’s not some deceptive trick. That’s the way I make sense of the world. That’s how I think. Clearly it was a mistake. But . . .”

  “That Twitter stream!” I said.

  “I was trying to apologize, and to see the response to it live . . . I didn’t know if I was going to get through that. I had to turn off some emotional switch in me. I think I had to shut down.”

  “What are the tweets you remember most?”

  “It wasn’t the totally off-the-wall cruel ones, because those are so easy to discount,” he said. “It’s the ones that mixed in a little tenderness with the shiv.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t want to . . .”

  Jonah said he couldn’t judge why people “got so mad” about his apology. I said I thought it was because it sounded too much like a Jonah Lehrer speech from the old days. People wanted to see him altered somehow. His not being overtly cowed gave the audience permission to envisage him dramatically, a monster immune to shame.

  “They didn’t want you to intellectualize it,” I said. “They wanted you to be emotional. If you’d been more emotional, they’d have gone for it more.”

  Jonah sighed. “That may have been a better strategy,” he said. “But it wasn’t a strategy I wanted to rehearse onstage. It was not something I wanted to share with the universe, with everyone on Twitter. I didn’t want to talk about how this had ruined me. That’s something for me to deal with, and for my loved ones to help me through. But that’s not something I wanted to get up onstage in front of the Internet and talk about.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Oh, gosh, I don’t know,” said Jonah. “Could you do that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think I could. And I think that would mean I’d survive better than you.”

  “So what would Jon Ronson’s apology speech be?” Jonah said. “What would you say?”

  “Right,” I said. “I’d say . . . okay . . . I . . . Hello. I’m Jon Ronson and I want to apologize for . . .” What would I say? I cleared my throat. “I just want everyone to know that I’m really upset . . .”

  Jonah was listening patiently on the line. I stopped. Even though I was just play-acting, I felt wiped out. And I hadn’t really even got anywhere in my attempt.

  “What happened to you is my worst nightmare,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jonah replied. “It was mine too.”

  • • •

  Four more months passed. The winter became the early summer. Then, unexpectedly, Andrew Wylie began shopping a new Jonah Lehrer book proposal around New York City’s publishers. A Book About Love. The proposal was immediately leaked to The New York Times. In it Jonah described the moment he felt “the shiver of a voice mail message.”

  I have been found out. I puke into a recycling bin. And then I start to cry. Why was I crying? I had been caught in a lie, a desperate attempt to conceal my mistakes. And now it was clear that, within 24 hours, my fall would begin. I would lose my job and my reputation. My private shame would become public.

  Jonah then described leaving St. Louis and returning to Los Angeles, his suit and shirt “stained with sweat and vomit.”

  I open the front door and take off my dirty shirt and weep on the shoulder of my wife. My wife is caring but confused: How the hell could I be so reckless? I have no good answers.

  —JONAH LEHRER’S BOOK PROPOSAL, AS LEAKED TO The New York Times, JUNE 6, 2013

  The New York media community declared itself resolutely indifferent to Jonah’s suffering. “‘Recycling bin’ is a hilarious choice of detail for the compulsive plagiarist,” wrote Gawker’s Tom Scocca. “And, obviously: Bring us two witnesses who saw you puke when and where you claim you puked. Or don’t bother.”

  And then, to my amazement, Slate’s Daniel Engber announced that he had spent a day combing through Jonah’s proposal and believed he had uncovered plagiarism within it.

  Surely Jonah hadn’t been that insanely reckless?

  —

  When I read Engber’s article closer, things didn’t seem quite so clear-cut. “A chapter on the secret to having a happy marriage,” Engber writes, “comes close to copying a recent essay on the same subject by Adam Gopnik, Lehrer’s onetime colleague at The New Yorker.”

  Gopnik: In 1838, when Darwin was first thinking of marriage, he made an irresistible series of notes on the subject—a scientific-seeming list of marriage pros and cons . . . In favor of marriage, he included the acquisition of a “constant companion and friend in old age” and, memorably and conclusively, decided that a wife would be “better than a dog, anyhow.”

  Lehrer: In July 1838, Charles Darwin considered the possibility of marriage in his scientific notebook. His thoughts quickly took the shape of a list, a balance sheet of reasons to “marry” and “not marry.” The pros of wedlock were straightforward: Darwin cited the possibility of children (“if it please God”)
, the health benefits of attachment and the pleasure of having a “constant companion (& friend in old age).” A wife, he wrote, was probably “better than a dog anyhow.”

  Gopnik: And the Darwins went on to have something close to an ideal marriage.

  Lehrer: This might seem like an inauspicious start to a relationship, but the Darwins went on to have a nearly ideal marriage.

  And so on, for a few paragraphs. Engber wasn’t totally sure this counted as plagiarism, “or if [Lehrer] modified his words to stop just short of doing so.” Or maybe both men had drawn from the same source: “In the footnotes Lehrer cites page 661 of Desmond and Moore’s 1991 biography of Darwin. Anyone who has a copy of that book is invited to check the wordings.”

  But even if it wasn’t plagiarism, Engber was “convinced that Lehrer hasn’t changed his ways at all. He’s set his course as clearly as can be. He’ll recycle and repeat, he’ll puke his gritty guts out.”

  No matter what transgressions Jonah had or hadn’t committed—it seemed to me—he couldn’t win. But his Book About Love is scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster around the same time that this book will appear, so we’ll all learn at once if it will win him some redemption.

  Four

  God That Was Awesome

  During the months that followed, it became routine. Everyday people, some with young children, were getting annihilated for tweeting some badly worded joke to their hundred or so followers. I’d meet them in restaurants and airport cafés—spectral figures wandering the earth like the living dead in the business wear of their former lives. It was happening with such regularity that it didn’t even seem coincidental that one of them, Justine Sacco, had been working in the same office building as Michael Moynihan until three weeks earlier when, passing through Heathrow Airport, she wrote a tweet that came out badly.