So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

  “But I’m still very resentful,” I said.

  “Good!” said Brad. “I hope you remain incomplete all lunch.”

  “I don’t see any value in that at all,” I muttered, as I put on my jacket.

  —

  Out in the hotel corridor Mario the marijuana dealer smiled and told me, “I don’t think Brad’s finished with you yet!” I understood why Mario said that. Brad seemed to have just broken his own golden rule. He hadn’t ensured that everyone stayed together while my anger played itself out. No love had been given the chance to grow. I had been cast out into Chicago at an apex of resentfulness.

  I spent the lunch hour stomping around the streets. After lunch, I had only a few hours before I needed to catch my plane back to New York, so I laid out for Brad my complaint.

  “You broke for lunch right in the middle of it,” I said. “You left me seething.”

  Melissa leaned over and removed my baseball cap from my head. I flinched.

  “I could have been suicidally unhappy about it,” I said.

  “We were running ten minutes late for lunch, so I made the decision to leave you cooking,” Brad said.

  After that, things moved on. Jack the veterinarian sex addict who hated my fiddling with my phone took the Hot Seat. He recounted a time his father physically attacked his mother in front of him. It was a heartbreaking story. He closed his eyes tightly as he told it, so I took the opportunity to quickly check Twitter. I hate not knowing what’s happening on Twitter. Soon after that, I caught my plane home.

  —

  We all kept in touch for a while. Mary e-mailed me to let me know how things had gone with Amanda: “I tried the Rad. Hon. approach and she was super resistant and defensive and pretty much closed to what I wanted to express. I could feel the waves of anger coming off her while talking to her. Since then I have had to still see her at the gym and at times I’ve ‘ignored’ her. Other times we’ve had civil, pleasant chats (not that many).”

  Another member of the group e-mailed us all to report that he attempted Radical Honesty on his wife, but she responded by trying to physically push him away so he told her that he would “‘get the ax and defend myself by killing you.’ Rightfully she was scared, as she knows that often I confuse truth with fantasy. We all do. So the police came by. I am under consideration for a job that involves a security clearance, so any ARREST will result in no offer there . . . I love you all, especially Thelma, who I find extremely attractive, and I want to have sex with her (you). Perhaps I could even treat her (you) as my wife.”

  Brad wrote back, copying everyone in: “What you say is completely insane. Your best bet is to seek out a psychiatrist who can prescribe you a mild tranquilizer.”

  —

  My Radical Honesty weekend had not been a success for me. But I continued to believe that Max Mosley’s own version of it—“as soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed, the whole thing crumbles”—had indeed been his magic formula, the reason why he’d soared above his shaming. And I continued to believe it right up until a new public shaming unfolded, this time up in Kennebunk, Maine, that forced me to rethink the whole thing. This new shaming made me realize that Max had survived his for a completely different reason—one I hadn’t put my finger on.

  Nine

  A Town Abuzz over Prostitution and a Client List

  KENNEBUNK, Me.—The summer people who clog the roads here are long gone and the leaves have turned crimson and orange, but the prevailing sentiment in this postcard-perfect coastal town these days is one of dread.

  For more than a year, the police have been investigating reports that the local Zumba instructor [Alexis Wright] was using her exercise studio on a quaint downtown street for more than fitness training. In fact, the police say, she was running a one-woman brothel with up to 150 clients and secretly videotaping them as they engaged in intimate acts . . . the list is rumored to be replete with the names of prominent people.

  —KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, The New York Times, OCTOBER 16, 2012

  • • •

  President George H. W. Bush has his seaside compound, Walker’s Point, four miles away from Kennebunk, up in Kennebunkport. Sometimes blacked-out cars zoom through town on their way up there, carrying Vladimir Putin or Bill Clinton or Nicolas Sarkozy, but besides that, not much happens in Kennebunk. Or not much did.

  Who might be on the list? A member of the Bush family? Someone from the Secret Service? General Petraeus?

  —BETHANY MCLEAN, “TOWN OF WHISPERS,” Vanity Fair, FEBRUARY 1, 2013

  A defense attorney, Stephen Schwartz, petitioned the Maine Supreme Judicial Court to have the names on the list remain secret (he was representing two of the unnamed men). This was still Puritan country, he argued: “Once these names are released, they’re all going to have the mark of a scarlet letter.” But the judge ruled against him, and the York County Coast Star, the Kennebunk paper, started publishing.

  There were sixty-nine people on the list in all—sixty-eight men and one woman. Sadly, no Bush was among them, not even a member of the family’s security detail. But there were Kennebunk society people—a pastor from the South Portland Church of the Nazarene, a lawyer, a high school hockey coach, a former town mayor, a retired schoolteacher and his wife.

  This was a unique event in the public shaming world. Mass disgrace scenarios like this never happen. Given that my job had become to try matching personality nuances with public shaming survival levels, it was a dream come true for me. When do you get a sample size like that? Surely among the people on the list there’d be those so eager to please that they’d allow strangers’ negative opinions of them to meld with their own, creating some corrosive amalgam. There’d be those so desperate not to lose their status that it would need to be pried from their clenched fingers. There’d be serious people like Jonah, hitherto smart-alecky people like Justine. And there’d be Max Mosleys. Kennebunk was like a well-stocked laboratory for me. Who would incur the crowd’s wrath, who its mercy? Who’d be shattered? Who’d emerge unscathed? I drove up there.

  —

  Inside Court One of the Biddeford District Courthouse half a dozen of the men from the Zumba list sat on the benches, staring grimly ahead while news crews pointed their cameras at them. We in the press area were allowed to stare at them and they weren’t able to look away. It reminded me of how Nathaniel Hawthorne had described the pillory in The Scarlet Letter: “[An] instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron. There can be no outrage, methinks . . . more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame.”

  Everyone was silent and a little awkward, like we were all standing around in some strange pre-consensus limbo. This story was new. There hadn’t been time for Kennebunk society to start shunning the men. However brutal or subtle the shunning might manifest itself, nothing had happened yet. I was in on the ground floor.

  The judge entered, and it began. The court proceedings were nothing much. The men were, in turn, told to stand up and plead guilty or not guilty. Each man pled guilty. Fines were imposed—$300 for each visit to Alexis Wright. The maximum fine today was $900. And then it was over. They were allowed to leave. And they did, hurriedly. I followed the last one out. All the others had vanished except for him. I introduced myself to him.

  “You can interview me,” he said. “But I want something in return.”

  “Okay?” I said.

  “Money,” he said. “I’m not talking about much. Just enough to buy my kid a present from Walmart. Just a voucher from Walmart. And then I’ll tell you all the details. I’ll tell you EVERYTHING. What me and Alexis got up to.”

  He was a heavy man. He gave me a look of desperate, sad, faux lasciviousness, like he was offering me the
best erotic novel. “I’ll tell you everything,” he said.

  I said I couldn’t pay someone to talk about his or her crime, so he shrugged and walked away. I drove back to New York and the next day I wrote to all sixty-eight men and one woman on the list, requesting interviews. Then I waited.

  A few days later, an e-mail arrived.

  Okay, we can talk. I am the former Church of the Nazarene pastor that unfortunately became involved in this whole mess.

  Sincerely yours,

  James (Andrew) Ferreira

  • • •

  Hello, Jon.” Andrew Ferreira’s voice was kind and tired and lost-sounding—a formerly chipper community leader trying to adapt to a world that might no longer have any interest in his leadership. This was the first time he’d agreed to talk to a journalist. He said the last few days had been hard. His wife had left him and he’d been fired from his job. All that had been inevitable, he said, but the rest was unknown. The extent to which the community would cast him out, and how he’d deal with it: unknown.

  I asked him why he visited Alexis Wright.

  “Maybe my marriage wasn’t great,” he replied. “It wasn’t horrible. It was just sort of drifting. Cohabiting to a point. Anyway. I was reading a story in The Boston Globe on the Craigslist Killer. You remember that story? He murdered a twenty-something call girl. And The Boston Globe said that most of the ads for escorts have migrated away from Craigslist and onto Backpage.com. If someone wants an escort or a happy-ending massage or something—Backpage.com. And I just remembered it. I wish I hadn’t. Unfortunately, some things just stick in your mind. I became tainted with the information.”

  Andrew visited Alexis three times, he said. On the last occasion “we shared a laugh. We both just belly laughed. That was outside of what I was there for. And she became human to me then. She was no longer an object. And that was the puncturing of the fantasy. It was anything I could do to get out of there. I’m not one to wear my emotions on my sleeve. But I bawled my eyes out in the car.”

  And that was his last visit to Alexis Wright.

  “How have you been spending the past few days?” I asked him.

  “I don’t sit alone at home and isolate,” he replied. “I’ve joined a meet-up group. It’s just a bunch of people and I’m completely anonymized there. I show up and we play board games. Risk and Apples to Apples and Pandemic. Besides that, I’ve been journaling. What do I do with all this information? If I wait a little bit—six months, a year—and I try to send out a manuscript? Is that something that would be received?”

  “Like a memoir?”

  “Could I utilize that to springboard into a new ministry?” he said. “And what angle do I come at it at? I could go faith-based and warn men not to do it. Or I could take a completely different tack and, well, I don’t want to become a champion for legalized prostitution. So I’ve really got to think about what this all means.” He drifted off. “What do I do with this?” he said again. “I don’t know yet. Unfortunately, I’m forty-nine years old and I’ve turned a great deal of my life into a cautionary tale . . .”

  “Have you met any of the other men or the woman from the list?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “We’re all members of a club we didn’t realize we were in. There’s really no reason or opportunity for any contact or solidarity.”

  “So mainly you’re just waiting for whatever happens next to happen,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the worst. The expectation. It’s horrible.”

  Andrew promised to let me know the moment his shaming began—online, in town, anywhere. At the first hint of it, he assured me, he’d call. We said our good-byes. And that was the last I heard from him for several months.

  So I telephoned him again. He sounded happy to get my call.

  “I never heard from you,” I said. “What happened?”

  “It went away,” he said.

  “There was no shaming at all?”

  “None,” he said. “My imagination had been far worse than what actually happened.”

  “Justine Sacco was annihilated,” I said. “And Jonah Lehrer too, of course. But Justine Sacco! And she didn’t do anything wrong! And you got nothing?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that,” Andrew said. “I don’t understand it. In fact, my relationship with my three daughters has never been stronger. My youngest one noted, ‘It’s like getting to know you all over again.’”

  “Your transgression made them see you as human?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Andrew said.

  “Huh,” I said. “Justine’s and Jonah’s transgressions made people see them as the opposite of human.”

  His marriage was over, he added, as was his job as a pastor in the local Nazarene church. That wasn’t coming back. But otherwise he had experienced only kindness and forgiveness. Actually, it wasn’t kindness and forgiveness. It was something much better than that. It was nothing. He experienced nothing.

  —

  Andrew told me a story. When Alexis Wright’s business partner, Mark Strong, was on trial for bankrolling the brothel, Andrew was ordered into court. There was a chance he’d be called as a witness, so he was sequestered in a private room at the back. After a while, six other men drifted into the room. They all nodded at each other but sat in silence. Then some tentative conversations ensued and they realized what they’d suspected: They were Alexis Wright’s clients. They were all men from the list. This was the first time they’d met, so they hurriedly, quite eagerly, swapped notes. Not about their visits to Alexis—everyone tiptoed awkwardly around that—but about what had happened next, once they were outed.

  “One man was saying, ‘It cost me a new SUV for my wife,’” Andrew said. “Another said, ‘It cost me a cruise to the Bahamas and a new kitchen.’ Everyone was laughing.”

  “None of them had fallen victim to any kind of shaming?” I asked.

  “No,” said Andrew. “It went away for them too.”

  —

  But there was one exception, Andrew said. The conversation between them turned to the one woman who had visited Alexis.

  “Everyone was laughing about her,” Andrew said. “Then, suddenly, this one older gentleman, who had been much quieter than the others, said, ‘That was my wife.’ Oh, Jon, you could feel the energy shift. Everything changed immediately.”

  “What kind of jokes had you all been making about the wife?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember exactly,” Andrew said, “but they had been more mocking. She was looked at differently by the men and, yes, with her it was considered more shameful.”

  —

  As it happens, Max’s and Andrew’s sins would in Puritan times have been judged graver than Jonah’s. Jonah, “guilty of lying or publishing false news,” would have been “fined, placed in the stocks for a period not exceeding four hours, or publicly whipped with not more than forty stripes,” according to Delaware law. Whereas Max and Andrew, having “defiled the marriage bed,” would have been publicly whipped (no maximum number was specified), imprisoned with hard labor for at least a year, and on a second offense, imprisoned for life.

  But the shifting sands of shameworthiness had shifted away from sex scandals—if you’re a man—to work improprieties and perceived white privilege, and I suddenly understood the real reason why Max had survived his shaming. Nobody cared. Max survived his shaming because he was a man in a consensual sex shaming—which meant there had been no shaming.

  I e-mailed Max to tell him. “Nobody cared!” I wrote. “Of all the public scandals, being a man in a consensual sex scandal is probably the one to hope for.” Max was a target of no one—not liberals like me, not the online misogynists who tear apart women who step out of line. Max suffered nothing.

  An hour passed. Then Max e-mailed back: “Hi Ron. I think you are spot on.”

  • • •


  It wasn’t that nobody cared. Max’s wife cared. And someone else did: Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail. In a 2008 speech to the Society of Editors, Paul Dacre called Max’s orgy “perverted, depraved, the very abrogation of civilized behavior.” It was a rueful speech lamenting the death of shame. Dacre portrayed Justice David Eady—the judge who found in Max’s favor in the privacy case against the News of the World—as its incarnation.

  The judge found for Max Mosley because he had not engaged in a “sick Nazi orgy” as the News of the World contested, though for the life of me that seems an almost surreally pedantic logic as some of the participants were dressed in military-style uniform. Mosley was issuing commands in German while one prostitute pretended to pick lice from his hair, a second fellated him and a third caned his backside until blood was drawn . . . [To Justice Eady] such behavior was merely “unconventional.” . . .

  But what is most worrying about Justice Eady’s decisions is that he is ruling that—when it comes to morality—the law in Britain is now effectively neutral, which is why I accuse him, in his judgments, of being “amoral.”

  Ever since I started telling people I was writing a book about shame, lots of people from the Paul Dacre–type world—successful older men high up in British society—have congratulated me, presumptuously, for telling it how it is about how young people don’t feel shame anymore. I met a famous architect at a party who said just that. And a religious broadcaster bemoaned to me how the loosening of religious morality has created a shameless society. I can understand why someone might believe that, given that we’re living in an age where a Church of the Nazarene pastor can visit a prostitute and nobody cares. I think Andrew and Max have women like Princess Donna to thank for their non-disgrace. Donna has worked assiduously for years to demystify strange sex, which is why men like them are able to emerge from their scandals unscathed. But shame hasn’t died. Shame has just moved elsewhere, gathering tremendous strength along the way.

  The fact was, speeches like Paul Dacre’s didn’t matter anymore. The people who mattered didn’t care what Dacre thought. The people who mattered were the people on Twitter. On Twitter we make our own decisions about who deserves obliteration. We form our own consensus, and we aren’t being influenced by the criminal justice system or the media. This makes us formidable.