So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

  • • •

  I was glad Mike Daisey had found a way to have a life. But I don’t think his survival method was helpful advice for Jonah or Justine. They had no storytelling career to fall back on. There was no third narrative for them. There was just the one. Jonah was the fraudulent pop-science writer. Justine was the AIDS-tweet woman. They were tainted people and it wouldn’t take a sleuth to find it out. Their flaws were right there on the front page of Google.

  Justine made good on her promise. Five months after our first meeting we had lunch on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She filled me in on how her life had gone. She’d had a job offer right away, she said. But it was a weird one—from the owner of a Florida yachting company. “He said, ‘I saw what happened to you. I’m fully on your side.’” But Justine knew nothing about yachts. So why did he want to hire her? “Was he a crazy person who thinks white people can’t get AIDS?” She turned him down. Then she left New York. “In New York your career is your identity. I had that taken away from me.” She went as far away as she could. To Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She got a volunteer job with an NGO working to reduce maternal mortality rates.

  “I thought that if I was going to be in this fucking terrible situation I should get something out of it, or at least try to make the most out of it and help people and learn.” She flew there alone. “I knew where I was staying but there are no addresses. They don’t really have street names. English is not their national language.”

  “Did you like it in Ethiopia?” I asked.

  “It was fantastic,” she said.

  And this is where Justine’s story could end. If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of people who tore her apart, you may want to make this your closing image of her. You may want to picture her in some makeshift maternity hospital in Addis Ababa. Perhaps she’s bent over a woman in labor and she does something extraordinary to save the woman’s life. Perhaps she glances up then, and wipes the desert sweat from her brow, and she’s got a whole different facial expression—one of tough, proud wisdom or something. And it’s all because of you. Justine would never have gone to Addis Ababa had she not been publicly shamed and fired from IAC.

  But who was Justine kidding? Addis Ababa was great for a month, but she wasn’t an Ethiopia person. She was a New York City person. She was nervy and sassy and sort of debonair. And so she came back. To a town where things were still not okay for her. She had temporary work doing the PR for the launch of a dating website, but she was not back on her feet. She was still fired from her dream job. She was still ridiculed and demonized across the Internet.

  “I’m not fine yet,” she said. “And I’ve really suffered.”

  She pushed the food around her plate. When I thought of Justine, I thought of a store looted in a riot. She may have left the door ajar, but she was all smashed up.

  But I did notice one positive change in her. The first time we’d met, she’d seemed ashamed—weighed down by the guilt that she’d “tarnished” her family by pressing send on that stupid tweet. I think she still felt ashamed, but maybe not quite so much. Instead, she said, she felt humiliated.

  The week I had lunch with Justine, the European Court of Justice delivered an unexpected judgment—the Right to Be Forgotten ruling. If an article or a blog about a person was “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”—whatever those vague words meant—Google must, if requested, deindex it from its European sites (although not from Google.com). Tens of thousands of people applied to be forgotten straightaway—there’d be more than 70,000 applicants within three months. Google complied vigorously, apparently assenting to practically every request. In fact, it complied so vigorously—deindexing swaths of Guardian and Daily Mail articles, for example, and then sending the newspapers automated notices informing them that they’d been deindexed—the company seemed to be intentionally creating chaos to stir up resistance to the judgment. Articles and websites sprung up across the Internet attacking the ruling and outing the forgotten: a football referee who had lied about his reasons for giving a penalty, a couple arrested for having sex on a train (who I’d forgotten all about until then), an airline, Cathay Pacific, accused of racism by a Muslim job applicant.

  Justine, following the news from New York, had “conflicting feelings immediately,” she told me. It seemed like censorship to her. And it also seemed appealing. But she knew invoking it would be a disaster for her. If the world found out—imagine the frenzy. No. The Right to Be Forgotten ruling would improve the life of some actual transgressor—some barely shamed niche European former fraudster who slipped through the outers’ net, for instance—far more than it would improve the life of the super-shamed Justine Sacco.

  And so the worst thing, Justine said, the thing that made her feel most helpless, was her lack of control over the Google search results. They were just there, eternal, crushing.

  “It’s going to take a very long time for those Google search results to change for me,” she said.

  Eleven

  The Man Who Can Change the Google Search Results

  In October 2012 a group of adults with learning difficulties took an organized trip to Washington, D.C. They visited the National Mall, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Smithsonian, Arlington National Cemetery, and the U.S. Mint. They saw the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. At night they sang karaoke in the hotel bar. Their caregivers, Lindsey Stone and her friend Jamie, did a duet of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

  “They had the greatest time on that trip,” Lindsey Stone told me. “We were laughing on the bus. We were laughing walking around at night. They thought that we were fun and cool.”

  Lindsey was telling me the story eighteen months later. We were sitting at her kitchen table. She lives down a long lane near a pretty lake in a seaside town on the East Coast of the United States. “I like to dance and I like to do karaoke,” Lindsey said. “But for a long time after that trip I didn’t leave the house. During the day, I’d just sit here. I didn’t want to be seen by anybody. I didn’t want people looking at me.”

  “How long did that last?” I asked her.

  “Almost a year,” she said.

  Lindsey didn’t want to talk to me about what had happened on that trip to Washington, D.C. I had written to her three times and she had ignored each of my letters. But a very peculiar circumstance had made it necessary for her to change her mind.

  • • •

  Lindsey and Jamie had been with LIFE—Living Independently Forever—for a year and a half before that trip. LIFE was a residence for “pretty high-functioning people with learning difficulties,” Lindsey said. “Jamie had started a jewelry club, which was a hit with the girls. We’d take them to the movies. We’d take them bowling. We got the company to purchase a karaoke sound system. We heard a lot from parents that we were the best thing that ever happened to that campus.”

  Off duty, she and Jamie had a running joke—taking stupid photographs, “smoking in front of a NO SMOKING sign, or posing in front of statues, mimicking the pose. We took dumb pictures all the time. And so at Arlington we saw the SILENCE AND RESPECT sign. And inspiration struck.”

  “So,” Lindsey said, “thinking we were funny, Jamie posted it on Facebook and tagged me on it with my consent because I thought it was hilarious.”

  Nothing much happened after that. A few Facebook friends posted unenthusiastic comments. “One of them had served in the military and he wrote a message saying, ‘This is kind of offensive. I know you girls, but it’s just tasteless.’ Another said ‘I agree’ and another said ‘I agree’ and then I said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa! It’s just us being douchebags! Forget about it!’”

  Whoa whoa whoa . . . wait. This is just us, being the douchebags that we are, challenging authority in general. Much like the pic posted the night before, of me smoking right next to a no smoking sign. OBVIOUSLY we meant NO disrespect to people that serve or have served our coun
try.

  —LINDSEY STONE’S FACEBOOK MESSAGE, OCTOBER 20, 2012

  After that, Jamie said to Lindsey, “Do you think we should take it down?”

  “No!” Lindsey replied. “What’s the big deal? No one’s ever going to think of it again.”

  Their Facebook settings were a mystery to them. Most of the privacy boxes were ticked. Some weren’t. Sometimes they’d half notice that boxes they’d thought they’d ticked weren’t ticked. Lindsey has been thinking about that “a lot” these past eighteen months. “Facebook works best when everyone is sharing and liking. It brings their ad revenues up.” Was there some Facebook shenanigan where things just “happen” to untick themselves? Some loophole? “But I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist. I don’t know if Jamie’s mobile uploads had ever been private.”

  Whatever: Jamie’s mobile uploads weren’t private. And four weeks after returning from Washington, D.C., they were in a restaurant celebrating their birthday—“We’re a week apart”—when they became aware that their phones were vibrating repeatedly. So they went online.

  “Lindsey Stone hates the military and hates soldiers who have died in foreign wars,” and “Die cunt,” and “You should rot in hell,” and “Just pure Evil,” and “The Face of a Typical Feminist. Fifty pounds overweight? Check. Sausage arms and little piglet fingers? Check. No respect for the men who sacrificed? Check,” and “Fuck You whore. I hope I die [sic] a slow painful death. U retarted cunt,” and “HOPE THIS CUNT GETS RAPED AND STABBED TO DEATH,” and “Spoke with an employee from LIFE who has told me there are Veterans on the board and that she will be fired. Awaiting info on her accomplice,” and “After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client. Woman needs help,” and “Send the dumb feminist to prison,” and, in response to a small number of posters suggesting that maybe a person’s future shouldn’t be ruined because of a jokey photograph, “HER FUTURE ISN’T RUINED! Stop trying to make her into a martyr. In 6 months no one except those that actually know her will remember this.”

  “I wanted to scream, ‘It was just about a sign,’” Lindsey said.

  Lindsey doesn’t know how it spread. “I don’t think I’ll ever know,” she said. “We have a feeling that somebody at work found it. We had kind of revitalized that campus. There was animosity that came from that. They saw us as young, irreverent idiots.”

  By the time she went to bed that night—“which was admittedly at four a.m.”—a Fire Lindsey Stone Facebook page had been created. It attracted 12,000 likes. Lindsey read every comment. “I became really obsessed with reading everything about myself.”

  The next day camera crews had gathered outside her front door. Her father tried talking to them. He had a cigarette in his hand. The family dog had followed him out. As he tried to explain that Lindsey wasn’t a terrible person, he noticed the cameras move from his face down to the cigarette and the dog, like they were a family of hillbillies—smoking separatists down a lane with guard dogs.

  LIFE was inundated with e-mails demanding their jobs, so Lindsey was called into work. But she wasn’t allowed inside the building. Her boss met her in the parking lot and told her to hand over her keys.

  “Literally, overnight everything I knew and loved was gone,” Lindsey said.

  And that’s when she fell into a depression, became an insomniac, and barely left home for a year.

  • • •

  COMPANY PRAISED FOR FIRING WOMAN WHO TOOK DISRESPECTFUL PHOTO NEXT TO SOLDIER’S GRAVE

  A company is being applauded for firing a woman who made a vulgar gesture next to a soldier’s burial site, sparking nationwide outrage . . . Vitriol toward Lindsey Stone hasn’t relented since she lost her job . . . Commentators suggested “she should be shot” or exiled from the United States . . .

  Stone, who issued a statement of apology, has refused to show her face since the backlash, her parents told CBS Boston.

  —RHEANA MURRAY, NEW YORK Daily News, NOVEMBER 22, 2012, AS SEEN ON PAGE ONE OF THE GOOGLE.COM RESULTS FOR THE SEARCH TERM “LINDSEY STONE”

  During the year that followed the Washington, D.C., trip, Lindsey scanned Craigslist for caregiving work, but nobody ever replied to her applications. She lurked online, watching all the other Lindsey Stones get destroyed. “I felt so terrible for Justine Sacco,” she said, “and that girl at Halloween who dressed like the Boston Marathon victim.”

  And then her life suddenly got much better. She was offered a job caring for children with autism.

  “But I’m terrified,” she said.

  “That your bosses will find out?”

  “Yeah.”

  —

  Psychologists try to remind anxiety sufferers that “what if” worries are irrational ones. If you find yourself thinking, What if I just came across as racist? the “what if” is evidence that nothing bad actually happened. It’s just thoughts swirling frantically around. But Lindsey’s “what if” worry—“What if my new company googles me?”—was extremely plausible. In the tempest of her anxiety attacks there was no driftwood to hold on to. Her worst-case scenario was a likely one. And the photograph was everywhere. It had become so iconic and ubiquitous among swaths of U.S. veterans and right-wingers and antifeminists that one man had even turned it into patriotic wallpaper, superimposing onto the wall behind Lindsey’s shrieking face and upturned finger a picture of a military funeral, complete with a coffin draped in the American flag.

  Lindsey had wanted the job so much she’d been “nervous about even applying. And I wasn’t sure how to address it on my résumé. Why the abrupt departure from LIFE? I was conflicted on whether to say to them, ‘Just so you know, I am this Lindsey Stone.’ Because I knew it was just a mouse click away.”

  Before the job interview, the question had haunted her. Should she tell them? She was “insanely nervous” about making the wrong decision. She left it until the moment of the interview. And then the interview was over and she found that she hadn’t mentioned it.

  “It just didn’t feel right,” she said. “People who have gotten to know me don’t see Arlington as a big deal. And so I wanted to give them the opportunity to know me before I say to them, ‘This is what you’ll get if you google me.’”

  She’s been in the job four months, and she still hasn’t told them.

  “And obviously you can’t ask them, ‘Have you noticed it and decided it’s not a problem?’” I said.

  “Right,” said Lindsey.

  “So you feel trapped in a paranoid silence,” I said.

  “I love this job so much,” Lindsey said. “I love these kids. One of the parents paid me a really high compliment the other day. I’ve only been working with her son for a month and she was like, ‘The moment I met you, seeing the way you are with my son, and the way you treat people, you were meant to work in this field.’ But I see everything with a heavy heart because I wait for the other shoe to drop. What if she found out? Would she feel the same way?” Lindsey could never just be happy and relaxed. The terror was always there. “It really impacts the way you view the world. Since it happened, I haven’t tried to date anybody. How much do you let a new person into your life? Do they already know? The place I’m working at now—I was under the impression nobody knew. But someone made a comment the other day and I think they knew.”

  “What was the comment?”

  “Oh, we were talking about something and he tossed off a comment like ‘Oh, it’s not like I’m going to plaster that all over the Internet.’ Then he quickly said, ‘Just kidding. I would never do that to somebody. I would never do that to you.’”

  “So you don’t know for sure that he knew.”

  “Exactly,” Lindsey said. “But his hurried follow-up . . . I don’t know.” She paused. “That fear. It impacts you.”

  But now, suddenly, something had happened that could make all Lindsey’s problems vanish. It was something almos
t magical, and it was my doing. I had set in motion a mysterious and fairy tale–like set of events for her. I’d never in my life been in a situation like this. It was new for both of us. It felt good—but there was a chance it wasn’t good.

  • • •

  It all started when I chanced upon the story of two former philosophy classmates from Harvard—Graeme Wood and Phineas Upham. There was something quite like Michael Moynihan and Jonah Lehrer about them. At Harvard—as Graeme Wood would later write—Phineas “dressed preppy and was a member of the Harvard chapter of the Ayn Rand cult. I wasn’t poor, but no one in my family knew how heavy a bag with $300,000 in it felt.”

  What Graeme Wood meant was that in 2010—twelve years after leaving Harvard—Phineas Upham and his mother, Nancy, were arrested on tax-evasion charges. The indictment read that they conspired to hide $11 million in a Swiss bank account and then sneak the money in cash back to America. Graeme was intrigued by the news, so he set up a Google alert to “keep abreast of developments.”

  The scandal was over fast. Nancy pled guilty, was fined $5.5 million, and received a three-year suspended sentence. Soon after that, Graeme received a Google news alert about Phineas.

  U.S. DROPS CASE OF MAN ACCUSED OF HELPING MOM HIDE MONEY

  The office of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan has dropped an October 2010 indictment charging Samuel Phineas Upham with one count of conspiracy to commit tax fraud and three counts of aiding in the preparation of false tax returns . . . “The government has concluded that further prosecution of the defendant would not be in the interests of justice,” prosecutors said in a May 18 filing in federal court in New York.

  —DAVID VOREACOS, Bloomberg Businessweek, MAY 23, 2012

  All charges against Phineas had been dropped. And so that was that. Except Graeme never bothered to cancel his Phineas Upham Google alert. Which was how he began to notice the strange accolades. Phineas was suddenly garnering a lot of them. He was appointed “Head Finance Curator of Venture Cap Monthly,” whatever that meant. “Charity News Forum” voted him “Philanthropist of the Month.” He started writing for a magazine Graeme had never heard of called Philanthropy Chronicle. He published a collection of essays. He even created a magazine to “bring philosophy writing to underprivileged youth by making it part of nonprofit educational programs in developing nations.”