by Jon Ronson
But, as Graeme would write, “something was wrong with these sites, which in every case looked flimsy and temporary, especially when you got beyond the first page.”
When I went to the street address listed for the [Philanthropy Chronicle] magazine’s offices, I discovered that 64 Prince Street did not exist—or, rather, that it is a back entrance next to an Indian restaurant.
What had begun as a schadenfreude-motivated Phineas Upham Google alert had led Graeme into the mysterious world of “black-ops reputation management.” The purpose of the fake sites was obvious—to push reports about the tax-evasion charges so far down the search results that they’d effectively vanish. Nobody had heard of the European Court of Justice’s “Right to Be Forgotten” ruling at that point—it was still two years from existing—but somebody was evidently fashioning some clumsy homemade U.S.-based version for Phineas Upham.
Graeme had a skill most people don’t. He knew how to attain clues from HTML codes. So he dug into them, “looking for evidence of a common author.” And he found it. The fake sites were the work of a man named Bryce Tom, the head of a business called Metal Rabbit Media. He was a young Californian living in New York City.
The two men met in a café, Graeme thrilled to have exposed the mother lode, Bryce Tom evidently plagued with anxiety.
“This could be very bad for me,” he said, visibly shaken. “No one’s going to want my business.” We stared at each other in uneasy silence for a few minutes, and I fetched him a nonalcoholic sangria to calm him down. When I returned, Tom had shredded his napkin.
—GRAEME WOOD, “SCRUBBED,” New York MAGAZINE, JUNE 16, 2013
I found Graeme’s story strange and enthralling except for this last part. Bryce Tom had seemed in such despair that he’d been exposed, which made for a melancholy ending.
—
And now Graeme and I sat opposite each other in a New York City café. I told him I hadn’t a clue that people like Bryce Tom existed and I wanted to do some digging of my own. Graeme gave me leads: names of men and women he suspected might be Metal Rabbit clients, like a highly decorated UN peacekeeper who had twice been blown up in suicide bombings. Back home, I read articles about how, on both occasions, bleeding from shrapnel wounds, this UN peacekeeper stayed to help the wounded and the dying. The stories were full of eulogies, tributes to his bravery, “but his Wikipedia page has been edited by a man I know works for Metal Rabbit,” Graeme had told me. And after an hour of hacking through Google’s undergrowth, I found a site accusing the peacekeeper of being a philanderer, cheating on three women at the same time, a “low life prick,” and a “pathological liar [whose] behavior is demonic.” When I e-mailed him to ask if he was a Metal Rabbit client, he obliquely replied that he wasn’t but “I do know the guys.”
Like Graeme Wood, I was having fun exploring the Google search pages nobody ever goes to for secrets that would otherwise go unnoticed, but then I met Justine and heard about Lindsey, and I read Graeme’s article a second time and saw a different side to it. It was miserable that 99 percent of us could never afford a service like Metal Rabbit, and it was intriguing and scandalous that people like Bryce Tom went about their business in such a shadowy manner. Metal Rabbit deserved exposure. But Phineas Upham had been cleared of all charges. Surely he had a right to be forgotten? Didn’t he?
I e-mailed Bryce Tom, “Is Metal Rabbit Media still operational?”
He e-mailed back, “What can I help you with?”
I e-mailed him back, “I’m a journalist . . .”
I never heard from him again.
• • •
The Village Pub in Woodside, near Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, looks like no big deal from the outside, but when you get inside, you realize it’s massively upmarket and filled with tech billionaires—the restaurant version of the nonthreatening clothes the tech billionaires were wearing. I told my dining companion, Michael Fertik, that he was the only person from the mysterious reputation-management world who had returned my e-mail.
“That’s because this is a really easy sector in which to be an unappealing, scurrilous operation,” he said.
“Scurrilous in what way?”
“A couple of them are really nasty fucking people,” Michael said. “There’s a guy who has some traction in our space, who runs a company, he’s a convicted rapist. He’s a felony rapist. He went to jail for four years for raping a woman. He started a company to basically obscure that fact about himself, I think.” Michael told me the name of the man’s company. “We’ve built a data file on him,” he said.
Michael’s competitors were disreputable, he said, and so were some of his potential clients.
“Very early on, within two weeks of launching our website in 2006 [Michael’s company is called Reputation.com] I remember being by myself and getting a couple of sign-ups from guys. So I googled them. They were pedophiles.”
“Do you remember the pedophiles’ names?” I asked Michael.
“Of course not,” Michael said. “Why do you ask that shit?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Curiosity.”
“No, it’s prurient curiosity of the type you condemn in your book,” Michael said.
—
Michael looked different from our fellow diners. I didn’t recognize any of them, but everyone seemed insanely rich—preppy, with faces like luxury yachts, like Martha’s Vineyard in the summertime, WASPy and at peace with the world, practically floating through the restaurant, whereas Michael was a big, angry, coiled-spring Jewish bear of a man. He was born in New York City, attained a degree from Harvard Law School, and invented the concept of online reputation management while working as a clerk for the Sixth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Louisville, Kentucky. This was the mid-2000s. Stories about cyberbullying and revenge porn were just starting to filter through. And that’s how Michael got the idea.
—
After he turned the pedophiles down, Michael told me, he noticed he was getting sign-ups from neo-Nazis, albeit repentant former ones—“When I was seventeen I was a Nazi. I was an asshole kid. Now I’m in my 40s I’m trying to move on but the Internet still thinks that I am a Nazi.” They were more sympathetic than the pedophiles, but Michael, being Jewish, still didn’t want them as clients. So he drew up a code of conduct. He wouldn’t accept anyone who was under investigation or had been convicted of a felony violent crime, or a felony fraud crime, or any sexually violent crime, or anyone accused—even informally—of a sexual crime against children. And, he said, there was another moral difference between him and his competitors. He wouldn’t invent fake accolades. He’d only put the truth up there. Although “I don’t think it’s incumbent on anyone to do massive fact-checking.”
“I have no idea what you actually do,” I had told Michael over the telephone before our dinner. “I don’t know how you manipulate Google search results.”
I understood that Michael was offering some kind of stealthier version of the European Court of Justice’s Right to Be Forgotten ruling. Plus, unlike the ruling, Michael had a worldwide reach, not just a European one. As it happened, the judgment wasn’t working out well for a lot of its applicants. They were finding themselves less forgotten than ever, given that so many journalists and bloggers had dedicated themselves to outing them. But nobody was scrutinizing the client lists of the online reputation management companies. Only a few very unlucky people, like Phineas Upham, had been exposed that way.
“Your work is a total mystery to me,” I said to Michael. “Especially the technological side of it. Maybe I could follow someone through the process?”
“Sure,” Michael replied.
And so we planned it out. We’d just need to find a willing client. Which wouldn’t be easy given that my pitch was that I wanted to study something they were frantically attempting to conceal. It was not a winning pitch.
We talked about gen
eric possibilities. Maybe I could convince a victim of “revenge porn,” Michael suggested, some woman whose spurned boyfriend had posted naked photographs of her online. Or maybe I could convince a politician who had said some offhand thing and wanted it buried before it devoured him. Or, oh, Michael added, somewhat less generically, maybe I could convince the leader of a religious group who was currently being falsely accused online of murdering his brother.
I coughed. “How about the leader of the religious group being falsely accused of murdering his brother?” I said.
—
I’ll call the religious leader Gregory. Which is not his real name. Plus, I’ve changed some details of his story to make him unidentifiable for reasons that will become obvious. Gregory’s brother—a member of Gregory’s religious group—had been found dead in a hotel room. A member of Gregory’s flock had been arrested for the murder. The investigating officers had apparently discounted Gregory as a co-conspirator. But message boards were ablaze with speculation that he’d directed it as if he were some kind of Charles Manson.
Which was where Reputation.com had come in. Gregory hadn’t approached them. Their outreach team had noticed the accusations and had pitched him their services. I don’t know how far that conversation had gone. But now Michael talked to Gregory about taking him on as a client pro bono on the condition that I would be allowed to witness it all.
Gregory e-mailed me. He was appreciative of Michael’s offer, he wrote, and might consent to an interview with me—his tone made “consent to an interview” sound like “deign to consent to an interview,” I thought—but he was puzzled. Given that my previous books were about such frivolous topics as military psychics and conspiracy theorists, why did I suppose my readers would be interested in the important subject of public shaming?
Oh, my God, I thought. He’s right.
Gregory added that he was sorry if he was offending me, but why did I presume that my views on the serious subject of public shaming would be taken seriously by anyone, given that my previous books sounded so implausible?
That IS a bit offensive, I thought.
Gregory seemed suspicious that the murder-mystery aspect of his story was more captivating to me than the public shaming part. And what could I say? He was right. I was happy to have Gregory’s name purged from the Internet if I could get to hear the intriguing details. I was the Selfish Giant, wanting to keep the lavish garden for myself and my readers, while building a tall wall around it so nobody else could look in.
Gregory and I e-mailed back and forth about thirty times during the days that followed. My e-mails were breezy. Gregory’s e-mails alluded darkly to “conditions.” I ignored the word “conditions” and carried on being breezy. Finally, Gregory wrote that the good news was that he’d decided to grant me an exclusive interview, so he was instructing his lawyer to draw up a contract in which I agreed to portray him in a positive way or else suffer significant financial penalty.
And that was the end of my relationship with Gregory.
—
Now that I no longer needed to be on my best behavior in my e-mails to him, I let it all out. “For about a thousand reasons there is no way on Earth I would sign a contract promising to be positive or risk significant financial penalty,” I e-mailed. “I’ve never heard of such a thing! I can’t tell you how frowned upon something like that is in journalism. NO ONE does it. If I signed that, you could determine anything negative and take my money! What if, God forbid, you get charged? What if we have a falling out?”
Gregory wished me the best of luck with my book.
—
It was frustrating. Michael Fertik was offering free services to a shamed person of my choice and I was finding it difficult to provide him with one who wasn’t unpleasantly overbearing. The fact was, even though Gregory hadn’t been charged with any crime, his weird and controlling e-mails had made me feel warier of the online reputation management world. What other cracks were being papered over?
Michael had accused me of “prurient curiosity of the type you condemn in your book” when I’d asked him about the early pedophile sign-ups he’d thwarted. And now the accusation put me in a panic. I didn’t want to write a book that advocated for a less curious world. Prurient curiosity may not be great. But curiosity is. People’s flaws need to be written about. The flaws of some people lead to horrors inflicted on others. And then there are the more human flaws that, when you shine a light onto them, de-demonize people who might otherwise be seen as ogres.
But there was a side of Michael’s business I respected—the side that offered salvation to people who’d really done nothing wrong but had been dramatically shamed anyway. Like Justine Sacco. Which is why I now e-mailed Michael’s publicist, Leslie Hobbs, suggesting Justine as Gregory’s replacement: “I think she’s a deserving case,” I wrote. “She may not go for it. But should I at least put it to her as a possibility?”
Leslie didn’t reply to my e-mail. I sent another one asking why they didn’t want to consider taking Justine on. She didn’t reply to that one either. I took the hint. I didn’t want to lose their goodwill, so I threw Justine on the fire and came up with a new name—a public shamee I’d written to three times and had heard nothing back. Lindsey Stone.
—
It was the first time I’d ever been in a position to offer an incentive to a reluctant interviewee. I’d witnessed other journalists do it and had always glared at them with hatred from across the room. Twenty years ago I covered the rape trial of a British TV presenter. Journalists on the press bench were shooting him likable little smiles in the hope of an exclusive interview should he be found not guilty. It was embarrassing. And futile too: On the day of his acquittal a woman in a fur coat appeared in court from nowhere and whisked him away. It turned out that she was from the News of the World. All the other journalists—with their likable little smiles—had never stood a chance. This woman had a checkbook.
I still had no checkbook, but without Michael’s inducement, I’d have had no chance with Lindsey. And it was quite the inducement.
“We’ll end up spending hundreds of thousands of bucks on her,” Michael said. “At least a hundred grand. Up to several hundred grand of effort.”
“Hundreds of thousands?” I said.
“Her situation is very dire,” he said.
“Why does it cost so much?” I asked him.
“Take it up with Google.” He shrugged. “It sucks to be Lindsey Stone.”
I thought Michael was being unbelievably generous.
—
I didn’t tell Lindsey that she nearly lost out to Justine Sacco and the leader of a religious group who had been falsely accused of murdering his brother. Gregory’s story had overbeguiled me. But Lindsey was perfect. With her, there were no strange caveats, no domineering e-mails. All she wanted was to work with autistic children and not feel the terror.
“If Michael takes you on, that photograph might practically vanish,” I said to her.
“That would be unbelievable,” she replied. “Or if it just disappeared two pages down Google. Only creepy people check past the second page.”
Lindsey knew it wasn’t perfect. My book would inevitably bring it back up again. But she understood that anything would be better than the way things were now. She was being offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in free services. This was bespoke—a shaming-eradication service that only the superrich could normally afford. After I left Lindsey’s house, she and Michael talked on the phone. After that, Michael called me.
“She was nothing but very gracious and responsive and cooperative,” he said. “I think we can proceed.”
• • •
For scheduling reasons, Michael couldn’t start on Lindsey for a few months, and so I took a break. I’ve worked on dark stories before—stories about innocent people losing their lives to the FBI, about banks hounding debt
ors until they commit suicide—but although I felt sorry for those people, I hadn’t felt the dread snake its way into me in the way these shaming stories had. I’d leave Jonah and Michael and Justine feeling nervous and depressed. And so it was a nice surprise to receive an e-mail from Richard Branson’s sister Vanessa inviting me to appear at a salon of talks at her Marrakech palace/holiday home/hotel, the Riad El Fenn. “Other speakers,” she e-mailed, “include Clive Stafford Smith—human-rights lawyer. David Chipperfield—architect. Hans-Ulrich Obrist—Serpentine curator. Redha Moali—rags-to-riches Algerian arts entrepreneur.” I googled her Riad. It combines “grandeur and historic architecture with hideaway nooks, terraces and gardens” and is “just five minutes walk from the world-famous Djemaa el Fna square and bustling maze of streets that make up the souk.”
And so it was that, four weeks later, I sat reading a book underneath an orange tree in Vanessa Branson’s Marrakech courtyard. Vanessa Branson lay supine on a velvet bed in the corner. Her friends lounged around, drinking herbal teas. One had been the CEO of Sony in Germany, another owned a diamond mine in South Africa. I was feeling tired and jittery and less languid than the others, who were dressed in white linen and seemed carefree.
Then I heard a noise. I looked up from my book. Vanessa Branson was rushing across the courtyard to welcome someone new. He too was dressed in linen and was tall and thin, with the gait of a British man of privilege. He might have been a diplomat. After a few minutes, he bounded over to me. “I’m Clive Stafford Smith,” he said.
