So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

  I knew a little about him from his interview on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs—how he was all set for a life in British society until one day at his boarding school he saw a drawing in a book of Joan of Arc being burned at the stake and realized she looked like his sister. So in his twenties he became a death-row lawyer in Mississippi, and he has been defending death-row and Guantánamo prisoners ever since. The Desert Island Discs presenter, Sue Lawley, treated him with baffled amazement, like Queen Victoria would a lord who had gone off to explore darkest Africa. Ten minutes after introducing himself, he was walking me through the corridors of Vanessa Branson’s labyrinthine palace telling me why prisons should be abolished.

  “Let me ask you three questions,” he said. “And then you’ll see it my way. Question One: What’s the worst thing that you have ever done to someone? It’s okay. You don’t have to confess it out loud. Question Two: What’s the worst criminal act that has ever been committed against you? Question Three: Which of the two was the most damaging for the victim?”

  The worst criminal act that has ever been committed against me was burglary. How damaging was it? Hardly damaging at all. I felt theoretically violated at the idea of a stranger wandering through my house. But I got the insurance money. I was mugged one time. I was eighteen. The man who mugged me was an alcoholic. He saw me coming out of a supermarket. “Give me your alcohol,” he yelled. He punched me in the face, grabbed my groceries, and ran away. There wasn’t any alcohol in my bag. I was upset for a few weeks, but it passed.

  And what was the worst thing I had ever done to someone? It was a terrible thing. It was devastating for them. It wasn’t against the law.

  Clive’s point was that the criminal justice system is supposed to repair harm, but most prisoners—young, black—have been incarcerated for acts far less emotionally damaging than the injuries we noncriminals perpetrate upon one another all the time—bad husbands, bad wives, ruthless bosses, bullies, bankers.

  I thought about Justine Sacco. How many of the people piling on her had been emotionally damaged by what they had read? As far as I could tell, only one person was damaged in that pile-on.

  “I’m writing a book about public shaming,” I told Clive. “With citizen justice, we’re bringing public shame back in a big way. You’ve spent your life in actual courts. Is it the same there? Is shaming utilized as a kind of default position in real courtrooms too?”

  “Oh, yes!” he replied, quite happily. “I do it all the time. I’ve humiliated a lot of people. Especially experts.”

  “What’s your method?” I asked him.

  “Oh, it’s a very simple game,” he said. “You need to figure out something that’s so esoteric the expert can’t possibly know about it. Maybe it’s something that’s not relevant to the case, but it has to be something they cannot know the answer to. They’ll be incapable of saying they don’t know. So they’ll gradually walk down the garden to the place where they look really stupid.”

  “Why are they incapable of saying they don’t know?”

  “It’s their entire profession,” Clive said. “It’s respect. It’s a big deal being an expert. Imagine the things you can discuss at dinner parties as opposed to the other boring people at the table. You’re the witness who put Ted Bundy away. They’ll do anything to not look stupid. That’s the key thing. And if you can make them look stupid, everything else falls by the wayside.”

  Clive made it sound as if shaming were as natural as breathing in the court world and as if it had been that way forever. And, of course, I understood that witnesses needed to be grilled, their honesty tested. But it’s odd that so many of us see shaming how free-market libertarians see capitalism, as a beautiful beast that must be allowed to run free.

  Those of us on social media were just starting out on our shaming crusade. In the real courts, according to Clive, it was venerated as a first-line tactic. I wondered: When shaming takes on a disproportionate significance within an august institution, when it entrenches itself over generations, what are the consequences? What does it do to the participants?

  Twelve

  The Terror

  A dozen men and women sat around a conference table at the Piccadilly Hotel in Manchester. There was a marine metallurgist, a pediatric nurse, an occupational therapist specializing in brain injuries, a laboratory technician working with the metropolitan police drug squad, someone from the tobacco industry, a social worker who visits the homes of parents suspected of abusing or neglecting their children, and so on. These people had just one thing in common: They were rookie court expert witnesses. They were all hoping to make extra money from the court world. Like me, they didn’t know the minutiae of how a day in court worked. None of them had yet been called as experts. Which was why they had signed up for this “courtroom familiarization” course, organized by the legal-training company Bond Solon. I had signed up after my conversation with Clive. I was curious to know if shaming was a significant enough part of the court milieu to merit a mention in a courtroom familiarization course.

  It merited a mention straightaway. There was a whiteboard. Our trainer for the day, John, stood next to it. “You,” he told us, by way of introduction, “are a bone being dragged over by two dogs that want to win. And if you get between the lawyer and his goal, you’re going to get hurt.” He surveyed the room. “Appreciate what the lawyer is trying to do. The lawyer hopes to drag you down. He’ll call you incompetent, inexperienced. You might start to feel angry, upset. He will try and drag you outside your area of expertise, your circle of facts. How? How will he try to do this?”

  There was a silence. Then it dawned on the rookie experts that this wasn’t a rhetorical question.

  “Facial expression?” the marine metallurgist said.

  “What do you mean?” said John.

  “Smiling or not smiling,” the metallurgist said. “Looking unmoved. Lulling us into a false sense of security and then pouncing. Looking bored?”

  John wrote the suggestions down on the whiteboard.

  “Unnerve us with a disbelieving, patronizing, or sarcastic voice?” asked the social worker.

  “Might they snigger?” the lab technician asked.

  “No, that would sound unprofessional,” said John. “But they might go for incredulity. They might say, ‘Really?’”

  “What would happen if I nervously laugh?” the lab technician said. “Sometimes, when I’m under pressure, I nervously laugh.”

  “Don’t,” John warned. “If you do, they’ll say, ‘Are you finding it funny? My client isn’t.’”

  “Are we allowed to ask them to stop if it gets too much for us?” the marine metallurgist said.

  “No,” said John. “You aren’t allowed to ask them to stop. Any other guesses?”

  “Pretend to mispronounce your name?” someone said.

  “Silence?” someone else said. Everyone cringed at the thought of silence.

  “Should we be concerned about the color of our clothes?” asked a care worker. “I hear someone wearing brown is considered less believable.”

  “That’s too deep for me,” said John.

  —

  I assumed that by lunchtime John would move away from shaming familiarization to other types of courtroom familiarization. But, really, that never happened. It turned out that shaming was such an integral part of the judicial process that the day was pretty much all about it. In the afternoon the experts were taught shame-avoidance techniques. When they first enter the dock, John told them, they should ask the court usher to bring them a glass of water. That would give them a moment to settle their nerves. They mustn’t pour the water themselves, but instead ask the court usher to. When the lawyer asks them a question, they should swivel on their hips and deliver their answer to the judge.

  “They’ll have a much harder time breaking you down that way,” John said. “Oddly enough, we like to look
at our tormentors. Maybe it’s linked into the Stockholm syndrome.”

  —

  The day ended with a mock cross-examination—a chance for the rookie experts to enact what they had learned. Matthew the marine metallurgist was the first to take the fake witness stand. John asked me to pretend to be the judge. Everyone smiled supportively at Matthew. He was a young man, wearing a pink shirt and a pink tie. He was shaking a little. He poured himself a glass of water. The water in the glass shook like a pond during a minor tremor.

  He forgot to ask the usher to pour him a glass of water, I thought.

  “Tell me your qualifications,” said John, taking the role of the cross-examining lawyer.

  “I have an upper first-class degree, sorry, second-class degree in metallurgy,” said Matthew, looking John in the eye.

  Then he bowed his head, like a geisha.

  Why is he not turning to face me? I thought.

  Matthew’s role-play lasted fifteen minutes. His face turned as crimson as a rusted cargo container as he mumbled about corroded coils. His mouth was dry, his voice trembling. He was a wreck.

  He’s weak, I felt myself think. He’s just so weak.

  Then I caught myself. Judging someone on how flustered he behaves in the face of a shaming is a truly strange and arbitrary way of forming an opinion on him.

  • • •

  I started corresponding with a woman from the Scottish town of New Cumnock. Her name was Linda Armstrong. One September night Linda’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Lindsay, was on her way home from a nearby bowling alley when a fourteen-year-old boy from the town followed her off the bus, coaxed her into a park, pushed her to the ground, and raped her. At the boy’s trial Lindsay was cross-examined by his lawyer, John Carruthers. Linda sent me a copy of the court transcript. “I have never read it,” she wrote to me, “because I couldn’t face it.”

  LINDSAY ARMSTRONG: He started following behind me and he was asking me out and everything and I kept saying no and then I walked away from him and then he followed behind me and he pulled my arm like that and he started trying to kiss me and everything and I kept shoving him away. I told him to leave me alone and then he shoved me down . . .

  JOHN CARRUTHERS: I wonder if we could see label number 7 please. Do you recognize those?

  LINDSAY ARMSTRONG: Uh huh.

  JOHN CARRUTHERS: What are they?

  LINDSAY ARMSTRONG: My pants.

  JOHN CARRUTHERS: Those are the pants that you were wearing that day?

  LINDSAY ARMSTRONG: Uh huh.

  JOHN CARRUTHERS: I wonder if you could hold them up to allow people to see them. Would it be fair to describe those pants as flimsy?

  LINDSAY ARMSTRONG: I don’t think what kind of pants I wear has anything to do with . . .

  JOHN CARRUTHERS: Well, hold them up again. It has got a name, the design of it, hasn’t it? What’s it called? Is it not a thong?

  LINDSAY ARMSTRONG: Yes.

  JOHN CARRUTHERS: I beg your pardon, Miss Armstrong. If I could ask you to hold them up?

  LINDSAY ARMSTRONG: Sorry.

  JOHN CARRUTHERS: Now you can see through those pants, is that correct?

  LINDSAY ARMSTRONG: Uh huh.

  JOHN CARRUTHERS: What does it say on the front?

  LINDSAY ARMSTRONG: Little devil.

  JOHN CARRUTHERS: Sorry?

  LINDSAY ARMSTRONG: Little devil.

  “Lindsay told me she was disgusted and very embarrassed about him making her hold up her underwear,” Linda e-mailed me. “She said she put them back down quickly and he shouted at her to pick them up again. Purely to let the jury see what type of underwear she wore. I think this was probably the most stressful part of the cross-examination for her, as she didn’t ever want to see those clothes again. There was absolutely no need for her to read out what was written on the front of them.”

  The boy was found guilty. He was sentenced to four years in a young-offenders’ institution (he eventually served two). Three weeks after the cross-examination, Lindsay’s parents found her in her bedroom at two a.m. She had put on “Bohemian Rhapsody” and had taken a lethal overdose of antidepressants.

  —

  A shaming can be like a distorting mirror at a funfair, taking human nature and making it look monstrous. Of course, it was tactics like those John Carruthers had used that compelled us to believe we could do justice better on social media. But still: Knee-jerk shaming is knee-jerk shaming and I wondered what would happen if we made a point of eschewing the shaming completely—if we refused to shame anyone. Could there be a corner of the justice system trying out an idea like that? It turned out that there was. And it was being run by about the last person you’d expect.

  Thirteen

  Raquel in a Post-Shaming World

  A little boy and his father were eating breakfast at an almost deserted restaurant in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan when they became aware of a man dashing across the floor toward them. He seemed to have something urgent to say. The boy looked anxious at what might happen next. The stranger took a breath.

  “STUDY HARD AT MATH!” he yelled.

  There was a silence. “Okay,” the boy said.

  At this, the man walked over to me and sat down, pleased to have had the chance to positively motivate a child. His phone rang. “Sorry,” he mouthed. He picked it up. “DID YOU DO TEN STRONG POWERFULS LAST NIGHT?” he hollered at the receiver. “WORD OF HONOR? GOOD FOR YOU! LOVE YOU, BYE!” He put the phone down. Then he smiled, delighted that this was proving to be such a gold-rush morning for him in terms of imparting inspirational messages.

  —

  His name was Jim McGreevey. He used to be the governor of New Jersey. He’d been a severe one too: “I never pardoned anyone,” he told me.

  “How does the pardoning process even work?” I asked him.

  “The attorney general’s office makes a recommendation,” he replied. “They contact the local county prosecutor, who contacts the parole officer of the person being considered for a pardon, who makes an official recommendation to the governor. Who was me.”

  I pictured the prisoners in their cells, concentrating hard on their letters to Jim, frantically wondering how best to lay out their mitigating circumstances. What would draw Jim in? What would grab the attention of the governor?

  “Can you remember any of their stories?” I asked Jim.

  “I never read any of them,” he said.

  “You never even looked?”

  Jim shook his head.

  “You were like a hanging judge,” I said.

  “I was a law-and-order Democrat,” Jim said.

  • • •

  Bill and Hillary Clinton had campaigned for Jim back in 2001. He was young, handsome, and married, with two beautiful daughters. He won a landslide victory and took his place at the heart of the New Jersey power elite—“as close,” as he’d later describe the state in his memoirs, “to Machiavelli’s cutthroat Venetian principality as anywhere on Earth.” It was a place where “political meetings start with a big bear hug” so that each hugger could surreptitiously check the other for a concealed wire: “A New Jersey pat down among friends.” Now Jim had a beach house, a helicopter, a staff of cooks, and Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion.

  Drumthwacket

  Jim considered himself awesome. He was inviolable. This was just after 9/11. He’d turn up at places like the offices of the Bergen Record—North Jersey’s regional newspaper—and hold forth, lording over the journalists, making grand pronouncements like “We will not skimp on security. We’ve even employed a security adviser from the Israeli Defense Forces, probably the best in the world.” Then he’d swan off, thinking how well it had gone, unaware that the editorial board of the Bergen Record was now wondering why on earth the governor of New Jersey had employed a man from the Israeli Defense Forc
es to advise on local security.

  • • •

  When Jim was a young boy, he’d lie in his tent at summer camp and “think I was hearing people in other tents call me a faggot and then realize that they were.” Jim stirred his coffee. “It’s funny how these things just stay.”

  “They really stay,” I said. “My life at fifteen and sixteen never leaves me.”

  We looked at each other then—Jim and I—two middle-aged men in a coffee shop in New York City.

  —

  Jim grew up, went to Columbia University, and would some nights walk all the way down from 116th Street to the Meatpacking District to look into the windows of the gay bars. But he couldn’t bring himself to go inside and he’d walk back up to 116th Street.

  He grew up to become an assistant prosecutor—“a prosecutor’s prosecutor”—and a town mayor. He read books on how to stop having gay thoughts. As a state assemblyman, he voted against gay marriage.

  He lost his first election campaign for the governorship by just twenty-seven thousand votes (out of more than two million votes cast). When he was campaigning for the second time, he went on a diplomatic junket to Israel where he found himself at a lunch in some rural town. The man sitting next to him introduced himself. His name was Golan, he said, and he worked for the local mayor.

  “I followed your campaign very closely,” Golan told Jim. “Twenty-seven thousand votes is a very narrow margin.”

  Jim was, he’d later write, “flattered beyond anything I’d ever experienced before. Nobody commits to memory the demographic standings of a politician halfway around the world.”

  Jim fell in love with Golan. He told him that if he came to New Jersey he’d give him an important concocted job title like “special counselor to the governor.” Golan agreed and, on his arrival in America, demanded an especially opulent office that had already been allocated to another member of Jim’s staff. Jim gave Golan the office.