So You've Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson

  At that, a few women glanced over at the woman I took to be Raquel. Their looks seemed wary and deferential. Pretty much every woman here was in for drugs or prostitution. But the comment and the glances made me think that with Raquel it was something else.

  Raquel’s eyes darted around the room. She fidgeted a lot. The other women were stiller. I wondered what Raquel had done, but I didn’t know the etiquette of how to ask. Then, as soon as the meeting broke up, Raquel immediately dashed across the room to me and told me everything. I somehow managed to get it all down—taking notes frantically like a secretary in Mad Men.

  —

  “I was born in Puerto Rico,” she said. “I was sexually abused from the age of four. When I was six, we moved to New Jersey. Every memory I have of growing up is a memory of being punched in the face and told I was worthless. When I was fifteen, my brother broke my nose. I ended up covered in blood. When I was sixteen, I had my first boyfriend. Three months later I was married. I started smoking pot, drinking. I cheated on my husband. I left him. Eighteen, nineteen was a big blur. I tried heroin. Thank God I don’t have an addictive personality. I drank like a fish. We’d go to bars, wait for people to come out, take their money, and make fun of how they screamed for their moms. Suddenly, holy shit, I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant with the only thing that’s ever going to love me. My son was born January 25, 1996. I went to business school, dropped out. I had a daughter. We moved to Florida. In Florida we’d have water fights, movie nights. I’d buy all their favorite food and lay it all out on the bed and we’d pile in and watch movies until we all passed out. We played baseball in the rain. My son loves comedy, drama, he sings. He won a talent show when he was fourteen. I would make him do his homework over and over. I used to make him do five-page reports, read encyclopedias. I shoved him out of the bed when he was fourteen and slapped him. A girl had texted him, ‘Are you a virgin?’ I was ballistic. I slapped the shit out of him. It left nail marks.”

  —

  Ten months ago Raquel had sent her children to stay with their father in Florida for a vacation. As she watched them walk down the tunnel toward the plane, her son suddenly turned and called back at her, “How much do you want to bet I don’t come back?” Then he said, “Just kidding.”

  Raquel yelled back at him, “How much do you want to bet you don’t get on that plane?”

  Her son walked on for a few more steps. Then he called back, “We should make that bet.”

  “And that was the last thing he ever said to me,” Raquel said.

  —

  That Friday the Department of Children and Families turned up at Raquel’s house. Her son was accusing her of child abuse.

  “He used to ask me if he could stay out until nine p.m,” Raquel said. “I’d say no. He’d ask why not. I’d say, ‘There are people out there that can hurt you.’ But I was hurting him more than anyone. Thank God they got away from me when they did. He’s safe. He’s getting the chance to be a teenager. He’s a very angry boy because I made him that way. My daughter is very shy, withdrawn, because I made her that way. I just pray they’ll be normal.”

  —

  For the first few months of Raquel’s incarceration she was downstairs on a nontherapeutic floor.

  “What was that like?” I asked her.

  “Downstairs is chaos,” she replied. “It’s borderline barbaric. Downstairs girls get slapped with the food trays. Some girl will decide she doesn’t like you. She’ll pull you into a room and lock the door and you’ll fight and whoever comes out unbroken wins. Up here we eat coffee cake. We watch TV. We spread books across the table. It’s like we’re in a college cafeteria sipping our coffee. Sophisticated!”

  Just then there was commotion. A woman behind us had collapsed and was having a seizure. She was carried away on a stretcher.

  “Feel better!” some of the other women shouted after her.

  “Last call for medications,” an officer called out.

  Jim and I left the prison and walked back toward his car.

  “How long do you think Raquel will stay in prison?” I asked him.

  “We’ll know more in two weeks,” he replied. “That’s when we’re due to hear from the prosecutor. My guess is a few more months.”

  Jim said he’d pass on the news when he heard it. Then he drove me to the train station.

  I didn’t hear from Jim two weeks later, so I e-mailed: “How did things go with Raquel?”

  Jim e-mailed back. “She received difficult news yesterday. An eight-count indictment. She is in significant emotional pain.”

  I telephoned him. “What are they charging her with?” I asked.

  “Attempted murder in the first degree,” Jim replied. He sounded shaken. “She threw a knife at her son. They’re going for a twenty-year jail sentence.”

  • • •

  Six months later. Three people sat together in the council chamber at Newark City Hall: Jim, Raquel, and I.

  Jim had intervened. The prosecutors were persuaded that Raquel was a victim of an “abuse cycle.” And so instead of twenty years she served four more months and then they let her go.

  “If shaming worked, if prison worked, then it would work,” Jim said to me. “But it doesn’t work.” He paused. “Look, some people need to go to prison forever. Some people are incapable . . . but most people . . .”

  “It’s disorienting,” I said, “that the line between hell and redemption in the U.S. justice system is so fine.”

  “It’s public defenders that are overwhelmed and prosecutors that are following guidelines,” Jim said.

  This has been a book about people who really didn’t do very much wrong. Justine and Lindsey, certainly, were destroyed for nothing more than telling bad jokes. And while we were busy steadfastly refusing them forgiveness, Jim was quietly arranging the salvation of someone who had committed a far more serious offense. It struck me that if deshaming would work for a maelstrom like Raquel, if it would restore someone like her to health, then we need to think twice about raining down vengeance and anger as our default position.

  It wasn’t freedom without boundaries for Raquel. She’d been banned from contacting her children for five years. Her son would be twenty-two then, her daughter seventeen. “So even when she’s seventeen, any contact will have to be okayed with their father,” Raquel told me, “because my parental rights have been stripped.” But still, she gets updates. “My friends from Florida are still friends with them. My friend actually called me yesterday and said, ‘You will never guess who is Facebooking me right now.’ I said, ‘Who?’ She said, ‘Your daughter.’ I said, ‘No way!’ My daughter is sending her messages, and she’s sitting there reading them to me. So apparently my daughter has a little crush on someone. He’s got a cleft in his chin. He’s got sandy brown hair . . .”

  I told Raquel it was nice to see her in such a good mood. And that’s when she told me her news.

  “Yesterday, when group was over, Miss Blake called me into her office.”

  Miss Blake was the manager of Raquel’s halfway house.

  “She said, ‘Raquel, I’ve seen how you carry yourself, how the guys listen to you. I want to offer you a job here. Can you get me your résumé?’”

  Raquel replied, “As luck would have it, I have a résumé right here.”

  Then Raquel said, “Miss Blake, is this really happening?”

  And Miss Blake nodded.

  • • •

  I got a call from Michael Fertik’s people. They were ready to start on Lindsey Stone.

  Fourteen

  Cats and Ice Cream and Music

  Are there any hobbies you’re particularly passionate about right now? Marathons? Photography?”

  Farukh Rashid in San Francisco was talking on a conference line to Lindsey Stone. I was listening in from my sofa in New York.

  I’d m
et Farukh a few months earlier when Michael’s publicist, Leslie Hobbs, gave me a tour of the Reputation.com offices—two open-plan floors with soundproofed booths for sensitive calls to celebrity clients. She introduced me to Farukh and explained that he usually works on Michael’s VIP customers—the CEOs and celebrities.

  “It’s nice that you’re giving Lindsey the bespoke service,” I said.

  “She needs it,” Leslie replied.

  She really did. Michael’s strategists had been researching Lindsey’s online life and had discovered literally nothing about her besides that “silence and respect” incident.

  “That five seconds of her life is her entire Internet presence?” I said.

  Farukh nodded. “And it’s not just this Lindsey Stone. Anyone who has that name has the same problem. There are sixty Lindsey Stones in the U.S. There’s a designer in Austin, Texas, a photographer, there’s even a gymnast, and they’re all being defined by that one photograph.”

  “I’m sorry to have given you such a tricky one,” I said, feeling a little proud of myself.

  “Oh, no, we’re excited,” Farukh replied. “It’s a challenging scenario but a great scenario. We’re going to introduce the Internet to the real Lindsey Stone.”

  “Are cats important to you?” Farukh asked Lindsey on the conference call.

  “Absolutely,” said Lindsey.

  I heard Farukh type the word cats into his computer. Farukh was young and energetic and just as upbeat and buoyant and lacking in cynicism and malevolent irony as he was hoping to make Lindsey seem. His Twitter profile said he enjoys “biking, hiking, and family time.” His plan was to create Lindsey Stone Tumblrs and LinkedIn pages and WordPress blogs and Instagram accounts and YouTube accounts to overwhelm that terrible photograph, wash it away in a tidal wave of positivity, away to a place on Google where normal people don’t look—a place like page two of the search results. According to Google’s own research into our “eye movements,” 53 percent of us don’t go beyond the first two search results, and 89 percent don’t look down past the first page.

  “What the first page looks like,” Michael’s strategist, Jered Higgins, told me during my tour of their offices, “determines what people think of you.”

  As a writer and journalist—as well as a father and human being—this struck me as a really horrifying way of knowing the world.

  “I’m passionate about music,” Lindsey told Farukh. “I like Top 40 chart music.”

  “That’s really good,” said Farukh. “Let’s work with that. Do you play an instrument?”

  “I used to,” Lindsey said. “I was kind of self-taught. It’s just something I mess around with. It’s not anything I . . .” At first, she’d sounded like she’d been enjoying the fun of it all, but now she seemed self-conscious, like the endeavor was giving her troubling existential thoughts—questions like “Who am I?” and “What are we doing?”

  “I’m having a hard time with this,” she said. “As a normal person I don’t really know how to . . . brand myself online. I’m trying to come up with things for you guys to write about. But it’s hard, you know?”

  “Piano? Guitar? Drums?” said Farukh. “Or travel? Where do you go?”

  “I don’t know,” Lindsey said. “I go to the cave. I go to the beach. I get ice cream.”

  At Farukh’s request, Lindsey had been e-mailing him photographs that didn’t involve her inadvertently flipping off military cemeteries. She’d been providing biographical details too. Her favorite TV show was Parks and Recreation. Her employment history included five years at Walmart, “which was kind of soul-suckingly awful.”

  “Are you sure you want to say that Walmart was soul-sucking?” Farukh said.

  “Oh . . . What? Really?” Lindsey laughed as if to say, “Come on! Everyone knows that about Walmart!” But then she hesitated.

  The conference call was proving an unexpectedly melancholic experience. It was nothing to do with Farukh. He really felt for Lindsey and wanted to do a good job for her. The sad thing was that Lindsey had incurred the Internet’s wrath because she was impudent and playful and foolhardy and outspoken. And now here she was, working with Farukh to reduce herself to safe banalities—to cats and ice cream and Top 40 chart music. We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland.

  • • •

  There was a time when Michael Fertik wouldn’t have needed to be so calculating. Back in the mid-1990s search engines were interested only in how many times a particular keyword appeared within a page. To be the number-one Jon Ronson search term on AltaVista or HotBot, you just had to write “Jon Ronson” over and over again. Which for me would be the most fantastic website to chance upon, but for everyone else, less so.

  But then two students at Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had their idea. Why not build a search engine that ranked websites by popularity instead? If someone is linking to your page, that’s one vote. A link, they figured, is like a citation—a nod of respect. If the page linking to your page has a lot of links into it, then that page counts for more votes. An esteemed person bestowing their admiration on you is worth more than some loner doing the same. And that was it. They called their invention PageRank, after Larry Page, and as soon as they turned the algorithm on, we early searchers were spellbound.

  This was why Farukh needed to create LinkedIn and Tumblr and Twitter pages for Lindsey. They come with a built-in high PageRank. The Google algorithm prejudges them as well liked. But for Michael Fertik, the problem with Google is that it is forever evolving—adjusting its algorithm in ways it keeps secret.

  “Google is a tricky beast and a moving target,” Michael told me. “And so we try to decipher it, to reverse engineer it.”

  This was what Michael knew right now: “Google tends to like stuff that’s old. It seems to think old stuff has a certain authority. And Google tends to like stuff that’s new. With the intervening stuff, week six, week twelve, there’s a dip.” Which was why Michael’s people predicted that Lindsey’s love of cats or whatever would achieve “initial strong impact,” followed by “fluctuation.” And after fluctuation: “reversion.”

  Michael’s clients dread reversion. There’s nothing more dispiriting than seeing the nice new judgments disappear down to page two and the horrific old judgments bubble back up again. But reversion is actually their friend, Jered Higgins told me. Reversion is when you think Glenn Close is dead but she suddenly leaps up in the bath, apparently filled with a new violent fervor, but really she’s muddled and wounded and vulnerable.

  “Reversion shows that the algorithm is uncertain,” Jered said. “It’s the algorithm shifting things around and wondering what, from a mathematical standpoint, is the story that needs to be told about this person.”

  And during this uncertainty, Jered said, “we go in and blast it.”

  The blasting—the bombardment of the algorithm with Tumblr pages about Lindsey’s trips to the beach, the shock and awe of these pleasant banalities—has to be choreographed just right. Google knows if it’s being manipulated. Alarm bells go off. “So we have a strategic schedule for content creation and publication,” Jered said. “We create a natural-looking activity online. That’s a lot of accumulated intelligence.”

  • • •

  Michael Fertik took me for dinner and he talked to me about the criticism that people often level at him, that “any change of search results is manipulating truth and chilling free speech.” He drank some wine. “But there is a chilling of behavior that goes along with a virtual lynching. There is a life modification.”

  “I know,” I said. “For a year Lindsey Stone had felt too plagued to even go to karaoke.” And karaoke is something you do alone in a room with your friends.

  “And that’s not an unusual reaction,” Michael said. “People change their phone numbers. They don’t leave the house. They go into therapy. They
have signs of PTSD. It’s like the Stasi. We’re creating a culture where people feel constantly surveilled, where people are afraid to be themselves.”

  “Like the NSA,” I said.

  “This is more frightening than the NSA,” said Michael. “The NSA is looking for terrorists. They’re not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about you.”

  —

  I wondered what to make of Michael’s Stasi analogy. There’s an old Internet adage that as soon as you compare something to the Nazis you lose the argument. Maybe the same could be said about the Stasi—the East Germans’ secret police force during the Cold War. They would, after all, creep into the homes of suspected enemies of the state and spray radiation onto them as they slept, their idea being to use the radiation as a tracking device. Stasi agents would follow them through crowds, pointing Geiger counters at them. A lot of suspected enemies of the state died of unusual cancers during the Stasi’s reign.

  But the Stasi didn’t only inflict physical horror. Their main endeavor was to create the most elaborate surveillance network in world history. It didn’t seem unreasonable to scrutinize this aspect of them in the hope it might teach us something about our own social media surveillance network.

  In Anna Funder’s seminal history of the Stasi—Stasiland—she interviews a woman named Julia who was one day called in for interrogation. The Stasi had intercepted love letters between her and her Western boyfriend. They were sitting on the officer’s desk in the interrogation room.

  There was a pile of her letters to the Italian. There was a pile of his letters back to her. This man knew everything. He could see when she had doubts. He could see by what sweet-talking she had let herself be placated. He could see the Italian boyfriend’s longing laid bare.

  Julia told Anna Funder that she was “definitely psychologically damaged” by the incident—the way the officer read through her letters in front of her, making little comments. “That’s probably why I react so extremely to approaches from men. I experience them as another possible invasion of my intimate sphere.”