The Panic Virus

by Seth Mnookin; Dan B. Miller

  The stall in her career gave McCarthy a chance to focus on her personal life. In 1999, she married an actor and director named John Mallory Asher, and in 2002 she gave birth to the couple’s first child, a boy named Evan. Shortly thereafter, she became an unlikely publishing phenomenon: A decade after the combination of her just-one-of-the-guys attitude and girl-next-door good looks made her the object of teenage boys’ fantasies, she discovered that her willingness to openly and honestly tackle subjects other people were too timid (or uncomfortable) to address held a similar appeal for thirtysomething women trying to navigate their way through adulthood. In 2004, she released Belly Laughs, a book about pregnancy in which McCarthy addressed topics like butt-hole problems and pubic hair fiascos; it ultimately sold more than 500,000 copies. Her next book, 2005’s Baby Laughs, didn’t do quite as well, although its sales figure of 250,000 copies still made it an unqualified success.

  Then things seemed to unravel once again. Dirty Love, a film McCarthy wrote and starred in and which Asher directed, was released to universally bad reviews: In his zero star write-up, Roger Ebert said the “hopelessly incompetent” film was “so pitiful, it doesn’t rise to the level of badness.” Instead of being refreshingly honest, McCarthy’s attention-getting antics—like the scene in Dirty Love that featured her wallowing in a pool of her own menstrual blood—seemed increasingly desperate and contrived. Even Life Laughs, the third book in her trilogy on early motherhood, didn’t do nearly as well as her previous two books. By the end of the year, her personal life had also hit a rough patch, and she and Asher filed for divorce. To top it all off, Evan, her perfect, blond-haired, blue-eyed little boy, was having problems of his own.

  • • •

  In the spring of 2006, McCarthy and her son were walking in downtown Los Angeles when a woman approached them. “You’re an Indigo,” the stranger said. “And your son is a Crystal.” McCarthy barely had time to shout “Yes!” before the woman left as quickly as she’d come.

  That chance encounter served as McCarthy’s introduction to a New Age movement based on the belief that a group of spiritually advanced children known as Crystals are destined to lead humanity to its next evolutionary plateau. (Parents of Crystals recognize each other through the purplish aura they emit, hence their designation as Indigos.) It was only then, McCarthy would say later, “[that] things in my life started to make sense.” Evan had always been a unique kid—he seemed less social and more intense than other children his age—and several doctors had already broached the topic of whether he had a behavioral or developmental disorder.

  McCarthy’s embrace of Crystal beliefs gave her the strength to reject doctors’ efforts to squash Evan’s spirit. “The reason why I was drawn to Indigo, and probably many other mothers [are] too, was the fact that my son was given a diagnosis for a behavior issue,” she explained later. “I would not accept this negative label they were trying to put on my son and found out that he mirrored Indigo characteristics. . . . Once moms educate themselves, and find out what other mothers of Indigos do for behavior issues, we generally find the answers and solutions for everything.”

  That summer, McCarthy launched IndigoMoms.com, an online portal for Indigos looking to connect with one another. It included a social networking area called “Mommy+Me,” a forum where McCarthy would answer readers’ questions, and an e-commerce section that offered tank tops and baby doll tees for sale alongside one-year subscriptions to something called a “Prayer Wheel”; the services of McCarthy’s sister, Jo Jo, a “celebrity makeup artist”; and Quantum Radiance Treatment by McCarthy’s friend Nicole Pigeault.

  IndigoMoms.com never really caught on, and by the end of 2006, McCarthy pulled the plug on the site. (It remains available only through a service that collects archives of Web pages.) As it turned out, by that point McCarthy was already deeply involved with another parent-led movement defined by its opposition to conventional medicine. In 2005, McCarthy had contacted Lisa Ackerman, the mother who’d founded Talk About Curing Autism five years earlier. “Jenny was looking for information to help her son Evan, who was recently diagnosed,” Ackerman wrote in an essay titled “TACA and Jenny McCarthy.” “Jenny is an extraordinary mom. She ran with every bit of information that she gleaned from TACA’s website, individual mentoring and community outreach efforts and was back when she needed more. As Evan improved Jenny kept good on her promise to get involved.” In fact, McCarthy got so involved that she donated a portion of the proceeds from Life Laughs, which was released several months before she launched her Indigo Web site, to the organization.

  Shortly thereafter, McCarthy told Ackerman she’d decided to write her next book about autism—and, McCarthy vowed, when it came out she’d publicize it on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The narrative for this latest project would be in stark contrast to the Crystal Child one McCarthy had been promoting on The Tonight Show and in newspaper interviews: Now, McCarthy said, her mistreatment at the hands of Evan’s doctors had begun when she’d tried to discuss with them her concerns about vaccines. The only two constants of McCarthy’s competing story lines were her refusal to let the medical establishment victimize her and her promise of succor to anyone who followed her path. “I say, Okay, let’s look at your choices,” she says of the message she’s currently pitching to the public. “You have a choice of listening to the medical community, which offers no hope, or you can listen to our community, which offers hope. . . . Our side at least gives you . . . somewhere to go.”

  True to her word, on September 18, 2007, one day after Louder than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism was released, McCarthy appeared as a guest on Oprah. That afternoon, with Ackerman looking on from the second row of the studio audience, McCarthy told Winfrey that her journey had begun with a flash of insight that sounded similarly dramatic to the one that had occurred in 2006 when a stranger told McCarthy that her son was a Crystal Child—except, McCarthy said, this epiphany had taken place two years earlier, when she awoke one morning with a terrifying premonition that something was wrong. Shortly thereafter, Evan, who was around two years old at the time, had the first in a series of what McCarthy described as life-threatening seizures. For months, McCarthy said, her requests for help for her child were dismissed by every doctor she approached. (At times, McCarthy said, her doctors’ condescension would mutate into rage: She claimed that one pediatrician had become so incensed by her insistent questioning that he shouted at her to “leave the hospital—now!”) It wasn’t until Evan suffered a nearfatal heart attack that he was properly diagnosed as autistic—and even then, McCarthy said, she wasn’t offered any help or support. “I got the, ‘Sorry, your son has autism’ [speech],” she told Winfrey. “I didn’t get the here’s-what-to-do-next pamphlet.”

  Winfrey, who praised Louder than Words as “beautiful” and “riveting,” didn’t ask McCarthy why she hadn’t mentioned the seizures or the screaming doctors or the heart attack during her Indigo phase, when she’d claimed that treating Evan for a behavioral disorder would be akin to “taking away all the beautiful characteristics he came into this world with.” In fact, neither Winfrey—nor, seemingly, anyone else—asked McCarthy about her involvement with the Indigo movement at all. Instead, Winfrey praised McCarthy’s unwillingness to bow to authority, her faith in herself, and her use of the Internet as a tool for bypassing society’s traditional gatekeepers:

  MCCARTHY: First thing I did—Google. I put in autism. And I started my research.

  WINFREY: Thank God for Google.

  MCCARTHY: I’m telling you.

  WINFREY: Thank God for Google.

  MCCARTHY: The University of Google is where I got my degree from. . . . And I put in autism and something came up that changed my life, that led me on this road to recovery, which said autism—it was in the corner of the screen—is reversible and treatable. And I said, What?! That has to be an ad for a hocus pocus thing, because if autism is reversible and treatable, well, then it would be on Oprah.

  The
ad McCarthy saw was for a wheat-and dairy-free diet. Within weeks of her putting Evan on this new regimen, McCarthy said, he’d doubled his language, his eye contact improved, he began smiling more, and he became more affectionate. “Once you detox them,” McCarthy said, “your kids are going to get better. You’re cleaning up their gut. You’re cleaning up their brain. There is a connection.”

  Winfrey nodded in agreement—but how, she asked, did McCarthy know to try this specific diet as opposed to the “fifty other things” that showed up online?

  MCCARTHY: Mommy instinct.

  WINFREY: Mommy instinct.

  MCCARTHY: Mommy instinct. . . . I went, okay—I know my kid. . . . I know what’s going on in his body, so this is what makes sense to me. . . .

  WINFREY: Okay—so this is what Jenny says really worked for her. It doesn’t mean it will work for all children. . . . It worked for her. This is her book. She wrote the book. So she knows what she’s talking about.

  As it turned out, Mommy instinct had done more than just show McCarthy which of the many alternative “biomedical” treatments she should pursue—it had also given her insight into what had made Evan sick in the first place. Winfrey, in much the manner she’d done with Katie Wright five months earlier, prompted McCarthy to share that information with the audience:

  WINFREY: So what do you think triggered the autism? I know you have a theory.

  MCCARTHY: I do have a theory.

  WINFREY: Mom instinct.

  MCCARTHY: Mommy instinct. You know, everyone knows the stats, which being one in one hundred and fifty children have autism.

  WINFREY: It used to be one in ten thousand.

  MCCARTHY: And, you know, what I have to say is this: What number does it have to be? What number will it take for people just to start listening to what the mothers of children who have autism have been saying for years? Which is that we vaccinated our baby and something happened. . . .

  Right before his MMR shot, I said to the doctor, I have a very bad feeling about this shot. This is the autism shot, isn’t it? And he said, “No, that is ridiculous. It is a mother’s desperate attempt to blame something on autism.” And he swore at me. . . . And not soon thereafter, I noticed that change in the pictures: Boom! Soul, gone from his eyes.

  At that point, Winfrey picked up an index card. “Of course,” she said, “we talked to the Centers for Disease Control and asked them whether or not there is a link between autism and childhood vaccinations. And here’s what they said.” As she started to read, the screen filled with text.

  We simply don’t know what causes most cases of autism, but we’re doing everything we can to find out. The vast majority of science to date does not support an association between thimerosal in vaccines and autism. . . . It is important to remember, vaccines protect and save lives.

  When Winfrey appeared back on screen, she turned to McCarthy, who was ready with a response: “My science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.” There was little question that Winfrey’s sympathies lay with the “mother warrior” who’d written a “beautiful new book” about how she’d cured her son of a supposedly incurable disease as opposed to the faceless bureaucracy that couldn’t provide any answers.

  Before the end of the show, Winfrey told viewers that McCarthy would be available to answer questions for anyone who logged on to a “special [online] message board just for this show so you can share your stories.” One fan asked McCarthy what she would do if she could do it all over again. “The universe didn’t mean for me to do anything else besides what I did,” McCarthy answered, “but if I had another child, I would not vaccinate.” A mother wrote in to say that she had decided not to give her child the MMR vaccine “due to the autism link.” McCarthy was delighted. “I’m so proud you followed your mommy instinct,” she wrote.

  Within a week of her appearance on Oprah, during which time McCarthy had also broken the news about her relationship with the comedian Jim Carrey, McCarthy had repeated her story on Larry King Live and Good Morning America. On those three shows alone, she reached between fifteen and twenty million viewers—and that wasn’t including people who watched repeats or saw the clips online. Print publications told her story as well: People, which is one of the largest general interest magazines in the country, ran an excerpt from Louder than Words under the headline “My Autistic Son: A Story of Hope.” The media blitz’s effects were felt immediately. Ackerman, who’d appointed McCarthy as TACA’s celebrity spokesperson in June, said the group was so swamped with e-mails from parents pleading for information about how to cure their children that it scrapped its more cautious expansion plans and went national that fall. “Had to,” she said. “Jenny forced us.”

  McCarthy’s sudden ubiquity did more than give families affected by autism hope for a miracle cure—it also further legitimized a movement that still had not completely shed its reputation as being on the scientific fringe. Dan Olmsted, a former UPI reporter who is one of the editors of Age of Autism, gives McCarthy credit for single-handedly pushing vaccine skeptics into the mainstream: “To anybody who comes to this issue from the environmental and recovery side of this debate—the idea that something happened to these kids, and it’s probably a toxic exposure—Jenny McCarthy is the biggest thing to happen since the word autism was coined.”

  The media’s willingness to indulge McCarthy’s campaign and its disinclination to provide an accurate representation of the issues at stake continued unabated in 2008. On World Autism Awareness Day that April, Larry King devoted his full hour-long broadcast to “Jenny McCarthy’s Autism Fight.” Also appearing on the show that evening were David Kirby and Jay Gordon, the celebrity pediatrician who’d been treating Evan ever since McCarthy became convinced he’d been harmed by the MMR vaccine. Together, the trio repeatedly shouted down David Tayloe, the president-elect of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

  GORDON: David Kirby’s book is entitled Evidence of Harm, okay? The evidence is there. We have to address the evidence. We do not have respect for the instincts of our parents. We don’t have respect for the immune system. The immune system is a complicated, complicated system in the body, complex—

  TAYLOE: But you need scientific evidence that—

  GORDON: You need to prove it’s safe!

  MCCARTHY: First!

  GORDON: Yes!

  KIRBY: There is a bill in Congress to study vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations in this country. Doctor, would you support that legislation? Would you?

  TAYLOE: We support—

  KIRBY: Do you?

  TAYLOE: We are not afraid of the truth at the American Academy of Pediatrics—

  MCCARTHY: Well, will you support the unvaccinated/vaccinated study?

  Two months later, McCarthy and Jim Carrey led a “Green Our Vaccines” rally in Washington that also featured Gordon and included a keynote address by Robert Kennedy. (In the TACA press release announcing the rally, Ackerman appeared to confuse Kennedy with his uncle, Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy: “Having Senator Kennedy as part of the supporters for the Green Our Vaccines Rally is an honor.”) McCarthy’s rally-related appearances on Good Morning America and Fox News’s On the Record with Greta Van Susteren didn’t even feature anyone representing an opposing viewpoint.

  By that time, McCarthy’s autism activism had become a full-time job. She’d taken over Generation Rescue, which was rebranded as “Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey’s Autism Organization.” (After the couple’s split in the spring of 2010, the Web site was listed either as “Jenny McCarthy’s Generation Rescue” or “Jenny McCarthy’s Autism Organization.”) By the end of the year, she’d published Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds and signed a deal with the licensing agency Brand Sense to create Too Good by Jenny, a line of products ranging from bedding to cleaning supplies that “will be positioned as providing safe, non-toxic surroundings for children.” She’d also launched Teach2Talk Academy, a school for autistic children, an
d developed a series of Teach2Talk DVDs designed to improve autistic children’s “imagination” and “empathy toward others” by having them mimic what they see on screen.

  The following spring, McCarthy was booked as the keynote speaker at the annual Autism-One conference at the Westin O’Hare. A half-hour before she was scheduled to appear, most of the seats in the Westin’s 7,400-square-foot Grand Ballroom had already been claimed. Twenty minutes later, people were sitting two and three deep along the walls and in the aisles. Before the start of the main event, the restless audience had to sit through a presentation by Sarah Clifford Scheflen, a thirty-one-year-old speech pathologist who was the co-founder of Teach2Talk. (In April 2010, Teach2Talk Academy was closed after McCarthy and Scheflen parted ways due to “different visions for the school.”) Scheflen appreciated that putting autistic children in front of a TV might seem to some to be a counterintuitive way to teach children with developmental disorders how to interact appropriately with actual human beings.56 “People always ask me, ‘Why, Sarah? Why does it work with the TV and not one-on-one?’ ” she said. “Children tend to be strong visual learners. . . . Sometimes I get distracted when I see two pairs of shoes on the floor, and I think that’s what happens when kids come into my office.” A handful of people in the audience chuckled, although most seemed nonplussed by Scheflen’s comparison. “So I would show the child the prerecorded model and then the child would watch the video and imitate that—because most children learn through imitation.”