So You've Been Publicly Shamed (PSY8)

by Jon Ronson

  A man had been waiting for her at Cape Town Airport. He was a Twitter user, @Zac_R. He took her photograph and posted it online. ‘Yup,’ he wrote, ‘@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town International. She’s decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.’

  Justine Sacco (in dark glasses) at Cape Town Airport. Photographed by @Zac_R and reproduced with his permission.

  Three weeks had passed since she pressed Send on the tweet. The New York Post had been following her to the gym. Newspapers were ransacking her Twitter feed for more horrors.

  And the award for classiest tweet of all time goes to … ‘I had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night.’ (4 February 2012)

  - ‘16 Tweets Justine Sacco Regrets’, Buzzfeed, 20 December 2013

  This was the only time Justine would ever talk to a journalist about what happened to her, she told me. It was just too harrowing. And inadvisable: ‘As a publicist,’ she emailed, ‘I don’t know that I would ever recommend to a client that they participate in your book. I’m very nervous about it. I am really terrified about opening myself up to future attacks. But I think it’s necessary. I want someone to just show how crazy my situation is.’

  It was crazy because ‘only an insane person would think that white people don’t get AIDS’. That was about the first thing she said to me when she sat down. ‘To me it was so insane a comment for an American to make I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was a literal statement. I know there are hateful people out there who don’t like other people and are generally mean. But that’s not me.’

  Justine had been about three hours into her flight - probably asleep in the air above Spain or Algeria - when retweets of her tweet began to overwhelm my Twitter feed. After an initial happy little ‘Oh, wow, someone is fucked,’ I started to think her shamers must have been gripped by some kind of group madness or something. It seemed obvious that her tweet, whilst not a great joke, wasn’t racist, but a self-reflexive comment on white privilege - on our tendency to naively imagine ourselves immune to life’s horrors. Wasn’t it?

  ‘It was a joke about a situation that exists,’ Justine emailed. ‘It was a joke about a dire situation that does exist in post-apartheid South Africa, that we don’t pay attention to. It was completely outrageous commentary on the disproportionate AIDS statistics. Unfortunately, I am not a character on South Park, or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform. To put it simply, I wasn’t trying to raise awareness of AIDS, or piss off the world, or ruin my life. Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the Third World. I was making fun of that bubble.’

  As it happens I once made a similar - albeit funnier - joke in a column for the Guardian. It was about a time I flew into the United States and was sent for ‘secondary processing’ (there was a Mafioso hit-man on the run at the time with a name that apparently sounded quite a lot like Jon Ronson). I was taken into a packed holding room and told to wait.

  There are signs everywhere saying: ‘The use of cell phones is strictly prohibited.’

  I’m sure they won’t mind me checking my text messages, I think. I mean, after all, I am white.

  My joke was funnier than Justine’s joke. It was better worded. Plus, as it didn’t invoke AIDS sufferers it was less unpleasant. So: mine was funnier, better worded, and less unpleasant. But it suddenly felt like that Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter when Christopher Walken puts the gun to his head and lets out a scream and pulls the trigger and the gun doesn’t go off. It was to a large extent Justine’s own fault that so many people thought she was a racist. Her self-reflexive sarcasm had been badly worded, her wider Twitter persona quite brittle. But I hadn’t needed to think about her tweet for more than a few seconds before I understood what she’d been trying to say. There must have been amongst her shamers a lot of people who chose to wilfully misunderstand it, for some reason.

  ‘I can’t fully grasp the misconception that’s happening around the world,’ Justine said. ‘They’ve taken my name and my picture and have created this Justine Sacco that’s not me and have labelled this person a racist. I have this fear that if I were in a car accident tomorrow and lost my memory and came back and googled myself, that would be my new reality.’

  I suddenly remembered how weirdly tarnished I felt when the spambot men created their fake Jon Ronson, getting my character traits all wrong, turning me into some horrific garrulous foodie, and strangers believed it was me, and there was nothing I could do. That’s what was happening to Justine, although instead of a foodie she was a racist and instead of fifty people it was 1,220,000.

  Journalists are supposed to be intrepid. We’re supposed to stand tall in the face of injustice and not fear crazy mobs. But neither Justine nor I saw much fearlessness in how her story was reported. ‘Even articles about how “we could all be minutes away from having a Justine Sacco moment” were all couched in “I am NO WAY defending what she said”,’ she told me.

  …As vile as the sentiment she expressed was, there are some potential extenuating circumstances here that don’t excuse her behaviour but might mitigate her misdeed somewhat. Repugnant as her joke was, there is a difference between outright hate speech and even the most ill-advised attempt at humour …

  - Andrew Wallenstein, ‘Sympathy for This Twitter Devil’, Variety, 22 December 2013

  Andrew Wallenstein was braver than most. But still: it read like the old media saying to social media, ‘Don’t hurt me.’

  Justine released an apology statement. She cut short her South African family vacation ‘because of safety concerns. People were threatening to go on strike at the hotels I was booked into if I showed up. I was told no one could guarantee my safety.’ Word spread around the Internet that she was heiress to a $4.8 billion fortune, her father being the South African mining tycoon Desmond Sacco. I assumed this was true about her right up until I alluded to her billions over lunch and she looked at me as if I was crazy.

  ‘I grew up on Long Island,’ she said.

  ‘Not in a Jay Gatsby type estate?’ I said.

  ‘Not in a Jay Gatsby type estate,’ Justine said. ‘My mom was single my entire life. She was a flight attendant. My dad sold carpets.’

  (She later emailed that while she ‘grew up with a single mom who was a flight attendant and worked two jobs, when I was twenty-one or twenty-two she married well. My stepfather is pretty well off, and I think there was a picture of my mom’s car on my Instagram, which gave the impression that I’m from a wealthy family. So maybe that’s another reason why people assumed I was a spoiled brat. I don’t know. But thought it was worth bringing up to you.’)

  Years ago I interviewed some white supremacists from Idaho’s Aryan Nations compound about their conviction that the Bilderberg Group - a secretive annual meeting of politicians and business leaders - was a Jewish conspiracy.

  ‘How can you call it a Jewish conspiracy when practically no Jews go to it?’ I asked them.

  ‘They may not be actual Jews,’ one replied, ‘but they are …’ He paused. ‘ … Jew-ish.’

  So there it was: at Aryan Nations, you didn’t need to be Jewish to be a Jew. And the same was true on Twitter with the privileged racist Justine Sacco, who was neither especially privileged nor a racist. But it didn’t matter. It was enough that it sort of seemed like she was.

  They were ANC supporters. One of the first things Justine’s aunt told her when she arrived at the family home from Cape Town Airport was, ‘This is not what our family stands for. And now, by association, you’ve almost tarnished the family.’

  At this, Justine started to cry. I sat looking at her for a moment. Then I tried to say something hopeful to improve the mood.

  ‘Sometimes things needs to reach a brutal nadir before people see sense,’ I said. ‘So maybe you’re our brutal nadir.’

  ‘Wow,’ Justine said. She dried her eyes. ‘Of all the things I
could have been in society’s collective consciousness, it never struck me that I’d end up a brutal nadir.’

  A woman approached our table - the restaurant manager. She sat down next to her, fixed her with an empathetic look, and said something at such a low volume I couldn’t hear it.

  ‘Oh, you think I’m going to be grateful for this?’ Justine replied.

  ‘Yes, you will,’ the woman said. ‘Every step prepares you for the next, especially when you don’t think so. I know you can’t see that right now. That’s OK. I get it. But come on. Did you really have your dream job?’

  Justine looked at her. ‘I think I did,’ she said.

  *

  I got an email from the Gawker journalist Sam Biddle - the man who may have started the onslaught against Justine. One of Justine’s 170 followers had sent him the tweet. He retweeted it to his 15,000 followers. And that’s how it may have begun.

  ‘The fact that she was a PR chief made it delicious,’ he emailed me. ‘It’s satisfying to be able to say, “OK, let’s make a racist tweet by a senior IAC employee count this time.” And it did. I’d do it again.’

  Her destruction was justified, Sam Biddle was saying, because Justine was a racist, and because attacking her was punching up. They were cutting down a member of the media elite, continuing the civil rights tradition that started with Rosa Parks, the hitherto silenced underdogs shaming into submission the powerful racist. But I didn’t think any of those things was true. If punching Justine Sacco was ever punching up - and it didn’t seem so to me, given that she was an unknown PR woman with 170 Twitter followers - the punching only intensified as she plummeted to the ground. Punching Jonah Lehrer wasn’t punching up either - not when he was begging for forgiveness in front of that giant-screen Twitter feed.

  A life had been ruined. What was it for: just some social media drama? I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high dramas. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It’s all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people. What rush was overpowering us at times like this? What were we getting out of it?

  I could tell Sam Biddle was finding it startling too - like when you shoot a gun and the power of it sends you recoiling violently backwards. He said he was ‘surprised’ to see how quickly Justine was destroyed: ‘I never wake up and hope I get to fire someone that day - and certainly never hope to ruin anyone’s life.’ Still, his email ended, he had a feeling she’d be ‘fine eventually, if not already. Everyone’s attention span is so short. They’ll be mad about something new today.’

  *

  When Justine left me that evening to clear out her desk she only got as far as the lobby of her office building before she collapsed on the floor in tears. Later we talked again. I told her what Sam Biddle had said - about how she was probably fine now. I was sure he wasn’t being deliberately glib. He was just like everyone who participates in mass online destruction. Who would want to know? Whatever that pleasurable rush that overwhelms us is - group madness or whatever - nobody wants to ruin it by facing the fact that it comes with a cost.

  ‘Well, I’m not fine,’ Justine said. ‘I’m really suffering. I had a great career and I loved my job and it was taken away from me and there was a lot of glory in that. Everybody else was very happy about that. I cried out my bodyweight in the first twenty-four hours. It was incredibly traumatic. You don’t sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night forgetting where you are. All of a sudden you don’t know what you’re supposed to do. You’ve got no schedule. You’ve got no …’ she paused, ‘… purpose. I’m thirty years old. I had a great career. If I don’t have a plan, if I don’t start making steps to reclaim my identity and remind myself of who I am on a daily basis, then I might lose myself. I’m single. So it’s not like I can date, because we google everyone we might date. So that’s been taken away from me too. How am I going to meet new people? What are they going to think of me?’

  She asked me who else was going to be in my book about people who had been publicly shamed.

  ‘Well, Jonah Lehrer so far,’ I said.

  ‘How’s he doing?’ she asked me.

  ‘Pretty badly, I think,’ I said.

  ‘Badly in what way?’ She looked concerned - I think more for what this might prophesy about her own future than about Jonah’s.

  ‘I think he’s broken,’ I said.

  ‘When you say Jonah seems broken, what do you mean?’ Justine said.

  ‘I think he’s broken and that people mistake it for shamelessness,’ I said.

  People really were very keen to imagine Jonah as shameless, as lacking in that quality, as if he were something not quite human that had adopted human form. I suppose it’s no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt - before, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise. In psychology it’s known as cognitive dissonance. It’s the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we’re kind people and the idea that we’ve just destroyed someone). And so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behaviour. It’s like when I used to smoke and I’d hope the tobacconist would hand me the pack that read ‘Smoking Causes Ageing Of The Skin’ instead of the pack that read ‘Smoking Kills’, because ageing of the skin? I didn’t mind that.

  Justine and I agreed to meet again, but not for months, she told me. We’d meet again in five months. ‘I’m compelled to make sure that this is not my narrative,’ she emailed. ‘I can’t just sit at home and watch movies every day and cry and feel sorry for myself. I’m going to come back.’ She wasn’t like Jonah. ‘Jonah lied over and over again. He was a fraud. I don’t know how you bounce back when you’ve sacrificed your character and lied to millions. I just have to believe that there’s a stark difference between that and my making a tasteless joke. I did something stupid, but I didn’t trash my integrity.’

  She said her job now was to avoid falling into ‘depression and self-loathing. I think the next five months are going to be really fucking crucial for me, and then we’ll know.’

  She couldn’t bear the thought of being preserved within the pages of my book as a sad case. She was determined to show the people who had smashed her up that she could rise again.

  ‘How can I tell my story,’ she said, ‘when it’s really just beginning?’

  *

  The day after my lunch with Justine I caught the train to Washington DC to meet someone I had prejudged as a frightening man: a fearsome American narcissist - Judge Ted Poe. For twenty years in Houston, Texas, Poe’s nationally famous trademark was to publicly shame defendants in the showiest ways he could dream up, ‘using citizens as virtual props in his personal theatre of the absurd’, as the legal writer Jonathan Turley once put it.

  Given society’s intensifying eagerness to publicly shame people, I wanted to meet someone who had been doing it professionally for decades. What would today’s citizen shamers think of Ted Poe - his personality and his motivations - now they were basically becoming him? What impact had his shaming frenzy had on the world around him - on the wrongdoers and the bystanders and himself?

  Ted Poe’s punishments were sometimes zany - ordering petty criminals to shovel manure, etc. - and sometimes as ingenious as a Goya painting. Like the one he handed down to a Houston teenager, Mike Hubacek. In 1996 Hubacek had been driving drunk at 100 mph with no headlights. He crashed into a van carrying a married couple and their nanny. The husband and the nanny were killed. Poe sentenced Hubacek to 110 days of boot camp, and to carry a sign once a month for ten years in front of high schools and bars that read, I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK, and to erect a cross and a Star of David at the scene of the crash and to keep it maintained, and to keep photographs of the victims in his wallet for ten years, and to send $10 every week for ten years to a
memorial fund in the names of the victims, and to observe the autopsy of a person killed in a drink-driving accident.

  Punishments like these had proved too psychologically torturous for other people. A seventeen-year-old boy called Kevin Tunell had in 1982 killed a girl, Susan Herzog, while drink-driving near Washington DC. Her parents sued him, and were awarded $1.5 million in damages. But they offered the boy a deal. They would reduce the fine to just $936 if he’d mail them a cheque for $1, made out in Susan’s name, every Friday for eighteen years. He gratefully accepted their offer.

  Years later the boy began missing payments, and when Susan’s parents took him to court he broke down. Every time he filled in her name, he said, the guilt would tear him apart: ‘It hurts too much,’ he said. He tried to give the Herzogs two boxes of pre-written cheques, dated one per week until the end of 2001, a year longer than was required. But they refused to take them.

  Judge Ted Poe’s critics - like the civil rights group the ACLU - argued to him the dangers of these ostentatious punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. They said it was no coincidence that public shaming had enjoyed such a renaissance in Mao’s China and Hitler’s Germany and the Ku Klux Klan’s America: it destroys souls, brutalizing everyone, the onlookers included, dehumanizing them as much as the person who was being shamed. How could Poe take someone with such low self-esteem that they needed to, say, rob a store, and then hold them up to officially sanctioned public ridicule?

  But Poe brushed the criticisms off. Criminals didn’t have low self-esteem, he argued. It was quite the opposite. ‘The people I see have too good a self-esteem,’ he told the Boston Globe in 1997. ‘Some folks say everyone should have high self-esteem, but sometimes people should feel bad.’

  Poe’s shaming methods were so admired in Houston society that he ended up getting elected to Congress as the representative for Texas’s 2nd Congressional District. He is currently ‘Congress’s top talker’, according to the Los Angeles Times, having made 431 speeches between 2009 and 2011, against abortion, illegal immigrants, socialized healthcare, etc. He always ends them with his catchphrase: ‘And that’s just the way it is!’