So You've Been Publicly Shamed (PSY8)

by Jon Ronson

  Andrew visited Alexis three times, he said. On the last occasion, ‘we shared a laugh. We both just belly-laughed. That was outside of what I was there for. And she became human to me then. She was no longer an object. And that was the puncturing of the fantasy. It was anything I could do to get out of there. I’m not one to wear my emotions on my sleeve. But I bawled my eyes out in the car.’

  And that was his last visit to Alexis Wright.

  ‘How have you been spending the past few days?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t sit alone at home and isolate,’ he replied. ‘I’ve joined a meet-up group. It’s just a bunch of people and I’m completely anonymized there. I show up and we play board games. Risk and Apples to Apples and Pandemic. Besides that, I’ve been journaling. What do I do with all this information? If I wait a little bit - six months, a year - and I try to send out a manuscript? Is that something that would be received?’

  ‘Like a memoir?’

  ‘Could I utilize that to springboard into a new ministry?’ he said. ‘And what angle do I come at it at? I could go faith-based and warn men not to do it. Or I could take a completely different tack and, well, I don’t want to become a champion for legalized prostitution. So I’ve really got to think about what this all means …’ He drifted off. ‘What do I do with this?’ he said again. ‘I don’t know yet. Unfortunately I’m forty-nine years old and I’ve turned a great deal of my life into a cautionary tale …’

  ‘Have you met any of the other men or the woman from the list?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re all members of a club we didn’t realize we were in. There’s really no reason or opportunity for any contact or solidarity.’

  ‘So mainly you’re just waiting for whatever happens next to happen,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s the worst. The expectation. It’s horrible.’

  Andrew promised to let me know the moment his shaming began - online, in town, anywhere. At the first hint of it, he assured me, he’d call. We said our goodbyes. And that was the last I heard from him for several months.

  So I telephoned him again. He sounded happy to get my call.

  ‘I never heard from you,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It went away,’ he said.

  ‘There was no shaming at all?’

  ‘None,’ he said. ‘My imagination had been far worse than what actually happened.’

  ‘Justine Sacco was annihilated,’ I said. ‘And Jonah Lehrer too, of course. But Justine Sacco! And she didn’t do anything wrong! And you got nothing?’

  ‘I don’t have an answer for that,’ Andrew said. ‘I don’t understand it. In fact my relationship with my three daughters has never been stronger. My youngest one noted, “It’s like getting to know you all over again.”’

  ‘Your transgression made them see you as human?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Huh,’ I said. ‘Justine and Jonah’s transgressions made people see them as the opposite of human.’

  His marriage was over, he added, as was his job as a pastor in the local Nazarene church. That wasn’t coming back. But otherwise he had experienced only kindness and forgiveness. Actually, it wasn’t kindness and forgiveness. It was something much better than that. It was nothing. He experienced nothing.

  Andrew told me a story. When Alexis Wright’s business partner Mark Strong was on trial for bankrolling the brothel Andrew was ordered into court. There was a chance he’d be called as a witness, so he was sequestered in a private room at the back. After a while six other men drifted into the room. They all nodded at each other, but sat in silence. Then some tentative conversations ensued and they realized what they’d suspected: they were Alexis Wright clients. They were all men from the list. This was the first time they’d met, so they hurriedly, quite eagerly, swapped notes. Not about their visits to Alexis - everyone tiptoed awkwardly around that - but about what had happened next, once they were outed.

  ‘One man was saying, “It cost me a new SUV for my wife,”’ Andrew said. ‘Another said, “It cost me a cruise to the Bahamas and a new kitchen.” Everyone was laughing.’

  ‘None of them had fallen victim to any kind of shaming?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Andrew. ‘It went away for them too.’

  But there was one exception, Andrew said. The conversation between them turned to the one woman who had visited Alexis.

  ‘Everyone was laughing about her,’ Andrew said. ‘Then, suddenly, this one older gentleman, who had been much quieter than the others, said, “That was my wife.” Oh, Jon, you could feel the energy shift. Everything changed immediately.’

  ‘What kind of jokes had you all been making about the wife?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t remember exactly,’ Andrew said, ‘but they had been more mocking. She was looked at differently by the men and, yes, with her it was considered more shameful.’

  As it happens, Max and Andrew’s sins would in Puritan times have been judged graver than Jonah’s. Jonah, ‘guilty of lying or publishing false news’, would have been fined, placed in the stocks ‘for a period not exceeding four hours, or publicly whipped with not more than forty stripes’, according to Delaware law. Whereas Max and Andrew, having ‘defiled the marriage bed’, would have been publicly whipped (no maximum number of lashes was specified), imprisoned with hard labour for at least a year, and, on a second offence, imprisoned for life.

  But the shifting sands of shameworthiness had shifted away from sex scandals - if you’re a man - to work improprieties and perceived white privilege, and I suddenly understood the real reason why Max had survived his shaming. Nobody cared. Max survived his shaming because he was a man in a consensual sex shaming - which meant there had been no shaming.

  I emailed Max to tell him. ‘Nobody cared!’ I wrote. ‘Of all the public scandals, being a man in a consensual sex scandal is probably the one to hope for.’ Max was the target of no one - not liberals like me, not the online misogynists who tear apart women who step out of line. Max suffered nothing.

  An hour passed. Then Max emailed back: ‘Hi Ron. I think you are spot on.’

  *

  It wasn’t that nobody cared. Max’s wife cared. And someone else did: Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail. In a 2008 speech to the Society of Editors, Paul Dacre called Max’s orgy ‘perverted, depraved, the very abrogation of civilized behaviour’. It was a rueful speech lamenting the Death of Shame. Dacre portrayed Justice Eady - the judge who found in Max’s favour in the privacy case against the News of the World - as its incarnation:

  The judge found for Max Mosley because he had not engaged in a ‘sick Nazi orgy’ as the News of the World contested, though for the life of me that seems an almost surreally pedantic logic as some of the participants were dressed in military-style uniform. Mosley was issuing commands in German while one prostitute pretended to pick lice from his hair, a second fellated him and a third caned his backside until blood was drawn. To Justice Eady such behaviour was merely ‘unconventional’.

  What is most worrying about Justice Eady’s decisions is that he is ruling that - when it comes to morality - the law in Britain is now effectively neutral, which is why I accuse him, in his judgments, of being ‘amoral’.

  - Paul Dacre, Speech to the Society of Editors, 9 November 2008

  Ever since I started telling people I was writing a book about shame, lots of people from the Paul Dacre-type world - successful older men high up in British society - have congratulated me, presumptuously, for telling it how it is about how young people don’t feel shame any more. I met a famous architect at a party who said just that. And a religious broadcaster bemoaned to me how the loosening of religious morality has created a shameless society. I can understand why someone might believe that, given that we’re living in an age where a Church of the Nazarene pastor can visit a prostitute and nobody cares. I think Andrew and Max have women like Princess Donna to thank for their non-disgrace. Donna has worked assidu
ously for years to demystify strange sex, which is why men like them are able to emerge from their scandals unscathed. But shame hasn’t died. Shame has just moved elsewhere, gathering tremendous strength along the way.

  The fact was, speeches like Paul Dacre’s didn’t matter any more. The people who mattered didn’t care what Dacre thought. The people who mattered were the people on Twitter. On Twitter we make our own decisions about who deserves obliteration. We form our own consensus, and we aren’t being influenced by the criminal justice system or by the media. This makes us formidable.

  My journey to find a shame-free paradise - somewhere we can be safe from the likes of us - had been a failure. Radical Honesty felt to me like people just yelling at each other. Neither Max nor Andrew had helpful secrets to impart about mustering the strength to survive the agony of a shaming. For them there had been no shaming to survive. In fact the only place on my journey where I’d witnessed any form of post-shame enlightenment was the Public Disgrace shoot at the sports bar in the San Fernando Valley. I looked back on the night with fondness. It was the only place I’d been to since I started writing this book that had felt relaxing.

  Then I reread my transcript of a conversation I’d had with Donna that night and saw something I hadn’t noticed before.

  Donna: I was just coming home from Sacramento. I was at the airport. And I read something about myself on TMZ.

  TMZ is a celebrity gossip website. When Donna read their story, she told me, she suddenly saw how she looked to the outside world. It made her feel deeply humiliated and upset.

  Donna: I’d been in this bubble in San Francisco surrounded by other sex-positive people who are knowledgeable about sex work, about the sex industry, and so I never felt judged. But then all of a sudden I had these people looking at me from the outside and talking about me as if I was some idiotic pornographer. It was really hard. I was crying at the airport. I was crying on the plane ride …

  Now I hunted down the TMZ article. What had been so crushing? How brutal had they been about Donna?

  James Franco is working on a top-secret project with an up-and-coming female porn director, TMZ has learned … and it turns out she has quite the reputation for being handy with her fist. The woman in the photo is Princess Donna Dolore, who’s featured in Franco’s soon-to-be released film ‘Kink’. Despite being in the film, Franco only met PDD for the first time in person last week … and sources tell us he has already locked her up to be a part of a future project he is working on. During the encounter, PDD gave Franco an official Princess Donna Dolore shirt, which includes her trademark fist on the back. James took it … the shirt, that is … and sported it proudly. We reached out to Franco for comment - but so far, no word back.

  - TMZ Staff, 26 December 2012

  Years ago I might have thought it crazy that Donna had been so upset over such an innocuous article. But now I understood. I think we all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them? And so I sympathized with Donna. It seemed sad - given that Max and Andrew owed her so much - that as soon as she saw herself from the outside she felt ashamed, like the shame had snaked its way into her, and there was no escaping.

  I’m sure there are psychopaths out there - people neurologically incapable of feeling shame, as if they’re shrouded in layers of cotton wool - but I hadn’t met anybody like that on this journey. Ever since I began writing this book, though, one name kept coming up as someone who had survived a public shaming with such an apparent lack of effort he made the entire concept of public shame seem like no big deal. And now after some reluctant emails - ‘I hope you’ll understand, I’m wary’ - he had agreed to meet me for lunch. His name was Mike Daisey.

  10

  THE NEAR DROWNING OF MIKE DAISEY

  ‘It feels like they want an apology, but it’s a lie.’ Mike Daisey and I were sitting in a Brooklyn restaurant. He was a big man and he frequently dabbed the perspiration from his face with a handkerchief that was always within his reach. ‘It’s a lie because they don’t want an apology,’ he said. ‘An apology is supposed to be a communion - a coming together. For someone to make an apology someone has to be listening. They listen and you speak and there’s an exchange. That’s why we have a thing about accepting apologies. There’s a power exchange that happens. But they don’t want an apology.’ He looked at me. ‘What they want is my destruction. What they want is for me to die. They will never say this because it’s too histrionic. But they never want to hear from me again for the rest of my life, and while they’re never hearing from me they have the right to use me as a cultural reference point whenever it services their ends. That’s how it would work out best for them. They would like me to never speak again.’ He paused. ‘I’d never had the opportunity to be the object of hate before. The hard part isn’t the hate. It’s the object.’

  Mike Daisey’s transgression - which was remarkably similar to Jonah’s - had been uncovered three months before Michael Moynihan lay on his sofa that 4th July and wondered when Bob Dylan had ever called the creative process ‘just the sense that you’ve got something to say’. Like Jonah and Stephen Glass, he had been caught lying in a story. His was about a trip he had just taken to Shenzhen, China, during which he met factory workers who made Apple products. But some of the meetings had never happened. His shaming was maybe even more agonizing than Jonah’s because every breath of it - every long, panicked silence - was captured on audio and broadcast on one of America’s most popular radio shows, This American Life. Mike Daisey has always been a dandy. He was a big, loud, flamboyant character in New York’s theatre world. And for much of the broadcast he sounded like he thought he could bluster his way through it. He had hope. He made justifications and nit-picked little points. But as the hour unfolded it all crumbled, and by the end, when he finally said, ‘I’m sorry,’ he sounded finished - exhausted, empty. It was such an agonized, ‘I’m sorry’ that I thought there was a chance he would leave the radio studio, go home, and kill himself. But instead, within minutes, he published an apologetic statement on his website and by the next day was back on Twitter. He was one man screaming at ten thousand people screaming at him. He berated and scolded and called his attackers hypocrites. At first all this made them even more incensed. But he didn’t budge. He was a tireless defender of himself.

  Eventually it became clear to his critics that their fury was useless. They drifted away, until it all just stopped. And now, as Jonah Lehrer roamed the Los Angeles wilderness shattered and disgraced, Mike Daisey posted photographs on Instagram of him and his wife sunbathing poolside in Miami, having just completed a critically acclaimed sell-out theatrical tour. How could almost identical shamings annihilate one man and leave another without a scratch?

  In the restaurant, Mike didn’t reply to these questions right away. Then he said, ‘When I was young, twenty-one, twenty-two, my life fell apart in a really catastrophic way.’

  He had been staring down at the table. But now he looked up. ‘My girlfriend had suddenly started avoiding me,’ he continued. ‘I’d be, “Let’s get together.” But she always put me off. And finally I got a phone call. She was pregnant. Eight months pregnant. I was going to be a father. In a month.’

  This was in far northern Maine, Mike said. He felt trapped. In Maine. The baby was born. Their relationship disintegrated under the strain. ‘I abdicated my responsibilities as a father. I completely fell apart.’

  Every night Mike would go swimming in a lake. Some nights he swam out as far as he could. ‘I kept going. It got colder and colder. And I’d just lie in the lake. And I was trying, it’s really clear now, I was trying to drown.’

  ‘You were trying to kill yourself?’

  Mike nodded. ‘This is really clear to me now.’ He paused. ‘Ever since, I’ve never felt as tethered to this place as other people do
. Everything seems like a long, improbable afterlife.’ Mike smiled. ‘I bring it up because it might be useful for you,’ he said.

  We carried on eating. The story just hung there. I think Mike was treating me like an audience, feeding me fragments of stories, forcing me to piece together the mystery myself.

  He swam back to shore each night. He ended up teaching high-school drama. He graduated a year late. Then he left Maine. ‘I drove to Seattle,’ he said. ‘I tried to create a new life for myself.’ And he did. He became, of all things, a monologist in the theatre. His shows were passionate and well liked but too esoteric to make a splash outside his fringe world. They were about esoteric things like how war had turned his grandfather cold, and how that coldness had trickled down to turn his father cold. And so on. But then, in the summer of 2010, he performed his masterpiece - The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs - the story of his trip to China.

  The factory workers he met there told him about the n-Hexane: ‘N-Hexane is an iPhone screen cleaner,’ Mike’s monologue went. ‘It’s great because it evaporates a little bit faster than alcohol does, which means you can run the production line even faster and try to keep up with the quotas. The problem is that n-Hexane is a potent neurotoxin, and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them … can’t even pick up a glass.’ His monologue moved on to describe his meetings with thirteen-year-old girls who worked at the plants because nobody checked ages, and the old man with the right hand that was ‘twisted up into a claw. It was crushed in a metal press at Foxconn.’ Mike showed this old man his iPad. ‘He’s never actually seen one on, this thing that took his hand. I turn it on … the icons flare into view. And he strokes the screen with his ruined hand. And he says something … He says, “It’s a kind of magic.”’