So You've Been Publicly Shamed (7 page)

Jonah sighed. “That may have been a better strategy,” he said. “But it wasn't a strategy I wanted to rehearse onstage. It was not something I wanted to share with the universe, with everyone on Twitter. I didn't want to talk about how this had ruined me. That's something for me to deal with, and for my loved ones to help me through. But that's not something I wanted to get up onstage in front of the Internet and talk about.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Oh, gosh, I don't know,” said Jonah. “Could you do that?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think I could. And I think that would mean I'd survive better than you.”

“So what would Jon Ronson's apology speech be?” Jonah said. “What would you say?”

“Right,” I said. “I'd say . . . okay . . . I . . . Hello. I'm Jon Ronson and I want to apologize for . . .” What
would
I say? I cleared my throat. “I just want everyone to know that I'm really upset . . .”

Jonah was listening patiently on the line. I stopped. Even though I was just play-acting, I felt wiped out. And I hadn't really even got anywhere in my attempt.

“What happened to you is my worst nightmare,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jonah replied. “It was mine too.”

•  •  •

F
our more months passed. The winter became the early summer. Then, unexpectedly, Andrew Wylie began shopping a new Jonah Lehrer book proposal around New York City's publishers.
A Book About Love
. The proposal was immediately leaked to
The New York Times
. In it Jonah described the moment he felt “the shiver of a voice mail message.”

I have been found out. I puke into a recycling bin. And then I start to cry. Why was I crying? I had been caught in a lie, a desperate attempt to conceal my mistakes. And now it was clear that, within 24 hours, my fall would begin. I would lose my job and my reputation. My private shame would become public.

Jonah then described leaving St. Louis and returning to Los Angeles, his suit and shirt “stained with sweat and vomit.”

I open the front door and take off my dirty shirt and weep on the shoulder of my wife. My wife is caring but confused: How the hell could I be so reckless? I have no good answers.

—J
ONAH
L
EHRER'S BOOK PROPOSAL
,
AS LEAKED TO
The New York Times
,
J
UNE 6
,
2013

The New York media community declared itself resolutely indifferent to Jonah's suffering. “‘Recycling bin' is a hilarious choice of detail for the compulsive plagiarist,” wrote
Gawker
's Tom Scocca. “And, obviously: Bring us two witnesses who saw you puke when and where you claim you puked. Or don't bother.”

And then, to my amazement,
Slate
's Daniel Engber announced that he had spent a day combing through Jonah's proposal and believed he had uncovered plagiarism within it.

Surely Jonah hadn't been that insanely reckless?

—

When I read Engber's article closer, things didn't seem quite so clear-cut. “A chapter on the secret to having a happy marriage,” Engber writes, “comes close to copying a recent essay on the same subject by Adam Gopnik, Lehrer's onetime colleague at
The New Yorker
.”

Gopnik:
In 1838, when Darwin was first thinking of marriage, he made an irresistible series of notes on the subject—a scientific-seeming list of marriage pros and cons . . . In favor of marriage, he included the acquisition of a “constant companion and friend in old age” and, memorably and conclusively, decided that a wife would be “better than a dog, anyhow.”

Lehrer:
In July 1838, Charles Darwin considered the possibility of marriage in his scientific notebook. His thoughts quickly took the shape of a list, a balance sheet of reasons to “marry” and “not marry.” The pros of wedlock were straightforward: Darwin cited the possibility of children (“if it please God”), the health benefits of attachment and the pleasure of having a “constant companion (& friend in old age).” A wife, he wrote, was probably “better than a dog anyhow.”

Gopnik:
And the Darwins went on to have something close to an ideal marriage.

Lehrer:
This might seem like an inauspicious start to a relationship, but the Darwins went on to have a nearly ideal marriage.

And so on, for a few paragraphs. Engber wasn't totally sure this counted as plagiarism, “or if [Lehrer] modified his words to stop just short of doing so.” Or maybe both men had drawn from the same source: “In the footnotes Lehrer cites page 661 of Desmond and Moore's 1991 biography of Darwin. Anyone who has a copy of that book is invited to check the wordings.”

But even if it wasn't plagiarism, Engber was “convinced that Lehrer hasn't changed his ways at all. He's set his course as clearly as can be. He'll recycle and repeat, he'll puke his gritty guts out.”

No matter what transgressions Jonah had or hadn't committed—it seemed to me—he couldn't win. But his
Book About Love
is scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster around the same time that this book will appear, so we'll all learn at once if it will win him some redemption.

God That Was Awesome

D
uring the months that followed, it became routine. Everyday people, some with young children, were getting annihilated for tweeting some badly worded joke to their hundred or so followers. I'd meet them in restaurants and airport cafés—spectral figures wandering the earth like the living dead in the business wear of their former lives. It was happening with such regularity that it didn't even seem coincidental that one of them, Justine Sacco, had been working in the same office building as Michael Moynihan until three weeks earlier when, passing through Heathrow Airport, she wrote a tweet that came out badly.

—

It was December 20, 2013. For the previous two days she'd been tweeting little acerbic jokes to her 170 followers about her holiday travels. She was like a social media Sally Bowles, decadent and flighty and unaware that serious politics were looming. There was her joke about the German man on the plane from New York:
“Weird German Dude: You're in first class. It's 2014. Get some deodorant.—Inner monolog as I inhale BO. Thank god for pharmaceuticals.”
Then the layover at Heathrow:
“Chili—cucumber sandwiches—bad teeth. Back in London!”
Then the final leg:
“Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!”

She chuckled to herself, pressed send, and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter.

“I got nothing,” she told me. “No replies.”

I imagined her feeling a bit deflated about this—that sad feeling when nobody congratulates you for being funny, that black silence when the Internet doesn't talk back. She boarded the plane. It was an eleven-hour flight. She slept. When the plane landed, she turned on her phone. Straightaway there was a text from someone she hadn't spoken to since high school:
“I'm so sorry to see what's happening.”

She looked at it, baffled.

“And then my phone started to explode,” she said.

—

We were having this conversation three weeks later at—her choice of location—the Cookshop restaurant in New York City. It was the very same restaurant where Michael had recounted to me the tale of Jonah's destruction. It was becoming for me the Restaurant of Stories of Obliterated Lives. But it was only a half coincidence. It was close to the building where they both worked. Michael had been offered a job at
The Daily Beast
as a result of his great Jonah scoop, and Justine had an office upstairs, running the PR department for the magazine's publisher, IAC—which also owned Vimeo and OkCupid and Match.com. The reason why she wanted to meet me here, and why she was wearing her expensive-looking work clothes, was that at six p.m. she was due in there to clean out her desk.

As she sat on the runway at Cape Town Airport, a second text popped up:
“You need to call me immediately.”
It was from her best friend, Hannah.
“You're the number one worldwide trend on Twitter right now.”

“In light of @JustineSacco disgusting racist tweet, I'm donating to @CARE today,” and “How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!” and “No words for that horribly disgusting, racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified,” and “I'm an IAC employee and I don't want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever,” and “Everyone go report this cunt @Justine Sacco,” and from IAC: “This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight,” and “Fascinated by the @JustineSacco train wreck. It's global and she's apparently *still on the plane,*” and “All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco's face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail,” and “Oh man, @JustineSacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands,” and “Looks like @JustineSacco lands in about 9mins, this should be interesting,” and “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she's getting fired,” and then, after Hannah frantically deleted Justine's Twitter account, “Sorry @JustineSacco—your tweet lives on forever,” and so on for a total of a hundred thousand tweets, according to calculations by the website BuzzFeed, until weeks later: “Man, remember Justine Sacco? #HasJustineLandedYet. God that was awesome. MILLIONS of people waiting for her to land.”

—

I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture—like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy.

—

Over the years, I've sat across tables from a lot of people whose lives had been destroyed. Usually, the people who did the destroying were the government or the military or big business or, as with Jonah Lehrer, basically themselves (at least at first with Jonah—we took over as he tried to apologize). Justine Sacco felt like the first person I had ever interviewed who had been destroyed by
us
.

•  •  •

G
oogle has an engine—Google AdWords—that tells you how many times your name has been searched for during any given month. In October 2013, Justine was googled thirty times. In November 2013, she was googled thirty times. Between December 20 and the end of December, she was googled 1,220,000 times.

—

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. Photograph by @Zac_R, reproduced with his permission.

Three weeks had passed since Justine had 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.” (February 24, 2012)

—“
16
T
WEETS
J
USTINE
S
ACCO
R
EGRETS
,”
B
UZZ
F
EED
,
D
ECEMBER 20
,
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 e-mailed, “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 reflexive comment on white privilege—on our tendency to naively imagine ourselves immune from life's horrors. Wasn't it?

“It was a joke about a situation that exists,” Justine e-mailed. “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 when 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 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 among her shamers a lot of people who chose to willfully 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 labeled 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.

But as vile as the sentiment she expressed was, there are some potential extenuating circumstances here that don't excuse her behavior 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 humor.

—A
NDREW
W
ALLENSTEIN
,
“J
USTINE
S
ACCO:
S
YMPATHY FOR
T
HIS
T
WITTER
D
EVIL
,”
Variety
,
D
ECEMBER 22
,
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, as people assumed her father was the South African mining tycoon Desmond Sacco. I wrongly thought this was true about her right up until I alluded to her billions over lunch and she looked at me like 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 e-mailed 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.”)