So You've Been Publicly Shamed (8 page)

Years ago I interviewed some white supremacists from an Aryan Nations compound in Idaho 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. “. . . Jewish.”

So there it was: At Aryan Nations, you didn't need to be an actual Jew to be Jew-
ish
. 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.

Her extended family in South Africa 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 need 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—a friend of Justine's. 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 okay. 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 e-mail 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 e-mailed 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 were 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 drama. 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 backward. 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 e-mail 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.”

•  •  •

W
hen Justine left me that evening to clear out her desk, she got only 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 something else—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 body weight 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, like he was 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 behavior. It's like when I used to smoke and I'd hope the tobacconist would hand me the pack that read
SMOKING CAUSES AGING OF THE SKIN
instead of the pack that read
SMOKING KILLS
—because aging 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. She was compelled to make sure that this was not her narrative. “I can't just sit at home and watch movies every day and cry and feel sorry for myself,” she said. I think Justine wasn't thrilled to be included in the same book as Jonah. She didn't see herself as being anything like Jonah. Jonah lied repeatedly, again and again. How could Jonah bounce back when he'd sacrificed his character and lied to millions? Justine had to believe that there was a stark difference between that and her making a tasteless joke. She did something stupid, but she didn't trash her integrity.

She couldn't bear the thought of being preserved within the pages of my book as a sad case. She needed to avoid falling into depression and self-loathing. She knew that the next five months were going to be crucial for her. She was determined to show the people who had smashed her up that she could rise again.

How could she tell her story, she thought, when it was just beginning?

•  •  •

T
he day after my lunch with Justine, I caught the train to Washington, D.C., to meet someone I had prejudged as a frightening man—a fearsome American narcissist—Ted Poe. For the twenty or so years he was a judge in Houston, 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 theater 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 that 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 one hundred miles per hour 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 site, and to keep it maintained, and to keep photographs of the victims in his wallet for ten years, and to send ten dollars 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 drunk-driving accident.

Punishments like these had proved too psychologically torturous for other people. In 1982 a seventeen-year-old boy named Kevin Tunell had killed a girl, Susan Herzog, while driving drunk near Washington, D.C. 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 check 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 prewritten checks, 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 being shamed. How could Poe take people 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 Second 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 health care, and so on. He always ends them with his catchphrase: “And that's just the way it is!”

—

“It wasn't the ‘theater of the absurd.'” Ted Poe sat opposite me in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. I'd just quoted to him his critic Jonathan Turley's line—“using citizens as virtual props in his personal theater of the absurd”—and he was bristling. He wore cowboy boots with his suit—another Poe trademark, like the catchphrase and the shaming. He had the look and mannerisms of his friend George W. Bush. “It was the theater of the
different
,” he said.

The Rayburn building is where all the congressmen and congresswomen have their offices. Each office door is decorated with the state flag of the congressperson who is inside: the bald eagles of Illinois and North Dakota and the bear of California and the horse's head of New Jersey and the strange bleeding pelican of Louisiana. Poe's office is staffed by handsome, serious-looking Texas men and tough, pretty Texas women who were extremely nice to me but totally ignored all my subsequent e-mail requests for clarifications and follow-up interviews. Although Poe ended the interview by warmly shaking my hand, I suspect that the moment I left the room he told his staff, “That man was an idiot. Ignore all future e-mail requests from him.”

He recounted to me some of his favorite shamings: “Like the young man who loved the thrill of stealing. I could have put him in jail. But I decided that he had to carry a sign for seven days:
I STOLE FROM THIS STORE. DON'T BE A THIEF OR THIS COULD BE YOU
. He was supervised. We worked all the security out. I got that down to an art for those people who worried about security. At the end of the week the store manager called me: ‘All week I didn't have any stealing going on in the store!' The store manager loved it.”

“But aren't you turning the criminal justice system into entertainment?” I said.

“Ask the guy out there,” Ted Poe replied. “He doesn't think he's entertaining anybody.”