Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

He won big: costs plus £60,000 in damages, the highest in recent British legal history for a privacy case. And now, as Max told me, people regard him “primarily as someone who has been wronged and who has pushed rather successfully for certain things. I’m a lot better off than I would have been if I’d gone off to hide.”

Within three years, the News of the World was no more. In July 2011, The Guardian revealed that a private investigator working for the paper had hacked into the voice mail of a murdered teenager, Milly Dowler. In an attempt to control the scandal, Rupert Murdoch shut the paper down. Later, Neville Thurlbeck pled guilty to phone hacking and was imprisoned for six months. Colin Myler wasn’t implicated and is currently the president and editor in chief of the New York Daily News .

Max felt like he’d been fighting not only for himself but also for the dead who preceded him. He meant people like Ben Stronge. “He was an English chef living in northern France, divorced, and he was a swinger. A man and a woman from the News of the World swung by his place. He gave them dinner, disappeared upstairs, and apparently came back down wearing nothing but a pouch.” Max paused. Then he said, softly, “Pathos.”

That was June 1992. When Ben Stronge discovered that the people looking at him weren’t swingers but News of the World journalists, he started crying. He telephoned the paper’s editor, Patsy Chapman. According to Max, “He said, ‘Please don’t publish, because if you do, I’ll never see my children again.’ Well, they published anyway. They didn’t give a damn. So he killed himself.”

Then there was Arnold Lewis. In the spring of 1978 the News of the World decided to infiltrate sex parties in caravans in the forests of Wales. The journalist Tina Dalgleish and her photographer, Ian Cutler, answered a small ad in a swingers’ magazine. It had been placed by a lay preacher and teacher, Arnold Lewis. They met in the local pub.

The turnout was small. Five people showed up, three of whom were Tina Dalgleish, Ian Cutler, and Arnold Lewis. Arnold left a coded note for potential latecomers with an arrow pointing in the direction of the caravan and the exact walking distance: “3.8 miles.”

At the caravan they drank sherry and ate biscuits, and an orgy occurred (which Ian Cutler and Tina Dalgleish witnessed but didn’t participate in), and then a few days later Tina Dalgleish telephoned Arnold to reveal her identity.

Later, after I left Max, I managed to get Tina Dalgleish’s photographer on the phone. Ian Cutler was recovering from a major stroke, but he wanted to talk. He’d never stopped thinking about Arnold Lewis, he said. For thirty-five years it had plagued him.

“Arnold told Tina that if she published the story he would kill himself,” Ian said. “He was a preacher. Fucking hell. He was a preacher in a small Welsh village.”

The News of the World published and Arnold Lewis killed himself. He inhaled exhaust fumes. His body was found in his car the morning the story appeared. The headline read “If You Go Down to the Woods Today You’re Sure of a Big Surprise.”

• • •

Max and I spent the afternoon trying to work it out. There was something about his behavior in the aftermath of the News of the World story that made the public totally uninterested in annihilating him. He just naturally seemed to get the formula right. People melted. But what was it?

At one point he raised with me the possibility that he might be a sociopath. Maybe he’d survived it all by drawing on special sociopathic powers. Maybe his instantaneous “whoosh” of resilient fury at the newsstand was a sociopathic whoosh. Maybe that was what we liked about him — that resilient fury. He told me that in 1991, two years before getting the job as president of motor racing’s governing body, they “commissioned a psychiatrist to analyze me, and the man concluded I was a sociopath.” As he said this, he gave me an anxious glance.

I sighed.

“Do you feel empathy?” I asked him.

“Yes!” he said. “The motive of most of the main things I’ve done in my life is feeling sorry for people. And the psychiatrist never met me. He just did it from the outside.”

“Well, I don’t think you’re a sociopath,” I said.

“Phew!” said Max.

“Anyway,” I said, “a psychologist once told me that if you’re worried you may be a sociopath that means you aren’t one.”

“Thanks, Ron, another phew,” Max replied. He paused. “Jon,” he said, “I meant Jon.”

“More proof you’re not a sociopath, because sociopaths wouldn’t care about calling me Ron,” I said.

“Another phew!” said Max.

• • •

It was getting dark by the time I left Max’s house. We both felt we hadn’t quite managed to solve the mystery, so we agreed to keep thinking about it.

“Oh, by the way,” I said, on my way out. “Have you heard of an S&M place in America called Kink? I think I’ve got an invitation to visit them.”

“Kink?” said Max. His eyes widened. “That is the place! I’ve only seen it on the Internet. They’ve got machines. They’ve got electrics. They’ve got water. You name it, they’ve got it. I’m quite envious!”

“Exciting!” I said.

—

My invitation to Kink.com had come about after I’d mentioned on Twitter that I was writing a book on public shaming. One of my followers — his name is Conner Habib — asked me if I was going to meet people who derive sexual pleasure from being publicly shamed.

“No!” I replied. “That hadn’t crossed my mind at all.”

He said that as it happened he was a gay porn star and if I wanted to know more about his work I should google him. I did and immediately saw many close-ups of his anus. I e-mailed him to ask how he managed to do that kind of work without feeling embarrassed.

“I do think there’s lots to learn from porn stars about how not to be embarrassed or feel vulnerable,” he e-mailed back. He added that a lot of sex industry people go on to become hospice workers: “They’re not freaked out by the body, so they can help people transition through illness and death. I’m not sure what would humiliate me at this point. If you want to talk at length about this, I’m open to it. Just don’t make me seem any goofier than I already am. Maybe that’s what could humiliate a porn star — a Jon Ronson essay?”

I frowned.

—

Conner’s e-mails got me interested in journeying into the porn world. Was it really populated by people who had learned how to be immune to shame? It suddenly seemed like a good talent to have.

He put me in touch with a famous porn impresario — Princess Donna Dolore of Kink.com studios. We swapped e-mails. “Growing up I was ashamed of everything,” she wrote, “and at a certain point I realized that if I was open with the world about the things that embarrassed me they no longer held any weight! I felt set free!” She added that she always derives her porn scenarios from this formula. She imagines circumstances that would mortify her, “like being bound naked on a street with everybody looking at you,” and enacts them with like-minded porn actors, robbing them of their horror.

—

Donna and I arranged to have dinner in Los Angeles. That morning I e-mailed her: “See you tonight at 7 p.m.!”

At 5:40 p.m. I e-mailed her again, “Don’t forget we’re supposed to be meeting in an hour and twenty minutes!”

“Sure!” she replied.

I arrived at the restaurant at 6:50 p.m. Two hours and ten minutes later, still sitting there, I checked her Twitter feed. Her last message, written four hours earlier, read: “Somebody please tell me what the fuck I am supposed to do at 7 p.m.! Why the fuck don’t I write this shit down?!?”