Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“Do you resent me for telling you what to say?” said Thelma.

“Yes, I fucking do,” I yelled. “I massively fucking resent you for telling me what to say.”

“Poor little thing,” said Brad. “We’re so sorry we hurt your tender little feelings. Okay!” Brad clapped his hands together. “Lunch! I hate to abandon you, Jon, but I’m going to leave you cooking.”

The group stood up and began drifting away.

They were breaking for lunch?

“But I’m still very resentful,” I said.

“Good!” said Brad. “I hope you remain incomplete all lunch.”

“I don’t see any value in that at all,” I muttered, as I put on my jacket.

—

Out in the hotel corridor Mario the marijuana dealer smiled and told me, “I don’t think Brad’s finished with you yet!” I understood why Mario said that. Brad seemed to have just broken his own golden rule. He hadn’t ensured that everyone stayed together while my anger played itself out. No love had been given the chance to grow. I had been cast out into Chicago at an apex of resentfulness.

I spent the lunch hour stomping around the streets. After lunch, I had only a few hours before I needed to catch my plane back to New York, so I laid out for Brad my complaint.

“You broke for lunch right in the middle of it,” I said. “You left me seething.”

Melissa leaned over and removed my baseball cap from my head. I flinched.

“I could have been suicidally unhappy about it,” I said.

“We were running ten minutes late for lunch, so I made the decision to leave you cooking,” Brad said.

After that, things moved on. Jack the veterinarian sex addict who hated my fiddling with my phone took the Hot Seat. He recounted a time his father physically attacked his mother in front of him. It was a heartbreaking story. He closed his eyes tightly as he told it, so I took the opportunity to quickly check Twitter. I hate not knowing what’s happening on Twitter. Soon after that, I caught my plane home.

—

We all kept in touch for a while. Mary e-mailed me to let me know how things had gone with Amanda: “I tried the Rad. Hon. approach and she was super resistant and defensive and pretty much closed to what I wanted to express. I could feel the waves of anger coming off her while talking to her. Since then I have had to still see her at the gym and at times I’ve ‘ignored’ her. Other times we’ve had civil, pleasant chats (not that many).”

Another member of the group e-mailed us all to report that he attempted Radical Honesty on his wife, but she responded by trying to physically push him away so he told her that he would “‘get the ax and defend myself by killing you.’ Rightfully she was scared, as she knows that often I confuse truth with fantasy. We all do. So the police came by. I am under consideration for a job that involves a security clearance, so any ARREST will result in no offer there… I love you all, especially Thelma, who I find extremely attractive, and I want to have sex with her (you). Perhaps I could even treat her (you) as my wife.”

Brad wrote back, copying everyone in: “What you say is completely insane. Your best bet is to seek out a psychiatrist who can prescribe you a mild tranquilizer.”

—

My Radical Honesty weekend had not been a success for me. But I continued to believe that Max Mosley’s own version of it— “as soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed, the whole thing crumbles” —had indeed been his magic formula, the reason why he’d soared above his shaming. And I continued to believe it right up until a new public shaming unfolded, this time up in Kennebunk, Maine, that forced me to rethink the whole thing. This new shaming made me realize that Max had survived his for a completely different reason — one I hadn’t put my finger on.

KENNEBUNK, Me. — The summer people who clog the roads here are long gone and the leaves have turned crimson and orange, but the prevailing sentiment in this postcard-perfect coastal town these days is one of dread.

For more than a year, the police have been investigating reports that the local Zumba instructor [Alexis Wright] was using her exercise studio on a quaint downtown street for more than fitness training. In fact, the police say, she was running a one-woman brothel with up to 150 clients and secretly videotaping them as they engaged in intimate acts… the list is rumored to be replete with the names of prominent people.

— KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, The New York Times , OCTOBER 16, 2012

• • •

President George H. W. Bush has his seaside compound, Walker’s Point, four miles away from Kennebunk, up in Kennebunkport. Sometimes blacked-out cars zoom through town on their way up there, carrying Vladimir Putin or Bill Clinton or Nicolas Sarkozy, but besides that, not much happens in Kennebunk. Or not much did.

Who might be on the list? A member of the Bush family? Someone from the Secret Service? General Petraeus?

— BETHANY MCLEAN, “TOWN OF WHISPERS,” Vanity Fair , FEBRUARY 1, 2013

A defense attorney, Stephen Schwartz, petitioned the Maine Supreme Judicial Court to have the names on the list remain secret (he was representing two of the unnamed men). This was still Puritan country, he argued: “Once these names are released, they’re all going to have the mark of a scarlet letter.” But the judge ruled against him, and the York County Coast Star , the Kennebunk paper, started publishing.

There were sixty-nine people on the list in all — sixty-eight men and one woman. Sadly, no Bush was among them, not even a member of the family’s security detail. But there were Kennebunk society people — a pastor from the South Portland Church of the Nazarene, a lawyer, a high school hockey coach, a former town mayor, a retired schoolteacher and his wife.

This was a unique event in the public shaming world. Mass disgrace scenarios like this never happen. Given that my job had become to try matching personality nuances with public shaming survival levels, it was a dream come true for me. When do you get a sample size like that? Surely among the people on the list there’d be those so eager to please that they’d allow strangers’ negative opinions of them to meld with their own, creating some corrosive amalgam. There’d be those so desperate not to lose their status that it would need to be pried from their clenched fingers. There’d be serious people like Jonah, hitherto smart-alecky people like Justine. And there’d be Max Mosleys. Kennebunk was like a well-stocked laboratory for me. Who would incur the crowd’s wrath, who its mercy? Who’d be shattered? Who’d emerge unscathed? I drove up there.

—

Inside Court One of the Biddeford District Courthouse half a dozen of the men from the Zumba list sat on the benches, staring grimly ahead while news crews pointed their cameras at them. We in the press area were allowed to stare at them and they weren’t able to look away. It reminded me of how Nathaniel Hawthorne had described the pillory in The Scarlet Letter : “[An] instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron. There can be no outrage, methinks… more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame.”

Everyone was silent and a little awkward, like we were all standing around in some strange pre-consensus limbo. This story was new. There hadn’t been time for Kennebunk society to start shunning the men. However brutal or subtle the shunning might manifest itself, nothing had happened yet. I was in on the ground floor.