Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

The judge entered, and it began. The court proceedings were nothing much. The men were, in turn, told to stand up and plead guilty or not guilty. Each man pled guilty. Fines were imposed—$300 for each visit to Alexis Wright. The maximum fine today was $900. And then it was over. They were allowed to leave. And they did, hurriedly. I followed the last one out. All the others had vanished except for him. I introduced myself to him.

“You can interview me,” he said. “But I want something in return.”

“Okay?” I said.

“Money,” he said. “I’m not talking about much. Just enough to buy my kid a present from Walmart. Just a voucher from Walmart. And then I’ll tell you all the details. I’ll tell you EVERYTHING. What me and Alexis got up to.”

He was a heavy man. He gave me a look of desperate, sad, faux lasciviousness, like he was offering me the best erotic novel. “I’ll tell you everything,” he said.

I said I couldn’t pay someone to talk about his or her crime, so he shrugged and walked away. I drove back to New York and the next day I wrote to all sixty-eight men and one woman on the list, requesting interviews. Then I waited.

A few days later, an e-mail arrived.

Okay, we can talk. I am the former Church of the Nazarene pastor that unfortunately became involved in this whole mess.

Sincerely yours,

James (Andrew) Ferreira

• • •

Hello, Jon.” Andrew Ferreira’s voice was kind and tired and lost-sounding — a formerly chipper community leader trying to adapt to a world that might no longer have any interest in his leadership. This was the first time he’d agreed to talk to a journalist. He said the last few days had been hard. His wife had left him and he’d been fired from his job. All that had been inevitable, he said, but the rest was unknown. The extent to which the community would cast him out, and how he’d deal with it: unknown.

I asked him why he visited Alexis Wright.

“Maybe my marriage wasn’t great,” he replied. “It wasn’t horrible. It was just sort of drifting. Cohabiting to a point. Anyway. I was reading a story in The Boston Globe on the Craigslist Killer. You remember that story? He murdered a twenty-something call girl. And The Boston Globe said that most of the ads for escorts have migrated away from Craigslist and onto Backpage.com. If someone wants an escort or a happy-ending massage or something — Backpage.com. And I just remembered it. I wish I hadn’t. Unfortunately, some things just stick in your mind. I became tainted with the information.”

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 good-byes. 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’s 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’s 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’s 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 was specified), imprisoned with hard labor for at least a year, and on a second offense, imprisoned for life.