Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“I wanted to scream, ‘It was just about a sign,’” Lindsey said.

Lindsey doesn’t know how it spread. “I don’t think I’ll ever know,” she said. “We have a feeling that somebody at work found it. We had kind of revitalized that campus. There was animosity that came from that. They saw us as young, irreverent idiots.”

By the time she went to bed that night—“which was admittedly at four a.m.”—a Fire Lindsey Stone Facebook page had been created. It attracted 12,000 likes. Lindsey read every comment. “I became really obsessed with reading everything about myself.”

The next day camera crews had gathered outside her front door. Her father tried talking to them. He had a cigarette in his hand. The family dog had followed him out. As he tried to explain that Lindsey wasn’t a terrible person, he noticed the cameras move from his face down to the cigarette and the dog, like they were a family of hillbillies — smoking separatists down a lane with guard dogs.

LIFE was inundated with e-mails demanding their jobs, so Lindsey was called into work. But she wasn’t allowed inside the building. Her boss met her in the parking lot and told her to hand over her keys.

“Literally, overnight everything I knew and loved was gone,” Lindsey said.

And that’s when she fell into a depression, became an insomniac, and barely left home for a year.

• • •

COMPANY PRAISED FOR FIRING WOMAN WHO TOOK DISRESPECTFUL PHOTO NEXT TO SOLDIER’S GRAVE

A company is being applauded for firing a woman who made a vulgar gesture next to a soldier’s burial site, sparking nationwide outrage… Vitriol toward Lindsey Stone hasn’t relented since she lost her job… Commentators suggested “she should be shot” or exiled from the United States…

Stone, who issued a statement of apology, has refused to show her face since the backlash, her parents told CBS Boston.

— RHEANA MURRAY, NEW YORK Daily News, NOVEMBER 22, 2012, AS SEEN ON PAGE ONE OF THE GOOGLE.COM RESULTS FOR THE SEARCH TERM “LINDSEY STONE”

During the year that followed the Washington, D.C., trip, Lindsey scanned Craigslist for caregiving work, but nobody ever replied to her applications. She lurked online, watching all the other Lindsey Stones get destroyed. “I felt so terrible for Justine Sacco,” she said, “and that girl at Halloween who dressed like the Boston Marathon victim.”

And then her life suddenly got much better. She was offered a job caring for children with autism.

“But I’m terrified,” she said.

“That your bosses will find out?”

“Yeah.”

—

Psychologists try to remind anxiety sufferers that “what if” worries are irrational ones. If you find yourself thinking, What if I just came across as racist? the “what if” is evidence that nothing bad actually happened. It’s just thoughts swirling frantically around. But Lindsey’s “what if” worry—“What if my new company googles me?”—was extremely plausible. In the tempest of her anxiety attacks there was no driftwood to hold on to. Her worst-case scenario was a likely one. And the photograph was everywhere. It had become so iconic and ubiquitous among swaths of U.S. veterans and right-wingers and antifeminists that one man had even turned it into patriotic wallpaper, superimposing onto the wall behind Lindsey’s shrieking face and upturned finger a picture of a military funeral, complete with a coffin draped in the American flag.

Lindsey had wanted the job so much she’d been “nervous about even applying. And I wasn’t sure how to address it on my résumé. Why the abrupt departure from LIFE? I was conflicted on whether to say to them, ‘Just so you know, I am this Lindsey Stone.’ Because I knew it was just a mouse click away.”

Before the job interview, the question had haunted her. Should she tell them? She was “insanely nervous” about making the wrong decision. She left it until the moment of the interview. And then the interview was over and she found that she hadn’t mentioned it.

“It just didn’t feel right,” she said. “People who have gotten to know me don’t see Arlington as a big deal. And so I wanted to give them the opportunity to know me before I say to them, ‘This is what you’ll get if you google me.’”

She’s been in the job four months, and she still hasn’t told them.

“And obviously you can’t ask them, ‘Have you noticed it and decided it’s not a problem?’” I said.

“Right,” said Lindsey.

“So you feel trapped in a paranoid silence,” I said.

“I love this job so much,” Lindsey said. “I love these kids. One of the parents paid me a really high compliment the other day. I’ve only been working with her son for a month and she was like, ‘The moment I met you, seeing the way you are with my son, and the way you treat people, you were meant to work in this field.’ But I see everything with a heavy heart because I wait for the other shoe to drop. What if she found out? Would she feel the same way?” Lindsey could never just be happy and relaxed. The terror was always there. “It really impacts the way you view the world. Since it happened, I haven’t tried to date anybody. How much do you let a new person into your life? Do they already know? The place I’m working at now — I was under the impression nobody knew. But someone made a comment the other day and I think they knew .”

“What was the comment?”

“Oh, we were talking about something and he tossed off a comment like ‘Oh, it’s not like I’m going to plaster that all over the Internet.’ Then he quickly said, ‘Just kidding. I would never do that to somebody. I would never do that to you.’”

“So you don’t know for sure that he knew.”

“Exactly,” Lindsey said. “But his hurried follow-up… I don’t know.” She paused. “That fear. It impacts you.”

But now, suddenly, something had happened that could make all Lindsey’s problems vanish. It was something almost magical, and it was my doing. I had set in motion a mysterious and fairy tale — like set of events for her. I’d never in my life been in a situation like this. It was new for both of us. It felt good — but there was a chance it wasn’t good.

• • •

It all started when I chanced upon the story of two former philosophy classmates from Harvard — Graeme Wood and Phineas Upham. There was something quite like Michael Moynihan and Jonah Lehrer about them. At Harvard — as Graeme Wood would later write — Phineas “dressed preppy and was a member of the Harvard chapter of the Ayn Rand cult. I wasn’t poor, but no one in my family knew how heavy a bag with $300,000 in it felt.”

What Graeme Wood meant was that in 2010—twelve years after leaving Harvard — Phineas Upham and his mother, Nancy, were arrested on tax-evasion charges. The indictment read that they conspired to hide $11 million in a Swiss bank account and then sneak the money in cash back to America. Graeme was intrigued by the news, so he set up a Google alert to “keep abreast of developments.”

The scandal was over fast. Nancy pled guilty, was fined $5.5 million, and received a three-year suspended sentence. Soon after that, Graeme received a Google news alert about Phineas.

U.S. DROPS CASE OF MAN ACCUSED OF HELPING MOM HIDE MONEY

The office of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan has dropped an October 2010 indictment charging Samuel Phineas Upham with one count of conspiracy to commit tax fraud and three counts of aiding in the preparation of false tax returns… “The government has concluded that further prosecution of the defendant would not be in the interests of justice,” prosecutors said in a May 18 filing in federal court in New York.