Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“I have no idea what you actually do,” I had told Michael over the telephone before our dinner. “I don’t know how you manipulate Google search results.”

I understood that Michael was offering some kind of stealthier version of the European Court of Justice’s Right to Be Forgotten ruling. Plus, unlike the ruling, Michael had a worldwide reach, not just a European one. As it happened, the judgment wasn’t working out well for a lot of its applicants. They were finding themselves less forgotten than ever, given that so many journalists and bloggers had dedicated themselves to outing them. But nobody was scrutinizing the client lists of the online reputation management companies. Only a few very unlucky people, like Phineas Upham, had been exposed that way.

“Your work is a total mystery to me,” I said to Michael. “Especially the technological side of it. Maybe I could follow someone through the process?”

“Sure,” Michael replied.

And so we planned it out. We’d just need to find a willing client. Which wouldn’t be easy given that my pitch was that I wanted to study something they were frantically attempting to conceal. It was not a winning pitch.

We talked about generic possibilities. Maybe I could convince a victim of “revenge porn,” Michael suggested, some woman whose spurned boyfriend had posted naked photographs of her online. Or maybe I could convince a politician who had said some offhand thing and wanted it buried before it devoured him. Or, oh, Michael added, somewhat less generically, maybe I could convince the leader of a religious group who was currently being falsely accused online of murdering his brother.

I coughed. “How about the leader of the religious group being falsely accused of murdering his brother?” I said.

—

I’ll call the religious leader Gregory. Which is not his real name. Plus, I’ve changed some details of his story to make him unidentifiable for reasons that will become obvious. Gregory’s brother — a member of Gregory’s religious group — had been found dead in a hotel room. A member of Gregory’s flock had been arrested for the murder. The investigating officers had apparently discounted Gregory as a co-conspirator. But message boards were ablaze with speculation that he’d directed it as if he were some kind of Charles Manson.

Which was where Reputation.com had come in. Gregory hadn’t approached them. Their outreach team had noticed the accusations and had pitched him their services. I don’t know how far that conversation had gone. But now Michael talked to Gregory about taking him on as a client pro bono on the condition that I would be allowed to witness it all.

Gregory e-mailed me. He was appreciative of Michael’s offer, he wrote, and might consent to an interview with me — his tone made “consent to an interview” sound like “deign to consent to an interview,” I thought — but he was puzzled. Given that my previous books were about such frivolous topics as military psychics and conspiracy theorists, why did I suppose my readers would be interested in the important subject of public shaming?

Oh, my God, I thought. He’s right.

Gregory added that he was sorry if he was offending me, but why did I presume that my views on the serious subject of public shaming would be taken seriously by anyone, given that my previous books sounded so implausible?

That IS a bit offensive, I thought.

Gregory seemed suspicious that the murder-mystery aspect of his story was more captivating to me than the public shaming part. And what could I say? He was right. I was happy to have Gregory’s name purged from the Internet if I could get to hear the intriguing details. I was the Selfish Giant, wanting to keep the lavish garden for myself and my readers, while building a tall wall around it so nobody else could look in.

Gregory and I e-mailed back and forth about thirty times during the days that followed. My e-mails were breezy. Gregory’s e-mails alluded darkly to “conditions.” I ignored the word “conditions” and carried on being breezy. Finally, Gregory wrote that the good news was that he’d decided to grant me an exclusive interview, so he was instructing his lawyer to draw up a contract in which I agreed to portray him in a positive way or else suffer significant financial penalty.

And that was the end of my relationship with Gregory.

—

Now that I no longer needed to be on my best behavior in my e-mails to him, I let it all out. “For about a thousand reasons there is no way on Earth I would sign a contract promising to be positive or risk significant financial penalty,” I e-mailed. “I’ve never heard of such a thing! I can’t tell you how frowned upon something like that is in journalism. NO ONE does it. If I signed that, you could determine anything negative and take my money! What if, God forbid, you get charged? What if we have a falling out?”

Gregory wished me the best of luck with my book.

—

It was frustrating. Michael Fertik was offering free services to a shamed person of my choice and I was finding it difficult to provide him with one who wasn’t unpleasantly overbearing. The fact was, even though Gregory hadn’t been charged with any crime, his weird and controlling e-mails had made me feel warier of the online reputation management world. What other cracks were being papered over?

Michael had accused me of “prurient curiosity of the type you condemn in your book” when I’d asked him about the early pedophile sign-ups he’d thwarted. And now the accusation put me in a panic. I didn’t want to write a book that advocated for a less curious world. Prurient curiosity may not be great. But curiosity is. People’s flaws need to be written about. The flaws of some people lead to horrors inflicted on others. And then there are the more human flaws that, when you shine a light onto them, de-demonize people who might otherwise be seen as ogres.

But there was a side of Michael’s business I respected — the side that offered salvation to people who’d really done nothing wrong but had been dramatically shamed anyway. Like Justine Sacco. Which is why I now e-mailed Michael’s publicist, Leslie Hobbs, suggesting Justine as Gregory’s replacement: “I think she’s a deserving case,” I wrote. “She may not go for it. But should I at least put it to her as a possibility?”

Leslie didn’t reply to my e-mail. I sent another one asking why they didn’t want to consider taking Justine on. She didn’t reply to that one either. I took the hint. I didn’t want to lose their goodwill, so I threw Justine on the fire and came up with a new name — a public shamee I’d written to three times and had heard nothing back. Lindsey Stone.

—

It was the first time I’d ever been in a position to offer an incentive to a reluctant interviewee. I’d witnessed other journalists do it and had always glared at them with hatred from across the room. Twenty years ago I covered the rape trial of a British TV presenter. Journalists on the press bench were shooting him likable little smiles in the hope of an exclusive interview should he be found not guilty. It was embarrassing. And futile too: On the day of his acquittal a woman in a fur coat appeared in court from nowhere and whisked him away. It turned out that she was from the News of the World . All the other journalists — with their likable little smiles — had never stood a chance. This woman had a checkbook.

I still had no checkbook, but without Michael’s inducement, I’d have had no chance with Lindsey. And it was quite the inducement.

“We’ll end up spending hundreds of thousands of bucks on her,” Michael said. “At least a hundred grand. Up to several hundred grand of effort.”