So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Ten. The Near Drowning of Mike Daisey

It feels like they want an apology, but it’s a lie.” Mike Daisey and I were sitting in a Brooklyn restaurant. He was a big man and he frequently dabbed the perspiration from his face with a handkerchief that was always within his reach. “It’s a lie because they don’t want an apology,” he said. “An apology is supposed to be a communion — a coming together. For someone to make an apology, someone has to be listening. They listen and you speak and there’s an exchange. That’s why we have a thing about accepting apologies. There’s a power exchange that happens. But they don’t want an apology.” He looked at me. “What they want is my destruction. What they want is for me to die. They will never say this because it’s too histrionic. But they never want to hear from me again for the rest of my life, and while they’re never hearing from me, they have the right to use me as a cultural reference point whenever it services their ends. That’s how it would work out best for them. They would like me to never speak again.” He paused. “I’d never had the opportunity to be the object of hate before. The hard part isn’t the hate. It’s the object.”

—

Mike Daisey’s transgression — which was remarkably similar to Jonah’s — had been uncovered three months before Michael Moynihan lay on his sofa that July Fourth and wondered when Bob Dylan had ever called the creative process “just the sense that you got something to say.” Like Jonah and Stephen Glass, Mike Daisey had been caught lying in a story. His was about a trip he had just taken to Shenzhen, China, during which he met factory workers who made Apple products. But some of the meetings had never happened. His shaming was maybe even more agonizing than Jonah’s because every breath of it — every long, panicked silence — was captured on audio and broadcast on one of America’s most popular radio shows, This American Life. Mike Daisey has always been a dandy. He was a big, loud, flamboyant character in New York’s theater world. And for much of the broadcast, he sounded like he thought he could bluster his way through it. He had hope. He made justifications and nitpicked little points. But as the hour unfolded, it all crumbled, and by the end, when he finally said, “I’m sorry,” he sounded finished — exhausted, empty. It was such an agonized “I’m sorry” that I thought there was a chance he would leave the radio studio, go home, and kill himself. But instead, within minutes, he published an apologetic statement on his website, and by the next day, he was back on Twitter. He was one man screaming at ten thousand people screaming at him. He berated and scolded his attackers and called them hypocrites. At first, all this made them even more incensed. But he didn’t budge. He was a tireless defender of himself.

Eventually, it became clear to his critics that their fury was useless. They drifted away, until it all just stopped. And now, as Jonah Lehrer roamed the Los Angeles wilderness shattered and disgraced, Mike Daisey posted photographs on Instagram of him and his wife sunbathing poolside in Miami, having just completed a critically acclaimed sold-out theatrical tour. How could almost identical shamings annihilate one man and leave another without a scratch?

—

In the restaurant, Mike didn’t reply to these questions right away. Then he said, “When I was young, twenty-one, twenty-two, my life fell apart in a really catastrophic way.”

He had been staring down at the table. But now he looked up. “My girlfriend had suddenly started avoiding me,” he continued. “I’d be, ‘Let’s get together.’ But she always put me off. And finally I got a phone call. She was pregnant. Eight months pregnant. I was going to be a father. In a month.”

This was in far northern Maine, Mike said. He felt trapped. In Maine. The baby was born. Their relationship disintegrated under the strain. “I abdicated my responsibilities as a father. I completely fell apart.”

Every night Mike would go swimming in a lake. Some nights he swam out as far as he could. “I kept going. It got colder and colder. And I’d just lie in the lake. And I was trying, it’s really clear now, I was trying to drown.”

“You were trying to kill yourself?”

Mike nodded. “This is really clear to me now.” He paused. “Ever since, I’ve never felt as tethered to this place as other people do. Everything seems like a long, improbable afterlife.” Mike smiled. “I bring it up because it might be useful for you,” he said.

We carried on eating. The story just hung there. I think Mike was treating me like an audience, feeding me fragments of stories, forcing me to piece together the mystery myself.

He swam back to shore each night. He ended up teaching high school drama. He graduated a year late. Then he left Maine. “I drove to Seattle,” he said. “I tried to create a new life for myself.” And he did. He became, of all things, a monologist in the theater. His shows were passionate and well liked but too esoteric to make a splash outside his fringe world. They were about esoteric things like how war had turned his grandfather cold and how that coldness had trickled down to turn his father cold. And so on. But then, in the summer of 2010, he performed his masterpiece—The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs—the story of his trip to China.

The factory workers he met there told him about the n-hexane: “N-hexane is an iPhone screen cleaner,” Mike’s monologue went. “It’s great because it evaporates a little bit faster than alcohol does, which means you can run the production line even faster and try to keep up with the quotas. The problem is that n-hexane is a potent neurotoxin, and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them… can’t even pick up a glass.” His monologue moved on to describe his meetings with thirteen-year-old girls who worked at the plants because nobody checked ages, and the old man with the right hand that was “twisted up into a claw. It was crushed in a metal press at Foxconn.” Mike showed this old man his iPad. “He’s never actually seen one on, this thing that took his hand. I turn it on… the icons flare into view. And he strokes the screen with his ruined hand. And he says something… He says, ‘It’s a kind of magic.’”

One night at the end of 2011, This American Life’s creator, Ira Glass, saw Mike Daisey perform his show onstage at Joe’s Pub in New York City. Like everyone else, he was spellbound, and so he offered Mike the chance to tell it on his program. The people at the show tried to fact-check. They asked Mike to put them in touch with his translator. But Mike said his phone number for her no longer worked. Some of his other facts had checked out, so they took his word for it.

—

I heard it go out live. I was driving through Florida. I pulled my car onto the side of the road and didn’t move until it had finished. People all over America were doing the same. We felt inexorably altered by the power of Mike’s narrative and became determined to take action. Most of us, it goes without saying, were inexorably altered back to how we’d been earlier that day by the time we’d had dinner or whatever. But some weren’t. One listener started a petition calling for better working conditions at Apple’s manufacturing plants. He delivered 250,000 signatures. Pressure was put on the company like never before. It announced that, for the first time in its history, it would allow third parties in to audit the factory conditions. The Mike Daisey episode became the single most popular podcast in This American Life’s history.

But unbeknownst to Mike, his own Michael Moynihan was quietly digging.

He was Rob Schmitz, the Shanghai correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace. Some of Mike’s details had seemed suspicious to him. For instance, Mike had mentioned interviewing factory workers in a Starbucks. How could they afford that? Starbucks is even more expensive in China than in the West. So he tracked down Mike’s translator. And that’s when Mike’s story fell apart. There were no workers with hands that shook uncontrollably, no old man with a clawed hand. He hadn’t visited “ten” plants in China. He’d visited three. And so on. It wasn’t that the horrors Mike described hadn’t happened — they had. One hundred thirty-seven workers at an Apple plant had been sickened by n-hexane, but it had happened in 2010 and a thousand miles away, in a town called Suzhou. (In Apple’s February 2011 annual report, the company described the use of the toxic chemical as a “core violation” of worker safety and said it had ordered the contractor to stop using n-hexane.) Mike hadn’t met these Suzhou workers. He’d only read about them. It just made his story more enthralling to pretend he was there.

And so, on March 16, 2012, Ira Glass brought Mike Daisey back on the air.

IRA GLASS: Were you afraid that we would discover something if we talked to [the translator]?

MIKE DAISEY: No, not really.

IRA: Really? There was no part of you which felt like, OK, well, the hexane thing didn’t really happen when I was there. And did you feel like there was something that we would discover by talking to her?

MIKE: Well I did think it would unpack the complexities of, of like how, how the story gets told.

IRA: What does that mean, “unpack the complexities”?

MIKE: Well, it means that like the hexane thing, I think I’m agreeing with you….

MIKE: I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context… we have different languages for what the truth means.

IRA: I understand that you believe that, but I think you’re kidding yourself. Normal people who go to see a person talk — people take it as a literal truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. Brian, who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true….

MIKE: We have different worldviews on some of these things.

IRA: I know. But I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands onstage and says, “This happened to me,” I think it happened to them, unless it’s clearly labeled, “Here’s a work of fiction.”…

IRA: I have such a weird mix of feelings about this. Because I simultaneously feel terrible for you, and also, I feel lied to. And also, I stuck my neck out for you. I feel like I vouched for you. With our audience. Based on your word.

MIKE: I’m sorry.

The tone of voice in which Mike said, “I’m sorry,” sounded like that of a child — a gifted, difficult, maverick child who thought he was bigger than the school — being made to stand in front of everyone and get chastened until he changed. In those three syllables he seemed to shift from defiant to broken.

But then he was back online, his self-esteem apparently totally revived.

He felt proud to have recovered the way he did. “I’ve been obsessed with investigating literary scandals,” he told me. “Nobody ever comes back from those things. At the scale and intensity of what I experienced? Nobody comes out intact.”

“I know!” I said. “Did you know from the start you’d survive?”

“Oh no,” Mike said. “Oh no. I thought about killing myself.”

I looked at him. “Really?” I said.

“Everything was on the table,” he said. “I actively talked about killing myself. I actively talked about never performing again, just leaving the theater and never performing again. We talked about getting divorced. Very openly.”

“How was your wife during this?” I said.

“She was making sure I wasn’t alone,” Mike said.

“When was all of this happening?” I asked.

“The very worst part of the scandal was before anyone knew of the scandal,” he said. “There was a week between my interview with Ira and the show airing. During that week, I began to disassociate onstage. I was falling apart. I would freeze as I was doing the show. I would feel my mind take itself apart. That was the worst part. It was fucking terrible, the fear, and the feeling that you will dissolve.”

“What were you most scared of?”

“I was terrified that I would no longer be able to tell the narrative of my life,” Mike said, “that every time I performed onstage his judgment of me would echo forever, deciding who and what I was.”

“So what changed?”

Mike didn’t reply for a while. Then he said, “When Ira first asked me if I wanted to tell the story on his show, I thought, This is a test. If I really believe in this, then the cowardly thing would be to not do the story. If I bury it, nothing will change.” He paused. “I knew that the story would explode in the consciousness, and then it would explode for me.”

I frowned. “You’re saying you knew from the beginning that you’d be exposed?”

Mike nodded. “What happened on that lake showed me that there’s a door,” he said. “And the door is open a crack. And you can feel it. You can just die. You see? Once you accept that, it brings clarity. You want to do something in the world? Be willing to throw your life away. I was, ‘Fine. I’ll throw my life away. Fine.’”

“What about the risk that the scandal, instead of shining a light on what was happening in China, would turn the light off?” I said.

“I would have worried about that a lot,” Mike replied. Then he corrected his phrasing. “I worried about that a lot,” he said. “I was really worried about that.”

He could see me looking uncertainly at him.

“Look, nobody wants to hear that I am actually a heroic crusader and that I sacrificed myself,” he said. “Nobody wants to hear that narrative. But that is, actually, the narrative. I knew there was no way it would withstand the scrutiny of becoming a major story. I knew it was going to fail.”

—

I was sure I was watching a man in the process of building a fictional history for himself. In this new version of events, Mike had valiantly destroyed his reputation to save lives in China, like a suicide bomber. But at the time I felt I shouldn’t tell him that I’d worked this out about him. It seemed to be what was holding him together.

But I think he read all this in my face, because he suddenly said: “The way we construct consciousness is to tell the story of ourselves to ourselves, the story of who we believe we are. I feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to write a different narrative for the person. One story tries to overwrite the other. And so to survive you have to own your story. Or”—Mike looked at me—“you write a third story. You react to the narrative that’s been forced upon you.” He paused. “You have to find a way to disrespect the other narrative,” he said. “If you believe it, it will crush you.”

• • •

I was glad Mike Daisey had found a way to have a life. But I don’t think his survival method was helpful advice for Jonah or Justine. They had no storytelling career to fall back on. There was no third narrative for them. There was just the one. Jonah was the fraudulent pop-science writer. Justine was the AIDS-tweet woman. They were tainted people and it wouldn’t take a sleuth to find it out. Their flaws were right there on the front page of Google.

Justine made good on her promise. Five months after our first meeting we had lunch on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She filled me in on how her life had gone. She’d had a job offer right away, she said. But it was a weird one — from the owner of a Florida yachting company. “He said, ‘I saw what happened to you. I’m fully on your side.’” But Justine knew nothing about yachts. So why did he want to hire her? “Was he a crazy person who thinks white people can’t get AIDS?” She turned him down. Then she left New York. “In New York your career is your identity. I had that taken away from me.” She went as far away as she could. To Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She got a volunteer job with an NGO working to reduce maternal mortality rates.

“I thought that if I was going to be in this fucking terrible situation I should get something out of it, or at least try to make the most out of it and help people and learn.” She flew there alone. “I knew where I was staying but there are no addresses. They don’t really have street names. English is not their national language.”

“Did you like it in Ethiopia?” I asked.

“It was fantastic,” she said.

And this is where Justine’s story could end. If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of people who tore her apart, you may want to make this your closing image of her. You may want to picture her in some makeshift maternity hospital in Addis Ababa. Perhaps she’s bent over a woman in labor and she does something extraordinary to save the woman’s life. Perhaps she glances up then, and wipes the desert sweat from her brow, and she’s got a whole different facial expression — one of tough, proud wisdom or something. And it’s all because of you. Justine would never have gone to Addis Ababa had she not been publicly shamed and fired from IAC.

But who was Justine kidding? Addis Ababa was great for a month, but she wasn’t an Ethiopia person. She was a New York City person. She was nervy and sassy and sort of debonair. And so she came back. To a town where things were still not okay for her. She had temporary work doing the PR for the launch of a dating website, but she was not back on her feet. She was still fired from her dream job. She was still ridiculed and demonized across the Internet.

“I’m not fine yet,” she said. “And I’ve really suffered.”

She pushed the food around her plate. When I thought of Justine, I thought of a store looted in a riot. She may have left the door ajar, but she was all smashed up.

But I did notice one positive change in her. The first time we’d met, she’d seemed ashamed — weighed down by the guilt that she’d “tarnished” her family by pressing send on that stupid tweet. I think she still felt ashamed, but maybe not quite so much. Instead, she said, she felt humiliated.

The week I had lunch with Justine, the European Court of Justice delivered an unexpected judgment — the Right to Be Forgotten ruling. If an article or a blog about a person was “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”—whatever those vague words meant — Google must, if requested, deindex it from its European sites (although not from Google.com). Tens of thousands of people applied to be forgotten straightaway — there’d be more than 70,000 applicants within three months. Google complied vigorously, apparently assenting to practically every request. In fact, it complied so vigorously — deindexing swaths of Guardian and Daily Mail articles, for example, and then sending the newspapers automated notices informing them that they’d been deindexed — the company seemed to be intentionally creating chaos to stir up resistance to the judgment. Articles and websites sprung up across the Internet attacking the ruling and outing the forgotten: a football referee who had lied about his reasons for giving a penalty, a couple arrested for having sex on a train (who I’d forgotten all about until then), an airline, Cathay Pacific, accused of racism by a Muslim job applicant.

Justine, following the news from New York, had “conflicting feelings immediately,” she told me. It seemed like censorship to her. And it also seemed appealing. But she knew invoking it would be a disaster for her. If the world found out — imagine the frenzy. No. The Right to Be Forgotten ruling would improve the life of some actual transgressor — some barely shamed niche European former fraudster who slipped through the outers’ net, for instance — far more than it would improve the life of the super-shamed Justine Sacco.

And so the worst thing, Justine said, the thing that made her feel most helpless, was her lack of control over the Google search results. They were just there, eternal, crushing.

“It’s going to take a very long time for those Google search results to change for me,” she said.