So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Eleven. The Man Who Can Change the Google Search Results

In October 2012 a group of adults with learning difficulties took an organized trip to Washington, D.C. They visited the National Mall, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Smithsonian, Arlington National Cemetery, and the U.S. Mint. They saw the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. At night they sang karaoke in the hotel bar. Their caregivers, Lindsey Stone and her friend Jamie, did a duet of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

“They had the greatest time on that trip,” Lindsey Stone told me. “We were laughing on the bus. We were laughing walking around at night. They thought that we were fun and cool.”

Lindsey was telling me the story eighteen months later. We were sitting at her kitchen table. She lives down a long lane near a pretty lake in a seaside town on the East Coast of the United States. “I like to dance and I like to do karaoke,” Lindsey said. “But for a long time after that trip I didn’t leave the house. During the day, I’d just sit here. I didn’t want to be seen by anybody. I didn’t want people looking at me.”

“How long did that last?” I asked her.

“Almost a year,” she said.

Lindsey didn’t want to talk to me about what had happened on that trip to Washington, D.C. I had written to her three times and she had ignored each of my letters. But a very peculiar circumstance had made it necessary for her to change her mind.

• • •

Lindsey and Jamie had been with LIFE — Living Independently Forever — for a year and a half before that trip. LIFE was a residence for “pretty high-functioning people with learning difficulties,” Lindsey said. “Jamie had started a jewelry club, which was a hit with the girls. We’d take them to the movies. We’d take them bowling. We got the company to purchase a karaoke sound system. We heard a lot from parents that we were the best thing that ever happened to that campus.”

Off duty, she and Jamie had a running joke — taking stupid photographs, “smoking in front of a NO SMOKING sign, or posing in front of statues, mimicking the pose. We took dumb pictures all the time. And so at Arlington we saw the SILENCE AND RESPECT sign. And inspiration struck.”

“So,” Lindsey said, “thinking we were funny, Jamie posted it on Facebook and tagged me on it with my consent because I thought it was hilarious.”

Nothing much happened after that. A few Facebook friends posted unenthusiastic comments. “One of them had served in the military and he wrote a message saying, ‘This is kind of offensive. I know you girls, but it’s just tasteless.’ Another said ‘I agree’ and another said ‘I agree’ and then I said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa! It’s just us being douchebags! Forget about it!’”

Whoa whoa whoa… wait. This is just us, being the douchebags that we are, challenging authority in general. Much like the pic posted the night before, of me smoking right next to a no smoking sign. OBVIOUSLY we meant NO disrespect to people that serve or have served our country.

— LINDSEY STONE’S FACEBOOK MESSAGE, OCTOBER 20, 2012

After that, Jamie said to Lindsey, “Do you think we should take it down?”

“No!” Lindsey replied. “What’s the big deal? No one’s ever going to think of it again.”

Their Facebook settings were a mystery to them. Most of the privacy boxes were ticked. Some weren’t. Sometimes they’d half notice that boxes they’d thought they’d ticked weren’t ticked. Lindsey has been thinking about that “a lot” these past eighteen months. “Facebook works best when everyone is sharing and liking. It brings their ad revenues up.” Was there some Facebook shenanigan where things just “happen” to untick themselves? Some loophole? “But I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist. I don’t know if Jamie’s mobile uploads had ever been private.”

Whatever: Jamie’s mobile uploads weren’t private. And four weeks after returning from Washington, D.C., they were in a restaurant celebrating their birthday—“We’re a week apart”—when they became aware that their phones were vibrating repeatedly. So they went online.

“Lindsey Stone hates the military and hates soldiers who have died in foreign wars,” and “Die cunt,” and “You should rot in hell,” and “Just pure Evil,” and “The Face of a Typical Feminist. Fifty pounds overweight? Check. Sausage arms and little piglet fingers? Check. No respect for the men who sacrificed? Check,” and “Fuck You whore. I hope I die [sic] a slow painful death. U retarted cunt,” and “HOPE THIS CUNT GETS RAPED AND STABBED TO DEATH,” and “Spoke with an employee from LIFE who has told me there are Veterans on the board and that she will be fired. Awaiting info on her accomplice,” and “After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client. Woman needs help,” and “Send the dumb feminist to prison,” and, in response to a small number of posters suggesting that maybe a person’s future shouldn’t be ruined because of a jokey photograph, “HER FUTURE ISN’T RUINED! Stop trying to make her into a martyr. In 6 months no one except those that actually know her will remember this.”

“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.

— DAVID VOREACOS, Bloomberg Businessweek, MAY 23, 2012

All charges against Phineas had been dropped. And so that was that. Except Graeme never bothered to cancel his Phineas Upham Google alert. Which was how he began to notice the strange accolades. Phineas was suddenly garnering a lot of them. He was appointed “Head Finance Curator of Venture Cap Monthly,” whatever that meant. “Charity News Forum” voted him “Philanthropist of the Month.” He started writing for a magazine Graeme had never heard of called Philanthropy Chronicle. He published a collection of essays. He even created a magazine to “bring philosophy writing to underprivileged youth by making it part of nonprofit educational programs in developing nations.”

But, as Graeme would write, “something was wrong with these sites, which in every case looked flimsy and temporary, especially when you got beyond the first page.”

When I went to the street address listed for the [Philanthropy Chronicle] magazine’s offices, I discovered that 64 Prince Street did not exist — or, rather, that it is a back entrance next to an Indian restaurant.

What had begun as a schadenfreude-motivated Phineas Upham Google alert had led Graeme into the mysterious world of “black-ops reputation management.” The purpose of the fake sites was obvious — to push reports about the tax-evasion charges so far down the search results that they’d effectively vanish. Nobody had heard of the European Court of Justice’s “Right to Be Forgotten” ruling at that point — it was still two years from existing — but somebody was evidently fashioning some clumsy homemade U.S.-based version for Phineas Upham.

Graeme had a skill most people don’t. He knew how to attain clues from HTML codes. So he dug into them, “looking for evidence of a common author.” And he found it. The fake sites were the work of a man named Bryce Tom, the head of a business called Metal Rabbit Media. He was a young Californian living in New York City.

The two men met in a café, Graeme thrilled to have exposed the mother lode, Bryce Tom evidently plagued with anxiety.

“This could be very bad for me,” he said, visibly shaken. “No one’s going to want my business.” We stared at each other in uneasy silence for a few minutes, and I fetched him a nonalcoholic sangria to calm him down. When I returned, Tom had shredded his napkin.

— GRAEME WOOD, “SCRUBBED,” New York MAGAZINE, JUNE 16, 2013

I found Graeme’s story strange and enthralling except for this last part. Bryce Tom had seemed in such despair that he’d been exposed, which made for a melancholy ending.

—

And now Graeme and I sat opposite each other in a New York City café. I told him I hadn’t a clue that people like Bryce Tom existed and I wanted to do some digging of my own. Graeme gave me leads: names of men and women he suspected might be Metal Rabbit clients, like a highly decorated UN peacekeeper who had twice been blown up in suicide bombings. Back home, I read articles about how, on both occasions, bleeding from shrapnel wounds, this UN peacekeeper stayed to help the wounded and the dying. The stories were full of eulogies, tributes to his bravery, “but his Wikipedia page has been edited by a man I know works for Metal Rabbit,” Graeme had told me. And after an hour of hacking through Google’s undergrowth, I found a site accusing the peacekeeper of being a philanderer, cheating on three women at the same time, a “low life prick,” and a “pathological liar [whose] behavior is demonic.” When I e-mailed him to ask if he was a Metal Rabbit client, he obliquely replied that he wasn’t but “I do know the guys.”

Like Graeme Wood, I was having fun exploring the Google search pages nobody ever goes to for secrets that would otherwise go unnoticed, but then I met Justine and heard about Lindsey, and I read Graeme’s article a second time and saw a different side to it. It was miserable that 99 percent of us could never afford a service like Metal Rabbit, and it was intriguing and scandalous that people like Bryce Tom went about their business in such a shadowy manner. Metal Rabbit deserved exposure. But Phineas Upham had been cleared of all charges. Surely he had a right to be forgotten? Didn’t he?

I e-mailed Bryce Tom, “Is Metal Rabbit Media still operational?”

He e-mailed back, “What can I help you with?”

I e-mailed him back, “I’m a journalist…”

I never heard from him again.

• • •

The Village Pub in Woodside, near Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, looks like no big deal from the outside, but when you get inside, you realize it’s massively upmarket and filled with tech billionaires — the restaurant version of the nonthreatening clothes the tech billionaires were wearing. I told my dining companion, Michael Fertik, that he was the only person from the mysterious reputation-management world who had returned my e-mail.

“That’s because this is a really easy sector in which to be an unappealing, scurrilous operation,” he said.

“Scurrilous in what way?”

“A couple of them are really nasty fucking people,” Michael said. “There’s a guy who has some traction in our space, who runs a company, he’s a convicted rapist. He’s a felony rapist. He went to jail for four years for raping a woman. He started a company to basically obscure that fact about himself, I think.” Michael told me the name of the man’s company. “We’ve built a data file on him,” he said.

Michael’s competitors were disreputable, he said, and so were some of his potential clients.

“Very early on, within two weeks of launching our website in 2006 [Michael’s company is called Reputation.com] I remember being by myself and getting a couple of sign-ups from guys. So I googled them. They were pedophiles.”

“Do you remember the pedophiles’ names?” I asked Michael.

“Of course not,” Michael said. “Why do you ask that shit?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Curiosity.”

“No, it’s prurient curiosity of the type you condemn in your book,” Michael said.

—

Michael looked different from our fellow diners. I didn’t recognize any of them, but everyone seemed insanely rich — preppy, with faces like luxury yachts, like Martha’s Vineyard in the summertime, WASPy and at peace with the world, practically floating through the restaurant, whereas Michael was a big, angry, coiled-spring Jewish bear of a man. He was born in New York City, attained a degree from Harvard Law School, and invented the concept of online reputation management while working as a clerk for the Sixth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Louisville, Kentucky. This was the mid-2000s. Stories about cyberbullying and revenge porn were just starting to filter through. And that’s how Michael got the idea.

—

After he turned the pedophiles down, Michael told me, he noticed he was getting sign-ups from neo-Nazis, albeit repentant former ones—“When I was seventeen I was a Nazi. I was an asshole kid. Now I’m in my 40s I’m trying to move on but the Internet still thinks that I am a Nazi.” They were more sympathetic than the pedophiles, but Michael, being Jewish, still didn’t want them as clients. So he drew up a code of conduct. He wouldn’t accept anyone who was under investigation or had been convicted of a felony violent crime, or a felony fraud crime, or any sexually violent crime, or anyone accused — even informally — of a sexual crime against children. And, he said, there was another moral difference between him and his competitors. He wouldn’t invent fake accolades. He’d only put the truth up there. Although “I don’t think it’s incumbent on anyone to do massive fact-checking.”

“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.”

“Hundreds of thousands?” I said.

“Her situation is very dire,” he said.

“Why does it cost so much?” I asked him.

“Take it up with Google.” He shrugged. “It sucks to be Lindsey Stone.”

I thought Michael was being unbelievably generous.

—

I didn’t tell Lindsey that she nearly lost out to Justine Sacco and the leader of a religious group who had been falsely accused of murdering his brother. Gregory’s story had overbeguiled me. But Lindsey was perfect. With her, there were no strange caveats, no domineering e-mails. All she wanted was to work with autistic children and not feel the terror.

“If Michael takes you on, that photograph might practically vanish,” I said to her.

“That would be unbelievable,” she replied. “Or if it just disappeared two pages down Google. Only creepy people check past the second page.”

Lindsey knew it wasn’t perfect. My book would inevitably bring it back up again. But she understood that anything would be better than the way things were now. She was being offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in free services. This was bespoke — a shaming-eradication service that only the superrich could normally afford. After I left Lindsey’s house, she and Michael talked on the phone. After that, Michael called me.

“She was nothing but very gracious and responsive and cooperative,” he said. “I think we can proceed.”

• • •

For scheduling reasons, Michael couldn’t start on Lindsey for a few months, and so I took a break. I’ve worked on dark stories before — stories about innocent people losing their lives to the FBI, about banks hounding debtors until they commit suicide — but although I felt sorry for those people, I hadn’t felt the dread snake its way into me in the way these shaming stories had. I’d leave Jonah and Michael and Justine feeling nervous and depressed. And so it was a nice surprise to receive an e-mail from Richard Branson’s sister Vanessa inviting me to appear at a salon of talks at her Marrakech palace/holiday home/hotel, the Riad El Fenn. “Other speakers,” she e-mailed, “include Clive Stafford Smith — human-rights lawyer. David Chipperfield — architect. Hans-Ulrich Obrist — Serpentine curator. Redha Moali — rags-to-riches Algerian arts entrepreneur.” I googled her Riad. It combines “grandeur and historic architecture with hideaway nooks, terraces and gardens” and is “just five minutes walk from the world-famous Djemaa el Fna square and bustling maze of streets that make up the souk.”

And so it was that, four weeks later, I sat reading a book underneath an orange tree in Vanessa Branson’s Marrakech courtyard. Vanessa Branson lay supine on a velvet bed in the corner. Her friends lounged around, drinking herbal teas. One had been the CEO of Sony in Germany, another owned a diamond mine in South Africa. I was feeling tired and jittery and less languid than the others, who were dressed in white linen and seemed carefree.

Then I heard a noise. I looked up from my book. Vanessa Branson was rushing across the courtyard to welcome someone new. He too was dressed in linen and was tall and thin, with the gait of a British man of privilege. He might have been a diplomat. After a few minutes, he bounded over to me. “I’m Clive Stafford Smith,” he said.

I knew a little about him from his interview on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs—how he was all set for a life in British society until one day at his boarding school he saw a drawing in a book of Joan of Arc being burned at the stake and realized she looked like his sister. So in his twenties he became a death-row lawyer in Mississippi, and he has been defending death-row and Guantánamo prisoners ever since. The Desert Island Discs presenter, Sue Lawley, treated him with baffled amazement, like Queen Victoria would a lord who had gone off to explore darkest Africa. Ten minutes after introducing himself, he was walking me through the corridors of Vanessa Branson’s labyrinthine palace telling me why prisons should be abolished.

“Let me ask you three questions,” he said. “And then you’ll see it my way. Question One: What’s the worst thing that you have ever done to someone? It’s okay. You don’t have to confess it out loud. Question Two: What’s the worst criminal act that has ever been committed against you? Question Three: Which of the two was the most damaging for the victim?”

The worst criminal act that has ever been committed against me was burglary. How damaging was it? Hardly damaging at all. I felt theoretically violated at the idea of a stranger wandering through my house. But I got the insurance money. I was mugged one time. I was eighteen. The man who mugged me was an alcoholic. He saw me coming out of a supermarket. “Give me your alcohol,” he yelled. He punched me in the face, grabbed my groceries, and ran away. There wasn’t any alcohol in my bag. I was upset for a few weeks, but it passed.

And what was the worst thing I had ever done to someone? It was a terrible thing. It was devastating for them. It wasn’t against the law.

Clive’s point was that the criminal justice system is supposed to repair harm, but most prisoners — young, black — have been incarcerated for acts far less emotionally damaging than the injuries we noncriminals perpetrate upon one another all the time — bad husbands, bad wives, ruthless bosses, bullies, bankers.

I thought about Justine Sacco. How many of the people piling on her had been emotionally damaged by what they had read? As far as I could tell, only one person was damaged in that pile-on.

“I’m writing a book about public shaming,” I told Clive. “With citizen justice, we’re bringing public shame back in a big way. You’ve spent your life in actual courts. Is it the same there? Is shaming utilized as a kind of default position in real courtrooms too?”

“Oh, yes!” he replied, quite happily. “I do it all the time. I’ve humiliated a lot of people. Especially experts.”

“What’s your method?” I asked him.

“Oh, it’s a very simple game,” he said. “You need to figure out something that’s so esoteric the expert can’t possibly know about it. Maybe it’s something that’s not relevant to the case, but it has to be something they cannot know the answer to. They’ll be incapable of saying they don’t know. So they’ll gradually walk down the garden to the place where they look really stupid.”

“Why are they incapable of saying they don’t know?”

“It’s their entire profession,” Clive said. “It’s respect. It’s a big deal being an expert. Imagine the things you can discuss at dinner parties as opposed to the other boring people at the table. You’re the witness who put Ted Bundy away. They’ll do anything to not look stupid. That’s the key thing. And if you can make them look stupid, everything else falls by the wayside.”

Clive made it sound as if shaming were as natural as breathing in the court world and as if it had been that way forever. And, of course, I understood that witnesses needed to be grilled, their honesty tested. But it’s odd that so many of us see shaming how free-market libertarians see capitalism, as a beautiful beast that must be allowed to run free.

Those of us on social media were just starting out on our shaming crusade. In the real courts, according to Clive, it was venerated as a first-line tactic. I wondered: When shaming takes on a disproportionate significance within an august institution, when it entrenches itself over generations, what are the consequences? What does it do to the participants?