An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (40 page)

And then Jenny came along.

We’d met through mutual friends, one of whom was Jenny’s coworker at an academic publishing company. She was gorgeous, with big dark eyes, dark, shiny hair, and a stylish haircut with short, straight bangs. She reminded me of one of the hipster girls who had so fascinated me when I’d first moved to the city. She wasn’t quite a hipster herself, but she usually dressed like one, resembling a more slender version of the actress Zooey Deschanel.

She was funny and kind, and she liked movies and experimenting in the kitchen as much as I did; but what probably most attracted me to her was her relentlessly sunny disposition.

A disposition that I was about to severely test.

She was one of those who e-mailed me after the first post went up—not right away, since she was flying to Pittsburgh to visit family and friends. She’d messaged me pretty soon after landing, though.

I guess Jenny and the others had recognized my writing style, or my sense of humor. I began to worry that I’d put too much personality into the post.

I responded to each of them with something like
Ha-ha of course it isn’t me. Please don’t even joke about that, because the bosses might be reading my e-mails.

That had been a very real worry, actually. John and I had set up an elaborate system to avoid detection. I couldn’t e-mail him from my work e-mail, obviously; but also no e-mailing him from my Gmail account, which I looked at on my work computer. He’d set up a temporary phone number for me to call him so his number wouldn’t show up on my phone records, and even suggested that we avoid text-messaging each other.

“Texts are too easy for private investigators to get,” he’d said. Instead, we’d worked out a system in which he created a dummy Twitter account and would message me through that.

All the cloak-and-dagger stuff—and the prospect that private investigators might start digging into my life—had started to worry me a little, but John was so encouraging about the writing in my first post that it had soothed my nerves.

The first post covered the Romney horse video and rambled a bit about some of my issues with Hannity and the Hip-Hop BBQ post that had finally made me go rogue. I capped the piece with this little riff on one of my favorite movies:

“So why not just leave Fox News?” you might ask. Good question! I’ve asked myself that same thing many times. And I am leaving. Sooner rather than later, I’m guessing. But I can’t just leave quietly, can I? Where’s the fun in that? So I’m John McClane-ing this shit. I’m inside the building, crawling through the air vents, gathering intel, and passing it along to Carl Winslow.
⁷⁰

(Note: Please don’t misunderstand and take my
Die Hard
metaphor as a threat of violence. Like most left-wingers, I abhor actual violence but am still hopelessly enthralled by the Hollywood machine that glorifies it. Also, that was a Twentieth Century Fox movie. Synergy!)”

The post went live at three in the afternoon, too late to make any appreciable impact while I was still in the building. But that night, at home, I watched with fascination—and maybe a little bit of horror—as it got picked up by multiple news outlets. I thought that reaction would be limited to blogs and Twitter; but I was seeing mainstream organizations like ABC News and
The New York Times
cover the Fox Mole story.

I put the finishing touches on my next dispatch, and went to bed telling myself I was still totally secure from detection. I probably should have been nervous, but I was more excited than anything at that point to see the impact I was having.

The second Mole posting, a very silly piece about the abhorrent state of the bathrooms in the building, went up the next morning. It included a picture I’d snapped of a toilet stall where an incorrectly installed door had left a three-inch-wide gap, allowing the person on the toilet to make eye contact with the person using the sink, and vice versa. Fox, in typical fashion, had been too cheap to hire anyone to fix it. The makeshift solution devised by employees had been to drape toilet paper over the gap, hanging down like party streamers but maintaining the dignity of the person sitting on the bowl. The worst part is, it wasn’t just one bathroom in the building that was like this. It was
every
bathroom in the building, save one notoriously shabby commode near the newsroom that had finally been overhauled in late 2011, probably because someone had decided it was too disgusting to exist even a day longer.

About an hour after that post went up, Tim Wolfe delivered the line that had made my blood run cold.

“Oh, look, they caught him. They caught the Fox Mole.”

—

After getting expelled from the building that had been my workplace for almost eight years, I met John and A.J. at a bar near
Gawker
headquarters. After telling them what had happened, and about my paid suspension, they disappointedly agreed that the jig was up, and the best thing to do would be to just come clean.

We went back to the
Gawker
HQ, which was sort of the antithesis of my old office (and it was weird thinking that for the first time
—old office
), a high-ceilinged loft in Manhattan’s hip Nolita neighborhood, with exposed brick walls and top-of-the-line iMacs at every workstation. Nick Denton, the wily, brilliant, British ex-pat who founded the company, had covered the walls of the space with dozens of framed photos of media titans, including one of Rupert Murdoch and another of Roger Ailes. I posed in front of the Ailes portrait as John Cook snapped my photo, uploading it to head a post I’d hastily written. John headlined it
HI ROGER. IT’S ME, JOE: THE FOX MOLE.

Before the post went up, I called my parents, whom I had kept in the dark throughout the whole process, to warn them. “Don’t talk to any reporters if they call you,” I told them. “Just say no comment.”

Then I called Jenny.

“Baby, do you trust me?” I asked her.

“Oh, no,” she said. “What did you do?”

—

The next few days went by in a blur.

After leaving
Gawker
HQ, I met Rufus in an East Village bar. He gave me back the duffel bag I’d foisted on him that afternoon, and bought me a much-needed drink.

While I was at the bar, Sam Martinez texted me.

Please tell me it isn’t true,
he wrote.

I’m sorry, man. It is,
I wrote back
. I’ll talk to you when this is all over.

If you say so. But my heart is breaking.

The next day—a Thursday—my phone didn’t stop ringing. I fielded a few calls but let most of the others go to voice mail. Interview requests flooded in, all of which I ignored or declined.

Two messengers came to my apartment. The first one delivered a letter from Fox, officially and politely informing me that I was terminated, effective immediately.

The second messenger had a somewhat less polite letter from Fox’s law firm, a “cease and desist” telling me to stop leaking material to
Gawker
.

That wasn’t going to be a problem.
Gawker
had already published everything I’d given them. It never was about the video clips, for me. They were just gravy for the meaty dispatches—dispatches that I never got a chance to write.

A tenacious reporter from the
Daily News
camped outside my door all day long, not believing my roommate Ari’s story that I wasn’t home. He eventually ambushed me, along with a photographer—perfect karmic payback for me—when I left the house that night to regroup with my Manhattan-dwelling sister and some friends.

“Hey, man, I hate Fox probably as much as you do,” the reporter said, successfully buttering me up when at first I refused to talk. “I think you did a great thing.”

“Am I going to make the cover tomorrow?” I asked, laughing.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “This wasn’t exactly the crime of the century here.”

“I bet you’d put me on the cover if I were a hot blonde,” I said.

“Can I quote you on that?”

I smiled when he said that, and that’s the picture the
Daily News
used the next day—me, grinning like a jackass, apparently proud that I’d done something stupid and gotten fired for it. Despite my smile and the assurances of the reporter, I wasn’t so sure what I’d done was so great.

I agreed to do an interview with Howard Kurtz, a CNN media critic who hosted a Sunday show,
Reliable Sources
. I taped the interview on Friday afternoon, in CNN’s headquarters at the Time Warner Center overlooking Central Park. The CNN offices were impossibly gorgeous, sparking pangs of jealousy.
Whatever. Their ratings still suck,
I thought, the residual Fox chip on my shoulder asserting itself inadvertently, and much to my surprise.

Old Howie carved me up pretty good, and I stumbled through my interview without getting to explain myself very well. I figured I’d been behind the scenes on these interviews so often that I would automatically be good at it when the tables were turned. But I left the studio with newfound respect for our on-air talent and guests. Their job was not easy.

One of the things distressing me the most was that, judging from what I’d seen of the coverage, my intentions were getting widely misinterpreted. I had always pictured myself as a mischievous prankster whose conscience had suddenly gotten the better of him. But I was coming across more as a criminally insane malcontent—and an incompetent one at that; a good portion of the Internet commenters were simply laughing at me for lasting less than thirty-six hours. It was like being outed on a national scale as a premature ejaculator.

I’d gone in with so much bravado, talking about
Die Hard
, but the movie ended all too quickly. And instead of John McClane throwing Hans off the building, two security guards used their hands to throw me out the revolving doors.
⁷¹

I tried to temporarily push my concerns aside and enjoy the notoriety. I knew the clock had already started ticking on my fifteen minutes. After my filleting by Howard Kurtz, I met some friends at a bar, and they showed me the copy of the
Daily News
with my goofy grinning mug in full color as I walked down the street, trying to escape the pursuing reporter.

I met two old colleagues for coffee on Sunday. One had recently left the company of her own volition, seeking better-paying work. The other had been laid off just two months prior when his show—a libertarian-focused hour airing on the Fox Business Network—was unceremoniously canceled. Neither had any love left for Fox, and both were highly amused by the whole affair, though they agreed that Kurtz had gotten the better of me.

“I talked to my grandma on the phone an hour ago,” the woman said. “She watched the interview and said, ‘Oh, that poor boy didn’t do very well, did he?’”

“Even your grandma thinks I bombed?”

She laughed. “Yeah, sorry.”

The guy attempted to reassure me.

“You didn’t murder anyone. It’s not like you’re going to jail.”

Somehow it didn’t make me feel any better.

—

Jenny and my parents were horrified by all of it. They thought I had lost my mind. And at certain points, I wasn’t sure I disagreed with them.

They worried about my getting into legal trouble. Fox’s lawyers had made threats about civil and even criminal action. And they worried about my future career prospects, naturally. They reasoned that crapping on one’s employer would not look great on a résumé. I pooh-poohed those concerns, since I was obviously in the midst of starting my new career as a writer for
Gawker
.

This was apparently news to
Gawker
.

“Is there going to be a future for me at the site when all this is over?” I e-mailed John a few days later.

“I don’t think it’s in the cards,” he replied.

My heart sank. It was truly the pièce de résistance, the last little morsel in the feast of my own stupidity. I’d broken the number one rule of quitting my job—I hadn’t secured a new one first. In my ego-driven haste to leave Fox and ingratiate myself with the
Gawker
people, I’d misinterpreted vague promises and reassurances as an ironclad guarantee that I’d have a soft landing with them.

A week after it all went down, they’d virtually forgotten me.

At least it can’t get any worse,
I thought.

Once again, I thought wrong.

—

The knock came at six thirty in the morning.

It was two weeks to the day after I’d outed myself as the Mole, a name I was already sick of and had just about pushed out of my mind.

Of course, three cops at your front door has a way of pushing things back
into
your mind.

They were from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, and they had a warrant. It said I was being investigated on suspicion of larceny, both grand and petty, and that the bearers were allowed to take my phone, my laptop, and any other device that could send and receive e-mail.

I chitchatted politely with the head detective while his two underlings turned my bedroom upside down. I figured his job was probably already hard enough without my making it tougher by being a dick to him.

Plus, I kind of liked him. When he came into the apartment, the first thing he said to me was, “Look, I believe there are three sides to every story: your side . . . their side . . . and the truth.” I liked that. It had a nice ring.

They left after about forty-five minutes, taking with them a box of electronics, including the iPad I had gone out of my way to keep safe, and a stack of notebooks and other papers that weren’t going to tell them anything of consequence.

None of it was going to tell them anything—or at least anything I hadn’t already revealed to the world myself.

After the cops left, I flipped on the TV, which was at that very moment showing Rupert Murdoch—the same man who got all of Great Britain to start their day with a giant pair of D cups to go along with their bangers, eggs, and tea; the man who gave a GOP operative a dump truck full of money and said, “Build me a conservative news network that will absolutely murder CNN”; the man who was, up until two weeks before, my boss’s boss’s boss—testifying in London in front of a panel that was investigating the widespread use of phone hacking by reporters working for News Corp. papers. Employees had used various means to tap into the voice mails of politicians, celebrities, members of the British Royal Family, relatives of dead soldiers, victims of terrorist attacks—even of a thirteen-year-old girl who had been abducted and murdered.