So You've Been Publicly Shamed (3 page)

“How did you reply?” I asked.

“I said, ‘I'll think about it,'” Michael said. “I guess Andrew Wylie is a bazillionaire because he's very perceptive, because I got a call from Jonah, who said, ‘So Andrew Wylie says you're going to go ahead and publish.'”

—

On the afternoon of Sunday, July 29, Michael was walking down Flatbush Avenue, on the telephone to Jonah, shouting at him, “‘I need you to go on the record. You have to do it, Jonah. You have to go on the record.' My arms were going crazy. I was so angry and so frustrated. All the time he was wasting. All his lies. And he was simpering.” Finally something in Jonah's voice made Michael know that it was going to happen. “So I ran into Duane Reade, and I bought a fucking Hello Kitty notebook and a pen, and in twenty-five seconds, he said, ‘I panicked. And I'm deeply sorry for lying.'”

“And there you go,” said Michael. “It's done.”

—

Twenty-six days, and it took Michael forty minutes to write the story. He'd still not worked out how to make money from journalism. He'd agreed to give the scoop to a small Jewish online magazine,
Tablet
. Knowing how lucky they were, the people at
Tablet
paid Michael quadruple what they usually pay, but it was quadruple of not much: $2,200 total—which is all he'd ever make from the story.

Forty minutes to write it, and what felt to him like nine packs of cigarettes.

“If anything, Jonah Lehrer nearly killed
me
I smoked so many fucking cigarettes out on the fire escape. Smoking, smoking, smoking. When you have the ability to press send on something and really, really affect the outcome of the rest of that person's life. And the phone was ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing. There were twenty-odd missed calls from Jonah that Sunday night. Twenty-four missed calls, twenty-five missed calls.”

“He kept phoning,” Joanne said. “It was so sad. I don't understand why he thought it was a good idea to keep phoning.”

“It was the worst night of his life,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure,” Michael said.

Finally, Michael picked up the phone. “I said, ‘Jonah, you have to stop calling me. This is almost to the point of harassment.' I felt like I was talking him off the ledge. I said, ‘Tell me you're not going to do anything stupid.' It was that level of panic. So much so that I thought maybe I should pull back from this. He was,
‘Please, please,
please,'
like a child's toy breaking, droning, running out of batteries, ‘
Please please, please . . .
'”

Michael asked me if I'd ever been in that position. Had I ever stumbled on a piece of information that, if published, would destroy someone? Actually
destroy
them.

I thought for a while. “Destroy someone?” I said. I paused. “No. I don't think so. I'm not sure.”

“Don't ever do it,” he said.

Michael said he honestly considered not pressing send that night. Jonah had a young daughter the same age as Michael's young daughter. Michael said he couldn't kid himself. He understood what pressing send would mean to Jonah's life: “What we do, when we fuck up, we don't lose our job. We lose our
vocation
.”

—

Michael was thinking of former journalists like
The New Republic
's Stephen Glass. Glass was the author of a celebrated 1998 story, “Hack Heaven,” about a fifteen-year-old schoolboy hacker who was offered a job with a software company he'd hacked into. Glass wrote about being a fly-on-the-wall in the company's offices—Jukt Micronics—as the boy negotiated his terms:

“I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Men comic number one. I want a lifetime subscription to
Playboy
—and throw in
Penthouse
. Show me the money! Show me the money!” Across the table, executives . . . are listening and trying ever so delicately to oblige. “Excuse me, sir,” one of the suits says tentatively to the pimply teenager. “Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you.”

—S
TEPHEN
G
LASS
,
“W
ASHINGTON
S
CENE:
H
ACK
H
EAVEN
,”
The New Republic
,
M
AY 18
,
1998

But there was no conference room, no Jukt Micronics, no schoolboy hacker. A
Forbes
digital journalist, Adam Penenberg, annoyed that
The New Republic
had scooped him on his own turf, did some digging and discovered that Glass had invented it all. Glass was fired. He later enrolled in law school, earned a degree magna cum laude, applied in 2014 to practice law in California, and was refused. Glass's shaming was following him around wherever he went, like Pigpen's cloud of dirt. In some ways, he and Jonah Lehrer were eerily alike—young, nerdy, Jewish, preternaturally successful journalists on a roll who made things up. But Glass had invented entire scenarios, casts of characters, reams of dialogue. Jonah's “I'm glad I'm not
that
” at the end of “I'm glad I'm not me” was stupid and wrong, but a world that doled out punishments as merciless as that would be unfathomable to me. I thought Michael was being overly dramatic to believe that pressing send would sentence Jonah to Stephen Glass–level oblivion.

—

In the end, it was all academic for Michael. He said he felt as trapped in this story as Jonah was. It was like they were both in a car with failed brakes, hurtling helplessly toward this ending together. How could Michael not press send? What would people think if the story got out? That he'd covered it up for career advancement? “I would have been the spineless so-called journalist who buckled to Andrew Wylie. I never would have worked again.”

Plus, Michael said, something had happened a few hours earlier that he felt made it impossible for him to bury the story. After Jonah had confessed over the phone to him, Michael was shaking, so he went to a café in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to calm down. It was the Café Regular du Nord. As he sat outside, he ran into a fellow writer,
Vanity Fair
's Dana Vachon.

“I'm doing this story and this guy just fucking confessed to me that it's all
phony
,” Michael told him.

“Who?” Dana Vachon replied.

“I can't tell you,” Michael said.

That second Michael's phone rang. The screen flashed up the words
JONAH LEHRER
.

“Oh,” Dana Vachon said. “Jonah Lehrer.”

“Fuck you!” Michael said. “You can't say anything!”

So now Dana Vachon knew. Michael's editors at
Tablet
knew. Andrew Wylie knew. It was not going to stay contained.

So Michael pressed send.

—

Michael had one final telephone conversation with Jonah after they both knew it was over. It was just a few hours before the story appeared. Michael had barely slept that night. He was exhausted. He said to Jonah, “I just want you to know that it makes me feel like shit to do this.”

“And Jonah paused,” Michael told me. “And then he said to me, no joke, he said, ‘You know, I really don't care how you feel.'” Michael shook his head. “It was icy.”

Then Jonah said to Michael, “I really, really regret . . .”

Regret what?
Michael thought.
Cheating? Lying?

“I really regret ever responding to your e-mail,” Jonah said.

“And my response to him,” Michael said, “was basically silence.”

—

That night Michael was “shattered. I felt horrible. I'm not a fucking monster. I was crushed and depressed. My wife can confirm this.” He replayed in his mind his telephone conversations with Jonah. Suddenly, he felt suspicious. Maybe the icy Jonah from that final conversation had been the real Jonah all along. Maybe Jonah had been playing Michael all that time, “cranking the emotions” to guilt-trip him. Maybe Jonah had assessed Michael as “pliable and easy to manipulate.” When Michael had told Jonah that he'd spoken to Jeff Rosen, Jonah's reply had been “Then I guess you're a better journalist than me.” That suddenly sounded incredibly condescending to Michael, like he saw Michael as just “some putz piddling around trying to pick up freelance work.” Maybe everything Jonah had done during the previous weeks was, in fact, devious and very well plotted.

I wondered:
Had Jonah really been devious, or just terrified?
Was Michael conjuring up words like
devious
in an attempt
to feel less bad?
Devious is creepy. Terrified is human.

—

“Having a phone conversation with somebody is like reading a novel,” Michael said. “Your mind creates a scenario. I sort of knew what he looked like from his author jacket photos, but I'd never seen him move. I didn't know his gait. I didn't know his clothes. Well, I knew he posed in his hipster glasses. But over those four weeks, I was imagining this character. I was picturing his house. A little house. He's a journalist. I'm a journalist. I'm a fucking schlub. I pay my rent. I'm fine, I'm happy, but I'm not doing great.”

This was about the third time Michael had described himself to me as a “schlub” or something similar. I suppose he knew that highlighting this aspect of himself made for the most dramatic, likable retelling of the collision between the two men. The nobody blogger and the crooked VIP. David and Goliath. But I wondered if he was doing it for more than just storytelling reasons. All the stuff he said about how it wasn't his fault that he stumbled onto the story, how he made no money from it, how the stress nearly killed him, how he was actually trapped into it by Andrew Wylie and Dana Vachon . . . it suddenly hit me: Michael was traumatized by what he had done. When he'd said to me, “Don't ever do it”—don't ever press send on a story that would destroy someone—it wasn't a figure of speech. He meant it.

“I was picturing his house, a little house,” Michael continued. “I was transferring my life onto his. His wife's bustling around, his kid's in the background, he's in one of the two bedrooms at the back, sweating.” Michael paused. “And then my friend from the
Los Angeles Times
sent me a story from 2009 about the purchase of the Julius Shulman house.”

The Hollywood Hills residence and studio of the late iconic photographer Julius Shulman has sold for $2.25 million. The Midcentury Modern steel-frame house, built in 1950 and designed by Raphael S. Soriano, is a Los Angeles historic landmark. The buyer is bestselling author and lecturer Jonah Lehrer. His book “How We Decide” has been translated into a dozen languages. The writer has an affinity for classic design.

—L
AUREN
B
EALE
,
Los Angeles Times
,
D
ECEMBER 4
,
2010

The Shulman House. Photograph by Michael K. Wilkinson, reproduced with his permission.

“It's unfair,” Michael said. “It's stupid of me. In some ways it's unconscionable to begrudge him his success. But it made things a bit different.”

•  •  •

A
few weeks after Michael told me his Jonah Lehrer story, I was at a party in London, talking to a man I didn't know. He was a theater director. He asked me what I was writing about and I told him about Michael and Jonah. Sometimes, when I recount for people the stories I'm working on, I feel a stupid grin on my face as I describe the absurdity of whatever crazy pickle this or that interviewee had got himself into. But not this time. As I related the details to him, the director shivered. And I found myself shivering too. When I finished the story, he said, “It's about the terror, isn't it?”

“The terror of what?” I said.

“The terror of being found out,” he said.

He looked as if he felt he were taking a risk even mentioning to me the existence of the terror. He meant that we all have ticking away within us something we fear will badly harm our reputation if it got out—some “I'm glad I'm not
that
” at the end of an “I'm glad I'm not me.” I think he was right. Maybe our secret is actually nothing horrendous. Maybe nobody would even consider it a big deal if it was exposed. But we can't take that risk. So we keep it buried. Maybe it's a work impropriety. Or maybe it's just a feeling that at any moment we'll blurt something out during some important meeting that'll prove to everyone that we aren't proper professional people or, in fact, functional human beings. I think that even in these days of significant oversharing we keep this particular terror concealed, like people used to with things like masturbation before everyone suddenly got blasé about it online. With masturbation, nobody cares. Whereas our reputation—it's everything.