So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson Read Free Book Online Page A

Michael barely knew—had confessed out of the blue that a biography he’d written might have inadvertently veered into plagiarism.
    â€œLike I
adjudicate
these things,” said Michael.
    Whether Michael liked it or not, there was fear in the air now because of what had happened to Jonah. But Michael didn’t want to be some witchfinder general, roaming the countryside with writers blurting out declarations of guilt to him, begging his forgiveness for crimes he hadn’t known they’d committed.
    â€œYou turn around and you suddenly realize you’re the head of a pitchfork mob,” Michael said. “And it’s ‘What are these people fucking
doing
here? Why are they acting like heathens? I don’t want to be associated with this at all. I want to get out of here.’”
    â€œIt was
horrible
,” I said. “All this time I’d been thinking we were in the middle of some kind of idealistic reimagining of the justice system. But those people were so
cold
.”
    The response to Jonah’s apology had been brutal and confusing to me. It felt as if the people on Twitter had been invited to be characters in a courtroom drama, and had been allowed to choose their roles, and had all gone for the part of the hanging judge. Or it was even worse than that. They all had gone for the part of the people in the lithographs being ribald at whippings.
    â€œI’m watching people stabbing and stabbing and stabbing Jonah,” Michael said, “and I’m, ‘HE’S
DEAD
.’”
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    T he next day I drove from New York to Boston to visit the Massachusetts Archives and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Given how vicious the resurgence of public shaming had suddenly turned, I wondered why that type of punishment had been phased out in the nineteenth century. I had assumed—like most people do, I think—that this demise was due to the migration from villages to cities. Shame became ineffectual because pilloried people could lose themselves in the anonymous crowd as soon as the chastisement was over. Shame had lost its power to shame. That was my assumption. Was it right?
    I parked my car outside the Massachusetts Archives, a slablike Brutalist building on the waterfront near the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Inside were the microfilms that preserve early legal documents handwritten by the Puritan settlers. I took my seat at a microfilm reader and began to carefully scroll through them. For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers. The spindly words swirled on the fraying pages. They really should have spent more time on paragraph breaks back then and less time on the letter
f
. I began to speed up, scrolling unprofessionally, decades passing before me in seconds, until I suddenly found myself face-to-face with an early American shaming.
    It was July 15, 1742. A woman named Abigail Gilpin, her husband at sea, was found “naked in bed with one John Russell.” They were both to be “whipped at the public whipping post twenty stripes each.” Abigail was not appealing the whipping itself, but was begging the judge to “let me have my punishment before the people are stirring. If your honor pleases, take some pity on me for my dear children, who cannot help their mother’s unfortunate failings.”
    The documents don’t reveal whether the judge consented, but straight after that, I found a transcript of a sermon that offered a clue as to why she might have pled for a private whipping. The sermon, by the Reverend Nathan Strong of Hartford, Connecticut, was an entreaty to people to be less exuberant at executions: “Do not go to that place of horror with elevated spirits, and gay hearts, for death is there! Justice and judgment are there! The power of government, displayed in