So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Author:Jon Ronson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

Hi ladies. Just to confirm the scenario on Friday at Chelsea starting at 3. If you’re around before then, I’m doing a judicial on him at noon so if you’d like to witness that, be here for 11am but don’t stress if you can’t make that.

Can’t wait it’ll be great . . . My bottom is so clear for a change. Lots of love.

A “judicial”? A Nazi scenario might have been called a “Volksgerichtshof trial” or maybe a Gerichtsverfahren. But a judicial? James Price asked the News of the World to explain why, if the orgy was so Nazi, one of the guards was constantly referred to on the tape as “Officer Smith.” They had no answer. Max won the case.

He won big: costs plus £60,000 in damages, the highest in recent British legal history for a privacy case. And now, as Max told me, people regard him “primarily as someone who has been wronged and who has pushed rather successfully for certain things. I’m a lot better off than I would have been if I’d gone off to hide.”

Within three years, the News of the World was no more. In July 2011, The Guardian revealed that a private investigator working for the paper had hacked into the voice mail of a murdered teenager, Milly Dowler. In an attempt to control the scandal, Rupert Murdoch shut the paper down. Later, Neville Thurlbeck pled guilty to phone hacking and was imprisoned for six months. Colin Myler wasn’t implicated and is currently the president and editor in chief of the New York Daily News.

Max felt like he’d been fighting not only for himself but also for the dead who preceded him. He meant people like Ben Stronge. “He was an English chef living in northern France, divorced, and he was a swinger. A man and a woman from the News of the World swung by his place. He gave them dinner, disappeared upstairs, and apparently came back down wearing nothing but a pouch.” Max paused. Then he said, softly, “Pathos.”

That was June 1992. When Ben Stronge discovered that the people looking at him weren’t swingers but News of the World journalists, he started crying. He telephoned the paper’s editor, Patsy Chapman. According to Max, “He said, ‘Please don’t publish, because if you do, I’ll never see my children again.’ Well, they published anyway. They didn’t give a damn. So he killed himself.”

Then there was Arnold Lewis. In the spring of 1978 the News of the World decided to infiltrate sex parties in caravans in the forests of Wales. The journalist Tina Dalgleish and her photographer, Ian Cutler, answered a small ad in a swingers’ magazine. It had been placed by a lay preacher and teacher, Arnold Lewis. They met in the local pub.

The turnout was small. Five people showed up, three of whom were Tina Dalgleish, Ian Cutler, and Arnold Lewis. Arnold left a coded note for potential latecomers with an arrow pointing in the direction of the caravan and the exact walking distance: “3.

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