So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

In New York’s Meatpacking District, Ronson met up with Jim McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey who was notorious for “never pardon[ing] anyone.” Years ago, McGreevey was a family man and an astute politician who was backed by Bill and Hillary Clinton during his 2001 run for governor. He prided himself on Machiavellian policies, and he enjoyed his new place in New Jersey’s elite. But all the while, McGreevey was hiding a secret—he was gay. On a campaign trip to Israel in the mid-2000s, he began an affair with an Israeli man named Golan, and he brought Golan back to America, giving him a trumped-up job title and an opulent office.

The media and those close to McGreevey became suspicious of Golan’s role in the administration. So McGreevey began distancing himself from Golan, and within weeks, he received a letter from Golan’s lawyer, threatening to sue McGreevey for sexual assault. McGreevey held a press conference in which he came out, admitted to his affair with Golan, resigned the governorship, and retreated to an Arizona clinic to undergo treatment for PTSD.

McGreevey told Ronson that he was excited to hear that Ronson had interviewed famed psychiatrist and expert on shaming James Gilligan. In the 1970s, Gilligan began working with prisoners and mental patients throughout Massachusetts. There were many suicides, homicides, riots, and other violent incidents taking place in these facilities, and Gilligan initially assumed that the perpetrators were psychopaths. But upon arriving in the prison system and getting to know some of the prisoners, he realized that many of them “felt dead inside” due to traumas they’d experienced earlier in life. They were committing violent acts just to feel something.

These violent criminals, Gilligan found, were united by a common thread: they were all overwhelmed by shame. Every act of violence, Gilligan asserted, was a response to feelings of shame, humiliation, or disrespect. The childhood traumas that many of these men had endured were so shameful to them in adulthood that violence became their only way of replacing shame with self-esteem. Inspiring fear in others earned these men respect. In prison, the respect they’d gained through violent offenses was stripped away, and the officers in charge humiliated them—their renewed feelings of shame, then, inspired new and different violent tendencies. It’s no wonder, Gilligan told Ronson, that “mortification”—a word whose Latin root means “death”—is a word commonly used to express shame. 

Thinking about Gilligan’s words, Ronson found himself looking at Jonah Lehrer’s story through new eyes. He recalled Lehrer’s discomfort with displaying emotions, and how that discomfort had led the online mob to label him a “sociopath.” But now, Ronson was imagining the need to “turn off some emotional switch” that Lehrer described in the wake of his shaming.

Throughout the 1980s, Gilligan devoted his life to running experimental therapeutic communities inside Massachusetts prisons. These communities were all about establishing a space in which prisoners felt safe and respected. Gilligan also helped get some prison guards into treatment—these men had often suffered traumas, as well—and violence in the prisons began to drop. Gilligan tried to pioneer an education program run by Harvard lecturers within the prisons, but the governor, William Weld, decimated the program because he didn’t believe criminals should receive “free college education.”

Ronson visited the Hudson Country Correctional Center in Kearny, New Jersey, whose therapeutic community was quietly run by McGreevey. McGreevey accompanied Ronson on his tour, and as the two of them walked through the halls, McGreevey described how negative time in prison could be, but he said that care and attention could stop prisoners from building walls around themselves or resorting to violent behavior. McGreevey wanted to help people find forgiveness and a way out of their shame.

Inside of the therapeutic unit, 40 women were living, working, and taking workshops on sexual abuse, domestic violence, and anger management. The women could check books out of a library and read to their children over video calls. As Ronson joined McGreevey and a number of the women in a circle for a group meeting, he jotted down some notes—he wasn’t allowed to bring a recording device into the room—and noticed that the women in the circle kept making reference to what one inmate, Raquel, had done to land herself in prison.

When the meeting was over, Raquel herself ran up to Ronson and began telling him her story. He wrote it down as quickly as he could. Raquel was sexually abused as a child. She was constantly told that she was worthless. She got married at just 16, and she and her husband would hang around bars and mug drunk people in order to make money. After her son was born, she tried to turn her life around by moving her family to Florida—but the cycle of abuse continued, and Raquel often hit her son and daughter. Eventually, her son accused her of child abuse, and Raquel was arrested. Raquel had thrown a knife at her son during an argument, and she was being charged with attempted murder in the first degree.

Six months later, Ronson accompanied Raquel and McGreevey to a meeting at Newark City Hall, where Raquel’s legal team successfully convinced prosecutors that Raquel was the victim of a cycle of abuse. She was told that she’d serve four more months and then be released. The shaming cycles that happen in prisons, McGreevey asserted, don’t rehabilitate or change people—and most people aren’t violent, unrepentant criminals who need to be locked away forever.

Raquel’s story convinced Ronson even more deeply that “vengeance and anger” in response to human wrongdoing was the incorrect position to take. Once Raquel was released to a halfway house, she was able to find resources that would help her move past her shame and begin life anew. And Raquel had committed a far more serious offense than Justine Sacco or Lindsay Stone—yet the public still refused Sacco and Stone forgiveness for reasons Ronson could no longer understand.