Arthur Reed Kimball, writing in The Atlantic in 1900, was concerned about the invasion of yellow journalism, a press turning increasingly toward sensationalized headlines and scandal for its own sake. I was interested because, you know, being on the target end of scandal wreaked immense havoc on my life. But sensationalism itself wasn’t his real target. As he put it, to lay exclusive stress on the demoralization of what is sensational is to overlook a more serious condition, the quiet journalistic invasion of so much of the intercourse and thinking of life. He meant something broader than any single scandal. He meant that the habits of the newsroom, treating people as characters, treating private lives as copy, treating guilt as a formality that story momentum could outrun, had started reshaping how ordinary people thought about each other outside the paper altogether. Guilty or innocent is downstream. The momentum is the point. Blood, it seems, is slower than ink.
He wrote that before radio, decades before television, and the internet was not yet even an idea. A hundred and twenty-five years later, he would certainly recognize exactly what happened to Jason Arday, or me, or anyone who is run over before they can scream.
Now, the recent story of Jason Arday is troubling and instructive. Some of what he was accused of, by his own admission, was true. Many of the details of his life of personal accomplishment and academic achievement were, apparently, exaggerated or invented outright. He was the pride of Cambridge, a storied career, a gentle effete, a man of accomplishment and grace, and also a young man of color. With his long braids, smooth dark skin, he was a compelling figure in the lofty world of academia. Maybe someone had suspicions and said nothing. Maybe his charm and his kindness were equally disarming. Whatever the case, the accusations piled fast, and piled hard. And the press came a knock’n.
I don’t want to repeat all of the accusations, they are reported at length elsewhere. But, a brief overview: there were questions raised about passages in his doctoral thesis that resembled earlier academic work. Liverpool John Moores University investigated and upheld his doctorate, and Arday denied plagiarism, although he acknowledged errors in his doctoral work. Further reporting raised questions about some positions and affiliations on his CV, the scale of his charity fundraising, some of his extraordinary athletic claims, and other episodes he had described publicly. The university eventually announced an investigation after receiving what it called “new information” regarding his qualifications and academic conduct; Jesus College separately said it had begun disciplinary proceedings after finding inconsistencies in information supplied by Arday.
Even his famous childhood story has been disputed. Several people who knew Arday as a child told journalists that they remembered him speaking and joking when young. But other former classmates and adults who knew him supported his account, remembering a child with serious learning difficulties who communicated little or not at all verbally. Who knows for sure, but the evidence suggests things weren’t quite as they were presented. Okay.
Earlier this month, the scrim of inconsistencies kept tearing and some of the strange details of his life became visible, fresh fodder for the media. It got ugly fast. He resigned from Cambridge, writing in his resignation letter: “The response from so many people across the world was overwhelming. Thousands celebrated not simply my appointment, but what it represented: that talent, perseverance and hope can triumph over even the greatest adversity.”
Some of the evidence that caused his fall is inconclusive. His claims about marathon feats didn't hold up against what elite athletes said was physically possible, and no records supported them. But other parts of the case were less clean than they first appeared: a university that investigated the plagiarism charge, cleared him outright, then called it an "aberration" and cited "new information" without ever spelling out what that meant. Competing accounts from people who knew him as a child. None of it added up to what it was made to sound like.
I’m not going to toil over every detail, surely there will be many discussions about Arday in the years ahead. However, Jason Arday won’t be part of those. He died last week, at the young age of 41; I assume it was self-induced, but that’s not been announced. It seems certain that Arday created more than one story about himself, some of it very clearly was invented. But, on a personal note, he was by many accounts a kind, generous, and gentle human being. He had a family, and friends, and admirers. Whatever else this is, it is also tragic by any measure.
Now, I’m always looking through the lens of what happened to me, what I went through after I was accused, to see if I can spot the signs of this media machinery elsewhere. It’s my project to uncover and understand the way these things grow and gain. What happened to Arday and what happened to me are not morally equivalent, but they expose the same flaw in the media, in culture. I became an instant villain, an invention, served to the media, which turned me into a monstrous rapist, predator, claims that were never tested in the slightest. They weren’t true in any way. Of course, my life was upended, instantly. Arday was first hailed as a hero on the strength of an extraordinary story, much of which is in question now, because it was never properly tested either.
Arday seems to have conjured his own mythology. I had nothing to do with the construction of my story. Morally, the difference matters an awful lot, but the media’s role in both is worth acknowledging.
In one case, they constructed, story by story, the narrative of a heroic protagonist, a brilliant man of color whose preternatural rise in academia was historic. He was the holiest of holy, a genteel academic who wore eye makeup, a professor with dreads, a welcoming smile, amiable and good. In the other, they constructed a storyline of sexual harassment, predatory behavior and horrific violence. Unlike Arday, whose many friends and colleagues defended him, and * thousands showed up in Trafalgar Square in London to decry the attacks on his life, I was attacked by the very people I worked with and served for decades, even former friends joined in the celebration of my destruction. In one case, ample evidence existed that something was amiss, but it was ignored. In another, undeniable evidence existed that it was b******t, but it too was overlooked.
What is similar, follow me here, is that in both cases, the media manifests a hero or a villain, and once that is done it feasts on its destruction. I don’t believe that’s the way they think, nor that journalists generally are aware of the kind of curse they put upon a subject. Either way, the damage and the undoing become fuel for the clicks, the hits, and the headlines. In both my case, and Arday’s, the manifest character is more important than the human being behind it.
I know the challenges this presents journalists, because isn’t it their job to report on what’s happening? Are they responsible for how a subject reacts to their reporting? I think, in some cases, they are.
This is violence in the form of media. It chums the waters and then reports on the ugly details of the shark devouring the subject alive. The Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, who wrote the defining study of crowd psychology back in 1960, called it a public execution conducted through the newspapers. We all take part in this from the comfort of our home, choosing which grim detail to linger over, and maybe even applauding the blood sport, feeling none of the guilty complicity that would come from standing in the actual crowd killing a person. This is not determined by what’s true, as I’ve written before, truth is too often slow and plodding. I think, as cynical as this is, it’s determined by what sells. It doesn’t matter if the subject is ruined or maimed, it’s a story, it’s the news.
What does the media, journalists, owe a human being when that person, his or her life, becomes a very good story? What restraints do they owe to the soul caught in a scandal, a lie, or a crime, or an innocent who has been wrongfully accused?
In the wake of Arday’s apparent suicide, a petition was launched in the U.K. that I truly sympathize with. Rather than not reporting the details surrounding an alleged crime, the petition suggests that reports be limited for a time, meaning, there would be an imposed limit, a metering system, that would squelch the number of stories, particularly at the beginning. This might, as some believe, give the subject time to catch up with the momentum, offer some relief from the brutalizing effects of these ugly stories. I know it’s a problematic idea, but I’m here for it, I’m all for it. After all, if you’ve never been the subject of brutal media coverage, you can’t imagine how terrifying it is. There were days I thought I would suffocate from the anxiety of these articles, like dragging me across cut glass, who can breathe when you’re bleeding out. The accusation was horrible enough, but it was the media coverage that threw me into the ugly spiral of suicidal ideation.
Arday’s mourners gather in London’s Trafalgar Square
I’m not a fan of public punishment of any kind. Mobs, whether online, by the press, or in political protest, rarely move in a kind and just manner. That isn’t always true. Estonia’s Laulev revolutsioon, the Singing Revolution, saw several hundred thousand people gather to sing, a peaceful protest that helped win their independence from a crumbling Soviet empire.
Kindness is the choice not to harm, to embrace non-violence. By that measure, our media usually fails. Tacitly or deliberately fanning the flames encourages the kill, it feeds the ugliness, it taunts its subjects and assumes they are strong enough to take such overwhelming humiliation. After all, when you’re declared a thing by the press, it creates a permission structure for aggressive opinion, violent rhetoric, and for physical violence itself. For the media, the intoxication of such stories is irresistible. But what are the limits? Should we care if a person is charged and subsequently shamed in the media months, or years, before anything like a trial? What about due process? What is the responsibility of the press to fix the lives of people who have been wrongfully shamed by their stories?
The truth about Mr. Arday hasn’t been adjudicated, but the smell of investigations, the accusations themselves, that he’s a Black academic, it’s all chum, and the sharks descended on Mr. Arday and blew up his life. Whether or not he was a dishonest fabulist, did he deserve such ruthlessness? I don’t think so, because our first inclination should be to act with our highest regard, guilty or not. Instead, he became an active target, an object of intense derision and shame. Frankly, if there is any guilty party, it’s the college that hired him, that overlooked the obvious.
This reminds me of a story I posted last year. There was a funeral in a cemetery just down the block from our home. It was a large gathering. The mourners were younger, they drove newer cars, they wore nice winter coats, and they all looked devastated and sad. This is not the usual for a funeral, where most of the deceased are elderly, where one might assume their deaths were expected. Not this, this had the look of shock, of scandal.
A few days later, I looked up the name of the deceased and discovered he’d been caught in criminal misconduct to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Just the day before he “passed away suddenly,” a judge had ordered all his property seized. It was an ugly story. But there were all these images of family. Beautiful people, at nice homes, on boats, travel, family gatherings, football games, births of children. But scroll down and the media stories turned ugly fast, and I could feel it. I could feel the sense of despair. It looked like he did some bad things, but the prospect of such gross humiliation, and the thought of being put in prison, the human equivalent of a dog kennel, was less appealing than “passing away suddenly.”
I’m innocent, and always was. I didn’t rape anyone, of course. I didn’t mistreat anyone, of course. I didn’t prey on anyone, of course. I didn’t abuse anyone, of course. I didn’t lie about anything, of course. And yet, and yet, the machinery that came for me is the same that came for Arday, and the same that came for the man in the grave. Three different men. Three different relationships to the truth. One of us was likely guilty of crimes and swindles. One of us lied, invented the person he believed he was supposed to be. One of us did nothing but survive a catastrophic false accusation. The mob doesn’t care which was which. Who needs a criminal justice system, when we have a media that dispenses punishment faster, without remorse. Guilt was never really the question. The question was only ever how fast the story could move.
There’s an old idea, the one about killing a mockingbird. The bird does nothing but sing. What’s more, it perfectly mimics other birds and sounds in its environment. It doesn’t screw up your garden, in your garage, it mostly sings. Yet, people kill them, but not for punishment for anything. It’s just when something harmless is in range and some feel like pulling the trigger, or the slingshot. Arday sang his own strange, invented song, some of it real, some of it not. Mine was true note to note. The young guy in the grave had a song that turned into something else entirely by the time they came for him. None of that mattered once we were all in range, once someone, or a group had us in the crosshairs. Guilt was never really the question. It never is, once somebody’s already decided they’re going to take the shot.
Maybe we need an entirely different model of media and justice — one that doesn't rush to punish, and instead makes room for collective patience and even charity. Can a society hold someone accountable without needing to destroy them first? We have laws and rules, and they have to be enforced. But finding someone guilty isn't a license for dark retribution.
Accountability doesn't require violence.
*The actual crowd size was reportedly closer to 3 thousand.
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