After Mom and I said our goodbyes, I made my way to the Great Room for orientation. Valerie and Kevin were seated in armchairs, and the other seven of us joined them in a circle. They started out by giving us some background on where we were and what we were going to do—some of which, of course, I already knew from my research on the program.
Valerie and Kevin had started Revibe three years back. They had both worked in start-ups, and when Valerie’s dating app, Lovr, sold to AOL for what sounded like an unfathomable amount of money, they “retired” to Malibu, purchasing this massive beach house that we were now all staying in. Kevin took up surfing and cycling, and Valerie read a book a day—“But we felt unfulfilled,” Valerie explained. “We wanted to help people, and here we were, with time and resources and no real direction. What came next for us, we wondered?”
Valerie had observed frequent flare-ups of verbal attacks on her app. She described an instance of a white woman claiming the username “JustAChinaDoll” and getting hassled by other users until she quit. She described a man who said he was looking for “skinny chicks only PLEASE,” and the community was so enraged that they figured out his real identity, forwarded his profile to his boss, and managed to get him fired. “I could go on and on giving examples of this sort of thing,” Valerie said.
“And of course it wasn’t only on Lovr,” Kevin added. “We were seeing these sorts of showdowns about what is and is not acceptable behavior on the internet, what’s offensive and who should have to pay for it, all over the place. It really hit home one day when I myself was publicly shamed.” He made eye contact with each of us, as if to let us know that he wasn’t going to hang his head low about this; he wasn’t ashamed anymore. “My words were taken out of context in a news story about Silicon Valley. I had intended to communicate that I’d never trusted anyone as much as I trusted my first business partner, but it came out sounding as though I had never trusted anyone else I’d ever worked with, which was understandably offensive to them. And that was it; everyone turned their backs on me.
“It was one of the most devastating experiences of my life. Now obviously, I knew that this sort of thing happened to people. I just always assumed that it could never happen to me, because they must have done something to deserve it. After this experience, it wasn’t a they versus me thing anymore; it was us, all of us, this could happen to any of us.”
“But Kevin is strong,” Valerie said. “He figured out coping mechanisms. And they worked. We realized that if they worked for him, they could work for others, too. That’s why we started Revibe.”
Kevin added, “My dad was a serious alcoholic for most of his life. It wasn’t until he was in his late fifties that he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and it saved him. It saved me, too, and my whole family. I’ll be grateful to AA forever. So I definitely relied on some of the principles of AA. Then we added in some techniques from other drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities, and a solid helping of programming from yoga and wellness retreat centers, as well as our own insider understanding of internet culture. Out of the best of all that, we created the Revibe technique. You might be familiar with some aspects of our program, but as a whole, our approach is completely unique.”
This made me immediately dislike Kevin, since modifying unique is one of my pet peeves—either something is unique or it’s not unique, but “completely unique” is redundant.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t fair to dislike a guy I didn’t know who had suffered as I had, and who was trying to help me, just because he didn’t know that unique was an absolute.
“So that’s us,” Valerie summed up. “Before we get any more into how Revibe works or what’s expected of you, we want you each to introduce yourselves to the group. Specifically, please share with the group why you are here. We want to hear your stories. We need to hear your stories. Everyone in this room has experienced a life-changing incident of public shaming. I know that can be very difficult to talk about, so I promise we won’t make you do it again. But it is important that we do it once, and at the beginning, so we all can truly understand where everyone else is coming from. This is a safe space. Nothing you say will leave this room. So please, tell us your stories.”
* * *
Jazmyn was sitting next to Valerie, so she went first. She was a year younger than I was and she was from Austin, Texas. She had pink streaks in her hair and a diamond stud in her nose, which she later said she pierced herself, using nothing but a safety pin and alcohol. (Whether the alcohol went onto the safety pin to sterilize it or into her mouth so she wouldn’t feel the pain was unclear.)
She was a musician—and later, after hearing her play her guitar, I would add that she was a very talented one. She’d been in a band called the Duckface Vagabonds with her friends. “But it was barely a band,” she informed us. “The rest of them didn’t practice. I’d call rehearsals and our drummer just wouldn’t show up. I’d pour my heart into writing songs—I wrote all of our songs, since no one else was doing it—and at best my bandmates wouldn’t contribute anything, and at worst they’d shoot down everything I’d come up with. They were my friends, but they weren’t real musicians.”
So when another local band, You but Good in Bed, asked her to audition to be their new rhythm guitarist, she jumped at the chance.
Even I knew this was a big deal. I’d heard of You but Good in Bed. They had one pretty big single that was used in a beer commercial. It hadn’t made me want to buy beer, but it had made me look up who sang the song. My friends and I thought their name was hilarious and would say things to one another like, “You know who I’m really into these days? You but Good in Bed.” Or, “I could totally go in for You but Good in Bed right now.”
You but Good in Bed was a band of guys—good-looking guys, in that soulful rock ’n’ roll way—who were a couple years older than me. I was impressed that they’d asked Jazmyn to join them.
“I auditioned,” she said, “and I got in. So I told the Duckface Vagabonds I was quitting, and I … I wasn’t super-nice about it. I wasn’t trying to be mean. But I wanted them to know how much their laziness had frustrated me and that I didn’t have to put up with it anymore.”
The immediate problem with You but Good in Bed, however, was that they didn’t let Jazmyn play in shows right away. She learned all the parts, she rehearsed with them, but she never got up on stage. They told her she was in a “trial period” until she could prove her “loyalty to the band.” Impatiently, she asked how exactly she could do that, and they told her that she could do sexual favors for them.
“So I did,” Jazmyn said in a whisper.
Valerie reminded Jazmyn that this was a safe space and asked if she would go into detail about what “sexual favors” encompassed. Jazmyn gave her an Are you out of your mind? look and shot back, “No.” She added, “It’s embarrassing enough that I did it. That I honestly believed it would get me an equal part in this band. But I did believe that. That’s what they told me, and I didn’t have any reason to question them. And I needed this band to work out for me.”
It didn’t work out for her.
She quit once she figured out that she was being used and that, no matter how useful a sex object she was, she was never actually going to get to perform with them. She felt like a fool. She couldn’t go back to the Duckface Vagabonds after the dramatic and smug way she had left them. She had no band. She had no self-respect.
“And then people started to look at me funny,” she said, “and whisper and giggle about me.”
I knew what she meant. The looks, the whispers, the giggles. I knew those all too well, even though the idea of a sexual favor was so far removed from my own life as to be absurd.
“Everyone had heard what I’d done,” Jazmyn continued, “but they hadn’t heard the right story—or at least they hadn’t heard the full story. The story they had was that I was such a big fangirl of You but Good in Bed that I’d hooked up with all of them just to get closer to them. The story they had was that it was my idea, and the band thought it was kind of weird, but I really forced myself upon them. No one believed that I actually was—or thought I was—a member of the band. The story they had was that I was a starfucker and an attention whore and a desperate slut.”
They posted those names online. They wrote them on paper and stuck them in her school bag. They muttered them as she walked by. They never said them to her face.
“Did you explain what actually happened?” Valerie asked.
“I tried to. But nobody believed me.”
“Nobody?” Valerie asked.
“I guess some people did. But not enough for it to help.”
Jazmyn had tried to kill herself. “I couldn’t see any way out of it,” she said. “Even if somehow, someday, everyone else moves on, I will never forget how incredibly fucking stupid I was.”
But she didn’t succeed in dying. She got treated in a psychiatric ward and went on antidepressants, and she wasn’t suicidal anymore, but she still didn’t like herself. And then her parents found out about Revibe. “So they sent me here,” Jazmyn concluded. “They sent their idiot, screwed-up, slut daughter here, because they don’t know what to do about me, either. They would never say it, obviously, but they probably wish I’d succeeded in killing myself. Everyone looks better once they’re gone. At least then my parents could get some sympathy.”
* * *
Next up was Marco, a handsome man in his forties or fifties with wavy hair, off-puttingly white teeth, and a lilting Southern accent. It did not surprise me to learn that he was a politician. Specifically, he was the mayor of a city in Georgia.
Or he had been.
“I have a beautiful, supportive wife and a wonderful little daughter. There’s nothing wrong with them at all. They’re perfect. I’m not.”
He’d cheated on his wife once, early on in their relationship, with a man who’d fixed his computer. She found out almost immediately and was furious and hurt, and she almost left him right then, except that he swore up and down it was only that one time and it would never happen again. So she stayed with him, and for ten years, he stayed true to his word.
“Then I came across this app,” he said, his face turning red. “Called, uh, Thrust.”
It was for men who wanted to hook up with other men. Which described Marco perfectly, even though, he was quick to add, he had not for a second believed he would act on that want. “We all want things, all the time, that we don’t do,” he pointed out. “You want another slice of cake, or you want to yell at that driver who cut you off, or you want to sleep an extra hour and blow off your nine a.m. meeting, but you don’t do any of that because those are the wrong things to do. And we’re not animals. We can and should act in our long-term best interests, even if that’s not what we feel like doing in the moment.”
He signed up for Thrust with every intention of being a lurker. He looked at other men’s profiles but never reached out to any of them. “That seemed safe,” he said, “to imagine myself making a connection with these men without actually doing it.” Some of the other users messaged him, but they were easy to ignore. Until there was one who wasn’t.
“He was smart and witty and compassionate,” Marco said. “He didn’t put any pressure on the situation. He just seemed to enjoy talking to me, and I enjoyed talking to him, too. We wrote back and forth every day. And still I thought, Well, this isn’t betraying my wife. This isn’t hurting anybody. This is just a friendship.”
Eventually their e-mails turned into phone calls, which turned into video calls, which led to them finally meeting in person. And after their first meeting, Marco did start cheating on his wife. “I felt guilty,” he said, “but I also felt happier and more full of life and hope than I had in years. And I felt guilty about feeling happy, but, well, there you are.
“I never considered divorce. I know my actions make this statement hard to believe, but I loved my wife. I still do. She loved me. We’d built a good life. Raising our daughter together was important to us. Then there were our extended families, who believe that both homosexuality and divorce are sins. Frankly, I agree. I’m a sinner, and I didn’t want everyone to know that about me, and I didn’t want to drag my family into this pit of sin with me.”
And then, of course, there were his constituents. It didn’t take a political genius to intuit that most voters don’t like politicians who are cheaters, liars, or sinners.
After a couple months of intense happiness, guilt, and fear, Marco broke things off with the man he was seeing. “I did a lot of soul-searching, and I knew it wasn’t right to jeopardize my entire family and career and moral code for this.” He thought that was the end of all of it.
But then Thrust got hacked. The e-mail addresses for all the users were posted online for the world to see. And Marco had made a critical mistake: he’d used his government e-mail address to create his account.
It took no time for the local news to notice that their mayor was a Thrust user. The fact that he hadn’t logged on in four months meant nothing to them. Gleeful articles were written about this by the left-wing media, who had wanted him out of power in the first place. The right-wing media accused him of being a disgrace to the party. Both sides called him untrustworthy, immoral, and power-drunk. His colleagues immediately distanced themselves from him; the city legislators acted as though he didn’t exist, except to release damning statements about him.
His wife stuck by him in public, standing behind him in a conservative dress and pearls as he gave an apology speech. In private, though, she cried and cried. She took their daughter and went to stay at her parents’ house in the countryside.
“She’d forgiven me that first time,” Marco said, “so I guess on some level I’d thought she’d forgive me this time, too. She didn’t. Even someone as tolerant as my wife reaches her limit.”
He muddled through his job for another few weeks, but when it became clear that he was going to be brought to trial over misuse of government resources, he resigned. His wife and daughter never moved back home. Eighteen months had passed since then, and he had no new job. He’d tried to establish himself as a consultant, but nobody would hire him. “I spent my whole life immersing myself in public policy and working on campaigns and building connections, all so I could succeed in politics. That and my family were the foundation of my life. Now that’s all gone. So what do I do?”
* * *
I recognized Kisha on sight. She’d been one of the stars of a Disney show called Sense That! about a mystery-solving team of kids with ESP. I’d watched it when I was a kid—okay, I kept watching reruns into high school, even though I’d clearly aged out of its target audience. Kisha’s character was named Charisma, and her power was getting flashes of insight into the future. I had never in a million years imagined I’d ever be sitting across from a TV star, yet here we were.
Kisha was twenty-one now, and the past couple years had shown her decline into post-child-star infamy. I didn’t follow celebrity gossip, but even I knew some of the high points: speeding tickets, candid photos of her dress riding up her thighs at Hollywood parties, minor shoplifting charges, Twitter feuds.
“I don’t know why I did any of it,” she said, and I was surprised that she still had the bubbly, precocious voice I remembered from Sense That! “I didn’t have one good reason, like Jazmyn wanting to get into a band. It’s just that when the show stopped shooting, I was fifteen years old and had no idea what to do with myself. I had lots of money and lots of fans and no idea how the real world worked. I’d been a full-time actress since I was a kid, and I had no perspective on anything. I hadn’t been to real school in years. My first kiss was with a Swedish model who was six years older than me, and it was on-screen. My parents divorced—in large part because of my career and my needs—and in the divorce proceedings I actually had to hire my own lawyer because neither one of them was looking out for my best interests.
“I’m not trying to make excuses for what I’ve done,” she added. “I’m not trying to blame my parents or the network or anything. I did it. I made my choices. I just wanted to give a little context, I guess. The rest of the Sense That! kids came out of it fine, so it’s not like being a child actor necessarily screws you up. I guess they’re all just naturally more responsible than I am. Or luckier, maybe. Or both.
“A lot of teenagers do the same dumb stuff I did,” she went on. “But when I did that dumb stuff, thousands of strangers cared.”
At first I wasn’t sure I agreed with her. I was a teenager, and I’d never accidentally flashed my nipple while eating lunch. But, you know, I was a good girl. Emerson had gotten speeding tickets. I’d seen plenty of embarrassing photos of Brianna over the years. Mackler was not above a heated Twitter debate. I understood Kisha’s point.
“Parents wrote to me that I should be ashamed of myself, because I’d been such a role model and now they wouldn’t even let their kids watch Sense That! anymore. What was even worse was when I got notes from kids themselves, telling me that I’d betrayed them, that Charisma never would do the terrible things I was doing.
“I haven’t been able to find work for a year now. Not even voice-overs or commercials or modeling. Nobody wants to be associated with me. The last brand that I did a campaign for was Lucky Brand jeans, and they stopped using me after five thousand people signed an online petition saying they wouldn’t buy anything from Lucky as long as I was associated with them.
“And as for serious acting—movies, another TV show—forget it. They won’t say why they’re not offering me parts. Just that I’m ‘not a good fit.’ Even my agent has basically given up on me. The one time he’s called me in the past three months was to recommend that I sign up for Revibe.”
Part of the shaming, she went on, was related to her race. “There were essays and posts and letters to me and about me saying that I was making black people everywhere look bad. Here I was, a famous young African American, so I had the opportunity to represent my race well to the entire world. And I blew it. I’d confirmed every stereotype—that we’re aggressive, irresponsible, criminal—and I’d single-handedly set back the fight for racial equality by, like, fifty years. That’s what they said.
“And that made me feel so guilty, obviously. And I desperately wanted them to be wrong. I don’t want my dumb choices to reflect on anyone other than me. But it doesn’t work that way, and I got plenty of messages saying, ‘This is just the sort of antisocial behavior I’d expect from you people.’
“So that’s why I’m here. I’m not trying to be all poor-little-rich-girl about it, but I really don’t have anywhere else to go.”
* * *
Zeke was barely sixteen, and I tried to tell myself I shouldn’t be physically attracted to someone who was both younger than me and possibly even more screwed up than me, but it was hard, because he oozed a confidence that was undeniably sexy. He sat with his legs splayed and his clearly pricey jeans slung low on his hips. I tried not to look at him because he made me uncomfortable, but I also tried not to let on that I wasn’t looking at him, because that would also be uncomfortable.
Zeke the Hottie had grown up in an apartment building in Manhattan. Ms. Candela, the gray-haired woman in the apartment below his, loathed him. By the time he was old enough to understand his surroundings and the fact that there were people in the world other than him, she had already sworn a lifelong vendetta against him. “I used to stomp around and jump up and down,” he said, “and bang pots and pans and cry at night and, I don’t know, kid stuff. It drove her nuts. She’d come upstairs and scream at me. I was six and she was sixty, and she’d scream right in my face. When I had some friends over for my thirteenth birthday party, she literally filed a noise complaint with the police. The cops showed up and they just found a dozen kids eating pizza and playing Spin the Bottle in the living room. I’m pretty sure that’s not what we have a police force for.”
As much as Ms. Candela hated Zeke, she loved her cat, Dante. “Dante got deluxe cat food that stunk up the whole building. Dante went on walks around Central Park on a leash. I kid you not. One time Dante bit me and I had to get a tetanus shot.”
What had been a standard feud between neighbors blew up a few months ago. “I was leaving the house for soccer practice,” Zeke said, “when I saw Dante out in the hallway. He’d gotten out of Ms. Candela’s apartment—he did that sometimes, probably because he wanted to escape her, that crazy witch. I could have tried to bring him back to her. I could have even just left him there, I guess. But I was so mad, and, I don’t really know how to explain it, but it was like this rage boiled up inside me, and I grabbed him by the nape of the neck and tossed him down the garbage chute.”
Zeke went on to soccer practice. He didn’t want to be late. But he had trouble focusing on the exercises. Once the rage subsided, he felt kind of worried about Dante. Or, if not worried about Dante himself, Zeke at least felt guilty. He got through all of practice, telling himself that cats always landed on their feet and everything was fine. He even went out to the diner with his friends after practice to prove to himself just how fine it was. But he wasn’t hungry and wasn’t listening to the conversation, and soon he made his excuses and jogged home to look for Dante.
Zeke found Dante in the basement, bloodied and broken, barely conscious. So Zeke picked him up, tucked him in his gym bag, and brought him up to Mrs. Candela’s floor. He set the cat down on Mrs. Candela’s welcome mat, rang the doorbell, and bolted.
“I thought everything would be fine,” he said. “Her dumb cat was alive, and she could take it to the vet and get it fixed. No harm, no foul.”
But that was when Zeke’s real trouble began. Ms. Candela insisted on reviewing the apartment building’s security tapes so she could figure out what had happened to her beloved pet. And the tape clearly showed Zeke picking up the tabby cat, glancing around surreptitiously, and then tossing him.
Ms. Candela didn’t know what to do with this tape except be spitting mad, but her nephew was more resourceful: he posted the video online, along with a description about what had happened, how much his aunt loved her cat, and photos of Dante’s broken, distorted body lying in Ms. Candela’s arms. He started a fund-raising campaign for people who wanted to contribute to Dante’s veterinary bills and raised more than ten thousand dollars in less than a day. And he posted Zeke’s full name and contact information online, in case anyone wanted to let him know what they thought of him.
As it turned out, hundreds and hundreds of people wanted to let Zeke know what they thought of him. He was a sociopath and a would-be murderer. He was soulless and spoiled rotten. He would grow up to abuse and kill more animals, and, someday soon, people as well. It would be better for the world if he just died now, before he got the chance.
The building management pressured Zeke’s family to leave. Zeke’s parents owned their apartment and had lived there for twenty years, so at first they refused, but then the management company threatened to sue. Zeke’s parents had sent him to Revibe as a last-ditch attempt to keep their home. If he could show that he’d changed, really changed, then maybe they would be able to stay.
“I brought Dante back,” Zeke reminded us now. “I could have just left him down there and Ms. Candela never would have found him, but I didn’t. I brought him home, and he lived. Why doesn’t anyone give me credit for that part?”
I didn’t find Zeke that hot anymore. So that was a relief.
* * *
“I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Tabitha, and she’s the love of my life,” began Richard. “I would do anything for her.”
From what I could tell, Richard was in his thirties. His unwrinkled skin and thick hair made him look younger, but his eyes made him look much, much older. “Her mom took off when Tab was a few months old. She had a drug problem. She was clean the whole time she was pregnant, and I guess I thought she’d stay that way for the sake of our baby, but she didn’t, or couldn’t. That’s life, right? Since then, it’s just been me and Tab, and I’ve always told her that no matter what else happens, I’ll always be there for her. Daddy’s not going anywhere, I told her.”
Richard rearranged his work schedule so he could be home with his daughter as much as possible. He played with her and read to her and took her to the local zoo and playground. He made her baby food from scratch and never let her ride in anyone’s car but his own. “I didn’t want anyone—least of all her—to think that having just a dad wasn’t enough for her. And I wouldn’t risk losing her for anything.”
One evening Tabitha was playing in the backyard when a tiger loped in from the woods. “I didn’t know what it was at the time,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was a tiger, because that didn’t make any sense. I heard her scream, so I came running outside—I had only stepped into the house for a minute. And all I saw immediately was this enormous animal—he must have been ten times my daughter’s size—and he was coming for my baby.”
Richard didn’t panic. He swung into action, as though he’d been training for this encounter his entire life. He ran inside, grabbed his shotgun from the gun case, ran back out, and shot the tiger. That was all it took—one shot—and the animal fell down dead. “I’d been doing riflery and hunting since I was a boy,” he told us, “and that was hands down the cleanest shot I ever made.”
Tabitha, of course, was confused and scared and crying. He bustled her into the house, then called 911 to let them know there was a large animal carcass in his yard. And that was when he found out what had happened.
The tiger was named Boxer and had escaped from the nearby zoo—which made sense, as there was no other reason for it to be roaming free. But Boxer wasn’t just any tiger (if there is such a thing as “just any tiger”). He was a South China tiger, one of only a couple dozen of his species left in the world. South China tigers were functionally extinct, meaning they lived in zoos, but nowhere in the wild anymore. And now, thanks to Richard, one of these extremely rare and critically endangered beasts was dead.
“The story ran in the local newspaper, and then the animal rights activists came out in force,” Richard said. “They called themselves Team Boxer. I don’t blame them, exactly. It’s true that no one should go around hunting endangered species. But, you know, that’s not what I was doing.”
The activists threw red paint on his porch, on his car, and even at him on the first day that he tried to return to work. The gun control activists got loudly involved, too. “Why did he own a gun if not to use it?” they demanded. “If he hadn’t had the gun in the first place, no one could have gotten shot.”
“I own my gun for sport,” Richard told us now, “and for self-defense. And that’s what this was. I was defending my baby against a wild animal. The critics demanded to know why I didn’t grab her and run inside. Why did I shoot the animal instead of shooting a warning shot? I don’t know what to tell you except that I wasn’t taking any risks with my Tab’s life. She needed her daddy to protect her, and that’s what I did.”
But his protection was short-lived. Team Boxer made the case that he was an unfit parent. He kept guns in a cabinet where they were easily accessible by children. He was violent. He let his daughter play outside in the evening, unsupervised. He was neglectful. His home wasn’t safe for a child. If he’d been parenting her the way he should have, he could have just scooped her up and brought her into the house; no tiger should ever have needed to die.
“I know I should have been outside with her,” Richard conceded, shamefaced. “I never stop regretting that I was inside when that animal showed up. But, well, our backyard is really isolated, and it’s fenced in, and I could hear everything from inside the house. I figured there was no way anything could happen to my baby without my knowing. And I was only in there for a couple minutes, anyway.”
He’d been inside for a couple minutes because he was fixing himself a drink. Yet one more reason, Team Boxer pointed out, why he couldn’t be trusted with his daughter.
So social services took Tabitha away. They put her in a foster home after trying and failing to bring home her mother.
“She’s been in foster care for the past three months,” Richard told us, his eyes welling up. “I can have supervised visits with her, but that’s it. She cries every time I have to leave—she doesn’t understand.
“So that’s why I’m here. I took out a second mortgage on the house and got a loan, and here I am. I need to be rehabilitated. I need to get my daughter back.”
* * *
The first thing I noticed about Abe was that he used a wheelchair. The second thing I noticed were his eyes, which were wide and crystalline blue. He was a few years older than me and from Westport, Connecticut. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he started out, and all of us scoffed, with varying levels of politeness. Because didn’t we all want to believe that we’d done nothing wrong? Wasn’t the point that none of us got to be in charge of deciding whether we had done something wrong?
“I didn’t,” he insisted. “My father did.”
Abe’s father, he told us, was Michael Krisch. I recognized that name. Everyone did. Michael Krisch had been a big-deal investment advisor who, it had been revealed a couple years ago, had committed securities fraud and cheated his clients out of billions of dollars. “He’d been running this scheme for my entire life,” Abe said, “even before I was born.”
Abe had grown up believing his father was one of the greatest businessmen in America, only to learn, at the age of eighteen, that he was a thief of the first order. We all knew that Abe’s dad was in jail now. “He’s one year into a hundred-year sentence,” Abe said bitterly. “I haven’t visited him yet, but give me another ninety years and maybe I’ll get around to it.”
Once the truth about Michael Krisch came out, everyone turned on his family. Abe was deserted by his friends and girlfriend, whose parents had invested (and lost) their life savings with his dad. “My friends’ college funds?” Abe said. “Gone. Their parents’ retirement savings? Forget it. And that’s just the people who I knew personally. My dad handled investments for so many clients and ruined almost all of them. I don’t blame anyone for hating him. I hate him.”
The problem was that they came after Abe, too. Because, while he may not have aided his father, he didn’t stop him, either. “I’d been interning for my dad since I was fourteen. He said he wanted me to learn the value of hard work from a young age, which is, in retrospect, a joke. Really what he wanted me to learn was how to get away with cheating people. He had the idea that once I graduated, I’d join him in the family business and we’d become, like, this father-son duo of white-collar criminals. So he hid what he was up to from almost everyone, but he didn’t hide it very carefully from me, because in the long run, his plan was to bring me in on all of it. I think on some level he wanted me to appreciate what a mastermind he was.”
When the FBI investigation revealed this—that Michael Krisch had been offloading funds into accounts in his son’s name, that Abe had known some of the broad strokes of what his father was up to and failed to do anything to stop it—the public attacked him.
“People were angry, and they wanted someone to blame, and I was still there, wandering free and innocent. It just went on and on and on. There’s no way to ever escape the legacy my dad left me. So, like Jazmyn, I tried to kill myself. How’d you do it, Jazmyn? You didn’t say.”
“Pills,” Jazmyn replied. “I had to get my stomach pumped.”
“I jumped from a sixth-story balcony,” Abe said.
They both said it in such a casual way that, for a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
“Now I’m paralyzed from the waist down,” Abe went on. “I’ll never walk again. And some of my old friends feel bad about this—like they shouldn’t have pushed me so hard. But people who don’t know me? They don’t care. I’ve seen jokes about me online … things like, ‘Abe Krisch is as bad at offing himself as his father is at making money.’
“This wasn’t my crime, but people hate me for it anyway. I’ll be paying for it for the rest of my life.” Abe gestured to his wheelchair, as if we might have forgotten. “It’s stupid,” he concluded.
* * *
I told my story last. This wasn’t a competition—and if it was, we were all losers—but I was surprised to feel like I wasn’t the biggest victim in this group. What I’d gone through was hard, but it wasn’t unique. (And it certainly wasn’t “completely” unique.) I was even able to make eye contact with each of them as I explained my background as a champion speller, my post, and the fallout. I felt like this was kind of that chance I’d been dreaming of, the chance to speak to an impartial audience and explain why I had done it and what I’d meant. Okay, it wasn’t on CNN or NBC. But it was something.
Once I was through, Valerie and Kevin went over some of the key guidelines and principles of Revibe.
“No one is to leave the property without permission,” Kevin said. “I promise this isn’t as isolating as it might sound: we all leave together every afternoon to do volunteer work, so you will still get to see the outside world! But as a general rule, you need to be focused inward, in a controlled environment with few variables.”
“Your phone and e-mail communication will be limited and supervised,” Valerie went on. “It’s the internet that, in one way or another, landed most of you in trouble in the first place, so you need to take a step away from the internet to solve the problems it’s caused.”
I didn’t disagree—after all, that was why I’d quit all my social media—but the idea that I might not be able to google myself whenever I felt the need made my heart tighten.
“We have signal jammers set up on the property,” Valerie explained. “We turn them off for a few hours each evening, and during that time you can make and receive calls and e-mails. But the rest of the time, you simply won’t get any reception here. So even if you want to give in to the urge, you won’t be able to. If you’d like, you can give us your login credentials so that we can check your e-mail more regularly and let you know right away if something important comes in. I know some of you have children, so it may not always be feasible for you to wait for updates about them.”
It was starting to occur to me that I had, perhaps, signed myself up for being a prisoner.
“Even during the internet hours,” Kevin added, “you are to use your communication privileges responsibly. That means you may not make any statements about your public shaming without first running them past us. Nor may you reveal details of the Revibe technique publicly. Of course, you are never to share names or other private information about any other Vibers.”
I could do this. Maybe not the bit where I could only google myself once every twenty-four hours—I had no idea how to survive that uncertainty—but the rest of it, I told myself, I could do. I was, after all, a terrific rule follower. And I had promised my mother I’d do everything I could to make this work.
Kevin went on. “There is to be no use of controlled substances of any kind on the property. And it should go without saying that there’s to be absolutely no physical involvement with anyone else in the program.”
So much for my chances with the handsome animal abuser, then.
“You are all in delicate situations,” Kevin continued. “Many of you are emotionally fragile, some of you are underage, you’re all away from your homes and families, and your entire focus needs to be on redemption. I assume I don’t need to go into any more detail as to why all relationships here are to be strictly collegial.”
We shook our heads.
“That’s about it for the hard-and-fast rules,” Valerie said. “Everything else we just ask you to go into with an open mind and a commitment to getting better.
“The last thing I want to say here is that tonight, telling your stories, is the last time I want to hear any of you explaining why you did what you did, or placing blame on others, or anything else. We’ve all heard your side of the story now. We all know what you’d like to say in your defense. And now that it’s been said, we need to move on from it. If there’s one central point for the next five weeks, it’s this: I was wrong. And the sooner you can say that with conviction, the sooner we will be able to make you right again.”