All the lights were off in the used RV that night, and the blinds were closed to prevent anyone from seeing inside. Five people huddled in the small main room. Kate Petty, 34, lay on a bed that had been converted from a fold-down dinette table, underneath a large painting of a leopard. Her husband, Caleb, whose beard and long hair is the same auburn color as Kate’s, sat by her head and clutched her sweaty hand. She had been in labor for more than 24 hours and she was breathless, exhausted. The only light in the RV came from a flashlight held by a woman standing on Kate’s left. Another woman crouched between her splayed legs, hands outstretched.

“Keep going, honey. You got it,” said the woman with the flashlight.

Kate groaned. Her baby’s head emerged into the quivering circle of light.

“Is he stuck?” she asked in fear.

Kate’s contractions had started on the morning of May 8, 2017, in the Pettys’ brick one-story home in Opelika, Alabama. After two pregnancies, Kate knew she had some time to kill, so she made a last-minute grocery run. When the contractions picked up that evening, she and Caleb hopped in their car and headed for the Georgia state line, a half-hour drive away.

The roads wound through soft, wooded hills until finally the couple saw the large wooden cross marking the entrance of 3 Creeks Campground. They’d picked 3 Creeks for two reasons: It was close to Alabama, and it had working sewage. “A really podunk hole in the wall,” was how Kate described the place. The RV was waiting for them in slot K-9, already stocked with the supplies they’d need: old blankets, towels, Chux pads, buckets, candles, raw honey for energy. That night, the contractions were coming about every five minutes but Caleb and Kate curled up together on the bed and managed to get some sleep.

By morning, Kate couldn’t talk through her contractions anymore. She got into the rose-patterned birthing tub that her doula, Ashley Lovell, had filled with water from a plastic hose. Kate’s midwives, Rachel Hart and Paige White, arrived around 9 a.m. During a check, they realized the baby was asynclitic, or entering the birth canal at an angle. They had Kate get out of the tub and move into different positions to align the baby’s head. Everyone took turns rubbing Kate’s back and fanning her face. Meanwhile, Kate’s mother, Elizabeth Landreth, and other relatives sat on John Deere chairs outside, waiting. The campsites at 3 Creeks were close together, so it wasn’t long before some of their fellow campers became aware of what was going on.

It was hot in Georgia in May and the midwives were cranking the air conditioning, but the breaker kept tripping and Caleb had to hop in and out of the camper to get the power back up. It got so hot in the RV, Kate wasn’t sure she could stand it. She could hear a group of guys who worked for the Georgia Power utility company grilling and drinking beer and cutting up outside. The campground’s owner came by to lend Caleb a hand with the breaker. At one point he was standing right by the window, about 5 feet away from Kate. The couple hadn’t told him they planned to give birth at his campground and weren’t sure how he would react. So every time Kate had a contraction, the midwives closed the windows to muffle her cries. “I was pretty loud, I feel like, but he had no idea,” Kate said.

Every so often throughout the day, the midwives used a Doppler fetal monitor to detect the heartbeat. To help the labor progress, they had Kate squat, sit on a birthing stool and try the McRoberts maneuver, in which she lay on her back and pressed her legs to her belly. As the light faded and Kate neared the 30-hour mark, she started to panic. She had been in labor for so long. She worried she didn’t have the energy to keep going. She asked if she should go to the hospital for a cesarean section.

But Hart knew the baby was close. She told Kate that she wouldn’t stop her from having a C-section if that’s what she wanted, but she wasn’t going to tell her to have one, either. Instead, she asked Kate to get on her back. She felt like a turtle stuck the wrong side up. At Hart’s direction, Caleb held one of her legs in the air. A painful contraction came, and then another, and then the baby was coming so fast that White didn’t even have time to get her gloves all the way on.

“Here he is! Here he is!” she cried. At 8:03 p.m., a full day after Kate and Caleb had arrived at the campground, their son Jett was born and soon announced his arrival with a wail. To Elizabeth, standing anxiously right outside the window, it was the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard. “Oh, my baby,” she heard her daughter say. Elizabeth started jumping up and down with joy and relief; around her, the campers who knew what was going on inside the RV clapped and cheered in the humid night.

There are women who prefer to use a midwife because of deeply held beliefs about religion or wellness. And then there are those like Kate, who are simply desperate to avoid having a baby in a hospital. Mothers in this latter category have often endured a traumatic hospital experience and fear being pushed into risky procedures or surgery if they deliver there again. These fears are hardly unfounded in Alabama, which has one of the country’s worst rates of infant mortality, with maternal mortality also on the rise.

When it comes to women’s reproductive choices, we think of the primary battlegrounds as contraception, sex education and abortion. We hear far less about the significant restrictions on childbirth. While midwifery care is mainstream in other Western countries, it’s relatively rare in the United States. The closest option is a nurse-midwife—a registered nurse with a midwife credential who mostly operates in hospitals under the authority of doctors. This is a very different experience from having a trained midwife supervise a delivery in the home or in a birthing center. In some places, it’s impossible to access such services without skirting the law. Seventeen states, including North Carolina and Illinois, have laws that put midwives at risk of criminal prosecution for assisting birth outside a hospital. In Alabama, midwives were not permitted to practice in the state during Kate’s pregnancy.

And so, each year expecting mothers jump the border into Tennessee, Mississippi or Georgia, where midwifery is either legal or at least exists in some kind of gray area. Whether the journey is 10 minutes or two and a half hours, these women often make the drive while already in labor and pray they aren’t forced to have the baby in a parking lot or by the side of the road. They give birth in makeshift spaces, often in secret—Airbnbs, cheap hotel rooms, campers, a network of birthing cottages nestled anonymously throughout the hills of small, southern Tennessee towns, the western part of Georgia or along the Mississippi line. These might not be places where most mothers would want to give birth, but they give women like Kate something far more precious: a greater measure of control over how they bring a child into the world.

Alabama has a rich tradition of midwifery, but it is one that has virtually been erased from living memory. As in most places in the United States, until the mid-1800s it was midwives who were responsible for delivering children. Birth was something that happened in the home, among women. To this day, midwives still refer to their work as “catching babies”—reflecting a belief that birth doesn’t require medical intervention under normal circumstances, just a pair of hands to safely collect the child.

But as medicine became professionalized, its leading practitioners took a very different view. In 1915, the influential obstetrician Joseph DeLee declared that midwifery was a “relic of barbarism.” He also called on physicians to save women from the “pathologic” process of labor using sedatives, forceps and episiotomies—the surgical cutting of the perineum. By the early 1930s, nearly two-thirds of births in the U.S. happened in a hospital.

There was one place where midwives remained crucial: the South. During Jim Crow, black families could not access white hospitals and white doctors often refused to treat them, so it fell to black “granny midwives” to deliver children. In Alabama, Margaret Charles Smith caught her first baby at the age of 5 and, in her own telling, went on to deliver 3,500 children without losing a single mother. She once described saving an extremely premature baby by making an incubator out of a cardboard box and hot water bottles. Onnie Lee Logan started practicing in 1931, delivering nearly every child born in one black Mobile suburb. “I do all my work keepin em from having lacerations and havin to have stitches,” she recounted in her book, explaining how she used hot towels to stretch the skin and how she knew exactly when the mother should start pushing so the baby was positioned correctly.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act, as well as the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid, eventually led to the integration of medical services. By the 1970s, 99 percent of American births took place in hospitals and states were passing laws preventing midwives from practicing, ostensibly for health and safety reasons. Alabama ended the legal practice of lay midwifery in 1976. A tiny number of home birthers persisted, mostly white, middle-class women seeking an alternative to the hospital. It was technically a misdemeanor for midwives to assist them, but the likelihood of being prosecuted seemed slim.

One woman who defied the ban was Karen Brock. She’d delivered hundreds of babies since the 1980s, following the example of her midwife grandmother. In 2002, Brock was attending a birth that was complicated by a ruptured uterus and cord prolapse, which occurs when the umbilical cord drops through the open cervix into the vagina. She rushed the mother to the hospital, where the baby died. According to Brock, the doctor said her actions saved the mother’s life, but she was charged with the misdemeanor of practicing nurse midwifery without a license and pleaded guilty.

Brock, 61, is petite with straight silver hair and an abiding affection for Chaco sandals. She told me that at the time of her arrest, she didn’t want to abandon the 27 Alabama families still in her care. So she decided to move her practice to Tennessee, where she could operate as a certified professional midwife. (Certified midwives do not have to be nurses, but undergo training and apprenticeship programs.) For a couple of months, she delivered babies in a trailer in a midwife’s backyard. Then she rented a house in a small town right on the Alabama border. After about five years, she received a cease-and-desist order from the state of Tennessee for running an unauthorized birth center. (The state defines a birth center as any building “exclusively or primarily” dedicated to birth.)

The day she received the order, Brock happened to be attending a birth for a family from Huntsville, Alabama. When Brock told them about the cease-and-desist, they decided to help. “My husband and I really felt like the Lord called us to do it,” said a woman I’ll call Debbie, who asked to remain anonymous.

After months of searching, Debbie and her husband bought a three-bedroom house in southern Tennessee and enlisted friends and relatives to help convert it into a two bedroom, two bath.

They installed a capacious hot tub and an extra water heater. It is now one of about half a dozen birthing cottages scattered around the towns of St. Joseph, Elkton, Pulaski and Lawrenceburg. There is also a renowned midwifery center nearby in Summertown called The Farm, which has cottages that expecting families can rent. The Farm was originally founded as a commune in the 1970s by hippies who caravanned across the country from San Francisco in school buses. Many of the women in the caravan were pregnant and learned how to deliver each other’s babies, which inspired them to become midwives.

Karen Brock treats patients at her clinic.

Karen Brock treats patients at her clinic.

Alabama’s border birth community is a tightknit sisterhood. It includes engineers, meteorologists, nurses, real estate agents and stay-at-home moms of varying political persuasions. They drop terms like “proven pelvis” and “colostrum” into casual conversation and share information via word of mouth. The cottages don’t openly advertise their services, for fear of being identified as unlicensed birth centers.

In theory, any Airbnb or vacation property could be used as a birthing cottage, but there are benefits to using one within the network. The owners are supportive and flexible about booking. After a birth, Debbie and her family clean the house themselves. (“It’s hard to find someone and say, ‘There may be blood, you may need to wear gloves, and the tub needs to be disinfected,’” she explained.) The cottages, which cost anywhere from $250 to $1,500 a week, tend to be filled with the quaint, fusty furniture that inhabits secondary properties everywhere. One is affectionately known as the “barbershop house” because the owner also cuts hair in the garage. When Marie Douthit’s husband dropped off supplies there in preparation for his wife’s labor, he got a quick trim.

Douthit decided to jump the border after her first pregnancy resulted in a C-section that left her deeply distressed. A data-oriented engineer, she ran the numbers and concluded that a home birth with a midwife was less risky than another C-section in a hospital. She went into active labor for her second baby on January 18, 2017. On the way to the barbershop house, Douthit and her husband stopped to use the bathroom and get Douthit a Hardee’s milkshake. A convenience store clerk asked if she needed an ambulance, and Douthit, who was terrified of being taken to the hospital, rushed back to the car. When they reached the cottage, the midwives didn’t even have time to fill the tub all the way to the top before she felt the urge to push. Her baby was born an hour later.

Brianna Barker gave birth using the network around the same time. She’d had her first child at 20; the baby was preterm and breach. It was months after her C-section before she could even walk standing up straight; she still has recurring nightmares about being trapped in a dark hospital. She used birthing cottages for her third and fourth pregnancies. For one of them, her doula taught Barker and her husband how to do a car birth just in case the baby came during the two-and-a-half-hour drive.

One reason Barker opted to use a midwife was that many doctors and hospitals won’t allow women to give birth vaginally after a C-section, due to a widespread misconception that a vaginal birth after cesarean, or VBAC, is unsafe. In fact, VBACs are associated with fewer complications than elective repeat C-sections, according to the Mayo Clinic. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) endorses their use for low-risk moms, although it doesn’t recommend VBACs outside a hospital environment and generally supports hospitals and accredited birth centers as a safer option than home birth.

There have been no large-scale randomized clinical trials of planned home birth that the ACOG considers adequate. Existing research suggests that in the U.S., they are associated with fewer interventions but also with higher rates of infant death. In countries like the Netherlands and Canada, however, where home birth is well established, it’s considered safe. A study that included researchers from the University of British Columbia; the Child and Family Research Institute in Vancouver; King’s College, London; and the University of Alberta, Edmonton compared planned home birth with planned hospital birth. The authors found that home birth was associated with “very low and comparable rates of perinatal death,” as well as fewer surgeries and complications for moms.

All 14 Alabama women I spoke to said their decision to jump the border was connected to their desire to avoid unnecessary medical procedures. Most of them described harrowing hospital experiences—being derided for writing a birth plan, feeling pressured into C-sections, epidurals or Pitocin, a synthetic hormone that induces contractions.

Alabama is one of nine states where more than 34 percent of deliveries are cesareans. The ideal, according to the World Health Organization, is 10 to 15 percent. While cesareans may be essential in complicated births, they can come with higher risks of (sometimes life-threatening) complications and infection. “You have to look at the outcomes from hospital births, and they are not that good,” said Dr. Jesanna Cooper, an obstetrician who works with nurse-midwives in her Birmingham practice. “If it’s risky to have a hospital birth, it’s pretty hard to say a home birth is too risky.”

Another Alabama family who used the midwife network to give birth to their son.

Another Alabama family who used the midwife network to give birth to their son.

The Pettys live a little way out of town, on a street with modest homes surrounded by large yards. When I spotted a massive camper parked in one, bearing a decal that said “The Baby Wagon,” I knew I’d found the right place.

Kate grew up in Alabama. She was a stubborn kid, never big on rule-following. She and Caleb met at a hole-in-the-wall pool hall in 2011. “I'm pretty good for a girl. I can kick a lot of people’s booties,” she told me proudly. She was initially wary when she learned Caleb was seven years younger, but they married in 2013, planning on a big family.

Kate started out as a “very mainstream mother,” she said, clipping coupons, using disposable diapers, buying processed food. Their first daughter, AdaRee, was born on March 1, 2014, at East Alabama Medical Center. Kate had an epidural but hated not being able to feel what was happening to her body. When she got pregnant less than a year later, she was determined to give birth without drugs or surgical interventions. After going into labor, she stayed at home for as long as she could, figuring she had a better chance of avoiding unwanted procedures that way. She arrived at the hospital 8 centimeters dilated—but then her labor stalled. A nurse insisted that she needed Pitocin. “I said no repeatedly,” Kate recalled. “I finally caved.”

After receiving Pitocin through an IV, Kate experienced swells of unrelenting pain. She felt like she was dying; the doctor gave her narcotic painkillers. The baby’s heart rate started to drop. The doctor used a vacuum to get the baby out fast and then put her on oxygen. Her name was Eliza, and Kate got to touch her face and her hand before they rolled her out of the room. Eliza died three hours later.

Kate’s instincts were screaming that Eliza’s death wasn’t supposed to happen. When she asked the doctor if her baby’s death was caused by the labor drugs, he dismissed that possibility, she said. (East Alabama Medical Center declined to comment.) The autopsy report attributed the death to respiratory failure and a possible infection, an explanation Kate felt was “ludicrous at best.” She sought opinions from three other obstetricians, none of whom blamed the Pitocin. According to Kate, an OB in Atlanta told her he thought that the heart strips in Kate’s medical records indicated a connection between the intensity of the Pitocin-induced contractions and the stress Eliza was under in the womb. “I can’t tell you how much of a weight he lifted off my shoulders,” Kate said. “It was the most spiritual moment of my life.” Soon after, Kate and Caleb started trying to have another baby.

Eliza’s death had made Kate question everything, from the food she ate to the products she bought. There was no way she was going back to the hospital. She considered traveling to Tennessee to The Farm or giving birth at a relative’s house in Chattanooga with a midwife, but the five-hour journey was too far. She couldn’t convince an out-of-state midwife to come to her home. As she hit her 20-week mark, she was becoming increasingly anxious.

Finally, a friend put her in touch with a Georgia-based midwife who was willing to assist Kate as long as the birth wasn’t in Alabama. Almost as a joke, Kate asked, “Look, what if I buy a camper?” To her surprise, the midwife said that as long as the camper was parked over the Georgia line, that was fine. So that’s what the Pettys did.

Kate believed that because Eliza’s birth had been so traumatic, God would take it easy on her the next time around. But every logistical detail presented a new obstacle. Finding an affordable RV, for instance. Kate was working as a part-time real estate agent and Caleb was running a granite shop, and they didn’t have great credit. They finally found a used camper for $17,000, which came with two used Jet Skis, and Kate’s mother co-signed the loan. Then, after they settled on 3 Creeks Campground, Kate discovered she couldn’t book a site in advance. So they drove the camper up a few days before Kate’s due date and paid for a week.

These hurdles prompted Kate to throw herself into a decades-long campaign to change Alabama’s law on midwives. A group of activists led by the Alabama Birth Coalition spent so much time at the statehouse that they knew the best bathrooms for impromptu meetings and breastfeeding (the seventh floor). Brianna Barker took her infant along when she lobbied state lawmakers. Kate showed up into her ninth month of pregnancy and went back after Jett’s birth.

On May 19, 2017, the Alabama Legislature passed a bill allowing certified professional midwives to practice. But because of heavy opposition from the medical establishment, the bill came with numerous exclusions. When the law goes into effect—which is expected to happen before the end of 2018—midwives will not be able to attend mothers who have had C-sections or who are giving birth to twins or breech babies. Given the state’s high C-section rates, this rules out at least 35 percent of Alabama moms. “It was a gut punch,” Barker said.

Because of the law’s many exceptions, the border birth ecosystem will remain in place. And for the foreseeable future, midwife care is likely to be a viable option mostly for white women of some means. Melodi Stone, a black doula and reproductive justice advocate in Birmingham, said that because black women’s pregnancies are more likely to be high-risk (they have greater incidence of obesity, high blood pressure and other factors), they may not qualify to give birth at home with midwives. Even if they are eligible, the cost is expected to remain a deterrent for many. There are no plans for midwifery to be subsidized by Medicaid, which, as of 2016, covered 58 percent of births in Alabama. Health insurance providers also rarely cover midwifery care, which costs at least $3,000 (not counting the added expenses of jumping the border).

This is unfortunate because black mothers could especially benefit from a dedicated advocate during the birth process. Nationally, black women are more than twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as white women. In Alabama, they are five times as likely. In 2016, the infant mortality rate for black infants in the state was more than double that of white infants. But after four decades without legal midwifery in Alabama, many black women aren’t even aware it’s an option. “This was knowledge supposed to be passed down, but there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and information that we don’t have has been stolen from us,” said Kendra Burrell, a doula in Alabama. “I thought midwifery was literally a white woman thing.”

Kate hopes to eventually train as a midwife. In recent months, she has been acting as a doula for Erin Inman, a young mother she met on Facebook who lives in nearby Phenix City. Inman is due to give birth to her second baby in February. Like so many other border moms, she had a C-section for her first pregnancy that she still struggles with. Kate offered the use of her camper, but Inman wanted somewhere that could more easily accommodate a birthing tub. So Kate is researching hotel rooms in LaGrange, Georgia, an hour away from Inman’s home—not an easy task, because hotel websites often don’t include photos of bathrooms and it’s hard to tell the size of the room or the thickness of the walls.

Kate and Inman plan to drive to LaGrange and request room tours when Inman approaches 36 weeks. They won’t book a room until she goes into labor, though, because Inman doesn’t want to pay for more nights than she has to. She’s a little nervous that someone in a neighboring room might hear odd noises and call the police. But that still worries her less than going to a hospital.

As for Kate, she and Caleb can’t wait to have another baby. She may even use the camper again, which has come to represent something sacred for the Pettys: a refuge and a source of healing. Jett has a forest green “Born in a Camper” cloth diaper and his first birthday party had a “Happy Camper” theme. Kate’s parents and brother bought RVs of their own (her sister already owned one) and the whole family takes them on trips. “People look at me like I’m crazy when I say I chose home birth as the safer option,” Kate said. “If I had that with AdaRee and Eliza, my family would be whole. There’s no doubt in my mind. If I had stayed home that day or had a midwife, Eliza would be here with us right now.”

CREDITS

Story - Rebecca Grant

is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. She covers reproductive rights, women's health and gender-based violence. Her work has appeared in Vice, The Washington Post, NPR, The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic and The Nation.

Photography - Adrienne Grunwald

is a documentary photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Time Magazine, M Le Magazine du Monde and ESPN the Magazine. Adrienne was selected for PDN's 30 in 2016.

Creative Direction & Design -

Donica Ida is the creative director of Highline.
Kate LaRue is a freelance creative director.

Development & Design - Gladeye

is a digital innovations agency in New Zealand and New York.

Research - Emily McCullar

is an assistant editor at Texas Monthly.

Now We're Talking

Glenn Greenwald is evolving, kind of. Even before the election of Donald Trump, he was one of the country’s most visible skeptics of “Russiagate,” arguing that very little evidence supported the idea that Moscow was hot for Donald. Since then, Greenwald has continued to accuse Democrats, their friends in the media and their allies in the intelligence community of embarrassing themselves with unfounded claims about Trump and Russia, and generally struggling with the truth.

These positions, as you might expect, have pissed off a lot of progressives—partly because Greenwald has amassed a body of work that’s impossible to dismiss. He first sprang into public view about a dozen years ago as the ferocious author of a small personal blog, “Unclaimed Territory.” Writing with enviable frequency in caustic prose, he railed against the bloody occupation of Iraq, eviscerated the legal justifications for torture, ridiculed the pretense of “objectivity” in journalism and documented the steady encroachment of government surveillance on American citizens. His popularity continued to rise through a stint at Salon during the early Obama years, and seemed to peak as a writer for The Guardian in 2013, when he traveled to Hong Kong for a secret meeting with the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Greenwald’s ensuing articles about the illegal wiretapping of American citizens kicked off an international scandal and won him a Pulitzer Prize—along with the financial support of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who agreed to underwrite Greenwald’s next venture. Since 2014, the website he helped create, The Intercept, has exposed a host of shady extra-judicial programs in the U.S. government, even while irritating many of its own readers with Greenwald’s skepticism about Russian meddling.

This month, I began hearing from people close to Greenwald that his views on Russia were changing, so I reached out to see how far he’d come. Our conversation began at 10 on a recent morning, when one of his two young sons answered the phone at their home in Rio de Janeiro, and it continued through multiple calls and myriad disagreements on topics ranging from Russian espionage to the midterm elections to the practice of journalism itself, before winding down about 7 that evening as Greenwald rushed to the airport in a taxi, occasionally pattering with the driver in Portuguese. The discussion, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, was both illuminating and surprisingly warm—even when each of us thought the other sounded totally bonkers.

Greenwald and Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, about to shock the world. LAURA POITRAS

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“To watch the U.S. turn around and play the victim is very difficult to swallow given that I know what the U.S. does to ... many, many [countries] in the world.”

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"I had a lot of sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg. ... He was widely criticized for what he said when [Kara Swisher] asked about things like Holocaust denial. But I don't understand why he should be the one acting as arbiter of truth."

Al Gore, ever the Boy Scout, whether he’s canoeing or returning secret information on a political opponent. GETTY IMAGES

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"Watergate is actually an example supporting my view of how we ought to be ... waiting for evidence before we believe it."

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"I think it would be the height of all ironies if a Democratic House decided to bring impeachment charges against the president based on claims that he sought to conceal evidence of an extramarital affair."

Greenwald on stage with filmmaker Laura Poitras and his husband, David Michael Miranda (far left), accepting a Spirit Award for Poitras' film “Citizenfour.” AP IMAGES

From the 16th century to the 19th, scurvy killed around 2 million sailors, more than warfare, shipwrecks and syphilis combined. It was an ugly, smelly death, too, beginning with rattling teeth and ending with a body so rotted out from the inside that its victims could literally be startled to death by a loud noise. Just as horrifying as the disease itself, though, is that for most of those 300 years, medical experts knew how to prevent it and simply failed to.

In the 1600s, some sea captains distributed lemons, limes and oranges to sailors, driven by the belief that a daily dose of citrus fruit would stave off scurvy’s progress. The British Navy, wary of the cost of expanding the treatment, turned to malt wort, a mashed and cooked byproduct of barley which had the advantage of being cheaper but the disadvantage of doing nothing whatsoever to cure scurvy. In 1747, a British doctor named James Lind conducted an experiment where he gave one group of sailors citrus slices and the others vinegar or seawater or cider. The results couldn’t have been clearer. The crewmen who ate fruit improved so quickly that they were able to help care for the others as they languished. Lind published his findings, but died before anyone got around to implementing them nearly 50 years later.

This kind of myopia repeats throughout history. Seat belts were invented long before the automobile but weren’t mandatory in cars until the 1960s. The first confirmed death from asbestos exposure was recorded in 1906, but the U.S. didn’t start banning the substance until 1973. Every discovery in public health, no matter how significant, must compete with the traditions, assumptions and financial incentives of the society implementing it.

Which brings us to one of the largest gaps between science and practice in our own time. Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.

I have never written a story where so many of my sources cried during interviews, where they shook with anger describing their interactions with doctors and strangers and their own families.

About 40 years ago, Americans started getting much larger. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 80 percent of adults and about one-third of children now meet the clinical definition of overweight or obese. More Americans live with “extreme obesity“ than with breast cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and HIV put together.

And the medical community’s primary response to this shift has been to blame fat people for being fat. Obesity, we are told, is a personal failing that strains our health care system, shrinks our GDP and saps our military strength. It is also an excuse to bully fat people in one sentence and then inform them in the next that you are doing it for their own good. That’s why the fear of becoming fat, or staying that way, drives Americans to spend more on dieting every year than we spend on video games or movies. Forty-five percent of adults say they’re preoccupied with their weight some or all of the time—an 11-point rise since 1990. Nearly half of 3- to 6- year old girls say they worry about being fat.

The emotional costs are incalculable. I have never written a story where so many of my sources cried during interviews, where they double- and triple-checked that I would not reveal their names, where they shook with anger describing their interactions with doctors and strangers and their own families. One remembered kids singing “Baby Beluga” as she boarded the school bus, another said she has tried diets so extreme she has passed out and yet another described the elaborate measures he takes to keep his spouse from seeing him naked in the light. A medical technician I’ll call Sam (he asked me to change his name so his wife wouldn’t find out he spoke to me) said that one glimpse of himself in a mirror can destroy his mood for days. “I have this sense I’m fat and I shouldn’t be,” he says. “It feels like the worst kind of weakness.”

My interest in this issue is slightly more than journalistic. Growing up, my mother’s weight was the uncredited co-star of every family drama, the obvious, unspoken reason why she never got out of the car when she picked me up from school, why she disappeared from the family photo album for years at a time, why she spent hours making meatloaf then sat beside us eating a bowl of carrots. Last year, for the first time, we talked about her weight in detail. When I asked if she was ever bullied, she recalled some guy calling her a “fat slob” as she biked past him years ago. “But that was rare,” she says. “The bigger way my weight affected my life was that I waited to do things because I thought fat people couldn’t do them.” She got her master’s degree at 38, her Ph.D. at 55. “I avoided so many activities where I thought my weight would discredit me.”

But my mother’s story, like Sam’s, like everyone’s, didn’t have to turn out like this. For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room.

The terrible irony is that for 60 years, we’ve approached the obesity epidemic like a fad dieter: If we just try the exact same thing one more time, we'll get a different result. And so it’s time for a paradigm shift. We’re not going to become a skinnier country. But we still have a chance to become a healthier one.

A NOTE ABOUT OUR PHOTOGRAPHS

So many images you see in articles about obesity strip fat people of their strength and personality. According to a recent study, only 11 percent of large people depicted in news reports were wearing professional clothing. Nearly 60 percent were headless torsos. So, we asked our interview subjects to take full creative control of the photos in this piece. This is how they want to present themselves to the world.

This is Corissa Enneking at her lightest: She wakes up, showers and smokes a cigarette to keep her appetite down. She drives to her job at a furniture store, she stands in four-inch heels all day, she eats a cup of yogurt alone in her car on her lunch break. After work, lightheaded, her feet throbbing, she counts out three Ritz crackers, eats them at her kitchen counter and writes down the calories in her food journal.

Or not. Some days she comes home and goes straight to bed, exhausted and dizzy from hunger, shivering in the Kansas heat. She rouses herself around dinnertime and drinks some orange juice or eats half a granola bar. Occasionally she’ll just sleep through the night, waking up the next day to start all over again.

The last time she lived like this, a few years ago, her mother marched her to the hospital. “My daughter is sick,” she told the doctor. “She's not eating.” He looked Enneking up and down. Despite six months of starvation, she was still wearing plus sizes, still couldn’t shop at J. Crew, still got unsolicited diet advice from colleagues and customers.

Enneking told the doctor that she used to be larger, that she’d lost some weight the same way she had lost it three or four times before—seeing how far she could get through the day without eating, trading solids for liquids, food for sleep. She was hungry all the time, but she was learning to like it. When she did eat, she got panic attacks. Her boss was starting to notice her erratic behavior.

“Well, whatever you're doing now,” the doctor said, “it's working.” He urged her to keep it up and assured her that once she got small enough, her body would start to process food differently. She could add a few hundred calories to her diet. Her period would come back. She would stay small, but without as much effort.

“If you looked at anything other than my weight,” Enneking says now, “I had an eating disorder. And my doctor was congratulating me.”

Ask almost any fat person about her interactions with the health care system and you will hear a story, sometimes three, the same as Enneking’s: rolled eyes, skeptical questions, treatments denied or delayed or revoked. Doctors are supposed to be trusted authorities, a patient’s primary gateway to healing. But for fat people, they are a source of unique and persistent trauma. No matter what you go in for or how much you’re hurting, the first thing you will be told is that it would all get better if you could just put down the Cheetos.

Emily went to a gynecological surgeon to have an ovarian cyst removed. The physician pointed out her body fat on the MRI, then said, “Look at that skinny woman in there trying to get out.”

This phenomenon is not merely anecdotal. Doctors have shorter appointments with fat patients and show less emotional rapport in the minutes they do have. Negative words—“noncompliant,” “overindulgent,” “weak willed”—pop up in their medical histories with higher frequency. In one study, researchers presented doctors with case histories of patients suffering from migraines. With everything else being equal, the doctors reported that the patients who were also classified as fat had a worse attitude and were less likely to follow their advice. And that’s when they see fat patients at all: In 2011, the Sun-Sentinel polled OB-GYNs in South Florida and discovered that 14 percent had barred all new patients weighing more than 200 pounds.

Some of these doctors are simply applying the same presumptions as the society around them. An anesthesiologist on the West Coast tells me that as soon as a larger patient goes under, the surgeons start trading “high school insults” about her body over the operating table. Janice O’Keefe, a former nurse in Boston, tells me a doctor once looked at her, paused, then asked, “How could you do this to yourself?” Emily, a counselor in Eastern Washington, went to a gynecological surgeon to have an ovarian cyst removed. The physician pointed out her body fat on the MRI, then said, “Look at that skinny woman in there trying to get out.”

“I was worried I had cancer,” Emily says, “and she was turning it into a teachable moment about my weight.”

Other physicians sincerely believe that shaming fat people is the best way to motivate them to lose weight. “It’s the last area of medicine where we prescribe tough love,” says Mayo Clinic researcher Sean Phelan.

In a 2013 journal article, bioethicist Daniel Callahan argued for more stigma against fat people. “People don’t realize that they are obese or if they do realize it, it’s not enough to stir them to do anything about it,” he tells me. Shame helped him kick his cigarette habit, he argues, so it should work for obesity too.

This belief is cartoonishly out of step with a generation of research into obesity and human behavior. As one of the (many) stigma researchers who responded to Callahan’s article pointed out, shaming smokers and drug users with D.A.R.E.-style “just say no” messages may have actually increased substance abuse by making addicts less likely to bring up their habit with their doctors and family members.

Plus, rather obviously, smoking is a behavior; being fat is not. Jody Dushay, an endocrinologist and obesity specialist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, says most of her patients have tried dozens of diets and have lost and regained hundreds of pounds before they come to her. Telling them to try again, but in harsher terms, only sets them up to fail and then blame themselves.

Not all physicians set out to denigrate their fat patients, of course; some of them do damage because of subtler, more unconscious biases. Most doctors, for example, are fit—“If you go to an obesity conference, good luck trying to get a treadmill at 5 a.m.,” Dushay says—and have spent more than a decade of their lives in the high-stakes, high-stress bubble of medical schools. According to several studies, thin doctors are more confident in their recommendations, expect their patients to lose more weight and are more likely to think dieting is easy. Sarah (not her real name), a tech CEO in New England, once told her doctor that she was having trouble eating less throughout the day. “Look at me,” her doctor said. “I had one egg for breakfast and I feel fine.”

Then there are the glaring cultural differences. Kenneth Resnicow, a consultant who trains physicians to build rapport with their patients, says white, wealthy, skinny doctors will often try to bond with their low-income patients by telling them, “I know what it’s like not to have time to cook.” Their patients, who might be single mothers with three kids and two jobs, immediately think “No, you don’t,” and the relationship is irretrievably soured.

When Joy Cox, an academic in New Jersey, was 16, she went to the hospital with stomach pains. The doctor didn’t diagnose her dangerously inflamed bile duct, but he did, out of nowhere, suggest that she’d get better if she stopped eating so much fried chicken. “He managed to denigrate my fatness and my blackness in the same sentence,” she says.

Many of the financial and administrative structures doctors work within help reinforce this bad behavior. The problem starts in medical school, where, according to a 2015 survey, students receive an average of just 19 hours of nutrition education over four years of instruction—five hours fewer than they got in 2006. Then the trouble compounds once doctors get into daily practice. Primary care physicians only get 15 minutes for each appointment, barely enough time to ask patients what they ate today, much less during all the years leading up to it. And a more empathic approach to treatment simply doesn’t pay: While procedures like blood tests and CT scans command reimbursement rates from hundreds to thousands of dollars, doctors receive as little as $24 to provide a session of diet and nutrition counseling.

Lesley Williams, a family medicine doctor in Phoenix, tells me she gets an alert from her electronic health records software every time she’s about to see a patient who is above the “overweight” threshold. The reason for this is that physicians are often required, in writing, to prove to hospital administrators and insurance providers that they have brought up their patient’s weight and formulated a plan to bring it down—regardless of whether that patient came in with arthritis or a broken arm or a bad sunburn. Failing to do that could result in poor performance reviews, low ratings from insurance companies or being denied reimbursement if they refer patients to specialized care.

Another issue, says Kimberly Gudzune, an obesity specialist at Johns Hopkins, is that many doctors, no matter their specialty, think weight falls under their authority. Gudzune often spends months working with patients to set realistic goals—playing with their grandkids longer, going off a cholesterol medication—only to have other doctors threaten it all. One of her patients was making significant progress until she went to a cardiologist who told her to lose 100 pounds. “All of a sudden she goes back to feeling like a failure and we have to start over,” Gudzune says. “Or maybe she just never comes back at all.”

And so, working within a system that neither trains nor encourages them to meaningfully engage with their higher-weight patients, doctors fall back on recommending fad diets and delivering bland motivational platitudes. Ron Kirk, an electrician in Boston, says that for years, his doctor's first resort was to put him on some diet he couldn't maintain for more than a few weeks. “They told me lettuce was a ‘free’ food,” he says—and he’d find himself carving up a head of romaine for dinner.

In a study that recorded 461 interactions with doctors, only 13 percent of patients got any specific plan for diet or exercise and only 5 percent got help arranging a follow-up visit. “It can be stressful when [patients] start asking a lot of specific questions” about diet and weight loss, one doctor told researchers in 2012. “I don’t feel like I have the time to sit there and give them private counseling on basics. I say, ‘Here’s some websites, look at this.’” A 2016 survey found that nearly twice as many higher-weight Americans have tried meal-replacement diets—the kind most likely to fail—than have ever received counseling from a dietician.

“It borders on medical malpractice,” says Andrew (not his real name), a consultant and musician who has been large his whole life. A few years ago, on a routine visit, Andrew’s doctor weighed him, announced that he was “dangerously overweight” and told him to diet and exercise, offering no further specifics. Should he go on a low-fat diet? Low-carb? Become a vegetarian? Should he do Crossfit? Yoga? Should he buy a fucking ThighMaster?

“She didn't even ask me what I was already doing for exercise,” he says. “At the time, I was training for serious winter mountaineering trips, hiking every weekend and going to the gym four times a week. Instead of a conversation, I got a sound bite. It felt like shaming me was the entire purpose.”

All of this makes higher-weight patients more likely to avoid doctors. Three separate studies have found that fat women are more likely to die from breast and cervical cancers than non-fat women, a result partially attributed to their reluctance to see doctors and get screenings. Erin Harrop, a researcher at the University of Washington, studies higher-weight women with anorexia, who, contrary to the size-zero stereotype of most media depictions, are twice as likely to report vomiting, using laxatives and abusing diet pills. Thin women, Harrop discovered, take around three years to get into treatment, while her participants spent an average of 13 and a half years waiting for their disorders to be addressed.

“A lot of my job is helping people heal from the trauma of interacting with the medical system,” says Ginette Lenham, a counselor who specializes in obesity. The rest of it, she says, is helping them heal from the trauma of interacting with everyone else.

If Sonya ever forgets that she is fat, the world will remind her. She has stopped taking the bus, she tells me, because she can sense the aggravation of the passengers squeezing past her. Sarah, the tech CEO, tenses up when anyone brings bagels to a work meeting. If she reaches for one, are her employees thinking, “There goes the fat boss”? If she doesn’t, are they silently congratulating her for showing some restraint?

Emily says it’s the do-gooders who get to her, the women who stop her on the street and tell her how brave she is for wearing a sleeveless dress on a 95-degree day. Sam, the medical technician, avoids the subject of weight altogether. “Men aren’t supposed to think about this stuff—and I think about it constantly,” he admits. “So I never let myself talk about it. Which is weird because it’s the most visible thing about me.”

Again and again I hear stories of how the pressure to be a “good fatty” in public builds up and explodes. Jessica has four kids. Every week is a birthday party or family reunion or swimming pool social, another opportunity to stand around platters of spare ribs and dinner rolls with her fellow moms.

“Your conscious mind is busy the whole day with how many calories is in everything, what you can eat and who’s watching,” she says. After a few intrusive comments over the years—should you be eating that?—she has learned to be careful, to perform the role of the impeccable fat person. She nibbles on cherry tomatoes, drinks tap water, stays on her feet, ignores the dessert end of the buffet.

Then, as the gathering winds down, Jessica and the other parents divvy up the leftovers. She wraps up burgers or pasta salad or birthday cake, drives her children home and waits for the moment when they are finally in bed. Then, when she’s alone, she eats all the leftovers by herself, in the dark.

“It’s always hidden,” she says. “I buy a package of ice cream, then eat it all. Then I have to go to the store to buy it again. For a week my family thinks there’s a thing of ice cream in the fridge—but it’s actually five different ones.”

This is how fat-shaming works: It is visible and invisible, public and private, hidden and everywhere at the same time. Research consistently finds that larger Americans (especially larger women) earn lower salaries and are less likely to be hired and promoted. In a 2017 survey, 500 hiring managers were given a photo of an overweight female applicant. Twenty-one percent of them described her as unprofessional despite having no other information about her. What’s worse, only a few cities and one state (nice work, Michigan) officially prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of weight.

Paradoxically, as the number of larger Americans has risen, the biases against them have become more severe. More than 40 percent of Americans classified as obese now say they experience stigma on a daily basis, a rate far higher than any other minority group. And this does terrible things to their bodies. According to a 2015 study, fat people who feel discriminated against have shorter life expectancies than fat people who don't. “These findings suggest the possibility that the stigma associated with being overweight,” the study concluded, “is more harmful than actually being overweight.”

And, in a cruel twist, one effect of weight bias is that it actually makes you eat more. The stress hormone cortisol—the one evolution designed to kick in when you’re being chased by a tiger or, it turns out, rejected for your looks—increases appetite, reduces the will to exercise and even improves the taste of food. Sam, echoing so many of the other people I spoke with, says that he drove straight to Jack in the Box last year after someone yelled, “Eat less!” at him across a parking lot.

There’s a grim caveman logic to our nastiness toward fat people. “We’re attuned to bodies that look different,” says Janet Tomiyama, a stigma researcher at UCLA. “In our evolutionary past, that might have meant disease risk and been seen as a threat to your tribe.” These biological breadcrumbs help explain why stigma begins so early. Kids as young as 3 describe their larger classmates with words like “mean,” “stupid” and “lazy.”

And yet, despite weight being the number one reason children are bullied at school, America’s institutions of public health continue to pursue policies perfectly designed to inflame the cruelty. TV and billboard campaigns still use slogans like “Too much screen time, too much kid” and “Being fat takes the fun out of being a kid.” Cat Pausé, a researcher at Massey University in New Zealand, spent months looking for a single public health campaign, worldwide, that attempted to reduce stigma against fat people and came up empty. In an incendiary case of good intentions gone bad, about a dozen states now send children home with “BMI report cards,” an intervention unlikely to have any effect on their weight but almost certain to increase bullying from the people closest to them.

This is not an abstract concern: Surveys of higher-weight adults find that their worst experiences of discrimination come from their own families. Erika, a health educator in Washington, can still recite the word her father used to describe her: “husky.” Her grandfather preferred “stocky.” Her mother never said anything about Erika’s body, but she didn't have to. She obsessed over her own, calling herself “enormous” despite being two sizes smaller than her daughter. By the time Erika was 11, she was sneaking into the woods behind her house and vomiting into the creek whenever social occasions made starving herself impossible.

And the abuse from loved ones continues well into adulthood. A 2017 survey found that 89 percent of obese adults had been bullied by their romantic partners. Emily, the counselor, says she spent her teens and 20s “sleeping with guys I wasn’t interested in because they wanted to sleep with me.” In her head, a guy being into her was a rare and depletable resource she couldn’t afford to waste: “I was desperate for men to give me attention. Sex was a good way to do that.”

Eventually, she ended up with someone abusive. He told her during sex that her body was beautiful and then, in the daylight, that it was revolting. “Whenever I tried to leave him, he would say, ‘Where are you gonna find someone who will put up with your disgusting body?’” she remembers.

Emily finally managed to get away from him, but she is aware that her love life will always be fraught. The guy she’s dating now is thin—“think Tony Hawk,” she says—and she notices the looks they get when they hold hands in public. “That never used to happen when I dated fat dudes,” she says. “Thin men are not allowed to be attracted to fat women.”

The effects of weight bias get worse when they’re layered on top of other types of discrimination. A 2012 study found that African-American women are more likely to become depressed after internalizing weight stigma than white women. Hispanic and black teenagers also have significantly higher rates of bulimia. And, in a remarkable finding, rich people of color have higher rates of cardiovascular disease than poor people of color—the opposite of what happens with white people. One explanation is that navigating increasingly white spaces, and increasingly higher stakes, exerts stress on racial minorities that, over time, makes them more susceptible to heart problems.

But perhaps the most unique aspect of weight stigma is how it isolates its victims from one another. For most minority groups, discrimination contributes to a sense of belongingness, a community in opposition to a majority. Gay people like other gay people; Mormons root for other Mormons. Surveys of higher-weight people, however, reveal that they hold many of the same biases as the people discriminating against them. In a 2005 study, the words obese participants used to classify other obese people included gluttonous, unclean and sluggish.

Andrea, a retired nurse in Boston, has been on commercial diets since she was 10 years old. She knows how hard it is to slim down, knows what women larger than her are going through, but she still struggles not to pass judgment when she sees them in public. “I think, ‘How did they let it happen?’” she says. “It’s more like fear. Because if I let myself go, I’ll be that big too.”

Her position is all-too understandable. As young as 9 or 10, I knew that coming out of the closet is what gay people do, even if it took me another decade to actually do it. Fat people, though, never get a moment of declaring their identity, of marking themselves as part of a distinct group. They still live in a society that believes weight is temporary, that losing it is urgent and achievable, that being comfortable in their bodies is merely “glorifying obesity.” This limbo, this lie, is why it’s so hard for fat people to discover one another or even themselves. “No one believes our It Gets Better story,” says Tigress Osborn, the director of community outreach for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. “You can’t claim an identity if everyone around you is saying it doesn’t or shouldn’t exist.”

Harrop, the eating disorders researcher, realized several years ago that her university had clubs for trans students, immigrant students, Republican students, but none for fat students. So she started one—and it has been a resounding, unmitigated failure. Only a handful of fat people have ever showed up; most of the time, thin folks sit around brainstorming about how to be better allies.

I ask Harrop why she thinks the group has been such a bust. It’s simple, she says: “Fat people grow up in the same fat-hating culture that non-fat people do.”

Since 1980, the obesity rate has doubled in 73 countries and increased in 113 others. And in all that time, no nation has reduced its obesity rate. Not one.

The problem is that in America, like everywhere else, our institutions of public health have become so obsessed with body weight that they have overlooked what is really killing us: our food supply. Diet is the leading cause of death in the United States, responsible for more than five times the fatalities of gun violence and car accidents combined. But it’s not how much we’re eating—Americans actually consume fewer calories now than we did in 2003. It’s what we’re eating.

For more than a decade now, researchers have found that the quality of our food affects disease risk independently of its effect on weight. Fructose, for example, appears to damage insulin sensitivity and liver function more than other sweeteners with the same number of calories. People who eat nuts four times a week have 12 percent lower diabetes incidence and a 13 percent lower mortality rate regardless of their weight. All of our biological systems for regulating energy, hunger and satiety get thrown off by eating foods that are high in sugar, low in fiber and injected with additives. And which now, shockingly, make up 60 percent of the calories we eat.

Draining this poison from our trillion-dollar food system is not going to happen quickly or easily. Every link in the chain, from factory farms to school lunches, is dominated by a Mars or a Monsanto or a McDonald’s, each working tirelessly to lower its costs and raise its profits. But that’s still no reason to despair. There’s a lot we can do right now to improve fat people’s lives—to shift our focus for the first time from weight to health and from shame to support.

The place to start is at the doctor’s office. The central failure of the medical system when it comes to obesity is that it treats every patient exactly the same: If you’re fat, lose some weight. If you’re skinny, keep up the good work. Stephanie Sogg, a psychologist at the Mass General Weight Center, tells me she has clients who start eating compulsively after a sexual assault, others who starve themselves all day before bingeing on the commute home and others who eat 1,000 calories a day, work out five times a week and still insist that they’re fat because they “have no willpower.”

Acknowledging the infinite complexity of each person’s relationship to food, exercise and body image is at the center of her treatment, not a footnote to it. “Eighty percent of my patients cry in the first appointment,” Sogg says. “For something as emotional as weight, you have to listen for a long time before you give any advice. Telling someone, 'Lay off the cheeseburgers' is never going to work if you don't know what those cheeseburgers are doing for them.”

The medical benefits of this approach—being nicer to her patients than they are to themselves, is how Sogg describes it—are unimpeachable. In 2017, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the expert panel that decides which treatments should be offered for free under Obamacare, found that the decisive factor in obesity care was not the diet patients went on, but how much attention and support they received while they were on it. Participants who got more than 12 sessions with a dietician saw significant reductions in their rates of prediabetes and cardiovascular risk. Those who got less personalized care showed almost no improvement at all.

Still, despite the Task Force’s explicit recommendation of “intensive, multicomponent behavioral counseling” for higher-weight patients, the vast majority of insurance companies and state health care programs define this term to mean just a session or two—exactly the superficial approach that years of research says won’t work. “Health plans refuse to treat this as anything other than a personal problem,” says Chris Gallagher, a policy consultant at the Obesity Action Coalition.

The same scurvy-ish negligence shows up at every level of government. From marketing rules to antitrust regulations to international trade agreements, U.S. policy has created a food system that excels at producing flour, sugar and oil but struggles to deliver nutrients at anywhere near the same scale. The United States spends $1.5 billion on nutrition research every year compared to around $60 billion on drug research. Just 4 percent of agricultural subsidies go to fruits and vegetables. No wonder that the healthiest foods can cost up to eight times more, calorie for calorie, than the unhealthiest—or that the gap gets wider every year.

It’s the same with exercise. The cardiovascular risks of sedentary lifestyles, suburban sprawl and long commutes are well-documented. But rather than help mitigate these risks—and their disproportionate impact on the poor—our institutions have exacerbated them. Only 13 percent of American children walk or bike to school; once they arrive, less than a third of them will take part in a daily gym class. Among adults, the number of workers commuting more than 90 minutes each way grew by more than 15 percent from 2005 to 2016, a predictable outgrowth of America’s underinvestment in public transportation and over-investment in freeways, parking and strip malls. For 40 years, as politicians have told us to eat more vegetables and take the stairs instead of the elevator, they have presided over a country where daily exercise has become a luxury and eating well has become extortionate.

The good news is that the best ideas for reversing these trends have already been tested. Many “failed” obesity interventions are, in fact, successful eat-healthier-and-exercise-more interventions. A review of 44 international studies found that school-based activity programs didn’t affect kids’ weight, but improved their athletic ability, tripled the amount of time they spent exercising and reduced their daily TV consumption by up to an hour. Another survey showed that two years of getting kids to exercise and eat better didn’t noticeably affect their size but did improve their math scores—an effect that was greater for black kids than white kids.

You see this in so much of the research: The most effective health interventions aren't actually health interventions—they are policies that ease the hardship of poverty and free up time for movement and play and parenting. Developing countries with higher wages for women have lower obesity rates, and lives are transformed when healthy food is made cheaper. A pilot program in Massachusetts that gave food stamp recipients an extra 30 cents for every $1 they spent on healthy food increased fruit and vegetable consumption by 26 percent. Policies like this are unlikely to affect our weight. They are almost certain, however, to significantly improve our health.

Which brings us to the most hard-wired problem of all: Our shitty attitudes toward fat people. According to Patrick Corrigan, the editor of the journal Stigma and Health, even the most well-intentioned efforts to reduce stigma break down in the face of reality. In one study, researchers told 10- to 12-year-olds all the genetic and medical factors that contribute to obesity. Afterward, the kids could recite back the message they received—fat kids didn’t get that way by choice—but they still had the same negative attitudes about the bigger kids sitting next to them. A similar approach with fifth- and sixth-graders actually increased their intention of bullying their fat classmates. Celebrity representation, meanwhile, can result in what Corrigan calls the “Thurgood Marshall effect”: Instead of updating our stereotypes (maybe fat people aren’t so bad), we just see prominent minorities as isolated exceptions to them (well, he’s not like those other fat people).

What does work, Corrigan says, is for fat people to make it clear to everyone they interact with that their size is nothing to apologize for. “When you pity someone, you think they’re less effective, less competent, more hurt,” he says. “You don’t see them as capable. The only way to get rid of stigma is from power.”

This has always been the great hope of the fat-acceptance movement. (“We’re here, we’re spheres, get used to it” was one of the slogans in the 1990s.) But this radical message has long since been co-opted by clothing brands, diet companies and soap corporations. Weight Watchers has rebranded as a “lifestyle program,” but still promises that its members can shrink their way to happiness. Mainstream apparel companies market themselves as “body positive” but refuse to make clothes that fit the plus-size models on their own billboards. Social media, too, has provided a platform for positive representations of fat people and formed communities that make it easier to find each other. But it has also contributed to an anodyne, narrow, Dr. Phil-approved form of progress that celebrates the female entrepreneur who sells “fatkinis” on Instagram, while ignoring the woman who (true story) gets fired from her management position after reportedly gaining 100 pounds over three years.

“Fat activism isn’t about making people feel better about themselves,” Pausé says. “It’s about not being denied your civil rights and not dying because a doctor misdiagnoses you.”

And so, in a world that refuses to change, it is still up to every fat person, alone, to decide how to endure. Emily, the counselor in Eastern Washington, says she made a choice about three years ago to assert herself. The first time she asked for a table instead of a booth at a restaurant, she says, she was sweating, flushed, her chest heaving. It felt like saying the words—“I can’t fit”—would dry up in her mouth as she said them.

But now, she says, “It’s just something I do.” Last month, she was at a conference and asked one of the other participants if he would trade chairs because his didn’t have arms. Like most of these requests, it was no big deal. “A tall person wouldn’t feel weird asking that, so why should I?” she says. Her skinny friends have started to inquire about the seating at restaurants before Emily even gets the chance.

Hearing about Emily’s progress reminds me of a conversation I had with Ginette Lenham, the diet counselor. Her patients, she says, often live in the past or the future with their weight. They tell her they are waiting until they are smaller to go back to school or apply for a new job. They beg her to return them to their high school or wedding or first triathlon weight, the one that will bring back their former life.

And then Lenham must explain that these dreams are a trap. Because there is no magical cure. There is no time machine. There is only the revolutionary act of being fat and happy in a world that tells you that’s impossible.

“We all have to do our best with the body that we have,” she says. “And leave everyone else’s alone.”

Correction: A previous version of this story inaccurately calculated the chance a woman classified as obese could achieve a “normal” weight. It is 0.8 percent, not 0.008 percent.

CREDITS

STORY - MICHAEL HOBBES

Michael is a regular contributor to Highline and a senior enterprise reporter for HuffPost. He is also the co-host of You're Wrong About, a weekly podcast.

PHOTOGRAPHY - FINLAY MACKAY

Finlay is a photographer and film director based in New York City. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Time and the National Portrait Gallery.

CREATIVE DIRECTION & DESIGN - DONICA IDA

Donica is the creative director of Highline.

Additional Art Direction & Design - Kate Larue

Kate is a creative director and journalist who lives in Brooklyn.

Research - Matt Giles

Matt is a freelance writer and the head of research and fact-checking at Longreads.

Development & Design - Gladeye

Gladeye is a digital innovations agency in New Zealand and New York.

Chapter 1: "I Am Not a Liar"

THE CHAOS IN THE WHITE HOUSE was threatening Mike Pence’s chances of ever becoming president, and that was unacceptable. It was the spring of 2017. Special counsel Robert Mueller had just launched his investigation into the possibility of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Trump associates were scrambling to lawyer up, Pence included. And a group of the vice president’s close friends and advisers were growing fearful that everything Pence had worked for was about to be lost. His unquestioning loyalty to Trump was becoming an enormous liability. A friend familiar with the discussions said a decision was made that they had to be more strategic. Luckily, Pence knew someone who could help, an operative he trusted completely.

Nick Ayers was only 34 at the time, but in his short career, he had already inspired more admiration, envy and animosity among his peers than almost anyone else in Washington’s consultant class. On June 29, it was announced that Ayers would be taking over as Pence’s chief of staff. In an interview with The New Yorker, Anthony Scaramucci summed up the calculation this way: “Nick’s there to protect the Vice-President because the Vice-President can’t believe what the fuck is going on.”

Pence has always relied unusually heavily on his staffers, according to five people who have worked with him. One confessed to being “surprised” by his malleability. A consultant who knows Pence well explained that while he is ideologically unshakeable, he is often unsure about operational matters. “If you bump into him at an airport and tell him he needs better yard signage, he will immediately assume you are right,” said the consultant, who has done pretty much just that.

In the early months of Trump’s presidency, according to a former senior White House official, Pence had been “acting like a staffer, wandering in and out of the Oval Office with nothing to do.” Ayers swiftly inserted himself into meetings at which Pence had not been included and carefully guarded access to his boss. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and an old Pence friend, told me that for a while he couldn’t even get his calls returned. Ayers was also close with the right people. He had ingratiated himself with Jared Kushner and the younger Trumps while volunteering as an adviser for the campaign and later as a well-regarded member of the transition team. (He and the Trump sons share an enthusiasm for hunting.) After arriving in the White House, Ayers started flattering Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, relentlessly. (A regular West Wing visitor told me that Kelly “completely has his number.”)

Perhaps most useful of all is Ayers’ knack for staying on the right side of the president. During the 2016 GOP primary, Ayers served as chief strategist on Pence’s gubernatorial reelection campaign in Indiana. Pence remained strategically supportive of nearly all the final presidential candidates. He eventually endorsed Ted Cruz in a video, but was so flattering of Trump that Trump would (not incorrectly) call it “more of an endorsement for me.” People on the Cruz campaign detected the hand of Ayers. “Nick is really good at threading a needle,” one person close to Cruz explained.

These days, Pence is almost deferential around his chief of staff, two sources told me. “The more Nick is right, the more the vice president is empowering him,” said one. And the 2018 midterms will see Ayers’ power expand significantly. It is Pence, not Trump, who will anchor the GOP’s urgent effort to avoid massive losses in Congress. By the end of April, Pence will have appeared at more than 30 campaign events this year, with Ayers masterminding the details. Ayers is also one of the chief arbiters of which candidates receive money from Pence’s leadership PAC, the Great America Committee.

Even Ayers’ many detractors concede that he’s very good at his job. A number of Republicans believe he has salvaged Pence’s chances of succeeding Trump as president—which is very far from where he was nine months ago. The person close to Cruz said that Cruz would not run against Pence unless he is implicated in a serious finding by Mueller. “Ayers is critical to helping Pence (and by extension the GOP),” this person wrote me. On the one hand, he explained, Ayers “is carefully crafting strategies to show Trump [Pence] is loyal.” On the other hand, he went on, Ayers “is insulating Pence from Trump’s radioactive decisions. No easy task. Few can do it consistently. Ayers is a master at it.”

In person, Ayers is known to be exhaustingly charming. He has a panache you don’t normally encounter in D.C. Floppy blond hair, wide smile, swift stride, expensive suit. His greatest weapon is a Southern drawl that makes you feel as if everything is happening in slow motion. “If you talk slow, people think you think slow,” said Mark Meadows, the Republican congressman and chair of the House Freedom Caucus. “[Ayers] thinks four times as fast as he talks.”

Despite his age, Ayers is solicitous in the manner of a courtly older gentleman. Sometimes, he will ask permission from reporters to remove his coat or tie with an elaborate politeness. He is given to grandiloquent declarations of integrity. “One thing I am not, is I am not a liar,” was an example recalled by a Republican consultant who has spoken with him often. “I am always truthful. People can call me a lot of things, but one thing I am is a truthful person.” This “Southern Baptist preacher schtick” is the sort of thing GOP donors “swoon over,” the consultant told me, but it doesn’t always go over so well with Ayers’ peers. “Almost every operative that comes across Nick just absolutely cannot stand the guy,” the consultant added. Still, while Ayers’ affect may be cloying, it does place his principal guiding motive—himself—disarmingly in plain sight at all times.

It is a central tenet of politics that you can have money or power, but not the two at the same time. Ayers is a rare exception. He is not shy about showing his wealth—issuing gracious invitations to hunting parties on his estate on Georgia’s Flint River; sending Christmas cards that are fatter than most and wrapped in a bow. He has occasionally been known to lease a private jet—unusual among a crowd of strategists-for-hire who are accustomed to Marriotts and economy class.

When he joined the administration, Ayers’ White House financial disclosure attached some hard numbers to his high-roller image. After less than seven years of working as a political consultant and a partner in a media buying firm, Ayers reported a personal net worth between $12 million and just over $54 million. (For context, one leading strategist told me that a top-level consultant could expect to make $1 million in an election year and about a third of that in the off year.) And his business arrangements can be difficult to track. In the 2016 election cycle, Ayers spearheaded the Missouri gubernatorial campaign for Eric Greitens, who is now under indictment for invasion of privacy. In addition to the consulting fee of $220,000 paid to Ayers’ firm, he was paid over what appears to be a very similar time period by at least two different entities involved in the race.

Astonishingly, when Ayers entered the White House, he didn’t immediately sell his lucrative business, C5 Creative Consulting, as previous administrations would have required. He also obtained a broad waiver permitting him to talk to former clients. His ownership of C5 turned his White House job into a minefield of possible conflicts of interest. As chief of staff to the vice president, Ayers’ duties can include advising Pence on which candidates to support—decisions that can have a huge influence on fundraising and, hence, political advertising. In addition, in his private work for the Pence PAC, he is in a position to steer donor dollars into races where the company could potentially benefit. “That’s staggering,” one seasoned Republican operative told me.

In an environment where ethical scandals are spilling into public view on a near-daily basis, each seemingly more flagrant than the last, no one paid much attention to Nick Ayers’ consulting firm. Ayers himself declined to speak on the record and did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this article. After multiple attempts to clarify the status of Ayers’ business, Pence’s office sent a statement just as this story was going to press to say that his next financial disclosure in May “will reflect” the sale of his company. The White House provided no proof that the sale had occurred.

Waiting for so long into his White House tenure to address the issues posed by his ownership of C5 (and seemingly only under pressure) was a characteristic move from Ayers—and one strikingly at odds with the plain-spoken virtue that the vice president seeks to project. But, as is clear to those who have followed Ayers’ rapid ascent to the top of his profession, he has made an art form of skillfully navigating the gray areas in electoral politics. And in the process, he has demonstrated that the real danger in our porous, post-Citizens United campaign-finance regime isn’t always what’s illegal, but what’s been made possible.

Chapter 2: "The Apprentice"

AYERS GREW UP MODESTLY in Cobb County, Georgia. His father, a landscaper, and his mother, who worked for a laundry equipment company, divorced when he was young. Ayers took summer jobs, including buffing cars, for extra cash. “I decided I never wanted to be in a position of anxiety,” he once told The Washington Post. “I have always been a worrier and planned way ahead.” In high school, he told the reporter, he was the cautious one in a crew that ran on the “edge of the line”—the guy who would organize “huge drinking parties” but serve as the designated driver. “I would say, ‘Look, we have to be careful here. We can’t let people find out.’”

In 2001, while he was a freshman at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, Ayers met a reserved senior who would become his close friend and sidekick: Paul Bennecke, the state chairman of the College Republicans. The pair signed on to state senator Sonny Perdue’s long-shot campaign for governor. In a matter of days, Ayers was zipping around the state in Perdue’s four-seater plane. Perdue’s upset victory swept a Republican into the governor’s mansion for the first time since Reconstruction—and two very young, very ambitious operatives into the big leagues.

Two years later, Ayers was running Perdue’s reelection campaign. The 22-year-old gained a reputation for being a shameless self-promoter, a recurring accusation he has never done much to dispel. A post on the Georgia political blog Peach Pundit observed that people were “so focused on hoping Nick Ayers screws up the Governor’s race and gets egg on his face that they’ve forgotten they should be focused on getting the Governor re-elected and worry about Nick later.”

Less than two weeks before the election, Ayers did get egg on his face. One night, on his way back to campaign headquarters, he was arrested for driving under the influence. Refusing a breathalyzer test, he admitted to imbibing a Jack Daniels and Diet Coke. (All counts were dropped except one for reckless driving.) A two-part video of the arrest can be found online. It is impressive mainly for the deluge of flattery that the handcuffed Ayers directs at the arresting officer as he is driven to the station. “I have a ton of respect for the state patrol,” Ayers tells him. At one point he asks brightly, “Can we chat politics?”

In 2006, Perdue was appointed chairman of the Republican Governors Association. Ayers became the RGA’s executive director—a spectacular promotion for a 24-year-old with no experience in national politics. Bennecke was the political director. Someone who met Ayers through the RGA remembers him dipping tobacco and partying frequently at the hotspots of D.C. in that era, places like Rhino Bar or Smith Point. For a time, he roomed with Bennecke. In 2005, Ayers had married Perdue’s second cousin, Jamie Floyd, although he would tell The Washington Post he was so consumed by his work that the couple “didn’t really have sex” for the first three years of their marriage.

When Ayers showed up at the RGA, it was a bit of a backwater, mostly a place for parking spare corporate dollars. But it was about to transform into one of the most powerful loopholes in campaign finance law. Under the leadership of Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, who assumed the chairmanship in 2009, the organization took full advantage of its unique legal status. Unlike other major party committees, the RGA and its Democratic counterpart are not subject to regulation by the Federal Election Commission. The only oversight comes via a patchwork of state laws, which are often lax—and in many states, court rulings have made it nearly impossible to regulate the associations at all. This means the governors associations can solicit unlimited donations, unlike the party national committees. Although the RGA and DGA must disclose donors to the IRS, the list is essentially meaningless, since they don’t have to provide any information on where the money was spent or which races it was used to influence.

As it happened, Barbour took charge at the RGA just before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision sanctioned unlimited corporate spending in elections, as long as that spending is “independent” of campaigns. Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, an election law expert and associate professor at Stetson University, argues that both the RGA and DGA are functioning as giant dark money operations. “They can basically funnel money to where there is the least enforcement of campaign finance law,” she said. “Pick your metaphor: daisy chains, Russian dolls, shell game ...”

The 2010 midterms were set to be a huge year for the RGA—Republicans were fielding 37 gubernatorial candidates, including rising stars such as Nikki Haley and Scott Walker. And so Barbour created a club of the country’s wealthiest individual conservative donors, many of whom had been lackluster supporters of the RGA in the past. It was Ayers’ job to convince them that they could get a better return on their investment through the RGA than any other party machine. In this mission, he could not have had a better tutor than Barbour, whose fundraising prowess is legendary. “I think Nick would tell you he learned everything he knows from Haley,” said a former RGA colleague, Lauren Lofstrom. She recalled an evening in Chicago when Ayers charmed a clatch of billionaires, including Sam Zell and Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel. Some of the guests actually moved toward the edge of their seats as Ayers talked. “At the end I [thought,] ‘My God, they are going to give him whatever he asks for,’” Lofstrom said. According to Lofstrom, Griffin told Ayers that his talents were being wasted in politics and he should be working for his hedge fund. “Nick made people pause for the first time and go, maybe there’s more than just federal politics,” a former colleague said.

On Ayers’ watch, the RGA moved vast sums of donor money all around the country. When he joined the organization, its budget for the 2005-2006 election cycle was $43 million. By the end of the 2010 cycle, the budget had increased to $132 million. As for Ayers, he had amassed a Rolodex that would be the envy of his peers. Someone who knows him well said: “I’ve just watched: He can pick up the phone and call 30 governors, and they’ll all take his personal phone call. And he can pick up the phone and call the top 200 donors to give to governors in the country, and they’ll all take his phone call.” 

In all, it was an experience totally unlike those of his contemporaries, who were working their way up on candidate campaigns or through other party organs with far greater restrictions on raising and spending money. Barbour told me that Ayers “matured beyond his age.”

When Ayers concluded his term in early 2011, he was being talked about as a successor to Karl Rove. He was expected to follow a well-trodden path: build up his own political consultancy, advise major candidates and help shape Republican politics. And so his friends were baffled when Ayers took a partnership at a media buying firm that was barely known in D.C. Target Enterprises was a company of about 15 people who worked out of an office tower in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. Its founder, a brash New Yorker named David Bienstock, was about as far away as you could get from the Washington establishment. Ayers “was seen as a classy guy,” said a friend, explaining the consternation at his career move. “And Target wasn’t a classy company.”

Chapter 3: "The Dangle"

NO ONE HAS EVER MADE A FORTUNE in electoral politics merely by giving sound advice to candidates. The real money is in political advertising. “Everybody sees the media budget as the golden ticket,” said a senior executive at one of the five largest Republican media buying firms.

Even the standard way of doing business is, frankly, dubious. There can be variations on the model, but usually a consultant hired by a campaign or political action committee chooses a creative firm to make its TV ads. The consultant also hires a media buying firm to negotiate with TV stations over distribution. A commission of up to 15 percent of the advertising expense is split in various combinations between the consultant, the creative firm and the media buyer. And this is where the dubiousness comes in: Neither the candidate nor the donors typically have any idea how the split is divided. Often, at the end of the election, the TV station will not have run the exact number of ads the media buyer purchased. So the stations rebate the media buyer, who—in theory—is supposed to return that money to the campaign. But “only the media buyer knows the true amount of the rebate,” said one veteran creative director.

The sheer volume and speed of the transactions can obfuscate a lot of double-dealing. Campaigns are largely forced to trust that the media buyers pay the TV stations the contracted amount for the right ad spots. Two buyers emphasized to me that they pride themselves on returning leftover funds, suggesting that such scrupulousness may be the exception rather than the rule.

It is also not unusual, I was informed by a handful of industry insiders, for the consultant to privately negotiate a fee for bringing the media buyer the business. These sums can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars, far outstripping a consultant’s typical monthly retainer of around $15,000 on a gubernatorial or senate race. All of which provides a powerful incentive for the consultant to use the media buyer who will give him the best deal, not the one who will deliver the most effective ads. “That’s what happens a lot,” said one top buyer. Most political campaigns don’t conduct even perfunctory oversight of their spending. “There is no CFO on any campaign,” said the buyer. “There is a treasurer. The treasurer’s job is to make sure that the reports get filed properly at the FEC. That’s it.”

Until about a decade ago, Target Enterprises hardly had a presence in national political advertising. But in his West Coast milieu, David Bienstock was known as a consummate hustler. A flashy figure, he “was the kind of man to carry cash,” said a former colleague who remembers him being visited monthly at his offices by a banker who delivered envelopes of bills. Bienstock, who did not comment for this article, has a taste for lavish real estate. He changes cars often and used to drive a gullwing model with doors that opened upward. The former colleague recalls a framed photo in Target’s hallway of Bienstock standing next to his favored private plane. He’s known as both a charmer and a screamer who sometimes holds court at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, dressed in a black T-shirt and blue jeans. When discussing pitches with colleagues, he talks a lot about “the dangle”—that is, what the client really wants. He might say, “So, the dangle is ... ”

In 2009, Bienstock acquired a right-hand man who could help him break into national politics. Adam Stoll, a former Goldman Sachs executive then in his mid-30s, had run New York governor George Pataki’s 2002 reelection campaign. Quiet and preppy, Stoll is Bienstock’s outward opposite. Someone who has worked with him remarked to me that “he probably showers in his suit.” Stoll was also a longtime friend of Ayers, who was then midway through his tenure at the RGA.

The RGA had never used Target before 2009. That year, the firm was hired to work on, among other things, the Virginia gubernatorial race—a “test run” of sorts, said someone involved with discussions between Ayers and Target. But Bienstock and Stoll wanted a much closer relationship with the RGA for 2010. So they invited Ayers and Bennecke to a retreat at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas over the weekend of November 20 to cement a deal. The weekend “has become legend,” said one media consultant. “Nobody could figure out why Nick and Paul would even go anywhere with Bienstock. You’d see why if you met him ... [he] makes my skin crawl.” One of the items on Saturday’s agenda was a talk by Bienstock: “Media Buying: The Inside Story … A View from Behind the Curtain.”

I talked to four people who have heard Target’s pitch. Their experiences were not identical, but two consultants gave very similar accounts of someone at Target proposing the following arrangement: Target would charge the campaign a much lower fee than its competitors. The Target representative would go on to explain that the company would later invoice for an amount that represented a payment for how much the firm had saved the campaign—with Target determining what the savings had been. This model might be described as “performance-based pay,” said an industry insider. A more accurate term, said one person who listened to the pitch, is “fucking bullshit.” However, most campaigns either lack the expertise to spot the catch in a highly technical pitch or are too focused on winning to closely monitor how their media budgets are spent. “It’s much easier for someone to pull the wool over the eyes of a political client than a consumer client,” said a veteran buyer in both spaces.

Whatever Target’s dangle to Ayers and Bennecke was, it seemed to be persuasive. “David can be very charismatic,” said the former colleague. In 2010, according to IRS filings, Target suddenly became the RGA’s biggest vendor, receiving $31 million for buying ads—about 36 percent of the RGA’s budget. (The next-highest-paid media buyer was Crossroads Media, which got $7 million.) Bennecke and Target did not respond to questions about Target, its business practices and its relationship with the RGA. I asked Haley Barbour why the RGA had chosen to give Target so much of its business. He told me he could “not recall that one firm got an especially large [share] of the media buy.”

Chapter 4: "The Color of Dark Money"

AYERS HAD ONLY BEEN at Target for a few weeks when he made a startling announcement: He was taking a hiatus. “I have prayed deeply about my purpose in life and how best to utilize the talents God has given me,” he wrote in an email to friends in April 2011. “I wanted my decision to be wholly about how best to serve Him, not what was most politically or financially expedient for my family and me. As He often does in walks of faith, He has called me to a higher purpose.” The higher purpose, it turned out, was attempting to get Tim Pawlenty elected president. (After the email was leaked, Ben Smith, then of Politico, noted that Ayers’ sounded “a bit as though he’s the one who will be running.”)

The Pawlenty campaign was a bust, fizzling in less than three months and somehow racking up a debt of half a million dollars. When I spoke to Pawlenty last fall, however, he told me he doesn’t regret hiring Ayers. “I think he did a terrific job,” he said. The debt, he added, “wasn’t his fault. It was a campaign that was sort of a start-up operation that didn’t have a good insight into how much financial trouble we were in, in real time.”

I was curious to hear what Pawlenty thought of the fact that his campaign had paid nearly $600,000 for media buys through Target, according to FEC records. Ayers was not legally required to disclose his relationship with Target to the campaign, but various consultants I talked to argued that it would have been the ethically correct thing to do. Pawlenty paused. “That part I wasn’t as clear about,” he said, “as for what his status was relative to Target.”

After the campaign wound down, Ayers returned to Target and immediately resumed pitching the firm to his political friends. One recalled his firm receiving a classic Bienstock dangle: “I’ve got this great buying company. Doesn’t cost you anything.” This person actually ran a model using Target’s stated methodology and found that it would be more expensive than negotiating with the TV stations directly. And yet in the election cycle immediately following Ayers’ departure from the RGA, the organization gave Target at least 63 percent of its media business.

Ayers’s influence at the RGA was—and remains—significant. Ayers and his replacement, Phil Cox, were sufficiently close that Ayers would become an investor in Cox’s media business. The RGA’s general counsel, Michael Adams, would go on to work on personal legal matters for Ayers, according to a person who saw documentation. And many of Ayers’ team also stayed on after he left, according to a person who regularly deals with the RGA and remarked on their fierce loyalty to him. In 2014, when it came time for the RGA to select Cox’s successor, it named Ayers’ longtime friend, Paul Bennecke.

The RGA’s reliance on Target would become controversial among consultants—encouraging competition among vendors is what helps to keep prices down. (In response to questions, a spokesperson said the organization has been “managed with the utmost integrity.”)

And Target itself was attracting some scrutiny. Brian Baker is an attorney who runs a PAC affiliated with the Ricketts’ family, who are major conservative donors and the owners of the Chicago Cubs. Baker has told three people that in the spring of 2012, he had gone to some effort to check out Target’s practices. (Joe Ricketts intended to spend millions on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and Baker wanted to be sure he was dealing with an honest media buyer, two of the people said.) Based on the accounts of those three people, a clear story emerges. Baker visited a cable station in New England to follow up on some ad buys he’d asked Target to place. This was not a straightforward task. The FCC mandates that every TV station must maintain a public file recording purchased airtime for political ads, but many records are still kept in paper form. “It would have looked like a trash can,” said one of Baker’s confidantes.

According to the sources, Baker discovered a discrepancy between the services Target had promised to deliver and what actually ran on the air. Baker “hit the roof,” said one friend. Two of the sources recalled that he switched media buying firms.  

When I asked Baker about this episode, he told me that “in no way, shape, or form, was there any irregularity.” He added, “When I began buying TV, radio and digital ads, Adam [Stoll]—a true pro—was a great help to me. While the groups I run work with a variety of media vendors, we have used Target since 2010 and continue to do to this day.” (Stoll and Target did not comment.) One of Baker’s confidantes told me, “You’re going to have a hard time getting people to screw with Pence and Nick Ayers.”

It was during this period that Ayers started aggressively working on races from multiple angles. He stayed on as a partner at Target, but also advised candidates and outside groups through his company, C5. In 2014, Ayers was working as the lead strategist for Bruce Rauner, the Chicago businessman who had launched a bid for governor of Illinois. Rauner’s campaign chose Target as its media firm. By the end of the race, the campaign had paid Target $15 million to make media buys, while C5 received more than $500,000 for its services.

These arrangements started to become conspicuously convoluted. In 2014, Target was working for David Perdue’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in Georgia. In that same race, C5 was retained by an outside group supporting Perdue (who is Ayers’ distant relation by marriage). Under federal election law, a campaign and outside groups can’t coordinate spending on any form of political communication, advertising included. To avoid allegations of coordination, vendors that work with both a campaign and outside groups typically create a firewall ensuring that no knowledge of the campaign’s “plans, projects, activities or needs” is shared. After reporters commented on Ayers’ role, he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Target had instituted a firewall.

Both Rauner and Perdue won their races, which only served to burnish Ayers’ reputation as a Republican wunderkind. But despite all the business he was bringing to Target, Ayers never fully immersed himself in the company’s operations. “It was very hard to even get Nick on the phone,” someone who worked for the firm recalled. “If you needed him, you might not be able to find him for two days.” By early 2015, Ayers had left his partnership. Yet a relationship of sorts continued. On his White House disclosure form, which spans from 2015 to September 2017, he listed a “business partnership with Target.” And for every campaign he worked on after leaving the firm, Target served as a media buyer.

IN THE RUNUP TO THE 2016 ELECTION, Ayers was busier than ever. His most high-profile assignment was an attempt to rescue Indiana governor Mike Pence’s foundering reelection effort. Ayers had pitched Pence on Target back in 2011. Pence didn’t use the firm, but had warmed to the young operative, not least because he was a fellow evangelical. “Ayers is very religious and Mike liked that about him,” said a Pence ally.

Ayers also spent 2016 talking up a new media arbitrage fund that would purchase TV advertising slots and resell them for a profit to campaigns of both parties, according to two sources pitched on the idea. He used his extensive Rolodex to enlist potential investors, including Texan oil and gas magnate Toby Neugebauer. After Trump won the nomination, Ayers acted as a part-time, unpaid adviser for the Trump campaign but kept pitching the arbitrage fund. “He assumed Trump was going to lose,” said someone he confided in at the time. “So he hedged himself.”

But perhaps his most ambitious venture was an effort to create his own political star—a candidate with the potential to one day go all the way to the White House. Eric Greitens, a candidate for governor of Missouri, was a GOP consultant’s dream. The 41-year-old was an intensely ambitious, chisel-jawed former Navy SEAL and Rhodes scholar turned best-selling author. He had also been a lifelong Democrat until shortly before he entered the GOP primary. Greitens championed transparency in campaign finance. “We’ve already seen other candidates set up these secretive super PACs where they don’t take any responsibility for what they’re funding,” he said in a radio interview. “Because that’s how the game has always been played.”

After Ayers signed on as the campaign’s lead strategist in the summer of 2015, his influence quickly became visible. “Eric was a chalkboard, a very, very blank, black chalkboard. And Nick wrote in white chalk on the chalkboard whatever he wanted,” said a former member of the campaign who’d observed them together. Greitens replaced his campaign manager with a 20-year-old from Georgia named Austin Chambers. A Republican consultant described Chambers to me as Ayers’ “place holder.”

Under Chambers’ watch, the money flowed to some familiar names. Target was ultimately paid $21 million to buy media for the Greitens campaign. The digital team was replaced by a Target offshoot called BASK (the A stands for “Ayers”). And a C5 client called Something Else Strategies, a creative firm, was enlisted to produce ads, including one of Greitens firing a machine gun at “Obama’s Democrat machine.” Meanwhile, Ayers talked up Greitens at RGA meetings and introduced him around to donors. “We all thought Greitens was a golden boy,” the Pence ally told me. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, however, would question Greitens’ “oddly national” fundraising effort, which included sizable donations from people like Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and the now-disgraced Silicon Valley venture capitalist Michael Goguen: “Why would scores of business tycoons from Manhattan to Silicon Valley lavish contributions … on a political novice running in a primary election for governor of a Midwestern state where none of them live?”

Ayers would later give The Missouri Times an insight into the campaign’s strategy. It was important for Greitens not to peak early, he explained, or the other three contenders would have too much time to tear him down. As it happened, a dark money-funded super PAC would play a useful role. In the early summer of 2016, LG PAC started airing negative ads against two candidates in the GOP primary, seemingly on behalf of a third: Peter Kinder, the state’s sitting lieutenant governor, or LG. But LG PAC had nothing to do with Kinder. Near the end of the primary, it would emerge that the group was actually backing Greitens. It was an extremely clever ploy. By giving the impression that Kinder was the source of the attacks, LG PAC made Kinder look sleazy. It also allowed Greitens to maintain a lower profile, not to mention his image as a campaign finance crusader. Kinder told people the episode was the dirtiest political trick he’d witnessed in his career.

After the negative ads started airing, reporters unearthed video footage that captured Greitens talking with the LG PAC treasurer, Hank Monsees, at a May 19 campaign event. People started raising the possibility of illegal coordination. A photograph posted on Facebook showed Monsees on a phone in Greitens’ war room, apparently making calls for the campaign. (Monsees told The Associated Press that he was sitting down by the phones because he has a bad back. Asked why he had a phone to his ear in the photo, he said, “I may have played with the phones or something, but I made no calls.”) The chairman of the Missouri Democratic Party filed a complaint with the state ethics commission, which was dismissed. “The Ethics Commission is formed to be weak and able to do very little, and in this case they did very little,” said Scott Faughn, the publisher of The Missouri Times and a former politician. After Greitens won easily, the controversy over dark money died down. On January 9, 2017, he was sworn in with Ayers and Chambers at his side.

Almost a year later, however, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group, discovered a financial connection between LG PAC and Ayers. LG PAC’s sole funder was Freedom Frontier, a dark money nonprofit based outside Missouri that appears to have operated almost exclusively in the Greitens race that election cycle. On Ayers’ White House disclosure form, Freedom Frontier is listed as a client of C5 that he had personally worked for, during a very similar time frame. In national races governed by the Federal Election Commission, and in most states, it would be illegal for a campaign to coordinate with outside groups on ads. In Missouri, however, the laws on coordination are less explicit.

Freedom Frontier is no small-time advocacy outfit. It is part of an influential network of dark money groups that funnels donor money into elections nationwide and is clustered around an Ohio lawyer named David Langdon. The network, by design, defies easy explanation—there are nonprofits that fund PACs that fund campaigns, a constellation of blandly named entities linked by the same few legal representatives. But what is clear is that such groups have become an invaluable weapon in elections. They enable candidates to keep a respectable distance from negative ads, which voters dislike. In addition, nonprofits like Freedom Frontier—so-called 501(c)(4)s—are permitted to conceal the identity of donors. Their primary purpose is supposed to be issue-oriented, rather than political, but violations are hard to prove and rarely penalized.

Paul Ryan, the vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, a government accountability think tank, said that laws on both the state and federal level have not caught up with the explosion of dark money groups after Citizens United. Regulations on coordination, he said, are “wholly inadequate.” Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, the election law expert, added, “People using these opaque nonprofits are sort of making a calculated risk that no election regulator will stand in and stop them.”

Ayers’ ties to the Langdon network go back years. It would be considered highly unusual for a consultant of his caliber to simultaneously work on a campaign and for a dark money group supporting that campaign. “One would think Ayers had enough business not to need income from both a campaign and the dark money group doing its independent expenditures,” said former Missouri state senator Jeff Smith, who has the dubious distinction of being perhaps the only person in the state to do prison time for coordination with an independent group. “Being paid by both entities certainly raises questions around coordination.”

The link between Ayers and Freedom Frontier is precisely the kind of association that is nearly impossible to detect in real time under current campaign finance laws. The only reason CREW was able to make the connection was because Ayers had to list C5’s clients on his White House financial disclosure—which chief investigator Matt Corley likened to “a light being shined in the dark.” And for once, this was a discovery that would not simply fade away.

Chapter 5: "A Lean and Hungry Look"

FOURTEEN MONTHS INTO TRUMP'S PRESIDENCY, the idea that he would fulfill his campaign promise to “drain the swamp” is the stuff of black humor. His failure to sell his real estate business—while technically legal because the president is exempt from conflict-of-interest statutes—has cast suspicion over nearly everything he does. It is impossible to tell whether a decision has been motivated by policy or financial self-interest or some combination of the two. This uncertainty undermines public trust in government—and the dynamic is far from limited to Trump.

Although Ayers had been a valued member of the transition, he was initially reluctant to take an official administration role. People who know him believed he was hesitant because he didn’t want to sell his business. “I was doubtful he was going to give up his financial empire,” mused the Pence ally. Ayers had lobbied unsuccessfully to succeed Reince Priebus as the chairman of the Republican National Committee. (Priebus, according to one source, couldn’t dismiss the chatter about Ayers’ prodigious self-promotion over the years.) After that, Ayers briefly ran Trump’s outside advocacy group, America First Policies. And he remained indispensable to Pence. Last spring, he was flying regularly to D.C. from the exclusive Atlanta neighborhood of Buckhead, where he has a $2.3 million home, to advise the vice president.

Privately, however, he was less than thrilled with his situation. He had rare behind-the-scenes access to the president and vice president and wasn’t fully utilizing it. A big problem, as he saw it, was that he wasn’t getting paid. He called a political veteran asking if there was some kind of “special purpose vehicle,” such as a 501(c)(4) or PAC, that he could set up so he could at least be reimbursed (it was unclear by whom) for his trips to and from D.C.

After checking around with others, this person told Ayers that the proper way to cover those costs was to go through the RNC. Furthermore, this person added, Ayers could not advise the vice president—even voluntarily—while on a business trip paid for by private clients. Ayers, the political veteran recalled, seemed unsatisfied by the conversation.

Within weeks of this exchange, Pence launched a leadership PAC headed by Ayers and another Pence adviser, Marty Obst. A front-page New York Times article would later describe the PAC as the possible vehicle for a “shadow campaign” for the presidency, which would be unheard of so early in a new administration. (Pence called this claim “offensive.”) One of the PAC’s first large expenditures was $50,000 to C5. According to the most recent available records, C5 has received over $110,000 from the Great America Committee, including a payment as late as October. It occurred to the person whom Ayers had approached for advice that perhaps The New York Times had misread the point of the PAC. Ayers “was calling around about a [special purpose vehicle] and then weeks later suddenly there was the PAC. Oh my God: The PAC was the SPV for Ayers,” this person said. (Obst did not respond to a request for comment.)

These ethical questions only became more acute when Ayers finally entered the White House. Ordinarily, someone with a political consultancy would have been expected to divest himself of it to avoid the potential for conflicts of interest. For instance, when Karl Rove became George W. Bush’s senior adviser, he sold his political consulting business at Bush's direction. Rove also went on to sell his stock portfolio. While the sale was processing, he was prohibited from attending any meetings on energy because he owned Enron stock. Separately, Rove got a waiver allowing him to talk to former clients if, for example, there was a government investigation or regulation that directly involved them. By selling his business, Rove had removed the prospect of those conversations being motivated by personal gain.

In contrast, by retaining his business, Ayers created a situation where even the most mundane matters could create the appearance of an improper conflict. Under 18 U.S.C. 208 it is illegal for a government employee to participate in any matters in his official position that could have a direct or predictable effect on his business. A chief of staff to the vice president can be called upon to help make all kinds of decisions that would have implications for a consulting firm looking for work—whom to endorse, whom to welcome into the White House, where to campaign, which event to show up for. “I think it’s a very dangerous situation,” said Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration. “It’s hard to avoid doing something in your official capacity that’s not going to affect [the consultancy].”

To give one example of the resulting murkiness: Earlier this year, Pence had a photo taken in his office with Tom Campbell, a farmer running for Congress in North Dakota in the 2018 midterms. It was a seemingly routine photo op. And yet around that time, Campbell was receiving media advice from Something Else Strategies, a client of C5. (A Something Else partner, Heath Thompson, has also had his picture taken with Pence and Ayers.) Campbell touted the photo with Pence on social media. Situations like these could create an incentive for companies to work with C5 if they think Ayers might connect them or their clients with Pence—whether or not Ayers has any idea of the client’s intentions. (Something Else Strategies did not respond to questions.)

For someone in Ayers’ job, it’s nearly impossible to take precautions that avoid the appearance of an illegal or improper conflict. According to ethics experts, there are really only two options: Recuse yourself from any government work that could affect your business, or divest from it. The first option is extremely impractical for someone with Ayers’ responsibilities. “How can he possibly recuse himself from every issue that affects his clients given who his clients are? That’s why you don’t see any lobbyists, lawyers or PR people enter the White House and keep their private practice,” said a former senior White House official who divested from his business. Richard Painter endorsed this view. “If I had had anyone say they want to own a political consultancy firm … while they’re working in the White House,” he told me, “I’d say you’re out of here.”

Then there is Ayers’ role for the Pence leadership PAC, which has given out over $200,000 to candidates so far. Since this work is in a private capacity, 18 U.S.C. 208 does not apply. However, any move Ayers made to direct donor dollars into a race that C5 was working on could arguably affect the company’s bottom line. As a top-tier political consultant put it, “It’s not like sticking your hand in the cookie jar. It’s as if he built a penthouse in the cookie jar and had everybody bring him cookies.”

Painter told me that Ayers’ prevarication over selling C5 was so unorthodox that it is difficult to untangle the threads. “What you have here is new,” Painter said. “It’s the same nonsense we’re hearing from Donald Trump because he turned the business over to his son. Now everybody else wants to play the same game.”

I had been trying to find out when Ayers planned to sell C5 since October 2017, when it was reported that he had been issued a sweeping waiver allowing him to talk to C5 clients. I had heard he had plans to sell by the end of the year. That did not happen. The company is a Georgia corporation, and on January 23 of this year, it was registered to do business in Virginia, where the Ayers family moved last year. His wife, Jamie, was recorded as the “registered agent.” The company’s Georgia paperwork previously named Nick Ayers as its CEO, chief financial officer and secretary. But in an annual filing dated February 3, Jamie Ayers was listed in those roles.

One person who knows Jamie Ayers described her as “one of the nicest, sweetest Southern belles you’ve ever met” and “no more capable of running a political consulting firm than the man in the moon.” Meanwhile, Austin Chambers, the operative perceived to be Ayers’ acolyte on the Greitens campaign, appears to be working for C5 and is using a company email address. He did not respond to a request for comment. C5 has already been paid this year by the reelection campaign of Alabama governor Kay Ivey.

In late February, I went back to Pence’s office for clarification about Ayers’ ownership of C5. A couple of weeks later, after repeated requests, I received an emailed statement from Alyssa Farah, Pence’s press secretary. The statement is notable for its elaborate use of tenses: “As Nick Ayers’ May financial disclosure will reflect, he sold and relinquished one hundred percent of his ownership of C5 including all stock, ownership interest, and managerial control. Additionally, no member of his family nor existing or former employee will have any control, or interest in it. This was all overseen and completed by White House ethics’ rules and within their timeline.”

Farah did not provide the date of the sale or any supporting documentation in response to multiple follow-up questions. The statement “suggests he may not have sold his business yet,” said Larry Noble, general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center. “He should be able to show proof that he divested himself from the business. … A carefully worded statement by a press secretary about what he will do in the future does not resolve any of the issues.’’

IN JANUARY, Eric Greitens’ political future exploded when a local news station reported allegations that he had tied a woman to gym equipment in the basement of his home, blindfolded her, taken a picture and then used it as blackmail. Greitens admitted to an extramarital affair, but denied blackmailing the woman, who had been his hairdresser. On February 22, he was indicted by a grand jury on a felony invasion of privacy charge.

A criminal investigation by the St. Louis Circuit Attorney's Office is underway, as is a separate inquiry by the Missouri House of Representatives. According to CNN, the FBI is also looking into Greitens. Some of these inquiries may be expanding beyond the blackmail allegation. State lawmakers have said that the Circuit Attorney may be looking into donations to A New Missouri, a nonprofit that promotes the Greitens agenda. Ayers has advised A New Missouri, according to his disclosure form. One person who has been interviewed by federal investigators told me that both A New Missouri and LG PAC came up during the conversation.

A Republican operative close to Pence insisted that the vice president isn’t naïve about Ayers: “He is fully aware of Nick’s strengths and his weaknesses.” Still, Pence has not comprehended “the full extent” of Ayers’ business activities, this person said. Over Christmas, Pence visited the Aspen home of Toby Neugebauer. The Texas businessman told Pence that in his view, Ayers would have a higher market value in the private sector than any other member of the administration except Gary Cohn (who has since announced his resignation). The vice president, Neugebauer said, was impressed—and pleased to think that such a person was helping to lead his team. However, the Republican operative is convinced that Pence has no idea of Ayers’ ties to the dark money groups in the Greitens race and the surrounding controversy.

In recent months, a friend of Trump had lunch with the president at the White House. Over the course of the meal, Pence kept popping in and trying to interrupt. By the visitor’s account, it seemed as if Pence was trying to figure out what they might be talking about. As it happened, the lunch guest wanted to talk to Trump about Ayers, among other things. It seemed to him that Pence was a loyal vice president but that his chief of staff had his own agenda. He decided to sound a warning note with a reference to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” “Yon Nick Ayers has a lean and hungry look,” he told the president. Trump did not reply.

Gerald Selbee broke the code of the American breakfast cereal industry because he was bored at work one day, because it was a fun mental challenge, because most things at his job were not fun and because he could—because he happened to be the kind of person who saw puzzles all around him, puzzles that other people don’t realize are puzzles: the little ciphers and patterns that float through the world and stick to the surfaces of everyday things.

This was back in 1966, when Jerry, as he is known, worked for Kellogg’s in Battle Creek, Michigan. He was a materials analyst who designed boxes to increase the shelf life of freeze-dried foods and cereals. “You ever buy a cereal that had a foil liner on the inside?” Jerry asked not long ago. “That was one of my projects.”

He worked in the same factory where the cereals were cooked, the smells wafting into his office—an aroma like animal feed at first, and then, as the grains got rolled and flaked and dried, like oatmeal. Near his desk, he kept a stash of cereal boxes made by Kellogg’s competitors: Cheerios from General Mills, Honeycomb from Post. Sales reps brought these back from around the country, and Jerry would dry, heat and weigh their contents in the factory’s lab, comparing their moisture levels to that of a Kellogg’s cereal like Froot Loops. It wasn’t the most interesting job, but both of Jerry’s parents had been factory workers, his father at a hose-fitting plant and his mother at the same Kellogg’s factory, and he wasn’t raised to complain about manual labor.

One day Jerry found himself studying a string of letters and numbers stamped near the bottom of a General Mills box. Companies like Kellogg’s and Post stamped their boxes too, usually with a cereal’s time and place of production, allowing its shelf life to be tracked. But General Mills’ figures were garbled, as if in secret code. Jerry wondered if he could make sense of them. After locating a few boxes of General Mills and Kellogg’s cereals that had sat on store shelves in the same locations, he decided to test their contents, reasoning that cereals with similar moisture must have been cooked around the same time. Scribbling on a piece of scratch paper, he set up a few ratios.

All of a sudden, he experienced the puzzle-solver’s dopamine hit of seeing a solution shine through the fog: He had worked out how to trace any General Mills box of cereal back to the exact plant, shift, date and time of its creation. “It was pretty easy,” Jerry would recall decades later, chuckling at the memory. In a more ruthless industry, cracking a competitor’s trade secrets might have generated millions in profits. This, however, was the cereal business. Discovering the adversary’s production schedule didn’t make anyone rich, and so when Jerry shared his findings with his managers, his discovery was swallowed and digested without fuss.

He didn’t mind. To him, the fun was in figuring it out—understanding how this small piece of the world worked. He’d always had a knack for seeing patterns in what struck other people as noise. As a kid, Jerry had been dyslexic, fumbling with his reading assignments, and he hadn’t realized he possessed academic gifts until a standardized test in eighth grade showed he could solve math problems at the level of a college junior. His senior year of high school, he’d married his sweetheart, a bright, green-eyed classmate named Marjorie, and after graduation he took a job as a Kellogg’s factory worker. As their family grew over the next decade—with six kids in all—Jerry worked a series of factory and corporate jobs: chemist at a sewage-treatment plant, pharmaceutical salesman, computer operator, cereal packaging designer and, eventually, shift manager.

Still, he remained intellectually restless, and he enrolled in night classes at Kellogg Community College, known around town as “Cornflake U.” It wasn’t easy to squeeze in a life of the mind between the demands of a growing brood, so Jerry invited his kids into his obsessions with various hidden layers of the world: When he got interested in mushrooms, he took them hunting for morels in the forests; when he became captivated by geology, he brought them to gravel pits in search of fossilized spheres called Petoskey stones. Around the time his oldest son, Doug, was in high school, Jerry asked Doug for help counting rolls of coins he’d collected. Knowing that people rolled up their spare change and cashed it at the bank, it had occurred to Jerry to buy these rolls at face value, hoping that the bank hadn’t opened and checked them. Jerry’s idea was that maybe bank customers, by mistake, had included certain rare and valuable coins along with the normal ones. Father and son would sit in front of the TV at night and rip open the rolls, searching for buffalo nickels and silver Mercury head dimes; they made about $6,000. “Anything he jumps into, he jumps into one hundred percent,” Doug explained later. “He gets interested in string theory, and black holes, and all of a sudden you’re surrounded by all these Stephen Hawking books.”

As the years passed, Jerry earned a pile of diplomas: an associate’s degree from Kellogg, a bachelor’s in mathematics and business from Western Michigan University and an MBA from WMU. He also started a master’s in mathematics, though eventually family duties got in the way and he didn’t finish. Even then, he couldn’t stop thinking about numbers. One year, when he and Marge went to a used-book sale at a library to find gifts for their family, Jerry’s main purchase was a stack of college math textbooks. When their daughter Dawn asked why, he replied, “To keep my skills sharp.”

So perhaps it was only fitting that at age 64, Jerry found himself contemplating that most alluring of puzzles: the lottery. He was recently retired by then, living with Marge in a tiny town called Evart and wondering what to do with his time. After stopping in one morning at a convenience store he knew well, he picked up a brochure for a brand-new state lottery game. Studying the flyer later at his kitchen table, Jerry saw that it listed the odds of winning certain amounts of money by picking certain combinations of numbers.

That’s when it hit him. Right there, in the numbers on the page, he noticed a flaw—a strange and surprising pattern, like the cereal-box code, written into the fundamental machinery of the game. A loophole that would eventually make Jerry and Marge millionaires, spark an investigation by a Boston Globe Spotlight reporter, unleash a statewide political scandal and expose more than a few hypocrisies at the heart of America’s favorite form of legalized gambling.

Evart, Michigan: 1,903 residents, three banks, one McDonald’s, no Starbucks, a single stoplight on Main Street, a combination Subway/gas station where locals drink coffee in the morning, a diner with the stuffed heads of elk mounted on wood-paneled walls. Historically an auto industry town, sustained by two factories that provided parts to General Motors and Chrysler. Four months of winter and rutted, ice-glazed roads. People endure the cold and the economy and vote for Republicans. Summer brings a shuffleboard tournament and a musical festival billed as “The World’s Largest Hammered Dulcimer Gathering.”

In other words, a perfect town—at least as far as Jerry and Marge were concerned, in 1984, when Jerry decided that he was tired of working for other people and wanted to run something himself: a convenience store. With typical analytic intensity, he had gathered data for 32 “party stores” available for sale across Michigan, places that sold mainly cigarettes and liquor. He studied their financial histories, the demographics of their towns, the traffic patterns on surrounding roads, and found exactly the place to move his family. Though Evart, 120 miles north of Battle Creek, was remote and cold, the town’s auto plants provided a steady customer base, and the store, simply called the Corner Store, was located on Main Street. He and Marge and the kids moved into a two-story house with white siding less than a mile away, on the edge of a forest and the Muskegon River.

Before long, everyone knew the Selbees. Marge, who for years had devoted herself to the role of supportive housewife, joined Jerry at the store. A practical woman who could clear a fallen tree with a chainsaw and sew a men’s suit from scratch without a pattern, Marge did the books, stocked the shelves, and handled impulse items like candy. Jerry purchased the liquor and cigarettes. They opened at 7 a.m. and didn’t leave until midnight, even opening on Christmas morning, when Evart’s only grocery store was closed. Everyone in town passed through the Corner Store—factory workers, lawyers, bankers—and if Jerry didn’t know a customer by name, he knew him by his order. Pall Mall and a Mountain Dew came in a lot. Six-Pack of Strohs was also a regular. Jerry figured out that if he put his beer cooler on defrost late in the evening, the bottles would develop a layer of frost by morning that made them irresistible to factory workers coming off the night shift. “Oh God, did they love that. A lot of 40-ouncers went out of that store. And they said, ‘Oh my God, coldest beer in town,’” Jerry recalled, laughing. “Never told ’em.”

Jerry was happiest when he was trying to solve the puzzle of the store like this, dreaming up ways to squeeze every last penny of profit out of a fixed space. He knew, for instance, that cigarette companies paid store owners for shelf space by discounting the price of cigarettes to the tune of $2 a carton. Jerry figured out that if he bought cigarettes wholesale at this discounted rate, then marked them up by $1 and sold them to smaller retailers who didn’t get the discount, he could undercut cigarette wholesalers. It wasn’t exactly fair to the cigarette companies, but it wasn’t exactly illegal, either.

A year after taking over the Corner Store, Jerry thought to install a lottery machine, a maroon box the size of a cash register that printed tickets for Michigan’s state lottery. The machine was the only one in Evart and one of the few in the county. Word got around fast. “All of our customers that came into our store would play—every one of ’em,” Jerry recalled. The loyal customer known as Six-Pack of Strohs became Six-Pack of Strohs and Five Quick Picks. Jerry offered 16 or 18 different instant games, earning a 6 percent commission from the state on every ticket sold and 2 percent of winning tickets cashed at his store. He advertised in the local paper, and when sales fell on a particular game, he took the unsold tickets and taped brand-new pennies to them. “Those are lucky pennies,” he’d tell his customers, who would then buy the tickets. Soon he was selling $300,000 in lottery tickets per year, pocketing about $20,000 of that in profit. (The biggest prize a customer ever won at his store was $100,000.)

Despite running a vice depot, the Selbees were teetotalers. They didn’t smoke or drink—Jerry permitted himself a single dark beer at Christmas—and Marge avoided the lottery entirely, disliking the sense of risk. Jerry bought a couple of tickets from time to time, but to him, the lottery was only interesting as a phenomenon with order, a set of rules mediated by math and a marketplace. The machine was so successful, however, that he and Marge were able to build a small addition to the store, and he hired an extra clerk to run the machine on the days of the weekly drawings, when business was especially brisk. Eventually, their profits helped pay for the educations of their six children, all of whom earned advanced degrees. “It was like free money,” said Jerry.

And for more than 15 years, this is how it went. The store opened, the sun rose, the sun set, the store closed. Cigarettes, liquor, tickets, tickets, tickets. The Selbee children grew up, left home and started families of their own. Finally, in 2000, Jerry and Marge decided it was time to retire. Jerry began hanging out at the Subway/gas station, arriving each day at 6 to drink coffee and read The Detroit News. Sometimes he’d stop by the Corner Store too, chatting with the new owners to see how they were getting along.

It was on one of these mornings at the Corner Store, in 2003, that Jerry saw the brochure for the new lottery game. Though he’d spent tens of thousands of hours watching his old customers hope for the break that might alter their fortunes, he knew better than to believe the lottery was ruled by chance. “People have been conditioned to think it is luck,” he would later reflect. “They don’t look at the structure of games.”

This particular game was called Winfall. A ticket cost $1. You picked six numbers, 1 through 49, and the Michigan Lottery drew six numbers. Six correct guesses won you the jackpot, guaranteed to be at least $2 million and often higher. If you guessed five, four, three, or two of the six numbers, you won lesser amounts. What intrigued Jerry was the game’s unusual gimmick, known as a roll-down: If nobody won the jackpot for a while, and the jackpot climbed above $5 million, there was a roll-down, which meant that on the next drawing, as long as there was no six-number winner, the jackpot cash flowed to the lesser tiers of winners, like water spilling over from the highest basin in a fountain to lower basins. There were lottery games in other states that offered roll-downs, but none structured quite like Winfall’s. A roll-down happened every six weeks or so, and it was a big deal, announced by the Michigan Lottery ahead of time as a marketing hook, a way to bring bettors into the game, and sure enough, players increased their bets on roll-down weeks, hoping to snag a piece of the jackpot.

The brochure listed the odds of various correct guesses. Jerry saw that you had a 1-in-54 chance to pick three out of the six numbers in a drawing, winning $5, and a 1-in-1,500 chance to pick four numbers, winning $100. What he now realized, doing some mental arithmetic, was that a player who waited until the roll-down stood to win more than he lost, on average, as long as no player that week picked all six numbers. With the jackpot spilling over, each winning three-number combination would put $50 in the player’s pocket instead of $5, and the four-number winners would pay out $1,000 in prize money instead of $100, and all of a sudden, the odds were in your favor. If no one won the jackpot, Jerry realized, a $1 lottery ticket was worth more than $1 on a roll-down week—statistically speaking.

“I just multiplied it out,” Jerry recalled, “and then I said, ‘Hell, you got a positive return here.’”

The lottery as an American pastime stretches back to the Colonial era, when churches, universities and Congress itself hawked lottery tickets to the public, keeping a cut of the sales and plowing those funds back into the community to pay for roads, or schools, or churches, or armies. This is the basic contract of the lottery: The player accepts a sucker’s bet, a fantastically tiny shot at getting rich, and the organizer accepts the player’s money and does something socially constructive with it.

Lotteries have always been popular with players. Psychological research suggests that we do it for a variety of negative or desperate reasons: a desire to escape poverty, coercion by advertising, gambling addiction, ignorance of probability. Yet there’s also the fun of it. Even when we understand on some level that the odds are ridiculous, that the government is the casino that always wins, we play anyway, because we enjoy the illusion, the surge of risk and hope.

Jerry wasn't thinking about socioeconomics. He was thinking about how he would hide his new hobby from his wife.

This demand for the lottery has made it deathless in America, a vampire institution that hides and sleeps during certain ages but always comes back to life. In 1762, lawmakers in Pennsylvania noticed that poor people bought more tickets than rich people and argued that the lottery functioned as a sort of tax on the poor. They fined operators of these “mischievous and unlawful games” for causing the “ruin and impoverishment of many poor families.” Toward the end of the 19th century, after a corruption scandal in Louisiana—criminal syndicates gained control of the state lottery by bribing elected officials—many states banned lotteries altogether. But Americans continued to play the game underground, with bookies siphoning off the cash that would have otherwise flowed into public coffers, and in 1964, when New Hampshire launched the first legal, government-sponsored lottery in the continental U.S. in 70 years, other states followed.

Today 44 states, Washington, D.C., the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico run their own lotteries; they also collaborate to offer Mega Millions and Powerball jackpots, controlled by a nonprofit called the Multi-State Lottery Association. The modern lottery industry is highly complex, offering a zoo of products that are designed and administered with the aid of computers (cash games with a drawing, instant scratch-off games, video lottery games, keno), and the sales of all of these tickets add up to a staggering yearly figure: $80 billion. For comparison, the entire U.S. film industry sells only about $11 billion in tickets.

As for the payouts: More than $50 billion goes to players in prizes, while $22 billion flows to public programs like education, senior assistance, land conservation, veteran support and pension funds. This is why lotteries don’t have a lot of political enemies: the money is impossible for elected officials of both parties to resist. At the same time, as the lottery has grown stronger, so has the fundamental case against it: that the lottery is regressive, taking from the poor and giving to the rich. One review in the Journal of Gambling Studies in 2011 concluded that the poor are “still the leading patron of the lottery”; another study, conducted by the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2012, found that men, black people, Native Americans and those in disadvantaged neighborhoods play the game at higher rates than others. Over the past 40 years, the lottery has played a key role in the broader shift of the American tax burden away from the wealthy; it’s far easier, politically, for states to raise money through a lottery than through more progressive means like corporate or property taxes. According to the investigative reporter David Cay Johnston, who won a Pulitzer for his work on the inequalities in the American tax code, 11 states made more from the lottery in 2009 than they did from corporate income tax.

Jerry was thinking about none of this at his kitchen table. He was thinking about how he would hide his lottery playing from Marge. She had always been the pragmatic one in the relationship, disliking uncertainty and valuing old-fashioned elbow grease over entrepreneurial brainstorms. Even now, in retirement, she was finding it difficult to relax; while her husband watched science shows on TV, she could often be found painting the barn or moving a fallen tree in the yard.

Marge would have questions, Jerry knew, and he might not have bulletproof answers. He didn’t quite believe the numbers himself. How likely was it that the hundreds of employees at the state lottery had overlooked a math loophole obvious enough that Jerry could find it within minutes? Could it be that easy? He decided to test his theory in secret, simulating the game with a pencil and yellow pad first. He picked numbers during a roll-down week, waited for the drawing, and counted his theoretical winnings. On paper, he made money.

The next time the Winfall jackpot crept north of $5 million and the state announced a roll-down, Jerry drove to a convenience store in Mesick, 47 miles northwest of Evart, so that no one would ask him questions. Standing at the machine, he spent $2,200, letting the computer pick all the numbers for him. A few days later, after the lottery drew six winning numbers, Jerry sorted through his 2,200 tickets and circled all the two-, three- and four-number matches (there were zero five-number matches). His winnings added up to $2,150, slightly less than he had spent on the tickets.

A less confident person might have stopped there. But Jerry figured it was mere bad luck. Odds are just odds, not guarantees. Flip a quarter six times and you might get six heads even though you have better odds of getting three heads and three tails. But flip it 5,000 times and you’ll approach 2,500 heads and 2,500 tails. Jerry’s mistake had been risking too little money. To align his own results with the statistical odds, he just needed to buy more lottery tickets.

This was an uncomfortable leap for a guy with no experience in gambling, but if he stopped now, he would never know if his theory was correct. During the next roll-down week, he returned to Mesick and made a larger bet, purchasing $3,400 in Winfall tickets. Sorting 3,400 tickets by hand took hours and strained his eyes, but Jerry counted them all right there at the convenience store so that Marge would not discover him. This time he won $6,300—an impressive 46 percent profit margin. Emboldened, he bet even more on the next roll-down, $8,000, and won $15,700, a 49 percent margin.

The Selbees then went on vacation, camping at a state park in Alabama with some friends, and while sitting at the campfire one evening, Jerry decided to let his wife in on the secret. He was playing the lottery. He knew how to beat it. He had a system. He’d already won five figures.

Marge didn’t react. The logs cracked in the dusk. She mulled his words over for a long moment. Then, at last, she smiled. She had seen her husband solve so many different kinds of puzzles over the years. Certainly he was capable of doing so again. And who could argue with $15,700? “Oh, I knew it would work,” Marge would later say. “I knew it would work.”

The American heist master Willie Sutton was famously said to have robbed banks because that’s where the money was. The lottery is like a bank vault with walls made of math instead of steel; cracking it is a heist for squares. And yet a surprising number of Americans have pulled it off. A 2017 investigation by the Columbia Journalism Review found widespread anomalies in lottery results, difficult to explain by luck alone. According to CJR’s analysis, nearly 1,700 Americans have claimed winning tickets of $600 or more at least 50 times in the last seven years, including the country’s most frequent winner, a 79-year-old man from Massachusetts named Clarance W. Jones, who has redeemed more than 10,000 tickets for prizes exceeding $18 million.

It’s possible, as some lottery officials have speculated, that a few of these improbably lucky individuals are simply cashing tickets on behalf of others who don’t want to report the income. There are also cases in which players have colluded with lottery employees to cheat the game from the inside; last August, a director of a multistate lottery association was sentenced to 25 years in prison after using his computer programming skills to rig jackpots in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, funneling $2.2 million to himself and his brother.

But it’s also possible that math whizzes like Jerry Selbee are finding and exploiting flaws that lottery officials haven’t noticed yet. In 2011, Harper’s wrote about “The Luckiest Woman on Earth,” Joan Ginther, who has won multimillion-dollar jackpots in the Texas lottery four times. Her professional background as a PhD statistician raised suspicions that Ginther had discovered an anomaly in Texas’ system. In a similar vein, a Stanford- and MIT-trained statistician named Mohan Srivastava proved in 2003 that he could predict patterns in certain kinds of scratch-off tickets in Canada, guessing the correct numbers around 90 percent of the time. Srivastava alerted authorities as soon as he found the flaw. If he could have exploited it, he later explained to a reporter at Wired, he would have, but he had calculated that it wasn’t worth his time. It would take too many hours to buy the tickets in bulk, count the winners, redeem them for prizes, file the tax forms. He already had a full-time job.

It never occurred to Jerry to alert the Michigan Lottery that Winfall was vulnerable to exploitation. For all he knew, the state was perfectly aware of the flaw already. Maybe the flaw was intentional, to encourage players to spend lots of money on lottery tickets, since the state took a cut of each ticket sold, about 35 cents on the dollar. (In 2003, the year that Jerry began playing, the state lottery would sell $1.68 billion in tickets and send $586 million of that revenue into a state fund to support K-12 public education.) In Jerry’s opinion, if he was purchasing large quantities of tickets at certain opportune moments, he wouldn’t be manipulating the game; he would be playing it as it was meant to be played. His tickets would have the same odds of winning as anyone else’s. He would just be buying a lot more of them.

Jerry founded an American company that sold nothing, created nothing, had no inventory, no payroll. Its one and only business was to play the lottery.

And, unlike Srivastava, he and Marge were willing to do the grunt work, which, as it turned out, was no small challenge. Lottery terminals in convenience stores could print only 10 slips of paper at a time, with up to 10 lines of numbers on each slip (at $1 per line), which meant that if you wanted to bet $100,000 on Winfall, you had to stand at a machine for hours upon hours, waiting for the machine to print 10,000 tickets. Code in the purchase. Push the “Print” button. Wait at least a full minute for the 10 slips to emerge. Code in the next purchase. Hit “Print.” Wait again. Jerry and Marge knew all the convenience store owners in town, so no one gave them a hard time when they showed up in the morning to print tickets literally all day. If customers wondered why the unassuming couple had suddenly developed an obsession with gambling, they didn’t ask. Sometimes the tickets jammed, or the cartridges ran out of ink. “You just have to set there,” Jerry said.

The Selbees stacked their tickets in piles of $5,000, rubber-banded them into bundles and then, after a drawing, convened in their living room in front of the TV, sorting through tens or even hundreds of thousands of tickets, separating them into piles according to their value (zero correct numbers, two, three, four, five). Once they counted all the tickets, they counted them again, just to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. If Jerry had the remote, they’d watch golf or the History Channel, and if Marge had it, “House Hunters” on HGTV. “It looked extremely tedious and boring, but they didn’t view it that way,” recalled their daughter Dawn. “They trained their minds. Literally, they’d pick one up, look at it, put it down. Pick one up, put it down.” Dawn tried to help but couldn’t keep pace; for each ticket she completed, Jerry or Marge did 10.

In the beginning, his children didn’t understand Jerry’s new passion. “I thought he was crazy,” Dawn said. “He starts to explain it to you, and your eyes glaze over.” Doug couldn’t make sense of it either. “He always said, this is just sixth-grade math. I was like, ‘Yeah, did you see what I got in math in sixth grade?’” Jerry and Marge insisted that they were enjoying themselves. They had the time. It was a game. Marge even seemed to like the manual labor. (“I’m just the grunt,” she explained, with a mix of self-deprecation and pride.) In the weeks between roll-downs, they got antsy.

And they were happy to share their good fortune. Like lotteries in other states, the Michigan Lottery welcomed large betting groups; after all, the more people who played, the more money the state got to play with. Jerry saw that office pools and other large bettors were allowed to play as corporations instead of individuals, and it seemed to him that the state was practically inviting groups to play Winfall for big stakes. So in the summer of 2003, about six months after Jerry bought his first tickets, the Selbees asked their six children if they wanted in. The kids ponied up varying amounts for Jerry to wager; on their first try together, the family bet $18,000 and lost most of it, because another player hit the six-number jackpot. When Jerry insisted this was just bad luck, Marge and the kids decided to believe him. They let him risk their money again, and within two more plays, everyone was in the black.

That June, Jerry created a corporation to manage the group. He gave it an intentionally boring name, GS Investment Strategies LLC, and started selling shares, at $500 apiece, first to the kids and then to friends and colleagues in Evart. Jerry would eventually expand the roster to 25 members, including a state trooper, a parole officer, a bank vice president, three lawyers and even his personal accountant, a longtime local with a smoker’s scratchy voice named Steve Wood. Jerry would visit Wood’s storefront office downtown, twist the “Open” sign to “Closed,” and seek his advice on how to manage the group.

The corporation itself was nearly weightless. It existed purely on paper, in a series of thick three-ring binders that Jerry kept in his basement, a ream of information about the members, the shares, the amounts wagered on roll-down weeks, the subsequent winnings and losses, the profits and the taxes paid. It was an American company that sold nothing, created nothing, had no inventory, no payroll. Its one and only business was to play the lottery.

And business was good. By the spring of 2005, GS Investment Strategies LLC had played Winfall on 12 different roll-down weeks, the size of the bets increasing along with the winnings. First $40,000 in profits. Then $80,000. Then $160,000. Marge squirreled her share away in a savings account. Jerry bought a new truck, a Ford F350, and a camping trailer that hooked onto the back of it. He also started buying coins from the U.S. Mint as a hedge against inflation, hoping to protect his family from any future catastrophe. He eventually filled five safe deposit boxes with coins of silver and gold.

Then, in May 2005, the Michigan Lottery shut down the game with no warning, replacing it with a new one called Classic Lotto 47. Officials claimed that sales of Winfall tickets had been decreasing. Jerry was offended. He’d found something he loved, something to order his days that felt constructive and rewarding and didn’t hurt anyone. He didn’t want to stop. “You gotta realize, I was 68 years old. So it just—it gave me a sense of purpose.” His fellow players were just as disappointed, including Marge. “I like to have something to do, especially in the wintertime,” she explained.

The following month, Jerry received an email from a member of the lottery group. The player, a plant manager at a Minute Maid juice factory in Paw Paw Township, had noticed that Massachusetts was promoting a brand-new lottery game called Cash WinFall. There were a few differences between it and the now-defunct Michigan game: a Cash WinFall ticket cost $2 instead of $1; you picked six numbers from 1 to 46 instead of 1 to 49; and the jackpot rolled down when it hit $2 million, not $5 million. But otherwise, it appeared to be the same. “Do you think we could play that?” the plant manager asked.

Jerry did a few brisk pencil-and-paper calculations. The odds were good. He wondered about the logistics: Lottery tickets had to be purchased in person, and the western edge of Massachusetts was more than 700 miles from Evart. He had no connections to store owners in Massachusetts, either. Who would ever let him and Marge stand in one spot for hours, printing ticket after ticket?

Still, he couldn’t resist. Jerry emailed the plant manager back, asking if he knew anyone who ran a party store in the state. The player gave him a name: Paul Mardas, the owner of Billy’s Beverages, in Sunderland, about 50 miles from the western border of Massachusetts. Disliking the hassle of airports, Jerry climbed into his gray Ford Five Hundred one day in August 2005 and began the 12-hour drive to the East Coast. What he didn't know was that, for the first time in his gambling career, he was about to encounter some ruthless adversaries.

Seven months earlier, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named James Harvey was knocking on doors in his dorm, trying to get people excited about two personal projects. One was a Super Bowl party—the New England Patriots were looking for a back-to-back championship. The other was a lottery betting pool he wanted to start.

The dorm, a four-story building known as Random Hall, was packed with computer science and engineering majors. It had a custom lab in the basement and a student-coded website that tracked when the dorm’s washing machines and bathrooms were in use. Harvey’s Super Bowl party had little appeal in Random Hall, but people sparked to his lottery idea. A mathematics major in his final semester, Harvey had been researching lottery games for an independent study project, comparing the popular multistate games Powerball and MegaMillions to see which offered players a better shot at winning. He’d also analyzed different state games, including Cash WinFall, and it hadn’t taken him long to spot its flaw: On a roll-down week, a $2 lottery ticket was worth more than $2, mathematically.

Within days, Harvey had recruited some 50 people to pony up $20 each, for a total of $1,000, enough to buy 500 Cash WinFall tickets for the February 7 roll-down drawing. The Patriots won the Super Bowl on February 6, and the following day, the MIT group took home $3,000, for a $2,000 profit.

Counting $70,000 in tickets took them a full 10 days, working 10 hours a day. They never left the room except to get lunch.

Curiously enough, the MIT students weren’t the only ones playing Cash WinFall for high stakes that day. A biomedical researcher at Boston University, Ying Zhang, had also discovered the flaw, after an argument with friends about the nature of the lottery. Believing it to be exploitative, Zhang had researched the Massachusetts State Lottery to bolster his point. Then he found the glitch in Cash WinFall, and as happens so often in America, a skeptic of capitalism became a capitalist. Zhang encouraged friends to play and formed his own betting club, Doctor Zhang Lottery Club Limited Partnership. His group began wagering between $300,000 and $500,000 on individual roll-down weeks, and eventually Zhang quit his job as a biomedical researcher to focus on the lottery full time. He bought tickets in bulk at a convenience store near his home, in the Boston suburb of Quincy, and stored the losing tickets in boxes in his attic until the weight made his ceiling crack.

As energetically as Zhang played the game, however, he couldn’t match the budding lottery moguls at MIT. After the first roll-down, Harvey assembled 40 to 50 regular players—some of them professors with substantial resources—and recruited his classmate, Yuran Lu, to help manage the group. Lu was an electrical engineering, computer science and math major with a mischievous streak: one time, to make a point about security, he’d stolen 620 passwords from students and professors. Now he helped Harvey form a corporation, named Random Strategies LLC, after their dorm. Their standard wager on a roll-down week was $600,000—300,000 tickets. Unlike the Selbees, who allowed the computer to pick numbers for them (“Quic Pics”), the MIT students preferred to choose their own, which avoided duplicates but also meant that the students had to spend weeks filling in hundreds of thousands of tiny ovals on paper betting slips.

Of course, it would have been a lot easier for the MIT students to print their lottery slips in bulk, using their own computers, and then hand the slips over to a convenience store owner when it was time to play. But Cash WinFall rules didn’t allow this. It was one of several safeguards put in place by the Massachusetts State Lottery to monitor betting activity and prevent manipulation of the game. Officials at lottery headquarters, in Braintree, were hardly in the dark; sales information went straight to them in real time, or close to real time, tracking the number of tickets sold at each store in the state. Any agent who sold more than $5,000 in tickets per day was also required to get a special waiver, which meant that lottery officials could detect unusually heavy betting well in advance.

As a result, the Massachusetts State Lottery was perfectly aware of several anomalies in Cash WinFall ticket-buying, unusual patterns over the months that signaled that something was up. One day in July, a store manager in Cambridge called headquarters because a kid from MIT had walked in and asked to buy $28,000 in tickets. The manager was stunned and wanted to know: Was that legal? (A compliance officer replied that yes, it was legal.) That same week, a dozen stores suddenly requested waivers to increase their Cash WinFall betting limits. Three of the stores were clustered in the town of Quincy, where Zhang lived, and the fourth was in the next town over. When lottery compliance officers visited the stores, they found two clear violations: a player had been scanning stacks of computerized betting slips, and the store where he operated had been extending him credit, allowing the slips to be scanned before they’d been paid for. Later, officials discovered that a whopping 23 stores across the state were violating a different rule involving a “free bet” feature of the game.

Though the Massachusetts State Lottery was within its rights to suspend or revoke the licenses of all these stores, it instead let them off with warnings. This lax approach to rule enforcement is perhaps why, when Jerry showed up at the party store in Sunderland, Paul Mardas was more intrigued than concerned by the Michigan retiree’s proposition. Jerry reckoned that, for starters, he aimed to buy about $100,000 in lottery tickets. Mardas laughed. Billy’s Beverages was one smallish room with a wood-paneled ceiling; he had no frame of reference for bets that large. But Jerry, wearing rubber bands around his left wrist, offered a deal: If Mardas allowed him to print tickets in bulk at his store, he would give him a stake in GS Investment Strategies LLC.

Mardas agreed, and a few weeks later, Jerry returned with Marge. As in Michigan, the two would need to split the work of printing tickets, and so they sought out a second terminal. They found it at Jerry’s Place, a diner in South Deerfield, whose owner was also willing to join their lottery corporation. That taken care of, the Selbees quickly developed a routine around Cash WinFall. About a week before a roll-down drawing, they would drive the 700 miles from Michigan, cutting across Canada to save time, listening to James Patterson novels on tape. They’d book a room at a Red Roof Inn in South Deerfield, and in the mornings, they’d go to work: Jerry to Jerry’s Place; Marge to Billy’s. They started at 5:30 a.m., before the stores opened to the public, and went straight through to 6 p.m., printing as many tickets as the terminals would handle, rubber-banding them in stacks of $5,000, and throwing the stacks into duffel bags.

After a drawing, they retreated to the Red Roof Inn and searched for winning numbers, piling tickets on the double beds and the tables and the air conditioner and the floor. Counting $70,000 in tickets took a full 10 days, working 10 hours a day. They never left the room except to get lunch. Then they claimed their winning tickets and drove the 12 hours back to Michigan with the tens of thousands of losing tickets, storing them in plastic tubs in a barn, behind a door that kept the raccoons out, in case an IRS auditor ever wanted to see the paper trail.

The first time they played Cash WinFall, on August 29, Jerry and Marge ended up spending $120,000 on 60,000 lottery tickets. After that they increased their wager to 312,000 individual tickets per roll-down, ultimately going as high as 360,000 tickets—a $720,000 bet on a single drawing. At first, Marge found these figures terrifying—it was more than they had ever risked in Michigan—but after a while she got used to it. “You know, you think of this as money,” Marge recalled, “but pretty soon you never really look. It’s just numbers. It’s just numbers on a piece of paper.” She grew friendly with other customers, chatting about her kids and the weather as if she had lived in Massachusetts all her life. Mardas came to think of her and Jerry as part of his family. “They’re salt-of-the-earth kind of people,” he said. “Genuine.” He was also amazed by their frugality. “I said to Marge, ‘You guys should go on a cruise or something.’ She said, ‘I’d rather go pick rocks in a quarry.’”

According to lottery regulations, customers weren’t allowed to operate terminals themselves—that was the store owner’s job—and the terminals weren’t supposed to be used outside normal business hours. Jerry got around the first rule by having the corporation, of which the store owners were members, “hire” the Selbees to print the tickets. As for printing tickets within posted store hours—well, yes, that was a violation. But Jerry saw it as a minor sin, no different than what millions of American businesses do every day to get by. He didn’t mind the funny looks he sometimes got. One day, a woman at the diner stared as Jerry printed tickets, then asked the store owner to tell Jerry to “stop doing that.” The owner shook his head. “No,” he replied.

More important to Jerry was that the Massachusetts State Lottery didn’t seem to have a problem with anything that he and Marge were doing. And his comfort level increased when he learned through the grapevine, in 2008, that there were other large betting groups playing Cash WinFall using strategies similar to his own. Over five years, the couple would return to Massachusetts six to nine times per year, never deviating from their system: printing tickets, counting them at the Red Roof Inn, redeeming the winners for a giant check, and driving back to Evart with the losers in the trunk. The lottery checked in on them as they printed tickets at least once, in April 2010, when a compliance officer was sent to Billy’s Beverages and Jerry’s Place. After observing the Selbees at work, the officer reported that he found nothing out of the ordinary. “I spent some time observing the wagering routine,” he wrote to his superiors in an email. “Everything is very organized and runs smoothly.”

One lottery employee replied to the email with a joke: “How do I become a member of the [Selbees’] club when I retire?”

Meanwhile, around them, the larger American economy was imploding. The housing bubble, the bank bailouts, the executive bonus scandals, the automotive bankruptcies—panic, panic, panic, panic. In Evart, an auto glass plant that had supplied Chrysler closed down, throwing 120 people out of work. American corporations had been playing a lot of games, noted Jerry, and their ways had finally caught up. “They were taking far more risks than I was, based on their rewards. That’s why I did a risk-reward analysis after every game, to make sure I was still on track.”

Compared with Bear Stearns or Goldman Sachs, the Selbees were downright conservative. By 2009 they had grossed more than $20 million in winning tickets—a net profit of $5 million after expenses and taxes—but their lifestyle didn’t change. Jerry and Marge remained in the same house, hosting a family gathering each Christmas as they always had. Though she could have chartered a private jet and taken everyone to Ibiza, Marge still ran the kitchen, made her famous toffee candy and washed dishes by hand. It didn’t occur to her to buy a dishwasher.

Instead, the Selbees' lottery playing helped cushion their friends and family, as well as a few people they had never met whom they’d allowed to join the betting group. (One such couple was confronted by their accountant after their tax returns listed winnings and losses in the six figures. “Do you have a gambling problem?” he wanted to know.) Jerry and Marge’s kids socked the winnings away for their children’s educations. A few players paid down debts. Wood, the Selbees’ accountant, took four cruises and renovated his house. Mardas filed for divorce. Meeting the Selbees had given him the financial freedom to “make some changes in my life,” as he put it. “I fell in love again, and remarried, and I’ve got three stepkids that I never thought I would have.”

From time to time, players in the group asked Jerry if he had a plan for stopping. How many more bets were they going to make, for how many years? Weren’t they pushing their luck? “I mean, if I were running a lottery game and somebody spotted a flaw, I would shut it down immediately,” said Jerry. The group had lost money only three times, and even after the biggest loss—$360,000 in a drawing in 2007, when another player correctly chose all six numbers and took the jackpot—the group had made the money back. As long as they kept playing conservatively, Jerry felt, they would not attract undue attention, and there was no reason not to continue. “I’m going to milk this cow as long as it’ll stand,” he’d reply.

Unbeknownst to him, however, the MIT students were preparing to attack the game with a new and unprecedented level of aggression. Though it would later be estimated that their group made at least $3.5 million by playing Cash WinFall, they had noticed that their profit margins were declining, for a simple reason: competition. With MIT, Zhang and the Selbees pushing huge pots of money into each roll-down drawing, they were all having to split the payouts. This had gotten the students thinking. Might there be a way to freeze out the other groups? They hit on an idea: Instead of waiting for a roll-down, perhaps they could force one to happen, by making an insanely large bet.

Jerry was enraged. It was one thing to make large bets, like he had been doing, and it was another thing entirely to manipulate the game.

In the week leading up to the Cash WinFall drawing of August 16, 2010, the state had not announced a roll-down, because the jackpot was only $1.6 million; it didn’t seem that it would reach the required $2 million. Harvey and his MIT friends saw their opening. Over three and a half days, they bought an astonishing 700,000 lottery tickets, costing $1.4 million. This was more than enough to tip the jackpot over $2 million before lottery officials knew what was happening—and before they could announce the roll-down. No one else knew that the money was going to roll down, so the other bettors, including Jerry and Marge, did not buy tickets. The MIT group hoovered up a $700,000 cash profit.

Surprised by the jackpot’s extremely rapid inflation, lottery employees reviewed their data to see what had gone wrong. One technical manager guessed, correctly, that one of the large betting groups had triggered the roll-down, though he misidentified the culprits. “FYI,” he wrote in an email to a colleague. “Michigan guys decided last Friday to push [Cash WinFall] jackpot over $2 mill.” Rather than impose penalties, however, lottery technicians instead installed a new software script to notify them of especially high sales, so that in the future, Braintree could alert all players to an imminent roll-down and give everyone a fair shot.

Jerry was enraged. It was one thing to make large bets based on a certain system, like he had been doing, and it was another thing entirely to manipulate the mechanics of the game to crowd other bettors out. “They took us out of the game,” Jerry said. “Intentionally.” The next time MIT tried to force a roll-down, he decided, he was going to be ready.

He suspected something would happen around Christmas. There was a drawing scheduled for December 27, when a lot of convenience stores would be closed for the holiday; with betting activity slow, it made for a perfect time for MIT to strike. On high alert for any shenanigans, Jerry asked Mardas to call lottery headquarters to see if stores were reporting spikes in sales. When Mardas was told that, yes, five stores were seeing a surge, Jerry hopped in his car. Leaving Marge behind, he drove on Christmas Day to Jerry’s Place, where he spent hours printing 45,000 tickets, long after the sun went down.

He was printing the last of them by the pale light of the lotto terminal when he heard a knock on the door. The store was closed—it was just Jerry behind the counter—so he opened the door a crack to talk to the visitor, a polite young man who said his name was Yuran Lu.

“I’m from the other club, and I think it would be mutually beneficial if we knew how much money each of us were playing,” Jerry would later claim Lu told him. Jerry gathered that the MIT kids were proposing to collude; instead of all groups pushing into every pot, it might make sense to take turns. This was unethical in Jerry’s mind, so he shook his head and closed the door. Lu walked away. (Lu did not respond to interview requests for this story.)

Despite its new alert software, lottery officials were slow to react once again, and sure enough, the large bets of the Selbees and the MIT group triggered a roll-down. Jerry had no idea how much went to the MIT kids, but his group made about $200,000 in profit. Driving back to Michigan, he felt vindicated. Maybe this would teach his rivals something about playing by the rules.

Andrea Estes had never thought much about the Massachusetts State Lottery before she got a tip from a state employee in June 2011. An investigative reporter with the Boston Globe, Estes had deep sources in political circles and had a track record of breaking stories about corrupt public officials. In 2008, Estes revealed a pay-to-play relationship between the state speaker of the house and a contractor, leading to an eight-year federal prison sentence for the speaker. In 2010, she joined the Globe’s Spotlight team, the unit known for exposing the child-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

The tipster told Estes that something weird was happening with the lottery, and that she should find a copy of the 20/20—a record of players who had won at least 20 times and $20,000 over the previous year. The Massachusetts State Lottery circulated this list to state agencies, in case someone on it wasn’t paying taxes or child support. The tipster, who worked for one of these agencies, had noticed that people were buying enormous quantities of lottery tickets in Sunderland, for some reason, and that the buyers were from out of state. Sure enough, when Estes examined the list, she saw that a Michigan company called GS Investment Strategies LLC was buying tickets in bulk at Billy’s Beverages.

Quickly, Estes learned everything she could about Cash WinFall. On July 12, 2011, right before the next roll-down, she drove to Billy’s Beverages, on a hunch that the Michigan players would be in town. When she walked into the store, she encountered a man and a woman behind the counter, printing lottery tickets—Mardas and Marge—and not another soul in sight. “It was really bizarre,” she recalled later. Once Estes introduced herself as a Globe reporter, Marge grew flustered. She refused to answer any questions. Estes drove to Jerry’s Place, which had also appeared on the 20/20 list, and found Jerry. He didn’t want to talk either.

“It was pretty obvious that something was askew,” Estes said. She requested public records from the lottery and discovered that other groups had formed to buy tickets, including one with a bunch of MIT students. When Estes asked officials for comment, however, they claimed ignorance. “The lottery was really sleazy about the whole thing,” she said. “They were quite aware this was going on, and they acted shocked when I told them about it.” However, as soon as word of her inquiries reached Steven Grossman, the newly installed state treasurer, he instructed the lottery’s executive director to do everything by the book. Within days, lottery officials were cracking down on the large betting groups. They suspended the licenses of seven convenience stores that serviced the groups, including Billy’s Beverages and Jerry’s Place. Aftwerward, they reached out to Estes to say that, yes, the stores had broken lottery rules.

But it was too late to stop Estes. Her story broke on July 31. “A game with a windfall for a knowing few,” read the headline. The article, co-written with reporter Scott Allen, named Jerry and Marge, as well as Lu. According to Estes’ research, Cash WinFall assured a profit, statistically speaking, for anyone who could spend at least $100,000 in tickets on a roll-down week. This meant, Estes wrote, that casual lottery players were unwittingly subsidizing the fortunes of the big groups by purchasing tickets in smaller amounts and at less opportune moments, when the odds were much longer. She consulted Srivastava, the Canadian statistician. “Cash WinFall isn’t being played as a game of chance,” Estes quoted him as saying. “Some smart people have figured out how to get rich while everyone else funds their winnings.”

The story caused a sensation. Embarrassed state politicians publicly criticized the lottery’s handling of the game, and national outlets like The Washington Post, HuffPost and Fox News picked up the story. Readers wrote to the Globe saying that they knew all along that they were getting screwed. (“Trust me,” one Cash WinFall player had told Estes, “small-time players always need divine intervention!”) Two days later, Grossman announced that the state would phase out Cash WinFall within a year; in the meantime, the lottery would limit each store to $5,000 in ticket sales per day. A Globe editorial denounced this as too little, calling instead for an immediate shutdown. “Lottery players have a right to expect that the money they spend on tickets goes to cities and towns,” read the piece, “not into the pockets of well-heeled investors who’ve found a way to game the system.”

Back in Evart, Jerry couldn’t believe the news. The framing of the story—that somehow he was a cheater, that big lottery players were screwing over the little guy—struck him as preposterous. How was buying tickets in bulk, at the right time, cheating? And wasn’t the money he spent on tickets making its way into the budgets of cities and towns all over Massachusetts? If anyone was the big guy, Jerry huffed, it was the lottery itself, which took a 40 percent cut of every ticket he bought.

He and Marge resolved to keep playing while they could. This was easier said than done, since they needed a store without a suspended license; when Jerry tried to explain his system to the manager of a Rite-Aid, the guy called the cops. “He said something about running some kind of scam,” Jerry recalled. “I said that if I was running a scam, it would be for more than just a $2 lottery ticket. It really made me mad.” Jerry had to explain to the police that he was an upstanding businessman who paid taxes and wasn’t trying to pull anything funny. “Well, it doesn’t sound right,” replied the officer, “but I guess it’s not illegal.”

If Cash WinFall was destined to be a scandal, thought Jerry, then people needed to know the parts that were actually scandalous. He decided to call up Estes and finally give her an interview, telling her what he knew about the real manipulations in the game—how the MIT group had placed its thumb on the scales in 2010 by forcing the roll-downs. Two more Globe stories followed, causing fresh public outrage, and that October, Grossman announced that he was asking the state inspector general to conduct an investigation of lottery procedures. The inspector general and his staff would examine thousands of internal lottery documents and interview officials and players, to determine if there had been any corruption. “We felt this was an important step we needed to take to protect the integrity of the lottery,” Grossman said.

The last time Jerry and Marge played Cash WinFall was in January 2012. They’d had an incredible run: in the final tally, they had grossed nearly $27 million from nine years of playing the lottery in two states. They’d netted $7.75 million in profit before taxes, distributed among the players in GS Investment Strategies LLC. Driving back home to Evart for the last time, the couple felt sad and frustrated. They’d known it could all end someday, of course, but they hadn't expected to be made out as villains. Almost anyone in their shoes would have made the same decisions. “If you figured it out and you could do this, would you do it?” Jerry would say later. “I’m just asking. Would you?”

They felt vindicated six months afterward, when the Massachusetts inspector general released his report on July 27, 2012. Twenty-five pages long, the report didn’t exactly absolve the Selbees. They and the other high-volume bettors had broken lottery rules by operating terminals themselves, and by doing so outside regular hours. (Though Harvey did not respond to interview requests for this story either, both he and Lu did speak at length with an investigator from the inspector general’s office; details of their activities are drawn largely from this report.) The report also confirmed the accuracy of the Globe stories: For years, as betting groups took advantage of the unique features of Cash WinFall, the Massachusetts State Lottery had looked the other way.

But the report also complicated the narrative of big guys screwing over little guys. There was no evidence, wrote the inspector general, that the game had harmed anyone—not the small players, and not the taxpayers. Over seven and a half years, Cash WinFall had pumped nearly $120 million into state coffers, thanks in part to the manic ticket-buying of high-volume players like the Selbees. The large groups had bought some $40 million in tickets, $16 million of which was revenue for the state. And with the exception of the drawings in which the jackpot had been forced to roll down, the big players had not crowded small players out of the game or reduced their chances of winning. “As long as the Lottery announced to the public an impending $2 million jackpot that would likely trigger a roll-down,” read the report, “...no one’s odds of having a winning ticket were affected by high-volume betting. ... When the jackpot hit the roll-down threshold, Cash WinFall became a good bet for everyone, not just the high-volume bettors.”

The lottery had worked how it was designed to work. In fact, as one financial reporter for Reuters would argue in the days after the report’s release, Cash WinFall was possibly more fair than other lottery games, because it attracted rich players as well as poor ones. Instead of taxing only the poor, it taxed the rich too. This didn’t mean that the public outrage over Cash WinFall was unwarranted, just that it was misplaced. In an increasingly unequal society, where everything seems rigged against the little guy, the lottery is a dream that many people still hold onto. It may be the last promise of a level playing field that Americans actually believe: Even if the lottery is a shitty deal and a sucker’s bet, at least everyone who plays is getting the same shitty deal.

But high-rolling players like Jerry and Marge had shattered the illusion, revealing the lottery to be what it is: a flawed, messy, contradictory and load-bearing structure of capitalism that can be gamed like so many other institutions. With Cash WinFall, if you had a knack for math, you could get an edge. If you were willing to spend the money, you could get an edge. If you put in the hours, you could get an edge. And was that so terrible? How was it Jerry’s fault to solve a puzzle that was right there in front of him? How was it Marge’s fault that she was willing to break her back standing at a lottery terminal, printing tickets?

Today, at 79, Jerry still plays the lottery sometimes—the multistate Powerball jackpot. (He is working on a system to pick “hot” numbers, with no success so far.) Once in a while he goes to a casino and plays Texas Hold ’em. Marge goes with him but doesn’t like to gamble; Jerry will give her $100 to play the slot machines, and she will give him $100 back at the end of the night. While Harvey and Lu went on to found an Internet startup and join the tech industry, the Selbees used their winnings to develop a new business venture: construction financing. Jerry now lends money to home builders in the Traverse City area who provide housing for military veterans, among others. “Marge is one of my big investors,” he said.

And after all these years, the Selbees still get together with members of their lottery group, reliving their adventures and defending their actions. One such morning, a few of them met for breakfast at the diner in Evart.

“The odds are the odds,” Wood said.

“They were just computer picks,” Marge chimed in.

“There’s no magic to a computer pick,” Wood continued. “It was perfectly legal. It’s the American way.”

“I look for tendencies,” Jerry said. “That’s all. Nothing guaranteed.”

Marge, who recently turned 80, was eating pancakes. She had poured so much sugar on top that there was almost no pancake visible beneath the crust of white. She’d always known, she said, that the caper couldn’t last forever. And there had been so many queasy moments of risk and uncertainty along the way. But now, without the game, life was a little emptier. “I really do miss it,” she said. “I’m too young to quit working.”

CREDITS

Story - Jason Fagone

Jason is an investigative reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle. His work has appeared The New York Times, GQ, New York and Wired. His latest book, The Woman Who Smashed Codes, about the American codebreaker Elizebeth Smith Friedman, was published in 2017.

Photography - Lyndon French

Lyndon is a documentary-influenced portrait photographer based out of Chicago.

Creative Direction & Design - Sandra Garcia

Sandra is the creative director of Highline.

Development & Design - Gladeye

Gladeye is a digital innovations agency in New Zealand and New York.

“I beg that you see how I am only human,” Otto Warmbier pleaded tearfully at his February 2016 show trial in Pyongyang. The University of Virginia honor student sat in judgment beneath gold-framed portraits of the Kim family, tugging occasionally at the fratty summer jacket he wore over his parti-colored shirt. Before him: a scrum of cameras and a horseshoe of dour goons scribbling in notebooks. The courtroom itself—its dimensions were simply wrong. Too tall, too narrow, why’s there a fern in the corner. Dreamlike, in the eeriest way.

“I have made the worst mistake of my life,” Otto admitted. Two months earlier, he’d ventured into North Korea as part of a five-day package with a China-based outfit called Young Pioneer Tours. He and some other Westerners did what was apparently common on these trips: They imbibed a few cocktails, they snapped a few outré photos in front of statues of mass murderers. As they were boarding their plane out of the country, however, Otto was quietly apprehended. He was accused of committing “a hostile act against the state.” Eventually, Otto was arraigned on charges of working secretly for the U.S. government and attempting to “[bring] down the foundation of [North Korea’s] single-minded unity.” How he supposedly went about this was by stealing a propaganda poster from a forbidden floor of the hotel where his group was staying. For evidence, the North Korean government provided ostensible surveillance footage showing ... a silhouetted humanoid ... lifting up a sign? And leaning it against a wall?

Along with countless others, I watched on television as Otto raised a prayer to the courtroom ceiling. I watched him collapse headfirst toward the microphone, as if the molten despair spilling through his mind had hardened, and set. I watched his body rack with sobs.

The North Koreans sentenced Otto to 15 years of hard labor. Seventeen months later, he was returned suddenly to the United States. Photos showed him being carried off a plane, limp as an exhausted child, colorless as a ghost, with tubes curling into his nose. Soon it was revealed that Otto was in a persistent vegetative state. He died after a few days at home.

Our commander in chief responded by accusing the North Koreans of torturing Otto “beyond belief.” A member of their foreign ministry rebutted by calling Donald Trump an “old lunatic.” The executive branch would eventually return the DPRK to the list of state terror sponsors, and Congress banned all Americans from traveling there. One of the world’s most fraught relationships deteriorated further—to the point where our president has taken to trolling North Korea’s ICBM-possessing dictator by referring to him as “Little Rocket Man” and cracking erectile dysfunction jokes. Meanwhile, the North Koreans have tested more missiles. Slowly, steadily, the specter of thermonuclear flame war has risen higher across our horizon, thanks in part to our modern Archbro Ferdinand who maybe ganked a poster while out on tour with an obscure travel group.

It was that obscure travel group Otto’s father lit into during a press conference following his son’s return. While dressed in the same ecru blazer Otto wore during his trial, Fred Warmbier denounced Young Pioneer Tours for turning his son into “fodder” for the isolated regime. “They lure Americans, then they take them hostage, then they do things to them, and that’s what happened to my son,” he said, conflating the Young Pioneers with the North Korean government.

Admittedly, YPT was doing a less than stellar job of convincing people that it was not, say, a malign backpacking cult. In the wake of Otto’s death, the group scrubbed any mention of him from its various accounts, aside from a Facebook note stating that “we too are reeling with the shock of a young man's life taken well before his time.” YPT discreetly amended the “North Korea FAQ” section of its website. No longer was the question “How safe is it?” followed by the answer: “Extremely safe! Despite what you may hear, North Korea is probably one of the safest places on Earth to visit.” Now, YPT acknowledged: “Despite what you may hear, for most nationalities, North Korea is probably one of the safest places on Earth to visit provided you follow the laws as provided by our documentation and pre-tour briefings.”

Inelegant, to say the least. But as I dug deeper into the company, I learned that inelegance was YPT’s stock in trade. Its promotional materials read like Ryanair in-flight magazine columns penned by laddish blokes who would absolutely follow through on a dare to thud-shut an unabridged dictionary on one or another’s testicles. “I’m sure we’ve all daydreamed about owning a time machine,” began a blog entry written after Otto’s apprehension. One essential journey would be to the year 3000 to see “just how fine your great-great-great-granddaughter really is.” After that, “my itinerary consists of those strange turning points in history ... Think the dying days of the Roman Empire, a time when the art of hosting orgies reached its throbbing, writhing zenith. Or Germany’s Weimar years, when ‘degenerates’ of all stripes drank and sang in the Berlin cabarets as Hitler’s brownshirts marched outside.”

Left: Otto Warmbier bows before the North Koreans at his show trial in Pyongyang. REUTERS/KCNARight: “#monday” read the caption for this now-deleted Instagram picture of Gareth Johnson.

Many of these posts were written by YPT founder and “semi-mythical travel creature” (their words) Gareth Johnson, a 37-year-old Brit. Gareth’s worldly experience began when he went for a dip in raging Bengali floodwaters at age 16. From there, he became a cruise-ship bartender, an English instructor and a foolhardy entrepreneur who has started several companies beyond YPT. One was a Philippines-based stag party service called Gross Negligence Travel that promised “beaches, babes, bullets and booze (all cheap).”

Legion are the stories of a drunk Gareth falling out of a moving train and breaking his ankle, or passing out on the floor at a homestay with his member a-dangle from his shorts, or attempting to cross the border from the DPRK into China while “almost unable to stand and barely understandable when he did speak,” as one client put it. In the aftermath of Otto’s detention, Gareth told Reuters he was going to remain in North Korea “to try and work out what the situation was.” Less than two weeks later, though, Gareth posted a photo to Instagram showing him snuggled up to a bottle of clear liquor, pouting. One week after that, Gareth posted another photo to Instagram showing a customer standing amid a wintertime train station, pantsless. Hashtag: NorthKorea.

When the Daily Mail ran a story last June under the headline “The ‘Grossly Negligent’ Brit who sent student to his doom in North Korea,” Gareth wiped himself from social media. He declined interviews. Stopped answering his phone. He really did transform into a semi-mythical travel creature.^[1]

The negative press coverage, the group’s own tone-deaf communiques, motherloving Gareth—all of it pointed to YPT being a clutch of maladaptive nihilists who made good money escorting louche tools to the most politically and culturally sensitive locations on the planet. Even their name was off-putting. The Young Pioneers had been the Communists’ child indoctrination wing, something like the Boy Scouts (or Hitler Youth) for would-be apparatchiks. Yet somehow, this shoestring-budgeted company promising “to take you safely and cheaply through any place on the planet that your mother would like you to stay away from!” had earned a perfect 5.0 score on TripAdvisor.

Which is to say that somewhere along the line there, I signed up for YPT’s inaugural Caucasus Combo tour. I don’t know—it was late at night, and I was in deep. This two-week, $2,540 trip was part of a larger Summer Soviet package that would begin in Chernobyl, stop in Moscow (where I’d join up), ramble through the Chechen Republic and then drop into the diplomatically unrecognized Republic of South Ossetia. Come mid-August, the Young Pioneers would be the first group of international yahoos to have toured the latter two republics. Assuming everything went according to plan, of course.

And what a plan it was. Eight days after Otto’s death, my putative guide Shane, an Irishman one year my senior, was responding to my visa-application queries with answers like “You can use fake hotels” and “Handle that independently.” He enjoined me to present the Russian embassy with a bogus itinerary centered around bus tours in Estonia. At no point during this process was any peep made as to the State Department’s warning:^[2]“Do not travel to Chechnya or any other areas in the North Caucasus region. If you reside in these areas depart immediately.” As for the South Caucasus, well: “U.S. Embassy personnel are restricted from travel to Abkhazia or South Ossetia, even in the case of emergencies involving U.S. citizens… There are no commercial airports in either region making air ambulance evacuations impossible during medical emergencies.”

In other words, it was profoundly stupid—nay, monumentally irresponsible—for an American to go traipsing along these geopolitical fault lines. I knew this journey was selfish to the point where I could very well affect international relations. That I could be justly portrayed on TV as one more callous and/or terminally privileged dingus who had viewed the prospect of his death as a feature and not a bug. I knew this—as I suppose Otto knew, on some level, the risks that went along with his own YPT trip.

Yet the moment my plane swayed gently into its runup to liftoff, I felt the purest of pre-journey elation. As the YPT literature in my hand suggested, “It does not get much more adventurous and off the beaten path than this.”

I was no stranger to Moscow, having studied at the Russian State University for the Humanities in 2006. Russian language—along with literature and history—was one of my majors in college (owing to a beloved Soviet-fleeing grandfather). The other major was journalism (owing to no rational thought process I can recall). I used to have a readymade joke about how my education prepared me for a career in the thrilling field of 1933, ha-ha, until recent history made that joke not funny.

What a lot of people don’t know is that Moscow (including its surrounding administrative oblast) is the largest metropolitan area in Europe. About 16 million people live here, in their cars on the roads mostly, at every hour of the day and night. My taxi floundered through this traffic for the hour and 45 minutes it took to reach the hotel YPT had booked on the fringe of the city center.

Moscow is a world capital, surely, but to me that morning she was still redolent of darker times. Each flash of venal-oligarch chic was offset by rows of crumbling, rectilinear housing blocks. Low unbroken clouds like synthetic stuffing seemed to aggravate the dinge. The monumentalist scale of Stalin’s high-rises and the vast central avenues called to mind the longed-for New Masses who never quite showed up. The actual Muscovites seemed very busy, though maybe not exactly working.

There’s a good deal of French hiding behind Cyrillic, yet the script itself lends Moscow the appearance of a truly foreign place. Like Arabic or Hindi, except slightly more familiar, more comfortable, because the English-speaking First Worlder can kinda-sorta see the linguistics peering around those hyperextended яs and spread-eagled жs. Many Russians have retained the Nordic features of their first Viking rulers, which also helps quell a white Westerner’s fear of the unknown. Nevertheless, most Russians older than, oh, age 30 still interact with unfamiliars according to the survival programming learned under Communism: Deny, dissemble, mock on the sly. All told, Moscow is that rare European metropolis different enough to make a traveler feel like a stranger.

And that’s what impels so much of travel, isn’t it? The quest after ever more novel, ever more unsettling places? Sailors, pith-helmeted Victorians and foreign correspondents used to be the only ones who could honestly call themselves world travelers. Now, though, much of the developed and developing world crisscrosses our globe as if searching after something.^[3] What we’re searching after, professor Dean MacCannell tells us in his seminal works The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class and The Ethics of Sightseeing, is not necessarily luxury or R&R but difference. Difference that might change us. We’re looking to experience something so transformative that we just might return home an improved version of who we were when we left.

Once upon a time, there was a word for this kind of searching: pilgrimage. Religious travel used to ease this yearning for personal renewal. (It also begat the first touristic infrastructure, requiring things like inns and guidebooks—but I digress.) Today, the task of wholly-other discovery by way of wayfaring falls mainly to tourism.

One might call this a symptom of existential modernity. That is, a “modern” person is often a traveler because that person (consciously or no) feels rootless or spiritually homeless and believes real reality and genuine living are to be found elsewhere. In the past, perhaps, or in more “primitive” cultures or “purer” lifestyles. Anywhere, really, but where that modern person happens to find herself most days.

The hitch is that with ever more people seeking these authentic experiences, authenticity becomes that much harder to experience. Masses of travelers tend to leave in their wake the same hotels, souvenir shops, fast-food joints, Zaras, H&Ms and Starbucks—the “small monotonous world that everywhere shows us our own image,” as the tourism scholars Louis Turner and John Ash put it. Our relentless drive to ferret out and consume difference is causing us to erase it.

Into this scarcity step Young Pioneer Tours and rivals like Wild Frontiers, Untamed Borders and War Zone Tours. They truck in a type of traveling—to war zones, political hot spots, “dodgy” locales—that is known as “adventure” tourism (or “dark” tourism, which, more on that later). It’s a surprisingly vibrant market, one that grew by about 65 percent annually between 2008 and 2012 (the last year data was available) to a value of $263 billion. A lot of that growth is generated by your more stereotypically “adventurous” activities like whitewater rafting and bungee jumping. But a good chunk of it is driven by people who want to go where Anthony Bourdain or Vice News go.

Come, the subliminal pitch tells us, discover locales that have managed to avoid the infectious monoculture of the contemporary world. Never mind that, like explorers come bearing blankets, we can’t help but introduce pathogens we’ve long since grown inured to.

At the Muzeon Park of Arts, an open-air gallery of Soviet sculptures, I met the individuals with whom I’d be sharing the enforced companionship of the road. They hewed pretty closely to the demographic norm for these kinds of tours: eight professionals, all but one of them white Westerners, all but one of them older than my 31 years. The gender split was more equitable than usual, though, with four men and four women present. Each was a veteran YPTer, which was not surprising because in nine years’ time, the company has earned a huge repeat-customer business. Usually, people wet their feet in North Korea; then, like one of Otto Warmbier’s not-at-all-traumatized groupmates, they go on subsequent YPT trips to Cuba or Turkmenistan. In fact, almost every YPT guide has been drawn from its customer base—including one young Australian who climbed the ranks after his trip with Otto.

“Aye, we practically checked you out with the FBI. You came out of nowhere,” Shane said in his starchless Galway accent. “No Facebook presence, no connection with past customers, no DPRK.”

“And now you can never, ever go!” Matilda,^[4] a spritely Finnish doctor, added in French-perfumed English. Then she smiled. Matilda was never not smiling—smizing, really, with blue elliptic eyes.

Until Otto’s death, trips to North Korea had made up some 70 to 80 percent of YPT’s business. It’d been so ever since 2006, when Gareth claimed to have discovered a route into the Hermit Kingdom via Hong Kong that was cheaper than the one other tour companies were using. He tried it on his own, got shithoused with a North Korean official “in charge of stuff” and had such a good time that he decided he should guide others to their own good time in the DPRK. Now, YPT is the second-biggest player in North Korean tourism behind Koryo Tours, which offers pretty much the same itinerary but with a lesser chance of your getting “pranked” with the ol’ “can’t find your husband’s passport, sorry!” gag during the DPRK border crossing. (“Note,” this particular customer wrote, “YPT guide used to make fun of me during the tour in front of the group, which was absolutely fine with me, really! However, in this situation, it was not funny!”)

After spending a lean 45 minutes in Red Square, Shane directed our photo-snapping blob to a nearby outdoor café. “I haven’t had a beer in a long time,” he announced.

“How long?” I asked.

“Three days. That’s a long time in my line of work,” Shane said, and then cheers’ed the table when our pints arrived.

Shane was adequately stylish, clad always in faded black jeans + loud floral-print tee + white high-top Converse. On his right hand, he wore a traditional Claddagh ring in the position that indicated he was single and ready to mingle. He had a trickster’s smirking charisma about him. Handsome in a British Isles-y way—brown beard covering round cheeks, thinning hair swept back, brown eyes lively, smile fully pelleted with ovoid teeth.

His job, it appeared, was to act as the epoxy to group cohesion. This was his third year leading trips in Russia. He spoke not a word of the language save пиво—beer.

At the other end of our patio table sat Inna, a young, blonde Ukrainian who radiated modesty and concern. Inna was a former YPT intern who’d taken on an elevated role for this tour because she was the only one in the company who could speak Russian. Indispensable as she was, Inna’s relationship with Shane did not come across as equal. She was the one who’d reached out to the guides in Chechnya and South Ossetia; she had to act as the group’s menu translator and train-ticket buyer; she had to defer to Shane whenever questions arose, and stay awake while he disco-napped, and basically do everything while he concerned himself with morale. As we drank deeper, Inna walked off to “charge [her] phone.”

Across from me was Ruud, a hefty, bespectacled Bavarian who stood at least a full head taller than everyone else. Ruud seemed ashamed of his relatively limited English. That, or he was something of an eccentric, because rather than talk, he preferred to flip open his phone’s leather case and study digital maps whenever we sat down as a group. (He would, however, brighten considerably if anyone brought up world football. Ruud had an encyclopedic knowledge of match dates, locations and scores.) If we made toasts or attempted getting-to-know-you games, he would flatly state “I don’t play your games,” before returning to his phone.

Next to Ruud was George. At 59, George was our lone senior, a retired Barclays employee (bloody forced out amid the financial crisis, George admitted after a few pints) who carefully apportioned his pension for budget trips like this one. George was short, hunched, a mild stutterer. He wore khaki pants and narrow transition lenses. His upper and lower lips curled away from one another in diametrically opposed directions, providing him with a countenance as stunned-seeming as a clobbered cartoon duck’s. George had a rich, rolling laugh, and he brought it out at the slightest provocation. I could picture him jaywalking Magoo-ishly, going up and over a motorist’s hood, and then staggering to his feet with a ho-ho.

Matilda was planning to celebrate her 30th birthday by driving a Panzer tank over a family sedan “because I am Finnish, of course.”

Hearing George and Ruud discuss the wide-ranging YPT trips they’d been on, I felt something akin to inadequacy. I liked to think I was a pretty serious traveler myself. I’d been to strange places, done dumb things. I’d tracked down alleged witches in Papua New Guinea’s central highlands; I’d walked 1,000 miles across and down Florida’s peninsula. There was an ill-advised tattoo of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, on my neck, even. But I was a goddamned amateur compared to these people.

“It’s a community,” insisted Gabriella, a blonde Austro-Australian luxury goods accountant. She was one half of a pair of women—opposite Chandra, a brunette Californian property manager—who had become fast friends on the Chernobyl leg of the Summer Soviet tour. Throughout the trip, these two stuck to each other as if Siamese twinned, whispergiggling in their private language. They would pretend to reveal things about themselves that (unbeknownst to others) were patently untrue, and then they’d laugh about it once we’d believed them. They often rolled their eyes at Matilda, or gossiped about her under their breath as she was speaking—like at this moment, for instance, when Matilda was bragging about how she would visit her 100th country well before her 30th birthday, which she planned to celebrate by driving a panzer tank over a family sedan “because I am Finnish, of course.”

“Even if you don’t know anyone on a trip,” Gabriella interjected, “you probably have four or five Facebook friends in common.”

“Like fookin’ Reinhart,” Shane offered. Everybody laughed but me and Jin, my roommate for the duration of the journey. Jin was a quiet, precise, stringily swimfit pathologist from Canada. When I asked him why he had chosen that field, he said, “My bedside manner is terrible, and I don’t like or understand people.” Jin classified his own need to see all of Russia as “pathological”—hence this trip.

After our fifth round, we decided it was time for dinner and more drinks. We were abuzz with anticipation, and also alcohol. None among us was married, or in a serious relationship, or outwardly amorous in virtually any sense. We were as unattached as tumbleweeds. We were also greatly inconveniencing our tomorrow, when the adventure began in earnest. But, what is an adventure except an inconvenience rightly considered? And, anyway, who goes on adventures nowadays, other than those in a position to take on inconvenience?

The next evening, we loaded up on beers in multiples of 12 and boarded our 36-hour train to Vladikavkaz, a city in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains at Russia’s southwestern border. From there, we’d take a minibus into Chechnya, an Islamic ethnostate that has been in violent conflict with the motherland ever since the tsar first tried to subdue the mountains three centuries ago.

Chechnya hasn’t been much of a destination for Russians, foreigners—anyone—until, well, now. “You’re the guinea pigs!” as Shane had toasted. And for me, at least, this was an uneasy proposition.

During and after the two wars with Russia that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, anywhere between 70,000 and 200,000 Chechen civilians (out of a population of about 800,000) were killed. What remains is a hard mountain people. Their national symbol is the wolf. Their image within the federation is that of school- and theater-bound hostage takers, bus and subway bombers. Even my two best friends, veterans of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had warned me that the most fearsome mujahedeen they encountered were the Chechens—were by far the Chechens. Before I left, they sent links to the Chechen War execution videos we’d stumbled across as bored adolescents in the hairier days of file-sharing services. Boots on foreheads, cries for mama, serrated blades plunging into necks and then sawing…

On the train, we Young Pioneers peopled two sleeper compartments—four men in one, four women in another, Shane off by himself—and resumed where we’d left off. As our ponderous old carriage trundled past suburbs and then black forest, we powered on a Bluetooth speaker and took turns judging one another’s musical tastes. We played “Never have I ever.”

Shane surprised everyone by admitting that never had he ever pissed himself while drunk. We learned that Jin cooks chicken and vegetables for himself six nights a week (the seventh being reserved for date night with Mum). Ruud threw us a biographical bone: He’s an accountant specializing in agribusiness, and he walks to the office each morning at six because he likes to be alone for as long as possible. Matilda’s never touched a drop of booze in her life, owing to her incorrigibly alcoholic parents—though she does drink something like 14 Cokes while doing her rounds of internal medicine with the elderly. “They groan when they see me,” she said with a smile, “because I mean they are probably not long for this world!”

Eventually, the group broke off into what I discovered was their favorite—and, for all intents and purposes, only—topic of conversation: remote territories they’ve visited, visas they’ve accrued, who was beating whom in the race around the globe.

George: “I got a Nagorno-Karabakh visa when I went.”

Gabriella: “You’re so lucky! I was on a group visa, so…”

Matilda: “I had an Antarctica stamp, and then somebody stole my freaking passport! And it was almost full!”

Chorus: “Oooooh, that hurts. That hurts.”

It hurt in large part because Matilda, like many on the trip, structured her worklife around travel and not the other way around. To keep her options open, she only signed one-year contracts with hospitals. And to hear her tell it, she dreamed not one whit about a more rooted, domestic life. Which is something she shared with the rest of the group. If these YPTers had any concerns about home, or friends, or daily life in the abstract—they did not let on. They made a show of caring only about the road.

While the others continued their passport-measuring contest, I decided to pry. I asked Shane what, if anything, he did before YPT. Standard post-uni malaise, he said. A year working in insurance; a year doing more run-of-the-mill tourism in New Zealand and east Asia. He found out about YPT while browsing Reddit; their whole vibe seemed to square with his personality as well as his academic background, which had been rogue states.

He’s since become the manager for all non-Korea tours as well as an investor in the company, he added. And, as we both had some water in the basement at this point, I felt no compunction about asking, “You make good money?”

“Why’s it always a Yank who starts asking about salaries?” Shane said with a laugh. Eventually he conceded: “It doesn’t pay well, no. I don’t have health insurance. I’ve been living in the company flat ever since I broke up with my girlfriend. I don’t know how long I’d want to keep doing this, but I’m doing it now.” He punctuated this statement with a tip of his half-full can, which he then downed.

“Ach,” he said, twisting his head, narrowing his eyes, smacking his lips. “Nothing worse than a warm beer, hey?”

A large-bore sun burned through the cobwebs of my hangover soon after dawn. I slid from supine to seated on my cabin bench, where I squinted out the window at a Hanna-Barbera-esque repeating reel of softly undulating plain → birch forest → onion-domed church overlooking desolate burgh → softly undulating plain → birch forest → and so on.

Russia, in other words. Her rural areas, the little Tolstoyan villages—once considered the foundation of the country’s culture and identity—that have been dilapidated by recent history and socioeconomic trends. The number of deaths in Russia last year exceeded the number of births by several thousand. Her military strength is decaying, her economic dynamism is waning. Even in terms of geography, today’s Russia is the smallest Russia since 17th-century Russia. Her recent lashing out—it’s not exactly coming out of left field.

Soon, my bunkmates roused themselves and Shane joined us in the compartment. We cracked breakfast beers at 9 a.m., passing the time by quizzing Ruud on historic soccer matches. I’d forgotten to buy bottled water and did not have rubles in small-enough denominations for the dining car, so I made the regrettable (regrettable) decision to rehydrate by filling my thermos with bathroom-sink water.

Versts—they flew by. Platforms—we stopped at them. We purchased more flagons of beer and stumbled over railroad ties. Back on the train, a stranger approached. He sauntered down the corridor with a Yorkshire terrier clutched like a football under one arm, his linen shirt unbuttoned to the navel, his stout torso’s worth of symmetrical prison tattoos on full display. He filled our doorframe, petted his lapdog, and announced: “Здравствуйте! Меня зовут Серёжа! Я гангстер.”

“Ahh, err,” I translated. “Fellows, this is Seryozha. He says hello. Also, that he is a gangster.”

Seryozha simpered ironically, the way a wiseguy will when he knows he has a gun and you do not. He waved his free hand at George, who inched closer to Jin to make room on the bench. Seryozha tsk tsk’ed me for the Baltika 9 I was drinking, withdrew a Heineken from his left pants pocket and proceeded to hold court for the next ??? hours, lecturing me (and, through my spotty translation, the rest of the cabin) on topics such as: “Why I Stole Motorbikes”; “Prison Was Prison, and You Don’t Want to Know About Prison”; “Man, Did I Miss Cooze, Though”; and, lastly, “Magic.” Seryozha had so many prison card tricks he wished to perform, every single one of them inscrutable to us civilians. He’d say something I couldn’t translate, shuffle, bite his lip, flip down a random suit, and then look from face to face, awaiting our reaction.

“Express astonishment, you dipshits,” I hissed through a smile. “Jesus Christ!”

Jet lag, bender, the amniotic rock of a Soviet-era rail system—whatever it was, I began to lose my senses of temporality, corporeality. At a brief platform stop, I hopped off with Sergie, who bought us bottles of citrus vodka and Ukrainian cognac-substitute from a guy with a bag. By the time we returned to the cabin, it was just him, me, Shane and George. Seryozha toasted to romanticism, to romanticism not being dead, he had me clarify. I’m pretty sure he had us toast to strong borders, and lasting friendship between Putin and Trump, whom Sergie loved. We choked down the cognac. Shane and George left immediately thereafter, whinnying. Sergie brought out a satchel of pearly cold cuts and began to make sandwiches for the two of us. When I tried to tell him that he need not, he laughed softly and placed a finger to my lips.

This begged the eternal traveler’s question: What the fuck am I doing here?

I’d often thought that travel wasn’t travel until I encountered something I didn’t understand. That is to say: If I came across people or situations that were easy to read, I was probably reading my own character or experience or beliefs into those things. But if I found someone or something whose meaning remained dark to me? Well, that person or that thing might be what ultimately illuminates the place. Such was the paradox: I wanted to understand Russia, East Timor or wherever it was I happened to be. But the moment I did understand them, I worried, would be the moment I was no longer traveling.

Seryozha’s finger on my lips was as cold and dense as the head of a tack hammer. He looked deeply into my eyes, switched to a rapid-fire Russian I had no feel for (save the intermittent swearing), and laughed while slapping my cheek several times before halting his monologue with a sudden, serious: Don’t you agree?

Strange to think his Yorkie understood Russian better than I did. “Конечно да,” I said. Of course I do. We laughed into one another’s faces. We proposed more toasts over slimy sandwiches. I gulped bathroom water from my thermos the way a drowning man swallows the sea. Somewhere along the line there, my lights cut out.

I awoke facedown on my bench. Shane stood over me, asserting, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! It smells like absolute cow shite in here!” I let out a long groan; I felt as if I had been slowly, painfully teleported, my body and soul disintegrated and then reconstituted on the other side, except not all of me made the journey. I cracked an eye and saw that passengers were filing off with their luggage. We had reached Vladikavkaz. I pushed myself into a seated position. I immediately sank half an inch into warm loam.

“Everything all right?” my travelmates asked. I grabbed my duffel and shoved past them, agitating for the water closet in a lock-kneed spraddle-waddle. Once inside, I took a few minutes to peel my pasted jeans from my body. I tried stuffing the evidence into the overflowing toilet paper basket. (When did I eat chives? Why are the stalks unbroken??) Alas, this narrow-gauge receptacle was hopeless. Gabriella pounded on the door, shouted that she needed to go one last time, also we had a bus to catch.

I understood panic then. Panic is an emotional state in which what was once background noise suddenly overwhelms everything else in one’s head. Fortunately, Uniqlo had been running a sale on the jeans I prefer in the week before my departure, so I pulled an identical pair out of my duffel. I triple-wrapped the evidence in plastic bags, having no choice but to carry it with me until I could sneak off and dispose of it. I joined the others at the front of the train station.

The atmosphere of the North Caucasus was bright, cloudless and kiln-hot. Inna paced nervously, worried that our Chechen chaperones had blown us off, but soon a white minibus turned into the small parking lot. From it emerged our guide, Mohammed, and Mohammed’s translator, Mohammed.

Welcome! said our guide (dubbed “Mohammed #1” by the group) via translator (“Mohammed #2”). You are first group of internationals to tour Chechnya! he proclaimed.

Unlike virtually every other Chechen man I encountered, Mohammed #1 did not wear a beard. He had a gaunt, pallid face and deep-set blue eyes that often expressed impatience with his more conservative countrymen. Mohammed #2, on the other hand, was a lithe ex-kickboxer in his mid-20s, which put him maybe a decade younger than Mohammed #1. He sported the same forward-combed hair and trimmed beard as Chechnya’s beloved mountain enforcer of a president, Ramzan Kadyrov—and by all appearances, Mohammed #2 shared Ramzan’s outward approval of everything orthodox. This tour was a first for them, too. Usually, they made music videos for people.

We drove for 90 minutes through North Ossetia, Ingushetia and finally into Chechnya, stopping briefly at the outskirts of Grozny, the capital city, to allow soldiers in an armored personnel carrier to sweep for IEDs. On first glance, Grozny seemed slapdash and impermanent, like a temporary colony on a craggy desert planet. Freshly planted saplings, haphazard apartment complexes spaced widely apart, and every few miles or so, a gleaming roadside mosque or new minimall. Grozny has been 99 percent rebuilt, Mohammed #1 told us. Some say 97, but I say 99. There’s a Putin Avenue. Not even Moscow or St. Petersburg has a Putin Avenue.

This is because the Grozny that stands today would not exist without his money. Shortly after Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov, modern Chechnya’s answer to George Washington, was assassinated in 2004, power coalesced around his large adult son Ramzan, who has proved himself to be one of Putin’s most trusted strongmen. Ramzan’s loyalty is expensive, though. From 2008 to 2012, Moscow pledged $120 billion to Chechnya. The torrent has since dwindled, but federal subsidies still accounted for 81 percent of the republic’s budget in 2015. The deal is that Ramzan gets to do what he pleases with this money so long as his fiefdom remains pacified, and loyal to the Kremlin.

And what appears to please Kadyrov is: purging his republic of homosexuals; burning down the homes of suspected extremists; posting Instagram videos in which Putin critics are put in literal crosshairs; possibly-probably involving himself in the murders of human rights activists, opposition leaders and journalists like Anna Politkovskaya. Among other interests, of course. Ramzan is also a big fan of coercing divorced couples to get back together, as well as mixed martial arts.

Such is the Faustian irony at the heart of modern Chechnya. After 300 years of open rebellion, the mountain warriors were finally subdued by Russia—but in being subdued, they achieved more practical autonomy than they had known during the previous three centuries. The tragedy is that this autonomy happens to be directed by a tyrant as petulant and capricious as a spoiled child.

It was impossible to avoid the man our first day there. He loomed so large, psychically. We drove under many an arch that featured his sun-blanched visage. We visited the monument and museum complex dedicated to Akhmat-hadji, where our Versace’d guide led us past more portraits of Ramzan and his signature Who, me?? smirk. “He sleeps only four hours a night,” Mohammed #2 confided. “He always is going from construction sites to business and soccer stadiums and things like this, telling his opinion. They don’t have to listen to his opinion, but often they do because it is correct.”

Ramzan Kadyrov took the place of fuzzy dice in one of our transports in Chechnya. PHOTO: KENT RUSSELL

Unbeknownst to the group, Inna had been reaching out to Ramzan via his infamous Instagram account. Kadyrov’s cult of personality thrives on social media, where he’s posted many well-liked pictures and video clips of himself praying, himself hanging with Gérard Depardieu and Elizabeth Hurley, himself wrestling crocodiles, himself starring in the trailer for an action film entitled “Whoever Doesn’t Understand Will Get It.” Despite having more Instagram followers than subjects in his republic, Ramzan decided to “follow” Inna back. Now, she could converse with him directly. In the Kadyrov museum, Inna apprised Shane of this development and asked what she should write. “‘Hello Mr. President,’” Shane suggested, “‘we are a group of foreigners from different nationalities that would love to meet you and discuss travel and tourism in your beautiful country.’” Those of us who overheard this back-and-forth craned our necks to get a look at Inna’s phone, snickering deliriously.

Later, the Mohammeds walked us to an overlit marble-and-gold party hall where veiled women were hurriedly stitching roses into sculptural arrangements. Tomorrow is Ramzan’s mother’s birthday, Mohammed #1 told us. This is special surprise for you, to see.

Shane checked behind the bar—mixers only. Inna and the Gabriella-Chandra dyad took selfies on the bedazzled stage. I walked between set tables to the place of honor. I turned to Mohammed #2 and said, “Aren’t they worried about security or anything? I mean, if I was an assassin, I could poison Ramzan’s glass here.”

“No, no,” Mohammed #2 assured me, “nobody here would try to kill Kadyrov. All the extremists, they went to the jihad, so they’re not here.”

“Are we invited to the party?” Shane inquired.

“We will see,” Mohammed #2 said.

“Can we crash the party?” Shane retried.

“We will see, but no,” Mohammed #2 answered.

“Does nobody else feel icky about this?” I asked. I didn’t mean it rhetorically, but that’s what the question ended up being.

In the ballroom before the big birthday bash for Ramzan’s mom. PHOTO: KENT RUSSELL

For the next few days, we crisscrossed the republic in our minibus, taking in what few sites Chechnya had to offer.

● Firstly, the liquor store. Or, once we learned that Chechnya has no liquor stores, the one Western-style supermarket in town where a person is permitted to buy alcohol between the hours of 8 a.m. and 10 a.m.

Most every day at 9:50, our minibus screeched into the parking lot, where we disembarked and did battle with a handful of bleary-eyed Russians over the small supply of booze. This the Chechens kept under guard in a wire cage, which they rattled when yelling things like “THREE MINUTES TO GO, ДАВАЙ!” while we frantically raked bottles of “Your Choice Whiskey, With Taste of Scotch” into our baskets à la “Supermarket Sweep” contestants.

● We visited many a cluster of ancient stone towers, the narrow, pointed fortifications in which every Chechen family used to live. “Seen one, seen 'em all,” Shane decreed.

As our minibus descended switchbacks after one such excursion, Inna received a reply from Ramzan. He wanted to know what we were doing later.

● One day, we clambered up wet and insanely treacherous rocks in order to dip our tootsies in the pool beneath a tall and prismatic waterfall. “Mohammed,” I said to #2 while pinioning my arms, trying to keep my center of gravity beneath me. “Do Chechens have anything like the legal concept of liability?” Around us, children ran across wet stones at a full sprint. Grandmothers skipped from foot to foot with a baby curled to each shoulder. After giving my question some thought, Mohammed #2 said: “No. We don’t have this. If you break your leg, you have broken your leg.”

● Late in the week, we crashed a Chechen wedding where: a) There was no drinking, naturally. (“Because then the men would fight the men”—Mohammed #2.) And yet: b) The guests still managed to dance feverishly, unselfconsciously.

Imagine a sped-up sea chanty set to double bass drums, and then transliterated into Lite Brite—that’s Chechen wedding music. Now imagine a baroque heel-toe jig combined with a lot of bent elbows and flouncing karate chops, all performed while moving quickly in a circle with a pistol tucked into your waistband—that’s Chechen wedding dancing. The groom’s family begged us to give it a try, but we’d left our alcohol on the bus, so we watched from the safety of the balcony.

It’s useful, if you’re a tour company, to keep everyone good and loaded. Drunk people are less likely to nitpick, more apt to overlook things. That, and a group of drinkers builds complicity through mutual embarrassment. For instance, the jokes at the bar about Hey, Kent, you definitely shit your pants on the train, right??—and then my being like, Ha, yeah, sure, I shit my pants on the train, and I’ve been wearing them practically every day since, with shit in them, ha!—this really brought us together.

Honestly, the group needed booze to butterfly their tongues. Without it, my fellow Young Pioneers tended to sit back and watch in silence as my or Shane’s attempts at engagement thudded to ground like unheeded flares. The most excited I ever saw them get was when they were told they’d be able to send postmarked postcards from South Ossetia. Give them alcohol, though, and the travel tales flowed. They would balk at the comparison, yet there was little difference between these adventure travelers on two chardonnays and elderly cruisers seated around the dining table, kvetching and talking shop in turn.

One evening, while we were waiting outside our hotel for a taxi to whisk us to our nightly drinking session at the capital’s lone bar, a dome atop the “five-star” Grozny City Hotel, a nondescript sedan pulled up to us. Out stepped a stocky man in damp gym clothes. He strode to Inna and explained that he was the head of the secretariat of the Chechen Republic. Effectively, he was the president’s aide-de-camp. Ramzan had dispatched him to see what our deal was.

He, Inna and Mohammed #1 sat down on a bench; the rest of us crowded around. Inna and Mohammed gave Ramzan’s right-hand man the rundown: where we’d been, how beautiful and peaceful and not at all totalitarian we thought Chechnya was. The functionary nodded, his eyes fixed on his phone as he scrolled through Instagram.

Men came out of the hotel to pay their respects. Mohammed #1 sat there swallowing hard, and frequently. Inna asked again if we could meet with Ramzan. The functionary said he’d see what he could do.

Then he burst out laughing. He lowered his chin to his chest. He slapped his knee. We Young Pioneers looked to one another, widening our eyes and practically tugging at our collars.

He held up his phone and played an Instagram video. It was... a propeller plane rumbling down a Chechen street... getting a few inches off the ground... and then slamming directly into a parked car.

It happened not far from where you were today! he told us. Did you expect to see things like this in Chechnya? His smile disappeared. What did you expect to see in Chechnya?

We bit our tongues. We chuckled nervously. No one ventured much.

Well, he said. Let’s take a picture.

I put my hands up. I was ready.Take me to the torture palace.

Every single one of us passed our phones to the assigned hotel employee. Group shots done with, we took selfies. I stood behind the right-hand man’s shoulder. I smiled widely. Turned out, my fly was down. If he smelled the Your Choice on my breath, he didn’t say anything.

Afterward, we tried to hash out the potential ethical quandary of ’Gramming these photos. Chandra said, “I’d keep the photo, but I wouldn’t post it.” Gabriella responded, “You wouldn’t? I definitely would.” Some others agreed. Their rationale was that the head of the secretariat—or, dream of dreams, Ramzan himself—made for quite the trophy to pose next to. Not unlike a lion bagged on safari. Here w/ one of cruelest and most dangerous beings on the planet😂😂. Who would ever top that?

Especially now, when half of one’s Facebook or Insta feed is given over to the unspoken brinkmanship of friends trying to outdo friends with photos geotagged in Skopje (terrible, what tourism has done to the Old City there…), or Patagonia (pff, you got your copy of Bruce Chatwin in your back pocket, bro?), or Machu Picchu (oh, honey). The bar for the most audaciously enviable (yet also relatable!) shot—it keeps jumping higher. I mean, what’s a guy gotta do to get you, the person on the other side of the screen, to take a break from your unleavenably ordinary day in order to admire and begrudge my adventuresome existence??

Paramount to this discussion—yet somehow also lost in it—was the fact that we were snapping these photos in a land subjugated by an autocrat, and we were doing so more or less on that autocrat’s terms. Ramzan Kadyrov condones honor killings, encourages the torture of gays and disappears dissidents. His Instagram is gauche and hilarious, sure; but actually being here, abiding by his rules in his domain, proved we were more comfortable with his “kitschy” tyranny than perhaps we would care to admit. Me and the other YPTers here (as well as the ones in Iran, North Korea, Turkmenistan, et al.)—we were putting a normalizing duckface on jackbooted killers.

That being said, please believe we still went out drinking.

Don't we all. PHOTO: KENT RUSSELL

When we returned to the hotel, our phones were able to draw deeply of the Wi-Fi. They chimed with the same alarming notification: Trump Threatens ‘Fire and Fury’ Against North Korea If It Endangers U.S.

We retreated to the fifth floor’s dark balcony, where we dangled drinks over a flimsy railing. A few hundred yards away, construction cranes slept beside modest high-rises-to-be.

“Oi, slag—so your man Trump, eh?” was how Shane opened the conversation.

Matilda said, “I would so love to put a world map to Trump…”

George agreed, “Yeah, give it to him upside-down. It won’t make any difference.”

“Yes,” I countered, “but isn’t it kind of ridiculous that the world is on the brink of blowing up partly because somebody may have done a dumb thing on one of these trips?”

Everyone aimed their eyes at the intersection below.

“Did any of you know Otto?” I asked.

In unison, a quick no.

“With North Korea, it’s all clickbait,” Shane declaimed. “They can say what they want, they can report what they want, and people will read it.”

“And people will believe what they want to believe,” George agreed.

“Let me tell you how it looked to some across the pond,” I said. Then I explained: A shockingly large segment of the American populace took North Korea at its word regarding Otto’s detention. Based solely on evidence provided by a murderous regime, they believed that Otto, a Jew active in his campus Hillel, “admitted” that he stole a propaganda poster for a church contest.

Why some people believed this, I wasn’t sure. Maybe they saw something resembling accountability, at last. A young, upper-middle-class white kid—the kind who regularly gets acquitted of crimes because of “affluenza" or boys-will-be-boys apologism—was finally subjected to the same harsh standard as the rest of the world. As to whether he had anything to be held accountable for—well…

I queued up some headlines on my phone for them. HuffPost: “North Korea Proves Your White Male Privilege Is Not Universal.” USA Today: “UD Professor says Otto Warmbier got ‘what he deserved.’”

“Bloody hell,” George remarked.

“I get it, though,” I continued. Guys like Otto and me can go to North Korea, Chechnya, the corner store at 3 a.m. and not once have fear flood our minds. Women, people of color, gay or transgender individuals—some of these people would never dream of going to such places. They could never dream it. Which, at bottom, means travel like this is unfair in that I get to move about untethered from the reality of the world as it is experienced by the vast majority of that world. I get to escape my daily life by finding new, unique daily lives to impinge upon.

“Anyway, it probably didn’t help that you guys called North Korea ‘extremely safe’ on your website,” I concluded, starting to fully feel the effects of Your Choice.

“Look,” Shane said. “We know about as much as everybody else knows. But there’s no history of them arbitrarily detaining American citizens. It doesn’t happen. There’s nothing in it for them to do that.”

“I was more afraid in Baltimore than when I was in North Korea,” Matilda offered.

“We got nothing but support from the other tour agencies,” Shane said. “Nothing but support from people going ‘You’ve handled it well,’ or ‘Good luck.’ Because they’ve all had tours where things have gone wrong.”

“Sure,” I said, “but didn’t I read that you guys have some kind of rite of passage where you run down the forbidden floor in your North Korean hotel?”

“That floor is an open secret, yes,” Shane said. “But we never encourage people to go there because then we’d lose our jobs.”

George asked, “He died on American territory, didn’t he? Now, in the U.K., you wouldn’t get a situation where you couldn’t have a proper autopsy, because it would happen automatically. So I don’t quite understand how that would happen in the States.”

Jin, who had been sitting quietly in a corner of the balcony, cleared his throat and said: “You don’t even have to autopsy to find out what happened. You could do any number of brain scans.”

“What do you think, Jin?” I asked. “In your mind, what happened?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “He may have sustained his injury maybe a month or three weeks before he was released.”

“Or more?” Shane said. “Because they were saying he was in a coma for a year.”

“I don’t buy that,” Jin answered. “I don’t believe the North Koreans would do that.”

“What do you think about self-harm?” Shane asked.

“It’s a possibility,” Jin said. “I can’t discount it. But, um, I would assume that American citizens are treated moderately well. They’re worked hard, but, you know, you wouldn’t be without food, you wouldn’t be without water, you wouldn’t be without the basic necessities.”

“You’re probably in better condition than other detainees…” George added.

“We’re still going to take Yanks to North Korea if they’ve got a dual passport,” Shane said. “It’s not like the State Department would know either way, since they don’t stamp your passport…”

I could no longer drink in this discourse. I slipped off to bed.

As was the case practically every morning on my tour, I rose with the sun feeling fresh-cracked. Peering through the gauzy sheet tucked over my head, I thought I could detect my duffel thudding “Tell-Tale Heart”-style across the baseboard, on account of the bagged abomination inside. If I wanted to get rid of my shitty drawers, now was the time—Jin was still asleep, and we weren’t due to meet in the lobby till 9 a.m.

I had been dreaming of this moment for more than a week. Rare were the occasions when I wasn’t surrounded by YPTers. Tense were the days we drove around the republic, getting stopped at checkpoints by teen sticklers with guns. Every time, I saw it playing out: An ambitious young militsiyoner rifles through my bag; he finds a dense brick of something suspicious, hermetically wrapped; he calls out to his superior, to ensure he gets full credit for the find; the whole company gathers round; they lean in; the calm militsiyoner returns to the bus with my mudpants flying atop his bayonet, with a few questions for the group.

I walked along weedy broken sidewalk past shuttered storefronts and exactly zero garbage cans or dumpsters (due to terror concerns). Already the day had been cinched with heat. In time, I found a bench along Putin Avenue with an overflowing garbage bin next to it. It would have to do. So as not to seem like I was planting a bomb, I sat down for a few minutes. While stretched on the bench, I happened to espy Ruud. He was sneaking out of a shawarma joint, his shirt soaked through with meatsweat. I started and then could not stop giggling. I was deep into my adventure, and I had yet to leave that punchy, dreamlike, hungover state in which everything appears absurd and miraculous and causes one to laugh purely, like a child. YPT prefers it this way, I couldn’t help but think.

Aside from my laughter, it was very, very quiet there. Through traffic was barred on Putin Avenue during weekends, so I was able to hear the hammer and rasp of a construction crew in the distance. A few cliques of women in full veil hurried past. I recalled Roger Scruton’s description of the traditional Islamic city: walled houses, jumbled courtyards, and very few public places outside the mosque and souk; “a creation of the shari’a—a hive of private spaces, built cell on cell.” A boulevardier like myself was an anomaly, then. I certainly felt eyes on me.

I didn’t swivel my head, didn’t want to appear suspicious. I just punched my plastic bags deep into the bin. I walked away with my hands in my pockets and a whistle on my lips. That’s when I noticed men emerging from alleys and shop entrances. They were looking my way. I picked up my pace. The men started to shout.

Black-clad militia types poured from a cross street and trotted toward me. I considered running. But running would make it worse, I figured. So I stopped.

Welp, I thought. In the end, it’s even dumber, somehow, than getting accused of stealing a poster. I could see the crawler: “Russia relations strained after American detained, suspected of planting fertilizer bomb.”

For a few seconds, I was irate at YPT. They didn’t expressly encourage stupid behavior, no, but they didn’t discourage it, either. They cultivated an environment in which loathsome things could arise and flourish. Then they disclaimed all liability in the fine print: “We have no responsibility in whole or part and customer agrees we are not liable for any and all liability or claims for any occurrences including but not limited to any delay, loss, accidents, personal injury, political unrest, sickness, medical expenses or property damage occurring on tour.”

You can lead a bro to sociopolitical flashpoints, the company philosophy goes, but you can’t make him stop drinking before he triggers an international incident.

Surely, I thought as the men closed in, this outfit should be shut down. For Christ’s sake, why even give jabronis such as myself the opportunity? At this moment, I could not have agreed more with Pascal: “The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

I had always assumed that my fast and loose traveling would lead to, in the worst case, my getting kidnapped or organ-snatched or hit by a bus—something along those lines. No harm (except to my family and a few friends), no foul (except to my family and a few friends). But I saw now that that was a startlingly naive belief, and possibly a destructive one. Who knew how my detention would affect our Russia policy? Fuck, what will the president tweet?

Asserting one’s ambitions and appetites without regard to the whole—that is never not wrong. Confusing one’s self with the outside world—that is the wellspring of what we used to call sin.

The men approached. I put my hands up. I am ready, I said to myself. Take me to the torture palace.

But the men trotted past me. I wheeled around and saw that they were moving to intercept the first black person I’d seen in Chechnya, a burly guy jogging my way. The guards reached for him, but he juked through their grasp. He made it to the head of the avenue, where a squad of blackshirts had formed a human barrier. They stopped him, they pointed to the bare flesh below the hem of his shorts. They wagged their fingers. They beckoned him to come with. He, jogging in place, flipped double birds, shouted “LEAVE ME ALONE!” in accented English. Then he ran as fast as he could in the other direction.

The militiamen cracked up. I finally exhaled. Then I resumed laughing.

“This beach is much better than the beach in Azerbaijan,” Matilda opined to no one in particular. “There, there is a lot of oil from the refineries in Baku.”

We had exhausted the tourist offerings in Grozny and beyond, so the Mohammeds took us across the border to Derbent in relatively liberal Dagestan, to swim in the Caspian Sea. We spread our hotel towels on the coarse-grit semolina sand that fronted apartment blocks hung with drying laundry. Ruud asked Jin to take his picture while he held an enormous beer in the slate wavewash. Everyone but George stripped down and ran into the water, where half of us were felled by unseen boulders in the surf’s trough. Bleeding from our shins, we frolicked until our beers ran dry, whereupon we returned to the towels.

We asked the Mohammeds if, now that we were out of Chechnya, they wouldn’t like to sneak a drink. “Ehhhh,” Mohammed #1 began. After hard wars, you need hard discipline. Chechnya is rebuilt today because the people are disciplined.

Inna’s phone buzzed with a message. We waited to see if it was an invitation from Ramzan, but it was only YPT’s guide in South Ossetia. “He says that it’s an honor to get guests drunk,” Inna relayed. A loud cheer went up. Buoyed, we drew ourselves into a circle and began to talk current events and politics with the Mohammeds. My tripmates had a stronger grip on the stuff than most Americans, since they were world citizens who had to plan for and react to our temperamental nation’s mood swings like a partner in a codependent relationship. Mohammed #1 told us that Obama was the greatest-ever American president, though Bernie Sanders could have beaten him out. Mohammed #2 said he’s fine with Chechnya being part of Russia. “Somebody else would come along and conquer us,” he conceded. “We are free here to do what we want.”

Too many beats later, Ruud dropped in with: “I think George W. Bush was a better president than Obama.”

As was her wont, Chandra posed a question as a demand: “Maybe you can tell us what you think about what’s happening to Chechnya’s gay population?”

Mohammed #2 began then aborted a few thoughts about Ramzan’s purge. Diplomatically, he offered, “In the West they say this, but here we never hear about it until they say it in the West.” He allowed that there could be as many as two or three homosexuals in Chechnya. “Be gay!” he encouraged these hypothetical gays. “Be gay for yourself! But don't speak about it.”

We had to cancel one of our two scheduled homestays after receiving word that our hostess had fallen out of a tree.

Around us, vacationing Russians were lying on their elbows, paying no mind to the cigarette butts and broken glass studding the sand they were gathering to their torsos. A top-heavy Dagestani bodybuilder in too-small briefs approached us and asked, “Where are you from?” Before we could respond, he shouted “BICEPS!” and contorted into a full-body flex.

Thanks to the beers, our capacity for trust and even love had expanded exponentially. No longer did anything seem banal or merely habitual. We’d moved from the seats to the stage.

“Are you worried about America, Mohammed?” Jin asked. Mohammed #1 said, I don’t want war. I love America. I think New York is greatest city in the world.

“It is Russia Europeans really fear,” Ruud interjected. “Russia coming into the Baltic states.”

Mohammed #1 didn’t wait for Mohammed #2 to translate. He waved away Ruud’s comment before continuing: If I pray for anything, it’s no war. War is something governments do to people. If people could get together like this—here he gestured at the ebb tide, the quarter-sunk sun—we would see that we are all brothers.

And, sure, this was the platitudinous jog of translator-ese. Whatever irony or innuendo Mohammed #1 might have been trying to connote was sifted out of his speech by the more conservative Mohammed #2. What got fed to the Young Pioneers was processed, purified and easy to swallow, like baby food. Sure.

Cynicism aside, though: This moment was beyond improvement. Mohammed #1’s message was being received and appreciated by every YPTer. We were nodding our heads, squeezing shoulders, practically wiping away single teardrops. Later, I’d talk this moment over with the likes of Jin, George, Shane. We all agreed that it was a highlight, if not the highlight, of the trip—nothing dodgy, just some disparate humans on a beach, face to face, existing for one another as ends in ourselves.

“Chechnya is Chechnya, people are people,” George adjudged this moment. It’s a statement that’s hard to disagree with, once you’ve been to the place. Or, for that matter, once you’ve done any traveling whatsoever.

“Any time you try to understand the world,” Matilda offered, “it can only be a good thing.”

Warm breeze, beery joie, birds beating like hearts across the water, faces suffused with golden light. My feeling of lost wholeness was no longer haunting me. This was one of those authentic moments people scour the globe searching after. Not just an impression of our kind, but an invitation to kindness. Not just a glimpse of who we are, but what we must live up to.

Anyway, Ramzan never got back to us, thank God.

Ten days into our Caucasus Combo tour, it was finally time to attempt the crossing into South Ossetia, a small null spot on the globe that belongs to no country and goes largely unrecognized by the international community.^[5] Shane was visibly petrifying with each passing mile. There was simply no way for him to know if they would let us in, turn us back, detain us—what? “Just remember,” he told us in a kind of pep talk that seemed mostly for his benefit, “we’ve had a great trip even without South Ossetia!”

On the road to the border, he and Inna had us practice our personal statements in preparation for interviews with the Federal Security Service. Since Russia doesn’t allow official observers into South Ossetia, I was absolutely not to mention anything about being a writer. I had put down “college instructor” on my visa application, which was at least partly true.

We wended up the still-fortified highway that invading Russian tanks traversed nearly 10 years prior during a brief, annihilating war against Georgia. In its aftermath, the South Ossetians found themselves with the bummiest of bum hands. Finally free from Georgia after a century of ethnic strife, they were left with little industry, a tiny federal budget footed almost entirely by Moscow and no official status.^[6] Meaning South Ossetia is trapped in a state of suspended animation not unlike that of a comatose body kept alive for political purposes. It certainly isn’t being kept alive for anything harvestable—one of post-war Ossetia’s most valuable assets was a cobwebbed mill worth a few grand in scrap.

A portrait of Stalin on the highway to South Ossetia. PHOTO: KENT RUSSELL

We entered one checkpoint, where we recited our alibis in our heads like prayers. We passed through another, where a short-fingered man said nil while pointing at free lines in a ledger for us to sign. In the end, the Russians and Ossetians waved us through without so much as a shoulder tap. In fact, they left it up to us as to whether we wanted a South Ossetian stamp in our passports.

“Oi, we’re the first tour company to go to all four frozen conflict zones!” Shane shouted, as if to proof-test the statement.

“Yes, I know, I have done them all,” Ruud deadpanned. George and Jin said they now had, too.

We were met on the other side by our handlers—Eka, a tall 20-something who’d studied in Richmond, Virginia, as a high school foreign-exchange student; and Giorgi, a squat and darkly handsome man who was the current president’s nephew (as well as the previous president’s nephew). They drove us in two cars past heavy guns pointed south toward Georgia.

South Ossetia felt haunted in a post-apocalyptic sense—life here had been extinguished suddenly, yet clues to its past remained. We traveled through 1,500 square miles of empty mountains, emptier sky, stray dogs, broken churches, decayed Soviet infrastructure and burned-out husks that were once Georgian villages. The inhabited villages weren’t much better off; the biggest difference was the woodsmoke wafting out of shanties.

“Hard to tell whether something in this country was devastated by time or war,” Shane said.

“Interesting theory,” George proposed. “War is just time accelerated.” Then he laughed.

None of the aforementioned sights were we able to explore on our own. Our being here was contingent upon our seeing what the South Ossetian government wanted us to see—and only what they wanted us to see. For instance: Not far from the road we traveled, Russian forces were in the process of “border demarcation” along the administrative boundary with Georgia. A few weeks before our arrival, these soldiers had picked up border signs and moved them 2,300 feet deeper into Georgia, absorbing a section of the Baku-Supsa oil pipeline overnight. This, we absolutely would not be seeing.

It did not take long for us to reach Tskinval (formerly known as Tskhinvali under the Georgians), which seemed more or less identical to every other provincial post-Soviet capital. That is, until Giorgi drove us to Tskinval’s southernmost limit, which abuts the border with Georgia.

This is first building attacked by Georgians at 11:45 in the night, Eka translated for us, gesturing at a fortified military building. As you can see, it is still Russian base. The Georgians killed 60 peacekeepers here.

On foot, she and Giorgi led us up the Street of Heroes, the still-ruined thoroughfare where South Ossetian irregulars battled Georgian forces block by block. They showed us bullet-nibbled walls, fields of detailed havoc. An older man approached and angrily demanded to know why we were gawking. Giorgi grabbed him by the nape of his neck and led him away while whispering in his ear.

A former bakery near the new parliament building in Tskinval. PHOTO: KENT RUSSELL

Let’s be clear: We were engaging in “dark tourism.” We were poking around a “death space,” as specialists term it, a site “where the death of others is commoditized as a tourist product.” Such spaces, Young Pioneer traffics in them.

The allure was that we were death-adjacent yet still relatively safe. And it felt ghoulish and exploitative, yes, at first. Ossetians were gazing down from their apartment windows at a bunch of strangers stumbling through the remains of their worst day. If they were seething at us, I couldn’t blame them. How were we any better than the shameless vultures who went on Hurricane Katrina aftermath tours?

We took pictures in front of buildings cheesed with ordnance holes. I tried to keep in mind that “dark tourism” is a lot older than the selfie stick. Mark Twain toured Pompeii and then wrote about it. Anton Chekhov was the world’s first “gulag tourist.” The inaugural guided tour in England was a day trip, via locomotive, to witness the hanging of two murderers. The very idea of tourism in the West originated with pilgrims’ desire to poke around the empty tomb of a peasant executed by the state.

As if to prove all was not destruction here, Giorgi and Eka showed us the gleaming new parliament building. Just a few hundred yards beyond it, though, were the vestiges of Tskinval’s Armenian and Jewish quarters, where the worst of the fighting took place. We climbed through rubble, we clicked photos on our phones. Shane was pissed that we had arrived just past the golden hour.

One of the problems of “dark tourism” is that it’s an imprecise designation. If being a “dark tourist” means visiting “death spaces,” well, who hasn’t been to a death space? Most of the leading scholarship on the topic suggests that going to any of Hiroshima, the Taj Mahal, or Arlington National Cemetery makes one a dark tourist. Lexington and Concord or a Titanic memorial cruise, too. One could make the argument that many destinations within the continental United States are themselves Native American burial grounds.

Nevertheless, South Ossetia was different from these places in terms of rawness. The woe was still smoldering here. Compare it to an event like September 11, and visiting the Tskinval destruction would be analogous to entering the crater of ground zero before it was built into the 9/11 Memorial. Free of any context or perspective for outsiders. We were but the first pips of the coming encrustation of touristic infrastructure. At least Eka and Giorgi hoped so, for their economy’s sake.

We walked past a carbonized bakery, stopping to photograph the sign’s extant word, хлеб, or “bread.” At the other side of the road stood a weathered poster promising: Ossetians will never forget the genocide!

I can’t comment on how my fellow travelers were reacting. They were silent as ever while exploring the ruins. Did that mean they were solemn? Bored? Psychosexually exhilarated by the pure, un-stepped-on misery? I don’t know.

“Please look at this living house,” Eka said. “This is new. The old one was completely destroyed. The Georgians, they shot at civilians and also civilian things.”

If you asked me, this was the opposite of escapism. Brushing up against death and coming away unscathed was one of the few ways left in a desacralized world to achieve something akin to ontological security: I am here now. I am alive.

But just because I’m free to seek security at the expense of other beings doesn’t mean I should. In visiting far-flung places like this one, I was bringing not innocence into them, but something much darker: tourism. That symptom of the sickness we suffer from, aka “existentialism,” that impels locals to sterilize and commodify their history, their pain, their cultural heritage until they, too, are rich enough and anomic enough to seek out something other somewhere else.

Inna had to cancel one of our two scheduled homestays after receiving word that our hostess had fallen out of a tree. Still, though, we’d get our chance to spend a night at a real South Ossetian farmhouse. To get there, we traveled for several hours along a gravel lifeline deep in the cupped hands of the mountains. Giorgi laughed at our panic whenever his vehicle—which still had its price grease-painted on the windshield—slammed into and scraped over boulders along the path’s unguarded bends. And because there was no potable still water in South Ossetia (outside the bottom shelf of one shop in Tskinval, where the labels read “Water for Babies,” to give you an idea), Giorgi occasionally stopped at rusted spigots tapped into the mountains so we could load up on icy mineral water laden with beneficial heavy metals like silver.

A velvet darkness had come down by the time we reached the three-room dwelling. There, a recent widow lived alone with a handful of cows and some hives of bees. Inside, a century-old stove warded off the Caucasus chill.

The widow was bundled in kerchiefs and aprons. She spoke only Ossetian. She neither talked to us nor asked of us anything. She left us free to roam her property, inspect her outhouse, play with her accordion, adjust the pictures on her wall. Meantime, she busied herself with the preparation of a traditional Ossetian feast.

Here, in microcosm, were all the joys and complications of this kind of travel. We were imposing upon a peasant woman, we enormous foreigners, cracking beers, filming her as she milked her cows, waiting to be fed with more food than she might eat in a month. But, then again, we were paying her more money for one night’s work than she was likely to get from a whole lot of subsistence farming in a mountain range in an unrecognized country.

Should her first contact with Westerners have been, I don’t know, a cohort of Rhodes scholars, or folklorists, or just kind, sober people? Probably! Did we nonetheless approach her with respect, curiosity and genuine goodwill? I like to think so.

At least until Giorgi brought out the chacha. He decanted this homebrewed vine vodka into an assortment of distressingly wide glasses. We gathered round him and his flowerpot of alcohol at a table piled high with fresh-baked flatbread, garden vegetables and about a dozen Ossetian pies—beef pies, cheese pies, beetroot pies. Joining us was a warm if silent man named Vadim, slightly brooding in aspect. Vadim, we were told, was a veteran of the war with Georgia as well as South Ossetia’s minister of tourism.

Our hostess stands in front of the home where we stayed in South Ossetia. PHOTO: SHANE HORAN

Despite that, Vadim deferred to Giorgi, who stood at the head of the table and proposed his first toast. Something about friendship, and understanding—I’m not really sure because Giorgi moved on quickly to his second toast. Then his third. The slugs of chacha went down like glowing bolts of metal pulled from a forge. Slowly it dawned on me that, should any of us poison ourselves with alcohol, the cow pasture would be our final destination.

It is your turn now to propose toasts, Giorgi told us through Eka. Honest toasts, from the heart. He led the way with a stirring tribute to South Ossetia’s war dead. Ruud, God love him, was hunched over the vegetables, jabbing with his fork. “I don’t want to play this game,” he said through a full mouth. One by one Matilda, Gabriella and Chandra saluted hospitality, world peace and hospitality again.

The chacha had soused me something good. I was feeling the irrigating pangs of conscience. When it was my turn, I raised my glass and looked around the table, making deliberate eye contact with those I’d come to consider friends. I understood then that YPT’s five-star scores came from people who weren’t rating the company, per se, but who were rating their group. Their camaraderie, the time they had together.

I opened my mouth. A flecked burp turned the air to jelly in front of me. I closed my mouth. “Christ, you could clean an oven with that,” Shane joked while fanning the air. I tried to compose myself.

Then, struck by inspiration—and disregarding my own politics, wishing solely to be a good guest—I repeated a bit of graffiti I’d seen the other day in Tskinval: Oдна Осетия вместе с Россией и Путиным. “One Ossetia together with Russia and Putin.”

Giorgi’s thick eyebrows practically flew off his face. He whooped it up, overpraising me with somewhat demeaning indulgences as though I were a newly verbal baby. He told me I put him in mind of Pushkin—what with my aptitude for language as well as my terrifically stupid hairdo. We threw back our chacha.

Again, I knew I had made a regrettable decision. One too many down my hatch, I shoved away from the table, choked back the upsurge and gasped something about needing to visit the outhouse.

Barf carefully deposited behind a beehive, I leaned back, meshed my fingers around the base of my skull and drew deep breaths. Amid the clarity and fire of the night sky was a large, unmoored moon. This inhumanly scaled beauty of firmament and mountain—I’d never encountered a vista quite like this. Seen through my runny eyes, the stars’ winking influence seemed to descend directly from their constellations.

For the past two weeks, as we kicked around a dictator’s personal fiefdom and then authentically experienced man’s inhumanity to man, I’d kept returning to the same questions: Should YPT be a thing? Should I be allowed to do this?

In a more perfect world, perhaps, I wouldn’t need YPT to take me where I can indulge morbid curiosity and allay ontological insecurity. In a more perfect world, I would sit quietly in my room, marveling at the humdrum miracle that is my individual, day-to-day existence. I don’t live in that world, though.

I don’t know that many people do. It’ll be in some strange estate beyond this one, perhaps, when we manage at last to have and to enjoy. But all across this world, I’ve found that something in my bloodshot nature makes it so I best enjoy a thing as mine when I’m reminded that, any moment now, it might not be.

Back in the shanty, pandemonium had erupted. Ruud was tottering very near to the red-hot stove after having booted himself. Jin had his arms around the Gabriella-Chandra dyad, who were laughing and agog. George was a shambles, his forehead on the tabletop. Inna and Matilda had atomized into a cloud of revulsion, I’m pretty sure. Preparing a bed for herself on the floor was our hostess.

From our group, only Jin would be staying on for the gulag portion of the Summer Soviet. The rest were heading home, regressing to the mean of workaday-ness: empty offices and single-occupancy flats. There, they would dream up and save for that next trip, the contrails of their departing and arriving flights coiling tighter around the globe as they hunted down the last of its endangered difference.

I sat down next to Shane. “Do people ever just pay as they go?” I asked. “Keep on keeping on with the trips?”

“Aye,” he said. He slapped my back. “We could make room for you on the gulag leg.”

“Nah,” I said. “I gotta get home. If I kept going, I’m pretty sure I’d die.”

CREDITS

Story - Kent Russell

Kent is the author of What Is Due the Other and I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son.

Conceptual photos - Derek Brahney

Derek is an artist, art director and designer based in New York. He is the founder of New Studio.

Spot illustrations - Claire McCracken

Claire is an illustrator based in Los Angeles.

Chapter numbers - Jason Wong

Jason is an art director and graphic designer based in suburban New Jersey. He is also a part of the lettering sketch blog Friends of Type.

Creative Direction & Design - Sandra Garcia

Sandra is the creative director of Highline.

Development & Design - Gladeye

Gladeye is a digital innovations agency in New Zealand and New York.

New Job Jitters

On May 5, 2011, Mike Picarella’s first day at HSBC, his boss wanted to know if he was sexting. “No, no,” he reassured her—his wife was just curious how things were going, so he was texting her back. His boss then inquired whether his wife had ever heard of the three-minute rule. “What’s that?” Mike asked. Well, his boss said, leaning in, if she ever wanted her husband to do something, she would give him a blowjob that lasted exactly three minutes, and voila, her wish was his command. Surveying Mike’s blank stare, she belted out one of her giant, guttural laughs and plopped herself down at her desk, a mere two feet from his.

Mike, a 22-year veteran of Wall Street, learned quickly that this was just the way Eileen Hedges interacted with the world. She was raised in a well-off suburb in New Jersey and joined HSBC, one of the largest foreign-owned banks in the United States, shortly after graduating from college in 1991. It was a time when male behavior on Wall Street was particularly noxious. “Women started getting jobs … and men did everything they could to make them feel like they didn’t belong,” says Susan Antilla, author of Tales From the Boom-Boom Room, a history of women in banking. That meant parades of strippers in the office, Playboy centerfolds hung up at the desks, care packages for female employees containing dildos or calzones shaped like penises. It could also mean verbal abuse or sexual assault.

And yet, Eileen managed to thrive in this atmosphere, eventually becoming head of business development for HSBC in the Americas. She moved up, in large part, by cultivating a reputation for being brash, boisterous and profane. By becoming one of the boys. Short and stocky, with blond hair and a penchant for holstering her Blackberry in her bra, Eileen would pant like a dog with her tongue out when certain men walked by her desk, Mike said. Sometimes, he would overhear her musing about which executives would be better in bed: “Mike H. would be fun but Mike S. would be boring.” (Apparently, there is no shortage of men named Mike at HSBC.)

On most work nights, Eileen posted up in her favorite seat at Windfall, the neighborhood bar a block from HSBC’s offices, where bartenders treated her like Norm from “Cheers.” Mike had even been told there was a drink named in her honor, “The Eileen,” a pink concoction with vodka and club soda. She held at least one performance review with a subordinate at the bar. And from time to time, Mike discovered, Eileen would have an assistant book her a hotel room nearby while her husband and two kids slept across the river in New Jersey. Her drinking buddies became a support network for her, a club, an identity. As she wrote to a male co-worker after a night out: “I’d rather hang out with you guys and laugh. … I at least feel normal?”

Mike wasn’t sure what to make of Eileen, but he had strong incentives not to think about it too hard. “He was hired with a view to ultimately being her successor,” said Ian Mullen, a managing director who helped bring him to HSBC. If Mike did end up taking her job, he’d rise to the level of managing director, the fanciest position of his career, worth at least half a million dollars a year in salary and bonuses.

Mike’s arrival boded well for Eileen, too. Having a viable replacement would set up her own promotion to the upper echelons of the bank, maybe some posh new assignment in Hong Kong or London. “Did I tell you I love my new guy,” Eileen wrote a colleague on Sametime, HSBC’s internal chat network, a couple weeks into his tenure. “I am almost floored. ... I don’t have to go to meetings with him.”

He was making her look good, she was in a position to make him rich, and both of them were poised to get exactly what they wanted. Little did they know what lay ahead for them and for HSBC—the years of acrimony, the firings, the lawsuits, the trial with the surprise decision. And the trouble started just a few weeks into Mike's tenure, when the third member of their team, a junior analyst in her mid-20s whom I’ll refer to as Jill, broke down at her desk, crying and shaking.

Windfall / Downfall

The banking industry is hardly known for its moral rectitude. But if you look beyond the executive suites and venture into compliance departments and operations back offices, you’ll find a handful of sticklers and self-appointed heroes who have made it their mission to save Wall Street from its excesses. Mike is one of them.

As a young banker, he spent his free time volunteering at New York Hospital, feeding Jell-O to burn victims. His mother had worked three different restaurant jobs to support him and his brother, and when he became a father, he figured the best way to honor her was to be there for his four children as much as possible. He coached their football and basketball teams. He also taught adult Bible study and served on the church council at St. Luke’s Lutheran on Long Island. “Mike is not about Mike,” says Charles Froehlich, the former pastor there. “He is about helping others.”

But Mike can sometimes act like the kid who tells the teacher she forgot to assign homework. Take the mooing incident. It was the late ’90s, and Mike was working at Morgan Stanley, where all the trading desks had “squawk boxes”—intercoms that analysts and brokers used to relay information during the trading day. Mike’s problem was that some of the young guys at Morgan Stanley abused their squawk boxing privileges by mooing loudly into them, disrupting colleagues who were trying to get work done. Mike asked his boss to tell everyone to stop, and a meeting was scheduled during market hours. That meant the traders had to call in. And as anyone who has ever met a banker could have predicted, midway through, somebody busted out the gnarliest Mooooooo! in the history of moos. The whole floor went nuts.

“I still get teased about this,” Mike says. “My friend referred to me as the guy who put an end to the mooing.”

HSBC “is the poster child of regulatory infraction—the gift that keeps on giving when I give studies on how not to do things.”

When HSBC called Mike in for an interview in early 2011, he knew almost nobody employed there and had trouble picking up any color about the organization. HSBC wasn’t like Morgan Stanley or Lehman Brothers or any of the other banks where he’d worked. It had $2.5 trillion in total assets, nearly three times more than Goldman Sachs, but the culture was insular, bordering on impenetrable. Most promotions came from within. Some senior managers had even gotten their start as tellers.

After the collapse of the financial industry in 2008, HSBC seemed motivated to lead the industry in scandals. There were accusations of doing business with criminals and rigging markets. In 2010, the year before Mike started, French investigators announced that they had information on 79,000 clients who may have been using HSBC’s private Swiss bank as a way to avoid taxes. (France’s budget ministry reportedly recouped more than $1 billion in penalties.) The same year, U.S. regulators identified “deficiencies” in HSBC’s anti-money-laundering practices, and a Senate report admonished HSBC for letting an Angolan central bank representative attempt $50 million in questionable transfers. HSBC may have even set up offshore accounts for the Angolan rep in the Bahamas.

“It is the poster child of regulatory infraction—the gift that keeps on giving when I give studies on how not to do things,” says Mayra Rodriguez Valladares, a consultant to banks and regulators who has worked with HSBC.

Mike’s role on the sales business management team included pitching new clients and making sure the company hit revenue targets. Still, he was irresistibly drawn to the compliance duties of his job. He saw issues right away—unnecessary bottlenecks, undefined processes and just a general looseness with the rules. In 2011, all major banks, leery of the new Dodd-Frank financial reform package, vowed to make regulatory obedience a top priority. And Mike sincerely believed his bosses would reward him for spotting problems before the feds did. “I thought they could use someone like myself,” he said. He was wrong.

The trading floors at HSBC headquarters in New York are giant, wide-open spaces, rollicking and loud, with hundreds of employees packed in shoulder to shoulder, back to back. You can read your neighbor’s computer screen or hear someone talking to his wife a couple seats down. Privacy is a joke, personal space a luxury best forgotten.

Which is why Mike found it so unsettling, a few weeks into the job, to see Jill crying at her desk. His desk was wedged in between Jill’s and Eileen’s, and at first, he pretended not to notice. But as the days went by, he kept finding Jill breaking down in different parts of the office: whimpering inside glass-walled conference rooms, outright sobbing on the leather couches in the ninth floor lobby.

Mike felt paralyzed. Eileen had previously told him that Jill’s boyfriend beat her and that she was close to being fired for a subsequent dip in performance. “For a while there, I believed Eileen,” Mike said. “I kept [Jill] at arm’s length. I didn’t have a normal relationship with her. I thought she was toxic.”

And so it went until Mike began to detect a pattern. A few times a week, not long after the stock exchange’s closing bell, Eileen would beg Jill to come to Windfall with her. Jill would resist at first, but ultimately relent. Then the next day, Mike said, dozens of people, including senior executives, would crowd around Eileen’s desk as she regaled them with stories that often revolved around Jill’s sexual adventures from the night before. Eileen would try to be low-key when spreading these tales, but Jill sat only a few feet away.

“I would see [Jill] slam the phone and start crying,” Mike remembered. “Sometimes she would say ‘I fucking hate her’ out loud, and Eileen would say, ‘Did she say that to me?’ And then [Jill] would give her the finger. Nobody does that to the boss, especially on Wall Street, and survives.”

In time, it became clear to Mike that Eileen didn’t just want a drinking buddy. He felt she was using Jill as flypaper to attract senior executives and big clients to the bar—and, five years later, when the matter finally landed in court, 900 pages of discovery documents and the testimony of several witnesses helped back up his account.

“Haah … you just like blonds named [Jill],” Eileen wrote to a high-ranking HSBC manager. He replied, “well, i need to admit that she is hot!” Eileen promised to make Jill available when he visited New York the following month. Days before the visit, Eileen had this exchange with him on Sametime, the interoffice chat network:

In another thread, Eileen asked a co-worker about the previous night: “Do you remember licking [Jill’s] face?” The man wondered if Jill was mad, and Eileen replied, “No, she was laughing about it.”

Mike overheard Eileen on the phone making similar comments. “She would be talking about [Jill], saying she needs a guy like you. After, I would hear Eileen persuading [Jill] to come out for just a few. It was never just a few.”

Gossip about Jill traveled quickly through the open office. One former HSBC staffer, who asked to remain anonymous because she still works in the industry, said, “It was out there in the organization. I don’t think people fully understood how much [Jill] was being impacted.” Sametime chats between Jill and Chris DeLuca, a work friend of hers, reveal a woman being slowly ground down by stares and snickers and half-whispered comments.

In separate chats with DeLuca, she complained that “just hearing [Eileen’s] voice makes my skin cringe” and “I can honestly say she makes me hate my job, and makes mike and [me] miserable.”

In court documents, both Mike and Jill testified that they believed Eileen derived power from demeaning Jill. Setting up a night out with a pretty young woman helped her build gratitude among clients and executives. It also gave Eileen ammunition if someone crossed her. According to Mike, Eileen repeatedly said that if she got fired, she would dish on everyone in the office: all the affairs, all the lies. He added that she bragged about keeping a running tally of who was having sex with whom.

These threats reflected Eileen’s insecurities within HSBC, where she saw herself as the victim of a sexist double standard. She would occasionally express concern that her partying put a cap on her career prospects. In a March 2012 Sametime chat with a co-worker named Christina Baldwin, she despaired:

Jill is bound by a confidentiality agreement and did not respond to interview requests for this story. But she corroborated much of Eileen’s conduct in a deposition for a federal trial. “I often felt she would try to offer me up to clients sexually, both internally and externally,” Jill said. “She would often make comments about me or lies about me and share them with other employees. One time I had a suitcase for a trip and she pulled out a pair of shoes and in front of all my colleagues said, ‘Look, aren’t these’—I think she used the word—‘fuck-me shoes.’”

Jill also alleged inappropriate touching, saying that Eileen once attempted to pull down her blouse around other employees. In another incident, at Windfall, Jill said Eileen “grabbed my buttock.” (Mike was there, too, and says the force of Eileen’s butt smack was so great that Jill was briefly lifted off the ground.)

Much of Jill’s testimony focused on an HSBC-sponsored conference in Key Largo, Florida, that turned into an old-fashioned Wall Street bacchanal. Jill said she was harassed by several HSBC executives, including one senior manager who talked about “eating out my ass. He described how he just wanted to—and I think these are his words, not mine—‘get up in there’ at this particular event.”

Jill described spending some of that same night in Key Largo fending off the advances of Eduardo Legorreta, the head of global market sales with HSBC Mexico. “He put his hand on my leg, trying to put it up my dress, and I hit him away. Throughout that evening [Eileen] was encouraging this type of behavior,” Jill testified. At one point, she said, Eileen physically pushed her toward Legorreta. Jill’s Sametime chats shortly after the incident tell the same story:

And yet, she, too, felt paralyzed when it came to Eileen. At one point, she told DeLuca that she’d “fucking had it” and was “done w her” and that she’d tell human resources “everything.” She never did.

“Try and get out of there at a decent hour. No Eileens 2nite,” DeLuca wrote to Jill during one bad patch. “Thanks—yeah no def not any eileen’s,” Jill responded. But in this case, as in so many others, she quickly found herself back at Windfall, drinking late into the night and then being run through the rumor mill in the morning.

Enter HR

In October 2011, five months after Mike started at HSBC, Eileen took a short medical leave to have weight-loss surgery. When she returned in November, Mike told her she looked great. “Yeah, but I lost weight in all the wrong places,” Mike recalled her saying. “It’s changing the shape of my nipples.” Eileen then pulled down the top of her dress, exposing her right breast in the middle of the trading floor. According to both of their testimonies, Mike and Jill quickly turned to each other, mouths agape, while Eileen laughed and walked away.

Mike figured it was time to approach Ian Mullen. In his first few months on the job, Mike would occasionally seek Mullen’s advice about how to maneuver through HSBC’s bureaucracies. He saw Mullen as a breed apart within the organization, someone who could serve as a mentor. He wanted to know how he would handle the flashing. “My initial reaction was shock,” Mullen said. “I thought I should go to HR myself. If a man had done that to a woman, the man wouldn’t have remained for more than a few days.” But Mike asked him to remain quiet—for a little while at least. He feared reprisal and felt too new to escalate charges against his boss.

After all, Mike’s first year was going well. He streamlined the system for authorizing new client accounts. He cleared the way for HSBC to sell Japanese government bonds in the U.S. And he swerved around an administrative barrier in HSBC's business with another bank that freed up $60 million in revenue. “He uncovered quite a lot of things never brought to management,” Mullen said. “He was one of the top business managers.”

At the end of December, Eileen rated Mike’s 2011 performance as “strong” and told him she would have checked the box for “exceeded expectations” had he been there the entire year. “Mike has taken good initiative. ... He’s developed good relationships and is starting [to] gel within the HSBC processes,” she wrote. There was a small section about him needing to be “better at communicating among all relevant parties,” but everything else appeared on track.

Still, Mike found himself unable to tolerate Eileen’s behavior, and in early 2012, he asked her on several occasions to start treating Jill better. He specifically mentioned dragging Jill to bars and gossiping about her sexual exploits afterward. “I would say, ‘[Jill] is crying every day, it’s not healthy for her well-being,’” Mike recalled. “It would work with Eileen for two or three days, but then she would go right back.”

Almost immediately, Eileen cooled toward Mike. “He kisses ass and it makes me sick,” she told Jill in a Sametime chat from April. Mike recounted an incident where he was in a meeting and Eileen started banging on the conference room windows to get his attention. When he came out, Eileen said she just wanted him in a different meeting. “I don’t know the reasons, but you seemed to be on the attack with me,” Mike wrote her in an email. “From my perspective it’s humiliating to be treated that way in front of others.”

On April 11, nearly a year into his tenure at HSBC, Mike showed up unannounced at the 12th floor offices of the human resources department. He specifically sought out Ellen Weiss, the head of HR for global markets, because of her close friendship with Eileen. Weiss kept a picture of Eileen’s two sons on her desk and told Mike she thought of them like her own children. Mike figured she would know how to tame his boss better than anyone.

After asking that the conversation remain confidential, Mike told Weiss about the sexual chatter, the nightly drinking, the rumor-mongering about Jill. He explained that after he tried to talk to Eileen, she started bullying him. He insisted that he wasn’t lodging a formal complaint against his boss, just asking for counsel. And he remembers suggesting that Weiss speak directly with Jill to get the full picture. In a recap email Weiss composed for herself that night, she wrote, “I told Mike I take these matters very seriously and if these behaviors are true they are not acceptable. I told him I wanted to talk to Eileen but he asked to talk to her first.”

The meeting broke up around 6 p.m., two hours after it started. By 8 p.m., according to Mike’s recollection of a later conversation with Jill, Eileen was on the phone with Jill grumbling about how Mike had accused her of sexual harassment. Weiss later denied alerting Eileen, saying she only notified the bank’s legal department, but several attorneys who specialize in these sorts of workplace claims agreed that the timeline was all too plausible. “[HR] immediately tells the harasser,” said Nancy Erika Smith, one of the lawyers who represented Gretchen Carlson in her case against former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes. “And the harasser and their friends and colleagues start retaliating right away.”

After Eileen learned of Mike’s visit to Weiss, she began to publicly criticize him over seemingly unrelated issues. “I want to f’in scream,” Eileen wrote to a colleague. “he’s a god damn svp… what in the world am I going to do w/him.” Eileen complained to Jill, too, saying she felt “so disrespected,” “beyond floored and hurt” and “so mad I cannot talk.” Jill chimed in, saying Mike had “no loyalty and [was] not a team player… 2 things that annoy me the most.”

Asked about her cutting comments toward Mike in later testimony, Jill said she would routinely go along with whatever Eileen said to keep the pressure off her. “Had I disagreed, despite even if I may not agree with her statements, she would have targeted her anger and aggression towards me,” she said.

A week after going to HR, Mike asked Eileen if they could set up weekly check-in meetings. These conversations would ostensibly be about work, but he believed they’d also give him a chance to temper Eileen’s behavior toward Jill without involving HR more than he already had. Still, shortly thereafter, Weiss told Mike that, due to the seriousness of the charges, HR needed to question Eileen independently. He agreed on the condition that Weiss keep his name out of it. “It’s possible that Eileen will make her own conclusions as to who she thinks brought this to our attention,” Weiss wrote to Mike in an email.

“It was a knot-in-your-stomach moment,” Mike said. “You knew you’ve been betrayed.”

Sue Jang, who worked for Weiss in HR, met with Eileen on April 26. In notes from that meeting, she wrote that Eileen began demeaning Mike’s work performance before she was able to ask a single question about Eileen’s behavior. That was curious because one day earlier, when Weiss spoke with Pablo Pizzimbono, Eileen’s boss and the head of global market sales for the Americas, Pizzimbono immediately asked if Mike had made the complaints. He proceeded to say that Mike was not performing well and that he was planning to push him out and put two junior people in his place. “Since Mike was unhappy with [his] bonus he has checked out,” Weiss wrote in a recap email.

Indeed, Mike had received a first-year bonus that was far lower than the number he was verbally promised. This angered him and even led him to ask a headhunter about new job leads. But he contends that his performance didn’t suffer at all.

After HR’s meetings with Eileen and Pizzimbono, Mike asked Jang if they knew who had made the initial complaint. “She laughed and giggled and said, ‘Yes, they guessed it,’” Mike said. “I said, ‘That’s not funny, you’ve ruined my career.’”

Meanwhile, Jill’s own career was about to be upended. She had struck up a romantic relationship with Jamie Rist, a married equity finance trader at HSBC. The relationship might have gone unnoticed had Rist’s wife not managed to get into the building one day and confront Jill outside the women’s restroom.

When Ellen Weiss investigated the incident, she asked Jill if she was romantically involved with Rist. Jill said she wasn’t. So in what was apparently an option for HR investigations at HSBC, Weiss began to monitor Jill’s emails. She found references to Rist as Jill’s “boyfriend” and a discussion of a weekend they spent together on Long Island. In a follow-up meeting, Weiss confronted her with the evidence, and Jill broke down. She apologized for lying. She said she didn’t think the relationship had anything to do with work since she and Rist were in separate departments. HSBC disagreed. On May 31, Jill was fired without severance.

“Professionally and personally, I will miss her,” Eileen wrote to a colleague in a Sametime chat.

Mike was unnerved. He found it ominous that at no point in the six weeks between his first meeting with Ellen Weiss and Jill’s termination did anyone in HR ever ask her about the allegations against Eileen. And he heard from Rist that Eileen had made a big deal about Jill’s run-in with Rist’s wife to distract from her own troubles. As Rist would later tell Mike, “You got [Jill] shot.”

ARE YOU CRAZY?

HSBC’s worries at the time extended far beyond the HR department; the very existence of the bank was in question. On July 17, 2012, about six weeks after Jill’s firing, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 334-page report that accused the bank of helping to launder tens of billions of dollars for drug traffickers, as well as countries prohibited from doing business in the United States. Documents reviewed by the subcommittee also showed HSBC employees pressuring internal compliance officers to ease up on scrutinizing these illegal transactions. Why? “To please a wealthy client,” according to the report.

This tracked with Mike’s own experience at the bank, where he said his inquiries into compliance issues often led to grief. For example, HSBC’s anti-money-laundering policy required every client account to have a designated relationship manager. So in April 2012, Mike emailed senior staff to request help identifying managers for 852 accounts that may have been “orphaned.” Upon receiving his email, Suzy White, the chief operating officer for Mike and Eileen’s division, chewed him out. White said she had just told executives in London that the U.S. business had no orphan accounts—why was Mike trying to undermine her? He replied that he wasn’t sure there were orphans; he merely wanted help filling in blanks in the system. White wasn’t having it. She asked Mike not to copy her on future emails, and in a Sametime chat with Eileen, she complained that he “doesn’t realize what this type of note can do… we will all look stupid and lose credibility.”

In later testimony, White explained that emails to superiors had to be done “the right way.” She added, “Unfortunately, we keep information at HSBC in lots of different places,” and Mike had merely unearthed a file that wasn’t up-to-date. But that’s part of what compliance is all about—making sure records of all bank activities are accurate and ready for regulators to examine.

Between the blowback on compliance matters and what Jamie Rist had told him about his role in Jill’s firing, Mike felt his job was in serious danger. He had a card to play, though. Weiss and Pizzimbono had been asking him for more information about the Key Largo event. With so many HSBC employees in one place, any misbehavior there represented a risk for the company. So Mike started to gather intel. He told Pizzimbono what he had heard about Legorreta’s groping and Eileen’s alleged encouragement. Mike also revealed Eileen’s breast-flashing incident. But, according to Mike, even though Pizzimbono asked for the report, he didn’t welcome it, in large part because Legorreta and Eileen were his direct reports. “He said, ‘Now that you’ve told me, I have to tell HR. You’re either stupid or a genius,’” Mike remembers.

HR reopened the investigation, and Eileen denied everything once again. Other employees, including Rist, corroborated some of Mike’s claims. By the end of July, Eileen was stripped of her managerial responsibilities and later given a different assignment within HSBC, ironically titled “Change the Bank.” In response to my many questions about her conduct, Eileen said, “I am not going to get into a back and forth on allegations that occurred almost a decade ago, but I have and will continue to deny any wrongdoing.”

After Eileen’s reassignment, Mike asked Weiss and White if he would be stepping into Eileen’s position, as he had been promised when he took the job. But there was no announcement throughout the summer. Shortly after Labor Day, Mike was sitting in a large compliance meeting that Eileen also happened to attend. Outside the glass walls of the conference room, he saw White and Pizzimbono, his two superiors, walking side by side. White looked straight at Eileen and gave her a big smile and a wink.

“It was a knot-in-your-stomach moment,” Mike said. “You knew you’ve been betrayed.”

Several days later, Mike was told that he wouldn’t be taking Eileen’s job. Instead, he would report to Carol Jenner, a vice president whose title was junior to his. Pizzimbono and White said Jenner was chosen for her operational risk experience, although Mike had worked far longer on exactly that issue.

“In all my 20-plus years in banking, I’d never seen anybody in such a scenario where they’ve had a more junior [titled] person than themselves as a boss,” Ian Mullen said. He considered the move an act of “constructive dismissal” to get an employee so fed up that he would exit of his own accord. “If I was trying to get someone to leave, that’s the type of thing I would do,” he said.

Mike would also lose control of one of his biggest compliance tasks: making sure that HSBC was properly documenting whether its sales staff was giving suitable financial advice to customers. He had discovered that the investments of hundreds of clients were never assessed, and that dozens had never even been entered into the company’s system. Mike created a PowerPoint presentation outlining this, expressing concern that “we have issues undisclosed to senior management.”

Though she later acknowledged the assessment process was “sloppy,” Suzy White once again objected to Mike sending bad news up the chain. She then made Jenner the lead on the issue, while claiming to assign Mike “higher-level work.” In an email to HR explaining her decision, White described Mike’s performance as “not very impressive, clearly Mike does not see himself part of the team. … [E]ven in his power point he writes in the third person, no ‘We’ or ‘Our’ just ‘HSBC.’”

Mike couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being retaliated against for elevating sexual harassment complaints—and that the retaliation also conveniently sidelined his questioning of compliance issues. Moving him into what was essentially a junior position limited his exposure to HSBC’s internal operations and contained his objections, at a time when pressure on the bank was intensifying.

On December 11, 2012, the Justice Department followed up on the damning Senate report by announcing a $1.9 billion deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with HSBC. It was one of the largest money-laundering penalties against a bank in U.S. history. HSBC, the report said, didn’t just look the other way when it came to illegal transactions. Bank employees stripped out references to Iran, which was under U.S. sanction, to avoid detection. HSBC’s Mexico operation also ran a special “Cayman Islands branch” where any Mexican citizen could open a U.S. dollar account. Drug lords even designed specially shaped boxes filled with huge sums of money that slid easily through HSBC Mexico’s teller windows.

Wall Street critics grumbled about the lack of criminal charges against the bank. But Justice Department officials insisted that a “sword of Damocles” now hung over HSBC’s head and implied that the smallest misstep could lead them to reopen the case. This would put HSBC employees at risk of criminal convictions and the bank itself in a position to lose its U.S. banking license. The government also appointed an independent monitor named Michael Cherkasky to burrow into the darkest corners of the bank to find compliance deficiencies.

This left HSBC with a choice: It could either clean up its act or turn even more inward. Management’s decision was clear. “On some compliance issues I asked, ‘Will we self-report?’” Mike recalled. “And they would say, ‘Are you crazy? We have a DPA over our head.’”

Exit, Pursued by a Bank

In October 2012, Jamie Rist was attending an HSBC conference in Canada when Suzy White pulled him aside and told him about a “complicated investigation” involving human resources and Mike. White, who was not Rist’s manager, advised him to stay out of it. If HR calls you, call me first, he remembered her saying.

A couple weeks earlier, Mike had forced a new investigation, focused on the retaliation against him. First, he called HSBC’s Employee Integrity Hotline. He had been under the impression that the hotline would connect him to a third-party service. After calling, however, he quickly heard from Laura Kane, an HSBC HR representative who sat right next door to Ellen Weiss. Fearing another run-around, Mike went directly to the head of HR for HSBC in the United States, Mary Bilbrey. According to Mike, she assured him that she took his claims seriously and that her HR team would look into the principals involved, as well as the HR department itself.

Those who work for human resources occupy a nearly impossible position within the corporate world. On the one hand, they’re tasked with ensuring a healthy work environment for all employees. On the other, they’re subordinate to senior managers and often don’t have the leverage to resolve issues where a leader is accused of abusing his power. “Companies don’t want to have to face the fact that someone who produces a lot of income for them may not be able to work there anymore,” says Carol Gordon, who worked in HR for financial institutions for 35 years.

The belief that HR is biased toward management chills rank-and-file employees from ever coming forward. A bipartisan task force commissioned in 2016 by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cited research suggesting that between 87 and 94 percent of harassment claims go unreported. Gordon recommends that firms employ external legal counsel for the most sensitive cases to remove conflicts of interest, but that’s an added and largely unwanted expense for most companies. The EEOC can also help resolve complaints, but the agency is badly understaffed and under-resourced.

When Bilbrey’s team questioned Pizzimbono and White, they both rejected the notion that they had retaliated against Mike, and White said that there was no truth to Rist’s claim that she had tampered with the investigation. Ellen Weiss argued that her staff had dealt with the allegations against Eileen capably and professionally. And these denials appeared to be enough for HR; the investigation wrapped up quickly. “I’m trying my best not to be biased but I am thinking we have a boy who cries wolf,” Laura Kane wrote on Sametime to a member of Bilbrey’s HR team days into the investigation. “I was thinking same,” was the reply.

Practically every interaction around the office felt to Mike like a provocation. He came in every day not knowing whom to trust or how he would be tormented.

However, in a totally different department, Rist also felt he was being retaliated against. In a later legal complaint, he said that after he had corroborated Mike’s story about Eileen’s behavior, he was forced to unload many of his accounts to junior team members. He also saw his annual bonus fall by 82 percent.

Sensing a pattern, Mike called Jim Hubbard, an employment lawyer who had helped win a retaliation case against banking giant UBS a decade earlier. Mike connected Hubbard with Jill, and both would eventually hire him as their lawyer, as would Rist.

At the end of 2012, Hubbard sent HSBC a “litigation hold letter” on behalf of Jill, asking the bank to retain all relevant documents involving her, Rist and Mike. Hiring a lawyer seemed to accelerate Mike’s troubles inside the bank. One by one, his work responsibilities were stripped away, until there were hardly any left at all. Strategic planning meetings were held without him, working groups he led were disbanded, approvals he administered were handled by Jenner and others. His name showed up repeatedly on a “Personal Conduct Case” list, an internal roundup distributed by HR to senior management of people engaged in discrimination, harassment or fraud.

Mike did receive one new assignment: Every week, he had to create a report for senior management in London by Monday morning based on information that wouldn’t come in until Friday night. He was given this task a day after he chatted with Pizzimbono about how busy his weekends were, between kids’ hockey games and other family obligations. “I thought he was being friendly,” Mike said.

Practically every interaction around the office felt to Mike like a provocation. He came in every day not knowing whom to trust or how he would be tormented. “It’s a different type of stress that most people don’t understand until they go through it,” Mike said. And yet, he confided in almost no one outside the office—not his pastor, not even his wife, Andrea, whom he said he didn’t want to burden.

In their initial meeting, Mary Bilbrey asked Mike to keep her informed of any other retaliatory measures against him. Mike took this request to the extreme, sending a flurry of emails to prove that his confidentiality had been compromised and his reputation irreparably harmed.

Some notes made Mike seem overly paranoid. He thought the person who sat behind him was reading his computer screen. He even complained about Carol Jenner’s humming, which he found distracting. Other reports depicted more clear-cut examples of taunting. “Yesterday afternoon two Sr. Managers made disparaging comments towards me at the elevator banks, ‘there’s Picarella better watch what we say,’” read one. In another, a colleague warns Mike as he opens his iPad: “Mike, day trading stocks is a violation of company policy as is using your personal iPad. Should we report [you] to HR and compliance?”

Sometimes, he was made to question his senses. In an email from March 2013, Mike wrote that he was at his desk when the administrative assistant who sat next to him walked by and “in a serious tone told me that I tried to trip her and that she almost tripped.” Later in the day, she got up from her desk, leaving her drawer open. “When she returned,” Mike wrote, “she accused me of stealing. … She was not joking.”

By the summer, Mike was the only person directly involved with the sexual harassment saga still at HSBC. Jill was working at a different firm in the finance industry and had reached an undisclosed settlement with HSBC rumored to be in the low seven figures. Eileen was fired a year after she was reassigned; according to Bilbrey’s later testimony, her behavior wasn’t consistent with HSBC values. But Mike had heard she received a soft landing: a severance package worth about $110,000, as well as a couple months to find a new job. An HSBC vendor called Genpact picked her up shortly after her last day.

It would’ve been easier for Mike to take a job anywhere else. But he didn’t want to give the bank the satisfaction. “I started out fighting for the young lady, then for my life, my job and the principle,” he said.

Around this time, Mike and Rist lodged official complaints with the EEOC. It took nearly a full year for the agency to issue them “right to sue” letters, by which point Rist had accepted another job. In June 2014, they both filed lawsuits alleging retaliation by HSBC. (Only with the lawsuit looming did Mike finally tell his wife what he had endured.) The case made him a mini-celebrity in his small town on Long Island. The local tabloids, the legal blogs and the Financial Times were unable to resist a tale of sexual intrigue at a big bank.

Naturally, this was terrible news for Mike. He ended up being managed by someone in the precious metals division, even though his job had nothing to do with precious metals. His boss there, Michael Karam, a large and imposing man, didn’t do much to hide his distaste for him. In an email to a colleague, Karam referred to Mike as “the hr related problem,” and he once promised Carol Jenner that he would “marginalize his behavior.”

It would’ve been easier for Mike to take a job anywhere else. But he didn’t want to give the bank the satisfaction.

Throughout 2014, Karam demanded that Mike set business objectives. Mike replied on several occasions that without actual responsibilities, his objectives couldn’t be defined. And on and on they went, never reaching a resolution, only talking to each other face to face a handful of times, until Karam finally set a meeting for Mike’s mid-year review—in November, a week before Thanksgiving. It did not go well. In a recap email sent to Mary Bilbrey, Mike said Karam handed him a piece of paper with a description of his “performance gaps,” citing several incomplete projects. “Mike is elusive, doesn’t take ownership of his work and lacks initiative,” the review stated. While Mike was scanning the document, Karam yelled at him to look him in the eye. “He’s leaning across a small table with his finger in my face, his face is beet red,” Mike explained. “I sat back and said, ‘I’m not going to fight with you.’”

Afterward, Mike told HR that he “feared for my safety,” and yet another internal investigation was launched. HR instructed Mike to work from home until the inquiry concluded, but he says he didn’t get the message, which was sent out late in the afternoon the day before Thanksgiving. So when he swiped his security card in the lobby the following Monday, he was surprised to find it didn’t work. Dozens of colleagues blew past him until a friend eventually let him up. The story made its way into the New York Post. First line: “HSBC is trying to shut the door on sexual harassment allegations—literally.”

Mike never made it to his desk again. In January 2015, Dan Silber, an HSBC managing director, hosted a biweekly sales team conference call where he notified everyone that the bank was being “looked into” for potentially violating conflict of interest laws. The next day, a New York Post reporter contacted Silber about the call, and HSBC immediately suspected that Mike was the leaker. (He denies it.) In a subsequent inquiry, HSBC’s Financial Crime Investigations unit could not “identify any definitive evidence linking Picarella or any other HSBC employee to leaked information,” but concluded it was “highly likely” that Mike’s lawyer or an associate had spoken with the paper. And so when HSBC fired Mike on March 26, 2015, for “significant performance issues,” the termination letter also included an extra paragraph blaming him for being “either directly or indirectly” responsible for the leak.

The FCI probe contained another nugget, however. The investigators searched years of Mike’s email traffic, finding it mostly to contain “interaction with his management that was performance related. What began as positive feedback appeared to deteriorate in March or April 2012,” right when he first alerted HR of Eileen’s behavior. Inadvertently, HSBC’s own investigations unit had discovered a timeline that seemed to corroborate Mike’s version of events.

The Trial

On Labor Day weekend 2015, Mike took his family to Fire Island, a vacation spot for New Yorkers who can’t abide (or afford) the glammed-up vibe of the Hamptons. He had always considered it a special place. Two decades earlier, he met his wife, Andrea, in a shared house there. And he returned enough over the years that he could mark time by watching his four children grow up on the white-sand beaches.

But this year, more than any other, Mike needed the salt air. With no job and no prospects, he had been left with too much time to think about the trial. He stewed about the strength of HSBC’s legal team, which included not only Eugene Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court justice, but also attorneys from Boies Schiller, the notoriously aggressive white shoe law firm. He wondered why, in a mediation conference for his and Rist’s cases, HSBC had offered Rist a payout in the mid six figures but wasn’t willing to throw him a penny. (Rist didn’t take the settlement.) And he obsessed over his disintegrating career.

When Mike reached out to headhunters and industry friends, he said they informed him that the publicity from the case made it hard for them to help. In particular, the allegation that Mike leaked private information was a career-killer; nobody wanted that kind of threat in-house. An interview at Morgan Stanley was going great until someone asked why he left HSBC. He couldn’t even land a job as a deputy treasurer for a small town in Suffolk County, or as an operations manager at a retirement home.

Sitting with their toes in the sand, looking out at the Atlantic Ocean, Mike and Andrea launched into one of those dreaded big-picture conversations about their finances. How long could they survive on her comptroller’s salary alone? Would they be able to send the twin girls to college in two years? Suddenly, Mike found himself shaking uncontrollably. His throat swelled, his chest tightened, his breath came up short. He thought he was going to die.

After paramedics airlifted him off the beach, a neurologist told him that he had suffered what it’s now impolite to call a nervous breakdown. Mike was put on Xanax and Lexapro, the first medications harder than NyQuil he had ever taken in his life. Though the pills smoothed out his anxiety, they also left him exhausted. He would drive his son to hockey practice and get home completely wiped. He jumped on and off the medications, the panic still rising occasionally. For more than a year, he spent whatever leftover energy he had readying himself for the trial, which was scheduled to go before Rist’s. Finally, he thought, he’d make HSBC pay for the mess his life had become.

When it began, on a sunny December day in 2016, Mike’s lawyer, Jim Hubbard, assured him the case was a winner. “He was like, this is it, this is a horrible case for the bank,” Mike said. But HSBC’s lead counsel was Randall Jackson, a former federal prosecutor hailed as one of the best young trial attorneys in the country. From the outset of the nine-day trial, he followed a time-tested strategy favored by powerful people and institutions, from big banks to Big Tobacco to Bill Cosby’s defense team: paint the accuser as an incompetent, greedy malcontent.

Jackson used chat messages and emails to argue that Mike, from the day he started at HSBC, was “one of the worst performers at his level. … A person who frankly failed to live up to professional standards in pretty much every way that an employee could fail.” And he marched in a collection of HSBC employees—Suzy White, Mike Karam, Pablo Pizzimbono—to back him up.

Everything Mike believed was evidence of mistreatment, Jackson recast as proof of his cravenness. He said Mike was stripped of his responsibilities because he was lazy and that his fights with colleagues were perfect examples of Mike’s inability to work with others. Jackson explained how Mike schemed to benefit from Jill’s misfortune, filing HR complaints as “a way to get a lottery ticket” from the bank. “To whatever extent you feel sympathy for Mr. Picarella,” Jackson said, “first of all, I submit he’s fine. He made millions of dollars on Wall Street, he’s fine.”

It was mere weeks after Donald Trump’s election, and in a deft stroke, Jackson implied to the Manhattan-based jury of eight women and one man that Mike was a spiritual cousin of the new president—loutish, entitled, sexist and rich. He berated Mike for not supporting the elevation of Carol Jenner, “one of the most respected employees at the entire bank.” Jackson also surfaced a chat between Mike and Eileen where Mike said he “mentally strangled [his wife] half a dozen times” during a recent fight. On the witness stand, Mike passed it off as a joke. But Jackson took the best thing Mike had going for him—that he had risked his professional life to help a female colleague in trouble—and muddied it by making him look like just another Wall Street chauvinist.

The case was about retaliation, not sexual harassment, so Hubbard had to prove there was a causal relationship between Mike’s whistleblowing and HSBC’s actions against him. While several of the most sordid details were revealed—Eileen offering Jill to clients and executives, the breast-flashing incident—they were not the focus of the trial. Far more attention was devoted to whether Mike talked on his cellphone too much. Jackson spotlighted Mike’s years of stress about being mistreated, which, out of context, could sound loopy. In two days of cross-examination, Jackson brought up the increasingly absurd complaints Mike made to HR: feeling like someone was reading his computer screen, being annoyed by Carol Jenner’s humming. “I was following the instructions of Ms. Bilbrey to let her and her team know of anything that was happening against me,” Mike said.

All the while, Hubbard, seemingly confident in his case, mounted what Mike felt was a muted effort on his behalf. For example, after complaining that Jackson made interpretive arguments in his opening statement instead of just outlining facts, Hubbard added, “I didn’t object to it because I’m not going to interrupt in front of the jury.”

“Are you asking me to do anything at this point?” the judge asked.

“No, sir.”

Hubbard had a lot of material to work with—everything from small flourishes, like Mike’s son being the one to open his dad’s termination letter from HSBC (he mistook it for a bar mitzvah invite) to bigger deals, like positive feedback Mike received from co-workers in his 2012 year-end review, which came well after he reported sexual harassment. “Mike is a pleasure to work with and always carries himself in a professional manner,” wrote one respondent. “Mike identified operational risks … and proposed solutions to eliminate the risks,” wrote another.

But Hubbard didn’t present those comments or call those witnesses. Instead, he relied heavily on Mike’s testimony, thinking it would be enough to persuade the jury. “He’s the main witness on our end,” Hubbard told the judge.

The other key plaintiff’s witness was Ian Mullen. He testified that Mike was hired to be Eileen’s replacement and argued that Mike saved the bank millions of dollars by “highlight[ing] a number of issues that no one highlighted before.” He also said Mike was the earliest person to work and among the last to leave, contradicting the claim of laziness. But Jackson got Mullen to admit that he had moved out of Mike’s division by November 2011 and didn’t get a direct perspective afterward.

The jury didn’t take long to come to a decision. It had to answer four questions. Did Mike engage in protected activity by reporting sexual harassment? Yes. Was HSBC aware that it was protected activity? Yes. Did HSBC take a “material adverse employment action” against Mike? Yes. Was this action taken because Mike reported sexual harassment? No.

As one of HSBC’s in-house lawyers hollered in delight—prompting a stern admonition from the judge—Mike sat stunned, his eyes fixed straight ahead. Hubbard asked if he was all right; he said no. Eventually, in a trance-like state, he peeled himself out of the courtroom and called his wife. She told him to meet her at Penn Station. As soon as they reached each other, Mike went limp and cried right there on the floor.

The House Always Wins

There’s a reason whistleblower claims so often end in defeat. Corporations have all the obvious advantages: more money, more lawyers. But, just as crucially, they control so many levers of power over their workers in the runup to trial.

The moment an employee presents himself as a potential threat, “you become a foreign organism,” says Richard Bowen, who was ousted from Citigroup in 2009 for warning about its shoddy mortgage practices. “The rest of the culture joins together to push you out.” When I walked Tales From the Boom-Boom Room author Susan Antilla through the details of Mike’s story, she interrupted me. “The case you’re talking about is unusual because it went to trial,” Antilla said. “There is no accountability.” (In fact, after seeing what happened to Mike, Rist came to an agreement with HSBC out of court.)

All too often, credible claims against banks are concealed through nondisclosure agreements and confidential settlements. Arbitration clauses in standard Wall Street employment contracts also force grievances into secret, extra-judicial tribunals, where the arbitrators are handpicked by employers. “For a half-century everyone in this industry went to arbitration for employment disputes,” Antilla explained. “They had decades to bury all their problems.”

And if an employee somehow musters up the money, energy and persistence to take a corporation to trial, he still faces terrible headwinds that his bosses have the ability to create. Of course someone stripped of all his responsibilities isn’t any good at his job. Of course someone suing the firm is looking for a payday. Of course someone ostracized by colleagues and supervisors is a conspiracy theorist who can’t be trusted. And it’s not as if people who still work at the company are eager to serve as character witnesses for their former colleagues. As Antilla put it, “Everyone has a mortgage.”

The power imbalance acts to protect the firm and its executives, and punish those who fight. “I tell my students, if you do whistleblowing, do so with the knowledge that you’re blowing up your career in every industry you’re in,” says Bowen, who is now an accounting lecturer at the University of Texas-Dallas.

This tradition of silence and futility helps explain why, for all of the training seminars and employee tiplines and initiatives to promote women, banking hasn’t experienced the reckoning that other professional fields have. “Wall Street has had absolutely no reform,” says Nancy Erika Smith, whose sexual harassment cases include clients from the banking industry. “It’s a macho frat boy culture to this day.”

The sense of impunity extends to other areas, too. After assisting drug cartels to launder cash, nobody at HSBC went to jail or had to fork over a dime of a Christmas bonus in penalties. By one estimate, the bank only had to pay about a month’s worth of profit to make the problem go away.

In 2012, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Lanny Breuer, admitted that if the government pressed charges, HSBC would have “almost certainly” lost its banking license in the U.S. Then-Attorney General Eric Holder backed up his criminal chief in Senate testimony: “It does become difficult for us to prosecute when we are hit with indications that if we do ... bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” The phrase “too big to jail” was popularized around the time of those hearings.

Over and over, Mike would talk about the injustice, the corruption, the damage done. “I saw what [HSBC] was all about. They are above the law in their own mind.”

HSBC spent five years under independent monitor Michael Cherkasky after the 2012 deferred prosecution agreement. His full reports were never released because the Justice Department worried that the unsealed documents might compromise future money-laundering investigations. But descriptions of key aspects of the report mirror Mike’s claims against HSBC: an inner circle determined to protect the bank at all costs and silence contrarians.

Cherkasky found that senior managers tried to bully internal watchdogs with a strategy he called “Discredit, Deny, Deflect and Delay.” According to a document signed by Loretta Lynch, the lead federal prosecutor on the case who would later become attorney general, Cherkasky singled out global banking and markets—the very division Mike worked in—for “combativeness, overblown complaints about factual inaccuracy, and a basic lack of cooperatives.” Employees in that division were pressured by bank executives like Suzy White to be “more favorable to the business than [they] would otherwise have been.” The head of global banking and markets was demoted after Cherkasky lambasted HSBC’s “deficient culture.”

Still, HSBC’s alleged misconduct continued apace. In Britain, HSBC is being scrutinized for running afoul of anti-money-laundering regulations. And in January, the bank entered into yet another deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice, paying $100 million in penalties to resolve a currency rate rigging investigation. That ruling came on the heels of a $175 million fine levied in September 2017 by the Federal Reserve, which charged the bank with fostering“unsafe and unsound“ practices in one of its trading divisions. But even with all these new compliance issues, in December 2017, the U.S. government decided to close its investigation into HSBC’s anti-money-laundering policies, citing sufficient enough improvement. The biggest threat to the bank’s profits was gone. HSBC won, again.

I visited Mike last summer at his house in Melville, Long Island. It’s a modest two-story with a garage full of sports equipment. As he showed me around, two dogs bounded through the house and his four kids popped in and out between after-school activities. The only sign that his life had been interrupted was the sparsely decorated living room. Because of the lawsuit, he didn’t have enough money to fill it with furniture.

The panic attacks are gone now. After an excruciating two-year job hunt, during which he had to beg friends to give him a chance, Mike eventually found a position on the fringes of the finance industry. It doesn’t pay as well as his old one, but it’s enough.

And yet his hurt about what happened at HSBC remains very much on the surface. Over and over during our many conversations about the details of the case, he would get sidetracked, trailing off to talk about the injustice, the corruption, the damage done. “I saw what that place was all about,” he said once. “They are above the law in their own mind.”

Rob Sherman, the bank’s U.S. head of media relations, disagrees. “The jury’s unanimous verdict dismissing all of Mr. Picarella’s claims against HSBC, as well as the clear evidence presented at trial, demonstrate that HSBC took swift and direct action in dealing with the alleged harassment,” he told me. He then provided a link to HSBC’s official whistleblower policy, which “does not condone or tolerate any acts of retaliation.”

Last fall, Mike appealed the verdict, on his own, without an attorney. He also filed a formal grievance with the state Supreme Court against Randall Jackson for violating rules of professional conduct, supplying a spreadsheet with 126 examples of “lies, deceptions, and fabrications.” The pleas haven’t yet proved successful. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of HSBC on January 31, arguing there was no “manifest injustice” in the jury verdict, and that Jackson did nothing improper. Mike filed another motion in February asking the judge in the case to throw out the verdict; late last month, the motion was denied. He’s currently suing his old lawyer, Jim Hubbard, for $10 million for malpractice, citing a failure to call key witnesses or make “appropriate objections” at trial, as well as a conflict of interest for also representing Jill. On Tuesday, Hubbard filed a motion to dismiss the charges.

I asked Mike why he has chosen to be so litigious, given how much pain the case still causes him. “They ruined my career,” he replied. “They put in the media, ‘lazy HSBC banker lost his case.’ They accused me of treason. They did it all purposely, intentionally, knowing that they can. I have to keep fighting for me and my family, and the next guy who wants to stick up for a lady that’s been sexually harassed.”

Late one afternoon, after hours of recounting his HSBC nightmare, Mike asked me if he could play the role of proud suburban dad for a moment. He pulled out a cellphone video of his twin daughters’ winter sports banquet and bragged about how the coach praised their discipline and determination. He then told me that the twins planned to attend the University of Southern California in the fall.

USC is one of the most expensive schools in the country, and Mike and his wife weren’t quite sure how they were going to pay for it. Maybe they’d have to take out a second mortgage, or he’d have to pick up a second job. But he was determined to make it work.

“I’m not going to let HSBC harm my family’s dreams,” he said, growing more emphatic as he spoke. “I will do anything so they can go to the school they want. They worked hard for it, and HSBC isn’t going to take that away from us. Pardon my language, but fuck them.”

CREDITS

Writer - David Dayen

David is the author of Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Fraud. He is a fellow with In These Times and contributes to The Intercept, The New Republic and the Los Angeles Times.

Illustration - Kristian Hammerstad

Kristian is an illustrator based in Oslo. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times, Le Monde and The New Yorker.

Creative Direction & Design - Sandra Garcia

Sandra is the former creative director of Highline.

Additional Art Direction & Design - Kate Larue

Kate is a creative director and journalist who lives in Brooklyn.

Research - Matt Giles

Matt is a freelance writer and the head of research and fact-checking at Longreads.

Development & Design - Gladeye

Gladeye is a digital innovations agency in New Zealand and New York.

The doctor specialized in sex offenders, and many of his patients seemed incorrigible. There was the head of a school—a married man and father—who said the sight of pretty female students caused him to masturbate behind his desk. There was the factory worker who, despite many arrests, hid in the bushes in the park, springing out to display his genitals to passing women. A barber’s assistant who also liked to expose himself claimed that when desire came over him, he was “devoid of reason” and felt “like a bull trying to butt his head through a wall.” Others had sexual fetishes, acting out odd obsessions. One patient, aroused by a buttocks-enhancing fashion, would sneak up behind women and climax into their bustles.

The doctor, a German-born psychiatrist named Richard von Krafft-Ebing, published his findings in 1886 in a medical textbook titled Psychopathia Sexualis, in which he laid out a comprehensive typology of deviant sexual behavior. Dismayed by the widespread ignorance on the subject, Krafft-Ebing reasoned that if his profession could understand what drove the impulses of these men—they were mostly men—society would be safer. So that his findings would be shared only among doctors, and not the prurient public, Krafft-Ebing wrote many of the case histories in Latin. But readers weren’t easily deterred: It was said that the publication of Psychopathia Sexualis caused a boom in sales of Latin dictionaries, and the book, which the doctor kept expanding, is read even now. Though many of his pronouncements are by today’s standards sexist (a “properly educated” woman “has but little sensual desire”) and racist (“certain barbarous races” are “devoid of morality”), in other ways Krafft-Ebing was farsighted and strikingly modern—for instance, he concluded that homosexuality was likely biological.

The hotel rooms. The bathrobes. And the masturbation. So much masturbation!

He also seems to have anticipated the Me Too movement more than 130 years in advance. If his case histories have an eerily familiar feel, it’s because we are in our own psychopathia sexualis moment. As man after powerful man is called to account, we’ve applauded the women, dissected male privilege and debated degrees of sexual misbehavior and appropriate punishment. Most of all, we’ve talked about power. As one viral post by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg put it: “The 1992 presidential race was once summed up in a pointed phrase: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Today, as headlines are dominated by stories about sexual harassment and sexual assault at work, a similar phrase comes to mind: ‘It’s the power, stupid.’” Former Vice President Joe Biden reprised the theme in a speech honoring campus activists. “This is not about sex,” he said. “This is about power. Usually fat, ugly men using their power, as you saw with that creep”—a clear reference to Harvey Weinstein.

There have been grotesque abuses of power—which some of the accused have acknowledged (and others have denied). Their victims have provided compelling testimony about the damage to their bodies, psyches, reputations and careers. Yet when we look closely at the men described as serious and serial offenders—the ones indicted or convicted of sexual crimes (Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Larry Nassar), or the ones accused of being repeat predators, gropers and exhibitionists (among them Louis C.K., Steve Wynn, Mark Halperin, Kevin Spacey, James Levine)—there’s also something strangely stylized about their behavior. It’s as if they were following a script available only to them, their victims forced to improvise in an awful, repetitive drama. The hotel rooms. Their surprise appearance in a bathrobe. (So many men have reportedly relied on the unbelted robe, from Weinstein to Charlie Rose to architect Richard Meier, that it could now be called the pervert’s uniform.) And the masturbation! So much masturbation! Behind desks, on women’s legs, inside their own pants. Their alleged predations are shocking in their brazenness, breadth and damage: At least 85 women have accused Weinstein; more than 50 have accused Cosby; more than 200 have accused writer-director James Toback. At Nassar’s sentencing, prosecutors identified more than 265 victims.

Something else is going on here—something that Krafft-Ebing recognized when he wrote that “the psychopathology of sexual life necessarily deals with the miseries of man and the dark sides of his existence.” It is something besides the power, something we haven’t been as willing to discuss or dissect. Yet we must.

During the near-decade I spent as Slate’s advice columnist, Dear Prudence, I received many, many letters about readers’ sexual proclivities and secrets. There were the people grappling with family gatherings where they would have to see their sexual abuser. There were the women who stumbled upon, or were sitting in the cubicle next to, an office masturbator. There was the fiancée who caught her future father-in-law at the laundry hamper, sniffing her panties. Another woman wrote about wanting to blackmail a former boyfriend, a celebrity, whose worm fetish she had memorialized on video. One mother wrote on behalf of her 13-year-old son: “When he was little, he would stop in front of the rubber glove display at the supermarket and just stare at the packages of dishwashing gloves.” Now that the boy had reached puberty, the obsession had turned sexual—the mother had found glove-fetish pornography on his computer—and he feared he would never find a woman who shared (or tolerated) his interest.

To leave the sex out of the conversation is to be blinkered about the sexual psychopathology that can upend people’s lives. Abuse of power is indeed intrinsic to the Me Too stories. But power alone does not explain why a man would choose to masturbate into a potted plant in front of a horrified woman rather than have sex with a willing one. Only when we examine the sexual aspect of these violations will we understand fully what is going on—and how to address it.

PORTRAIT OF AN ABUSER AS A YOUNG MAN

When it comes to sex, Americans are hooked on the lewd and excel at the punitive; if we think of the erotic at all, it’s as something strange and vaguely European, or maybe something cheesy in the mode of Fifty Shades of Grey. In the ’80s, Jack Morin, a psychologist in San Francisco, became convinced that a society that didn’t understand the erotic would invariably panic when confronted by it. So he set out to catalog the strange and wily nature of lust. In what he called the Sexual Excitement Survey, he asked more than 350 adults of different ages, races and sexual orientations about their most potent sexual experiences and fantasies.

He published the results in a book, The Erotic Mind, in 1995—the same year that movie star Hugh Grant got arrested for an encounter in a car with a sex worker, to the puzzlement of everyone. Grant was dating Elizabeth Hurley! Millions of women wanted to have sex with him! When the actor appeared on “The Tonight Show,” Jay Leno asked him, “What the hell were you thinking?” Morin’s book has plenty of answers.

“Whereas sex can be simple, by its very nature Eroticism is complex,” he explained. “Eros is energized by the entire human drama,” including “unruly impulses and painful lessons.” His survey respondents described their most memorable sexual encounters as being stoked by longing and anticipation, or by knowing that they were breaking social conventions. For many, the possibility of getting in a little bit of trouble was exciting. (Fortunately, for most people, the possibility of getting in a lot of trouble is a turnoff.)

Morin also found that his respondents’ sexual fantasies were “highly specific and focused” and that people tend to return to their most compelling ones again and again. For some, once a personal erotic script gets written, it can exert an obsessive grip on the imagination. “When someone pursues lustful aims with complete detachment from tenderness and affection,” Morin wrote, “erotic attention narrows to a laser-like focus on maximum genital arousal. The result is often a level of excitation that is qualitatively different than any other kind—hotter, more insistent, a unique psychophysiological high.”

People with unconventional turn-ons may feel shame or embarrassment, so they avoid exploring their desires with a partner.

You can detect these compulsions in the stories of, say, Spacey and Nassar. Harry Dreyfuss, the son of actor Richard Dreyfuss, described how when he was a teenager, Spacey once cupped his genitals in the presence of his father while the latter was busy reading a script. (Spacey has denied this allegation.) Likewise, Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics medical coordinator, often had girls’ parents sit in the room while he inserted his ungloved fingers in their daughters, casually blocking the view with his body or a towel. As prosecutor Angela Povilaitis said at Nassar’s sentencing: “To unnecessarily and without warning penetrate an unsuspecting minor for your own selfish sexual gains while her parent sat just feet away, unknowing, had to be part of the rush or the thrill for this defendant.”

It’s possible to see the kind of repetitive script that Morin described acted out by Bill Cosby. The comedian would get a young woman into his hotel room, sometimes his home, ostensibly to offer career advice. Noting that she seemed tense, he’d offer a glass of wine or another beverage (or pills, calling them her “friends”). He’d tell her to swallow—there was something disconcertingly insistent about this—then wait for the drugged woman’s eyes to flutter shut. After that, he could do with her what he wanted, experiencing, perhaps, the excitation that is different than any other.

How an abnormal focus like Cosby’s comes to be is not fully understood, but most experts agree that it often begins well before a person is explicitly aware of sexual feelings. Children, wrote Krafft-Ebing, experience “bodings and yearnings” and “mysterious sensations, foretastes and impulses.” The advance of puberty then develops these vague and undefined impulses “into conscious realization of sexual power.”

We tend to think of puberty as a hormonal levee break, in which tweens are suddenly flooded with chemicals that remake their bodies and minds. But it’s really more like an ongoing engineering process, with valves steadily discharging increasing amounts of hormones over time. Michael Vigorito, a sex therapist who co-authored the textbook Treating Out of Control Sexual Behavior with fellow sex therapist Doug Braun-Harvey, told me about a little-known phase of development called adrenarche, a precursor to the sexual maturation that occurs during puberty, when the adrenal glands in both boys and girls start releasing androgens, the male sex hormones. Adrenarche starts for most children between the ages of 6 and 8, and it seems that many sexual proclivities get fixed around then. “By the time someone reaches puberty,” said Vigorito, “what turns them on is likely there, and is for them to discover.”

When people discover what’s there, a specific fantasy, sometimes very specific, can get endlessly reinforced through masturbation. In The Erotic Mind, Morin described a patient who recalled receiving a fire truck when he was a child. It was large enough to ride on, and it came with a yellow raincoat. Driving around, he’d enjoyed the “tingling” sensations from riding, and the sense of himself as a brave fireman. As an adult, his most intense orgasms occurred when he masturbated while wearing a yellow raincoat. He found his fetish deeply dismaying, calling it a “sickness” he couldn’t shake.

Curiously, an intense arousal can be attached to something not sexual at all—and why this happens for some people remains unknown. In “The Butterfly Effect,” a podcast about the effects on society of unlimited pornography, host Jon Ronson explored “custom porn,” in which clients pay filmmakers to enact their private erotic dramas. One man requested a film of a woman in the kitchen exasperatedly swatting at an invasion of flies. Ronson interviewed another man, “Mike from Ohio,” who explained that when he was a kid, his mother had not allowed any talk of sex and only let him watch old TV sitcoms that she deemed free of sexual references. One day, Mike was watching an episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” in which Mary Tyler Moore got her toe stuck in the faucet of a bathtub. This scenario has been the locus of Mike’s sexual arousal ever since. He paid to have a film made that showed what “The Dick Van Dyke Show” didn’t: the fully naked woman unable to extricate her toe.

Such scripts may cause distress only to the person with the fetish. But scripts that involve other parties have the potential to go awry. “Some people fantasize about something autoerotically for a long time, then they spring it on somebody,” said Russell Stambaugh, a psychologist and sex therapist in Michigan. “They don’t have the social script for negotiating their fetish with a partner.”

And so the story of Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in 1782 described in his Confessions the origin of his spanking fetish. Shortly after his birth, Rousseau’s mother died, and eventually he was sent to live with a woman named Miss Lambercier. Of the spankings she inflicted on him, Rousseau wrote, “Who would believe this childish discipline, received at eight years old, from the hands of a woman of thirty, should influence my propensities, my desires, my passions, for the rest of my life.” Rousseau’s arousal required scornful superiority from the woman punishing him: “To fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments.” In search of this, he would go out and expose his buttocks, hoping for disapproval and a smack from passing women.

All the therapists and researchers I consulted said there’s no single explanation for the range of sexual behavior that crosses the line. In their book, Braun-Harvey and Vigorito explore some of the psychological roots. They describe how for some men, sexual situations trigger a specifically sexual narcissism; when these men are aroused, they can engage in exploitation they later justify to themselves. “There is a sense of entitlement and a lack of empathy,” Vigorito told me. So perhaps to the case of Louis C.K., who is reported to have posed this startling question to female colleagues: Could he masturbate in front of them? Sometimes he got a stunned yes, and he did. In a written statement, Louis C.K. acknowledged how he rationalized his actions: “I said to myself that what I did was O.K. because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first.”

The therapists also describe a pattern of sexual behavior called “avoidant attachment.” People with avoidant attachment patterns, they write, often have difficulty forming adult relationships. Even if these individuals are in a primary romantic relationship, they are more likely to seek sex elsewhere. Meanwhile, people with unconventional turn-ons may feel shame or embarrassment, so they avoid exploring their desires with a partner, preferring the reliability of masturbation. They can engage in out-of-control sexual behavior to regulate the threat of emotional closeness. Or, as Morin wrote, “Lust is most likely to turn destructive when it is split off from the rest of life, where it festers and grows hostile.”

THE COMPLICATIONS OF HYPERSEXUALITY

Despite our societal preoccupation with sex—keeping penises erect is, after all, a multibillion-dollar industry—the specifics of who or what turns people on, how they express their desires and how this can go wrong remain largely mysterious even to experts. There’s not even general agreement among medical and psychological professionals about what to call the behavior that repels and puzzles us—let alone treat it. Is it “compulsive sexual behavior”? “Sex addiction”? Is it a moral failing, a social problem, a medical issue?

In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, atypical sexual arousal is considered a “paraphilia,” the umbrella term for sexual fetishes and similar behaviors. The manual describes paraphilias that range from an obsession with a body part (for example: feet, hair) to engaging in certain conduct (exhibitionism, voyeurism) to a fetishistic focus on an object (shoes, rubber). Sexual attraction to children, or pedophilia, is a paraphilia, as are sexual masochism and sadism.

So paraphilias range from the harmless to the criminal. But paraphilias are not themselves a problem, according to the DSM. Until five years ago, a person with a paraphilia was considered psychologically ill. Now, however, the most recent edition of the DSM classifies most paraphilias as normal sexual variations that become problematic only when the person with one is distressed by it or acts on it in a way that violates others. This change was a triumph for the BDSM and other sexual minority communities that lobbied to bring it about.

Most of what we know about people with sexual compulsions or harmful paraphilias comes from research on those who end up in the criminal justice system or who seek psychological help on their own (or at the insistence of a spouse or employer). However, a Swedish study published in 2006 provides a window into the lives of “hypersexual” people in the general population. Based on a survey of sexual practices and psychological health in Sweden, the researchers identified a subset of men and women who had more sex than average. It turned out these subjects could be neatly divided. Those who were going at it in the context of a stable relationship tended to be happy Swedes. Those who had high rates of impersonal or solitary sex, not so much.

This second group started having sex earlier in life, had it more often and sought more variety than others. Their sexual menu included “paying for sex, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and masochism/sadism.” (Almost twice as many men as women fit the study’s criteria for hypersexuality, and the men masturbated three times as often as the women.) The researchers found that this group also tended to have romantic troubles and a history of sexually transmitted diseases. Hypersexuality itself was linked to a general propensity toward risky behavior, poor social adjustment and unhappiness.

The psychiatric profession is still grappling with how to categorize this behavior. The APA decided against “hypersexuality” as an entry in the latest DSM, but the International Classification of Diseases, an influential database maintained by the World Health Organization, recently included the diagnosis of “compulsive sexual behavior disorder,” described as “a persistent pattern of failure to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses” that “causes marked distress or significant impairment.” (The prevalence of this disorder is unknown, but estimates range from 1 to 6 percent of adults globally, with recent estimates at the lower end.)

Engaging in hypersexual behavior or having a paraphilia isn’t an explanation for why someone sexually transgresses. People can be hypersexual without having a paraphilia and vice versa. Not all sexual violators are sexually compulsive. There are also people whose key sexual fantasies are about behaviors harmful to themselves or others who do not act on those desires. But the Swedish study found a “strong association between high rates of impersonal sex and paraphilic interests,” giving support to the idea that hypersexuality and paraphilia can have a synergistic effect.

Many mental and physical maladies seem to act as a tripwire for hypersexuality. A paper by Meg Kaplan, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, and her husband and fellow Columbia associate clinical professor of psychiatry, Richard Krueger, listed some of the related conditions, including bipolar disorder, brain injury, dementia, substance abuse, obsessive-compulsive disorder and impulse-control disorder. There may also be a connection, wrote Krueger and Kaplan, between hypersexuality and certain personality disorders, such as histrionic and narcissistic personality disorders. Other studies have found high rates in sex offenders of antisocial personality disorder. These are people, such as psychopaths or sociopaths, who are aggressive, callous and manipulative.

Similar to the Swedes, Americans who have lots of sexual partners do not appear happier than their more buttoned-up fellow citizens, according to a recent analysis of American sexual behavior by sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger. Based on nearly three decades of data from the General Social Survey, Wolfinger found that the average American man has had five sexual partners and the average woman three—but there is a sliver of the population, about 5 percent, who have had many more partners. In this subset, the men had roughly triple the number of partners as women: 50 or more for the men compared to 16 or more for the women.

Which brings us to the unavoidable conclusion arrived at by most mental health experts: When we are talking about harmful sexual disorders, we are talking about a phenomenon that occurs predominantly in men.

WHY MEN?

Like many single women, Kerry Quinn was looking for a romantic partner on dating apps. And like many single women, she had been the unwilling recipient of an extraordinary number of dick pics. As she’d later write in a story for Thrillist, she was sick of “unexpected visual boners intruding on my day.” So she decided to conduct a little experiment: She would show men what it was like to get an unsolicited photo of female genitals.

Quinn picked a random picture of a “cute” vagina from the internet, then set her dating parameters wide—men between the ages of 22 and 60. After she matched with a man and exchanged some flirty texts, she hit him with the photo. Just as she’d expected, the men were grossed out and pissed off.

OK, I made up that part. To Quinn’s surprise, the men to whom she sent the photo responded with descriptions of how they planned to pleasure her and happily complied with a request to send a very personal photo of their own. Quinn decided to up the shock value. On the next round, she sent the photo immediately after the initial hellos, and her collection of photos of male genitals grew considerably. For a final round, Quinn dropped the hellos entirely and just sent the picture. More delight ensued, with men offering explicit descriptions of how they would improve her life.

Quinn’s experiment, in other words, was an abject failure. “Given that men like to send dick pics, I suppose their enthusiasm for v-pics makes sense,” she wrote. There’s no doubt that many dick pics are sent with the intent to shock and humiliate. But it’s also apparently a male trait to overestimate the female desire to see one’s genitals. Krafft-Ebing’s patient who liked to jump out of the bushes with his penis exposed explained to the doctor that, after finding the examination of his own genitals satisfying, he had “the lustful thought that this sight must be very pleasant to women.” In an article for Psychology Today examining the impulse behind the dick pic, psychologist David Ley noted that among gay men, sending such a photo would be meant not to offend but to entice. In a sexual world without women, many men happily speak dick pic semiotics.

Men were twice as likely as women to describe anonymous sex as a peak encounter.

When compared (in general) to female sexuality, there’s more moreness to male sexuality, and therefore more potential for it to go amiss. It’s popular in certain circles to assert that differences between the sexes are a construct, but the people I spoke to who deal with sexually troubled patients cautioned against ignoring the very real biological differences that do exist. Of course cultural forces greatly shape behavior, and generalizations will always be subject to dispute. But if we want to understand sexual misconduct, we must also acknowledge the places where our sexual wiring diverges.

Ley, who practices in Albuquerque, New Mexico, wrote the book The Myth of Sex Addiction, in which he ticks off the many (broadly general) differences between male and female sexuality, citing research and his own clinical experience. Men are more sexually aggressive, which can be welcome or frightening. Men think about sex more than women and want to have sex more than women. Men would be more likely than women to have sex with a stranger or with a group. Men are more likely to get a boost of self-esteem from a casual sexual encounter than women. Men are more likely to watch porn.

In The Erotic Mind, Jack Morin also discovered essential differences in men and women’s peak erotic encounters. The contrast was made especially clear when comparing gay men and lesbians to heterosexuals. Men were almost twice as likely as women to describe anonymous sex as a peak encounter. Almost 50 percent of the gay men in his survey described an encounter with a stranger or acquaintance as peak, compared to 1 percent of lesbians. Women were far more likely than men to have feelings for someone preceding the peak encounter.

Morin believed that the differences begin in the obvious place: the penis, insistent as a puppy, relentlessly demanding attention from its owner. “The penis is an instantaneous and unavoidable arousal feedback system,” he wrote, with favorite fantasy images reinforced by masturbation. On the way to a satisfying sex life, most men have to learn to restrain their orgasm, while many women must learn to access theirs. There have been experiments to measure arousal, in which women and men privately watched erotic films in a lab while hooked up to devices that gauge genital response. The scientists found that, objectively, most subjects experienced arousal, a point confirmed by the men but disputed by the women. The latter often said, in contradiction of physiological evidence, that they were not turned on at all. (Theories include women’s arousal being less obvious than men’s, even to women themselves; women being socialized to repress their sexual response; and women lubricating even if not aroused as an evolutionary adaptation to reduce injury in case of rape.)

Several therapists I interviewed talked about the need for a more empathetic understanding of male sexuality, for the sexual burdens and expectations that men carry. In our mating rituals, men are supposed to initiate, read signals and be forceful, all to a precise degree. Courtship is full of feints, double-entendres and mixed messages. “Men are taught from a young age that they must be sexually competent and sexually powerful with exaggerated and impossible ideals,” wrote Ley. “Compared to women, men are far more insecure and anxious about their sexual performance.” This pressure and insecurity, Ley continued, can also breed resentment.

But there’s more to male sexual vulnerability than performance anxiety. Ley writes that the popular caricature of male sexuality as either foolish or malign misses the enormous role that sex plays in men’s emotional lives. Often lacking the kind of physically expressive emotional support that women have with friends, men turn to sex to feed a craving for intimacy and tenderness that is “often starved near to death.” Men, Ley writes, use sex to “let down boundaries and drop our armor enough to be emotionally vulnerable.”

None of these differences excuse sexual violations. But when male psychological vulnerabilities aren’t recognized and addressed, the results can be dire. Negative emotional states, discovered Morin, can actually act as “unexpected aphrodisiacs.” Even more perversely, states of anxiety, guilt and anger are sexual fuel for some. As Morin put it, low self-esteem and high arousal can produce “the most overwhelming and destructive turn-ons.”

A CASE STUDY

Like Harvey Weinstein, Michael spent years in Los Angeles exposing himself to women. Weinstein is accused of shedding many bathrobes in his favorite venue, a Beverly Hills hotel suite. Michael’s venue of choice—of necessity, really—was the county bus. Michael (not his real name), who is 58 and no longer lives in California, can, like many people with a paraphilia, trace the origins of his behavior back to childhood. He grew up in a small town in the Midwest as an outsider, the only mixed-race child in his school. He says he’s a combination of Native American, white and African-American, but his classmates saw him only as the n-word, an epithet he says he heard regularly. (The sex offender registry classifies Michael as black.) His father was not around, and when his older brother beat him, his mother sometimes laughed.

So Michael spent as much time away from home as possible. From ages 10 to 12, that meant hanging out at the house of one of his few friends—let’s call him David—who lived with his stepmother and a stepsister in her mid-teens. Michael said the stepmother walked around the house in a bra and panties. The stepsister liked to pull up her top and show Michael her breasts. “I remember feeling excited, if that’s what it was,” he told me. “Or scared. A little bit of both, I guess.” Mixing lust with negative emotions, as Morin documented, can create a powerful fusion. As Michael says: “I think it screwed me up.”

By high school, many of Michael’s classmates were pairing off romantically, an opportunity he felt was unavailable to him because of his race. Instead he focused on how excited David’s stepmother and stepsister had made him. He thought that if he stood in the window and exposed himself to passing girls, they might get excited too—although he didn’t do it.

The day he turned 17, Michael joined the Army. A few years later, honorably discharged, he moved in with his grandmother. His bedroom overlooked the street, and he would leave the blinds open while he changed clothes; young women his age, he said, would walk by and sometimes look. So he started masturbating at the window, and when he did, some of them watched. Eventually, his shame was greater than his excitement, and he came to feel it was time to leave the Midwest for good. He ended up on a bus to Los Angeles. During the several-day trip, a young woman sat across from him. “I exposed myself,” he said. “She kept looking. I masturbated. She watched. Then I sat next to her. And we had sex on the bus while everyone was asleep.” Afterward, they held hands until she reached her destination.

James Cantor is a psychologist and associate professor at the University of Toronto’s faculty of medicine whose expertise is in atypical sexual expression. He characterized exhibitionism in a way that sounded almost fanciful: that there might be a biological glitch that gives some people an impulse to expose themselves, akin to courtship display rituals in other species. “It’s like it’s an ancient behavior normally suppressed in the human brain,” he said. (The DSM actually categorizes exhibitionism, voyeurism and frotteurism—touching or rubbing up against a nonconsenting person—as “courtship disorders.”)

It was striking how closely Cantor’s description matched Michael’s thought process when he was exposing himself: “I was looking for somebody to like me and want to be with me,” Michael told me. When he said that he had received enough positive responses to keep going, I found this hard to believe; I have encountered flashers four or five times, and each time I felt violated and repelled. But Michael said, “I was looking for a woman who liked it. Who would look directly at my penis, smile, and continue watching while I masturbated. I got a lot of those. I’m a little surprised you’re shocked.” Of course there were also plenty who didn’t smile. Michael hadn’t wanted to frighten women, and when he did, he was filled with guilt and self-loathing. “Some women were livid,” he told me of his many bus rides. “One of them—she pulled out a knife and said, ‘Put it away or I will cut it off.’”

“I can’t breathe,” she said. He explained that was because he excited her.

Living in southern California, Michael tried a variety of odd jobs, including being a stripper and porn actor, but being paid to expose himself wasn’t exciting. The bus trips became the centerpiece of his life. “It developed into a coping skill,” he told me. “Kind of like a drug high. When you’re feeling stressed, afraid, it takes your mind off it. While you’re doing that, you’re not feeling anything else.”

He was eventually forced to confront the effects of his behavior. In 1991, he was sitting on the bus next to a woman of about 20 and pulled out his penis. She kept staring at his crotch, so, assuming she was interested, he took her hand and put it on his penis. She squeezed, then asked him why his penis was “like that.” He said it was hard because she excited him. She then said, “I can’t breathe.” He explained that was because he excited her. Soon she let go and got off the bus, and he followed. “I thought it was going to be a love connection,” he said. Instead she flagged down a police officer.

Because he had put her hand on his penis, the charges were elevated to sexual battery. Michael said he later came to realize that the woman probably couldn’t breathe because she was afraid. “She had no way of knowing I wouldn’t hurt her. I knew that, but she didn’t know.” He ended up serving two years in prison.

After more arrests and more incarcerations—at least eight—Michael was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Depression and despair led him to attempt suicide. David Ley, the Albuquerque psychologist, explained that men with depression or anxiety learn early on that “masturbation or sex is a fabulous way to feel better for a while.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with masturbating to boost one’s mood (that’s one of the nice things about it); the problem comes with where, when and how much.

The concept of sex addiction therapy has been popular in the public mind since the ’80s—an idea bolstered by high-end rehab centers like the one in Arizona where both Weinstein and Spacey have been spotted. But leading organizations of sex therapists and researchers do not consider sex addiction a real medical condition. They say the diagnosis confuses symptom for cause, and the use of an abstinence model is not ideal when healthy sex, not celibacy, is the goal. The preferred approach requires getting a detailed individual history, diagnosing any co-occurring disorders (as in the case of Michael) and using cognitive behavioral therapy, group therapy, systems of accountability and medication if necessary.

One of the central goals is to correct what therapists call “cognitive distortions” and the rest of us call “self-delusions.” “Someone who takes out his penis in a non-consenting way often says, ‘Why did she stare? She must have liked it,’” explained Meg Kaplan, who has heard every kind of excuse in her decades as a therapist. In treatment, these ideas have to be confronted and the harm to the victim acknowledged. Another goal is to dispense with the belief that arousal is a kind of magical state that removes individual agency. Clients must take responsibility for what they do, Michael Vigorito told me, instead of seeing themselves as being overtaken by forces beyond their power. (Larry Nassar, in a court statement, used this kind of distancing language when he described his decades of penetrating young gymnasts as “a forest fire out of control.”)

In prison, Michael took classes on anger management and impulse control. “I learned that urges only last a matter of seconds or minutes,” he told me. “If you can get past that, you’re good to go for a while.” After his release, he continued with individual and group therapy for years. A growing spiritual sense was also crucial to his recovery. He now sees a clinical social worker once a week to keep himself on track, and he’s studying online to become a paralegal. Michael believes his story offers hope to those in a similar struggle, though he had a stern warning. “If they want to recover, they have to look in the mirror and say, ‘You are the problem,’” he said. “You are what needs to change, not the world.”

The DSM states that a person can gain long-term control of harmful sexual disorders: Someone is considered to be in “full remission” if he is functioning well in life and has not engaged in nonconsensual behavior for at least five years. In her recent book, Desistance From Sexual Offending, criminologist Danielle Arlanda Harris notes that, contrary to popular belief, desistance—that is, ceasing the behavior—is an empirical reality. “It happens,” she writes, “and it happens most of the time.”

For Michael, it’s been more than 15 years. He recognizes that he deserved imprisonment but despairs that he is on the sex offender registry for life, with no opportunity to get off no matter how long he goes without committing an offense. “Either we believe in recovery, and people can change, or we have to stop telling people we believe it,” he said. “Because we don’t act like we believe it’s possible.”

In Michael’s case, facing his actions and their consequences changed him. He was forced to do so because he didn’t have a fancy hotel suite, ruthless lawyers, ex-Mossad agents, combative representatives and the ability to make or break film careers. In other words, unlike Harvey Weinstein, he didn’t have power.

NOW WE CAN TALK ABOUT POWER

The idea that sexual violations are driven by power and nothing else has its origins in the mid-1970s, when feminist author Susan Brownmiller released her path-breaking book on rape, Against Our Will. “Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe,” wrote Brownmiller. She added that rape “is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”

Her work has had enduring influence. Two decades later, Jack Morin observed in The Erotic Mind that abuse of power is a “fashionable explanation” for sexual violations as people seek “to shield themselves from the dark side of lust by insisting that predatory sexual behavior isn’t really sexual at all.”

Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker explored the limitations of such explanations in his 2002 book, The Blank Slate. He credited Brownmiller with documenting many historical injustices against women. But he cautioned that her pronouncements were rooted less in prehistory than in 20th-century ideological struggles. Brownmiller’s work on male predation, he wrote, smashed up against a central cultural imperative of the 1960s—to free people from repressive sexual strictures—and thus meant compartmentalizing: “Sex is good because sex is natural and natural things are good. But rape is bad; therefore, rape is not about sex.”

As this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning stories in The New York Times and The New Yorker have shown, male workplace sexual abusers have exploited their enormous power. But we cannot ignore that their histories of sexual violations often predated that power. Harvey Weinstein has been accused by several women of sexual assault in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when he was a college dropout working as a music promoter in Buffalo, New York. One woman, Wende Walsh, told The Buffalo News that when she was waitressing at a bar, Weinstein, her former boss, came in one night, stayed until closing, then begged for a ride. In the car, she said, he forced her to perform oral sex. A few nights later he showed up at her apartment, exposed himself, then got kicked off the property when the landlord heard yelling.

These men enlisted a disturbing number of colleagues to enable and cover up their deeds.

Most sexual violators start one step at a time, several researchers told me, seeing what they can get away with. Larry Nassar has been accused of molesting a girl, under the guise of doing a study on flexibility, as early as 1992, when he was still bumbling his way through osteopath school. When abusers like him gain the resources or social standing that allow them to successfully cross boundaries and suffer no consequences, they can amass vast numbers of victims. What distinguishes these powerful violators, said psychologist James Cantor, is not just that they fool themselves about what they’re doing—that’s an inherent quality in many who commit sexual misdeeds—it’s that they can create an environment in which they go unchallenged: “The more they get away with, the more they can push the envelope.”

As the histories of Weinstein and Nassar show, adroit predators can also pursue a career that provides unquestioned access to their preferred targets. Weinstein perfected a system: calling a meeting with an actress or other woman seeking career advancement, having her brought to an office, restaurant or hotel bar by an assistant (preferably female, to put the woman at ease), arranging that the assistant leave, then moving the meeting to a hotel suite. The women who resisted or complained might receive flowers in an attempt at mollification, and a threat of career damage if the flowers didn’t work. Meanwhile, in Nassar’s case, gymnasts were required to submit to his abuse; being treated by him was compulsory for inclusion on the USA Gymnastics team. When several of them complained, doctors, coaches and trainers brushed aside their concerns as if they were naive girls who didn’t understand the special nature of Nassar’s therapy.

These men enlisted a disturbing number of colleagues to enable and cover up their deeds. The Washington Post, for example, reported how Yvette Vega, the longtime executive producer of the “Charlie Rose” show, responded to stories of Rose’s treatment of young female employees—which allegedly included nudity, groping and sexually charged come-ons. When a 21-year-old employee complained about Rose’s late-night calls, in which he described his fantasies of her swimming in his pool, Vega replied, “That’s just Charlie being Charlie.” Shortly before the dissolution of the show, Vega told the Post that she regretted not standing up over the years for the young women.

Glen Gabbard, a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, notes that this kind of collusion with an entourage can feed a sense of omnipotence. Gabbard has treated or reviewed the cases of hundreds of therapists and analysts who had sex with their patients, a gross violation of authority by people who are trained to know better. A small number were psychopathic predators, he wrote in his 2016 book, Boundaries and Boundary Violations in Psychoanalysis—mostly men who “systematically prey on female patients who seem vulnerable.” But there were other therapists whom Gabbard labels “profoundly narcissistic.” These individuals, he told me, rose to the top of their profession, the acclaim fueling their grandiosity and entitlement. Confronted with their sexual transgressions, they often refused to acknowledge them. Gabbard told me, “I’ve heard many times: ‘I have earned this. If someone else did this, I’d be concerned, but I know what I’m doing.’”

I asked several therapists if having a patient with power changes or complicates treatment. They emphasized that it’s crucial to thoroughly evaluate each patient without making assumptions based on that person’s social status. There’s no effective treatment for a sociopath, Kaplan explained, and such a person is very different from a patient whose behavior is intertwined with the use of drugs or alcohol, for example. Further, just as there is no one path that leads to crossing sexual boundaries, there is no one path to stopping. Professional and social standing aside, some people realize on their own that what they are doing is wrong, while others “age out.” For still others, facing an arrest or firing is enough to end the behavior.

But, Vigorito said, power can make it more challenging for certain people to recognize that they have crossed the line. An essential feature of therapy is having patients recognize the discrepancy between their self-justifications and the damage their behavior causes, then using these uncomfortable insights to prompt change. If people with power are able to avoid consequences, sometimes such insights may just not come—even after a reporter calls with a long list of questions.

WHERE NOW?

In the wake of Me Too, the worst of the predators have been forced to face what they did: Larry Nassar is serving what will be a life sentence, Bill Cosby has been convicted, Harvey Weinstein was recently indicted. There is an astonishing promise in Me Too: a workplace (a world!) that seriously addresses sexual harassment and abuse. We can hope that this reexamination will curb much bad behavior. But as Krafft-Ebing wrote, the man with pathological sexuality “is in constant danger of violating the laws of the state and of morality.” There will always be such people.

Already, some of the accused are reportedly seeking a return after a time-out of a few months. Journalist Tina Brown has said she was approached about producing a comeback for Charlie Rose: a talk show in which he would interview other disgraced men. (Rose has characterized his decades of sexual harassment as acting on what he believed were “shared feelings.”) It apparently is not happening, although it could have been worth watching if they all appeared in their bathrobes.

As employers and the public weigh if, and how, specific men may resume their professions, any return must take into account the myriad individual factors that go into evaluating someone who has been accused. The therapeutic profession has its own model for this. Gabbard, the Houston psychiatrist, described how his field evaluates whether therapists who have committed sexual violations can return to work. Some of them are found to be people whose acts and psychological conditions mean they have forfeited forever their right to practice. Others are offered the opportunity for professional rehabilitation based on “how the person conceptualizes what they’ve done, how much remorse they have, and how determined they are that it never happen again.” Such therapists are required to have ongoing psychological treatment, and a separate “rehabilitation coordinator” should monitor the therapist’s progress and return to practice.

While we strive to right genuine wrongs, we have to look directly at sex in all its complexity and potential for good and ill. If in order to protect our children from predators we tell them that most touch is suspect, a precursor to abuse; if in order to prevent them from becoming predators we make them feel their “mysterious sensations” are shameful and potentially dangerous, we risk distorting their healthy sexual development—and creating more of what we’d like to prevent.

More than 20 years ago, when Jack Morin released The Erotic Mind, he wrote that he was living in a time in which lust was held in low esteem, linked with sexual abuse, harassment and sex addiction. Not much has changed. But it is “very important not to reject lust,” he warned, “no matter how relentless the antisexual clamoring may become.” If we assume our drives and desires are a source of destruction, we push lust to the shadows. There it doesn’t disappear; sometimes it detonates.

DRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY

Suprising, even beautiful things can happen when it feels as if the world is about to end.

1 - THE CITY’S LIMITS

When I moved to South Africa nine years ago, one of the first things some locals told me was to be careful using GPS. The country had rules of navigation, they told me, but ones more complicated and intuitive than a computer could manage. You could drive through this neighborhood, but not at night. You could drive through that one, but roll up your windows, especially if you are white. It was often white South Africans who talked about the GPS, but many black South Africans agreed. It was sad, everybody would say; sad that the once-segregated country seemed not to have fully gotten over its past. But that was the way it was. Those were the rules. Some had come to think of them, painfully, as a fact of nature, of the human race.

I thought of these rules when I flew into Cape Town, South Africa’s second-largest city, in March. Over the last three years, Cape Town has been suffering an extraordinary, once-in-300-years drought—helped along, most analysts surmise, by climate change. The shift in the city’s physical appearance is astonishing. The Cape is cordoned off from the rest of the country by a 5,000-foot-high wall of mountains. To the northeast, the landscape looks like the Africa of safari brochures: dry, hot and then jungly. But in the little bowl-shaped area couched between the mountain range and the southwestern tip of the African continent, the climate is exceptional. Its technical name is “Mediterranean.” To look out from the peaks toward Cape Town, a city of 4 million distinguished by genteel architecture and craggy slopes, has traditionally been like glimpsing Greece, if Greece were even dreamier: ivory houses, cobalt sea, olive hills, all threaded through by ribbons of gold and twinkles of topaz from wine farms. Fed by five times more rainfall than South Africa’s arid central region, the Cape area is one of the most diverse floral kingdoms on Earth, boasting giant blush-colored blooms. Cloud formations, from billowing white cumulonimbus to fogs that flow like rivers to mists that course like waterfalls off the top of Table Mountain, the crag that looms over the city, make heaven seem almost like a real place here, as playful and richly landscaped as the earth below.

Some of that is gone now. Cape Town’s drought palette is a dull lime and beige. Lawns and gardens are dead. The city’s vast townships—spots legally reserved for people of color under apartheid—used to be differentiated from the wealthy neighborhoods that tumble down the Atlantic-facing side of Table Mountain not only by their location, tucked conveniently behind the mountain where they couldn’t easily be seen, but also by their own, less desirable microclimate, marshy and wind-scoured, prone to floods in wet weather and, in the dry and breezy summers, consumed by a cloud of grit. Dust, piled in little drifts in the gutters, was one of those signs that you were heading into a “bad” place. Dust is everywhere now.

Tourists love Cape Town: It has the second-highest “seasonal fluctuation of multimillionaire population rate” (i.e., summer holidayers with superyachts) after the Hamptons. It’s chic: Tech startups and hip restaurants with names like The Bombay Bicycle Club are all over the place. It’s affluent: Nine out of 10 of South Africa’s richest neighborhoods are here. I occasionally suspect the tourists come because it’s in Africa, and thus exotic, but they don’t really have to deal with many black people. Bantu-speakers had not arrived here by the time the Europeans came. They are migrating to the city now from jobs-starved rural areas to the east, but Cape Town still has an unusually low black population, only 39 percent. Forty-two percent of residents are “coloreds,” mixed-race South Africans with an unplaceably multicultural appearance. The international airport greets visitors with thrilling floor-to-ceiling photographs of vineyards, parades, jazz musicians, eye-popping beaches and zebras—but strikingly few images of the black villages and cityscapes that are the dominant reality for the rest of the continent.

Within South Africa, this identity has given Cape Town a questionable reputation. It is known as a place for South Africans—and foreigners—who don’t want to openly say racist things but who firmly intend to keep a grip on their privilege. Though whites make up only 16 percent of the population, compared to 8 percent of the country at large, they are much more visible here; the bars on upscale avenues and the jewel-toned beach resorts are filled with almost exclusively white patrons. A friend of mine who helped propose a wind farm that would have allowed more migrants to live in the area was defeated by a horde of angry British retirees and white South Africans who claimed to oppose it because it endangered a rare frog, a frog they had probably never heard of before they heard of the development.

Stories of outright discrimination against black people in restaurants abound. Last year, a reserved parking spot in a fancy neighborhood called Clifton went on sale for $83,000. I know Clifton. It’s crowded, but there’s parking. Some buyer probably paid what a typical South African family spends over 23 years for the privilege not to have to deal with “car guards,” the black or colored Capetonians who employ themselves to watch over your car for a quarter.

Driving in Johannesburg, I once saw a billboard for a Cape Town real estate company inviting South Africans to “semigrate.” The word was a play on “emigrate,” what many white South Africans have been threatening to do—to a whiter country—since the end of white rule in 1994. The implication was that moving to Cape Town was, more or less, just as good as leaving Africa itself.

This helps explain the strange quiet in the rest of the country about the drought. My friends in Johannesburg rarely talked or seemed to care very much about it. Serves them right for filling up their pools, a few acidly said. Let it become more like the rest of Africa—tougher, harder to eke out a living in—and let them see how it feels. With the coming of “Day Zero,” the day initially predicted for April when the government would have to shut off the taps, “four million people … may have to stand in line surrounded by armed guards,” National Geographic warned. The expectation among South Africans outside of Cape Town was that this might be a poetically just punishment. If Capetonians had wanted so badly to hold on to goodies, from wealth to race privilege, then let their overabundance and its effects drown them. The thought of a person who would pay $83,000 to avoid a car guard sweating in line to gather a bucket of water from a distribution truck was almost pleasurable.

2 - TURDS AS TOTEMS

I wrote to my friend Paul, who lives in an apartment in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, to see if I could stay with him in Cape Town. He agreed—but only if I understood what was going on.

What was going on, he suggested, was not just a drought, but a kind of vast, unplanned, crazy—and fabulous—social experiment. “I hope you’ll be game to test your water-saving limits!” he wrote me. “Nothing leaves the flat except via the toilet these days. The sink and bath are plugged ... I can manage the washing machine on the lowest setting, and its output goes into a 25-liter container for additional flushing. It’s all a bit extreme perhaps,” he conceded.

He and his present guest, he said, were each using only about a fifth of the 50 liters per person per day the city government had mandated—which is less than a sixth of the 330 liters the average American uses a day at home. “[But] it’s more of a challenge than a requirement,” he explained. “I’m sort of having fun with this!”

Being able to show a visitor day-old urine ripening in your toilet bowl is a proud moment.

Over the past year, unexpectedly, the city has cut its water consumption by 40 percent. “Bucket showers”—or catching the water in a plastic tub for reuse—are now the norm. Washing dishes in pure water is a luxury; kitchens smell of days-old dishwater. People put out ungainly tanks in their yards to harvest rainwater, smothering whatever grass might be left. Wealthy South Africans, traditionally, have had fastidious cleanliness standards, a way of distinguishing themselves and of tapping the vast labor reserve of cheap maids. Now, being able to show a visitor day-old urine ripening in your toilet bowl, proving you do not flush, is a proud moment. Body odor is less taboo. Many women have radically adjusted their haircare routines: embracing natural curls to diminish the need to wash and style, shampooing only once a week or, as one woman told me in a discussion on a community-run drought Facebook page, “experimenting with spraying my hair lightly” with a plant mister. Others chopped hip-length hair off into bobs or Sinéad O’Connor shaves. A queer friend of mine complained she didn’t know who to hit on because “there are queer haircuts everywhere.”

On the drought Facebook page, which now has 160,000 members, a spirit has arisen of egging each other on. The members, who hail from different classes, call each other “fellow water warriors.” They give each other digital fist-bumps for their low water usage, their “gray water systems,” “submersible pumps” and other odd contraptions they’ve engineered to make their homes more water-wise. The weirder and more DIY the better. Monique and Clint Tarling, a family living just outside the main city, showed me the “sustainable shower” they built out of a 500-liter tank and pallets. Revealing their new priorities, the shower is on their front stoop, and they can no longer enter their house through the main door.

Clint rejiggered an old worm farm to be a filter. Monique, a homemaker who fosters abandoned babies—20 in the past six years—discovered that the project became an outlet for creative tendencies, a longing for beauty, she barely knew she had. She decorated their new shower with ferns and waterproof fairy lights. It is magical. Her kids take extra-long showers—the water loops and re-loops—just to be in there.

In a country beset by many sensitivities, and where one person’s idea of a good joke is another person’s unacceptable taunt, a relatively rare public humor abounds on the Facebook page. Fellow residents’ efforts are gently mocked. One woman proudly posted a picture of how she bolted her washing machine onto the bathroom wall so a hose can empty its used water directly into the cistern. “Looks like a gas chamber!” somebody commented.

“Big chance of being killed by a Waschmaschine while having a crap,” said another.

The whole mood was contagious. My first night, I openly gagged when my friend Paul put his hands into my dirty shower water to scoop it out for the toilet. But a day or two into my trip, when I opened a friend’s guest toilet lid to a turd, I nearly squealed with glee. I have never been so thrilled to see a previously deposited piece of shit in a toilet I myself hoped to take a crap in.

We tend to think “norms” take a long time to establish, and a long time to shift. The turd of a stranger, in a well-off place, feels like a basic no-no, a fundamental signal that makes its discoverer feel not only disgusted but also vaguely unsafe, as if the environment is neglected and unsettlingly unruled. But in Cape Town, it had become a totally different symbol: a signifier of responsibility and community-mindedness.

3 - STORMING THE FORTRESSES

I couldn’t quite figure out why certain rules had changed so quickly. But Deon Smit helped explain part of it to me. A burly 60-year-old suburbanite with a Tom Selleck mustache, Smit is one of four volunteers who run the Facebook drought page. It is nearly a full-time job.

“My swimming pool, I can fill it out of my tap, and I’m still going to be under the limit the city has set,” he told me. “But that’s wrong! That’s somebody else’s water I’m taking.”

Smit grew up white under apartheid. He was a firefighter for 33 years before retiring. I asked him why he devoted all day to the page, as well as to exhausting missions to deliver water to farms and old-age homes, even though the work gives him terrible headaches.

When he was a kid, he “had two desires in life,” he explained in his office, as private Facebook messages from fellow water warriors bounced around the computer screen on his painkiller-strewn desk. “One was to become a fireman. And one was to get involved in a project like this, where I can do something for the community.”

In the past, though, it had been unclear what “the community” was. To sustain white rule, the apartheid government claimed the black parts of South Africa were “sovereign countries,” though no other nation recognized them. In South Africa, sometimes, whites still say “they” both to refer to black people and to “bad” people, like shitty politicians or criminals. It is appropriate to complain “They stole my car,” even before you have any idea who stole it.

But people of all races also always had intimate relationships. And they shared an experience, even if it was from different vantage points. Smit felt gratified to be prompted, thanks to the drought, to do something positive for a greater group of people. After apartheid, most whites in South Africa were marked by a faint moral taint. “I don’t know who stays in the old-age home,” he told me, “whether they’re pink, black, yellow, or whatever.” He looked vehement as he said this, as if he was stating something essential to his fellow men, or perhaps to his former self. I got this sense from many in the city. On the Facebook page, a woman named Valerie reflected that the drought made her feel “more aware of those around me. … It has levelled many of us.” She called it “humbling and uplifting at the same time.”

When I started to read contemporary white South African literature, I noticed a theme was the destruction of the infrastructure of privilege, from the demise of houses, farms, gardens and swimming pools, to the breaking of gates and walls through neglect or by revenge of the historically disadvantaged. This was generally presented as a fearful scenario.

But I began to feel it was as much a fantasy as a fear. In these books, having boundaries trespassed often afforded their privileged characters a strange sense of relief. In My Traitor’s Heart, published four years before the end of white rule, the wife of a white farmer—reflecting on her reconciliation with his murderer’s relatives—says that “trust can never be a fortress, a safe enclosure against life. … Without trust there is no hope for love.”

After the coming of democracy, though, both rich and middle-class South Africans did build fortresses: high, spike-topped walls went up around houses. Many of these houses don’t even have a bell, discouraging unknown visitors. Instead, they display ominous plaques depicting a skull or the name of the security company the owners have paid to answer their panic buttons with teams wielding guns.

Spend even a little time with the wealthy or white, though, and you’ll understand how aware they are that such fortresses can’t—or even shouldn’t—hold. One friend of mine near Johannesburg mused to me recently that both he and his wife know “deep down” that white people in South Africa “got away with” hundreds of years of injustice. His wife almost never admits this, or reveals any ambivalence about their four-bedroom house and self-isolating lifestyle, for fear of making herself “a target for retribution": In other words, that ceasing to defend the goodness and justice of the white lifestyle might legitimize crime against whites or the expropriation of their land. Privately, my friend suspects “the opposite”—that keeping mum and apart is what inflames black anger. His wife’s view generally wins out, as it seems the more prudent. But what if there were a nature-made excuse to tear down those walls and try out a different kind of life? Would it really be so bad?

A historian of behavior during disasters, New York University’s Jacob Remes, told me that while “sudden” disasters—like hurricanes or earthquakes—prompt a brief upswell in feelings of community-mindedness, there’s not the same evidence for slower-moving catastrophes. And it’s predicted, he said, that the wealthy will try to “buy their way out of” any inconvenience. “When my students hear the word ‘commons,’ they think ‘Tragedy of,’” he said. What I described in Cape Town made him wonder if the higher classes weren’t waiting for a chance to demonstrate to their neighbors, and themselves, that “there really is such a thing as society.”

Toward the end of my visit, Smit said he wanted to show me his lawn, a pitiful dustscape. “You couldn’t believe how emerald it was,” he told me, shaking his head.

Many wealthier Capetonians treasure their gardens. They function as tiny little nations, carefully manicured Edens supposedly untouchable, behind their walls, by the volatility of the now-integrated communal space. “That little lawn in front,” said Smit, “was my little kingdom.”

But when I asked him whether it made him feel sad that his lawn had died, he just laughed.

“I have to adapt,” he said. “It’s gone. So what?”

4 - A MORE NATURAL SPRING

In a formerly “white” neighborhood called Newlands, thousands of Capetonians line up each day to gather water from a natural spring that, save for a police booth to oversee parking, is completely unmanaged by any authority. A 42-year-old Indian man, Riyaz Rawoot, labored for 14 months to create the spring’s infrastructure—a long contraption made of concrete, bricks, metal stands and PVC hosepipes that diverts water into 26 outlets before which an extraordinary diversity of people kneel with jugs, as if at a Communion rail.

Anwar Omar, whom I’d met through the Facebook page when I told him how much I liked a shower he had made out of an insecticide sprayer, insisted I see the spring. He volunteered to take me there on his motorcycle. He said I would see something that would “change my views of what was possible in the world.” Rawoot, he explained, had built the infrastructure because he comes from an ethnic background where “everybody shares.”

The interesting thing is that the spring sits in a neighborhood that, before it was white, was mixed-race—the kind of neighborhood that, in South Africa, tends to be a source of special tension, because even relatively longtime homeowners worry that the descendants of residents evicted decades ago could lay a legal claim to the land. In fact, Rawoot’s ancestors had lived two blocks away from the spring. “People from everywhere in the Cape Flats are going there,” Omar whispered to me. The legal process for land claims is very complicated; he presented the influx of people to the spring as a sort of quiet, extralegal reclamation. Some come from as far as Mitchell’s Plain, a township more than 10 miles away. “They want to go back to their waters.”

Cape Town needed an act of God—or at least some kind of really, really big, fat, awesome machine.

The even more interesting thing is that, despite this, many white residents seemed to enjoy the mood of the spring, too. It was, indeed, incredible. It was a mob scene—60 people in flip-flops, bathrobes, headscarves, shalwar kameez, tony private school uniforms, surf shirts and the form-fitting clothes popular in the black townships swirled around Harleys and busted-up old bicycles, pushing jugs of water back and forth in strollers, in shopping carts, on homemade trolleys and on skateboards. Backpacks and empty water bottles were strewn everywhere, like in a high school hallway at lunchtime. A 16-year-old kid was doing handstands for a little crowd. “Shaheed, stop,” an embarrassed girl, probably his sister, begged.

“No!” a couple of people in the crowd—a group which more closely resembled South Africa’s on-paper demographics than anything I had ever previously seen—shouted. Rawoot was handing out grape popsicles.

But there was also something reverential about the mood: People slid gracefully around each other, softly pointing one another toward the best-flowing outlet, guiding other people’s trolleys, handing back filled jugs in organically assembled lines. These days, utopian dreams that people could manage themselves in a completely non-hierarchical situation have mostly died; anarchism is a sound for high school thrash bands. But at the spring it felt as if the dream had arisen again. The situation just worked, naturally. On the left side of the spring, one hose was problematic; its stream was too fierce. Through unspoken lines of communication, people realized that somebody needed to hold it still, and seamlessly, a guy vaping in a Ducati T-shirt gave way to a young black woman, who, after 10 minutes on hose duty, gave way to Abdulrahman.

Abdulrahman, an elderly Muslim man, told me he had toiled for 48 years in the townships as a soda hawker. He sold refreshment. He was tired of selling it. He wanted to give. A few weeks earlier, he had come to the spring to fill up some jugs and found himself holding the hose for an hour. Two days later he made the 10-mile trek back—just to hold the hose. He intentionally wore shoes “with holes in them so the water runs out,” he told me, howling with laughter.

He was soaked from head to toe. When I asked him why he did this unpaid work, he looked at me and laughed again, as if it should be obvious. “Everybody’s stressed,” he said. “Everybody’s rushing.” Thanks to him being at the hose, “people can relax!”

He also seemed to take pleasure from the feeling he had managed to figure out a special hose angle that made the stream especially efficient. “Does it go quickly?” he asked a blond stranger, hopefully. From her neck hung a cross.

“It is amazing,” she said. He beamed with pride.

Rawoot, who built and paid for the pipes that distribute the spring water, is a physiotherapist. Leading me to his “office” at the spring—a patch of cigarette-butt-strewn dead grass—he told me he loves guiding people from “pain to pleasure,” touching their bodies more intimately than a regular doctor would. Pain, Rawoot mused, is “like a beaten path.” There might be an original injury, but after time, the body and the soul become so used to pain they still feel it, even after the injury is officially healed.

Rawoot’s job is to put his hands on his patients’ bodies and move them, subtly rearrange their parts. Not to “fix” them, but to help them become aware that they already have the capacity, latent inside them, to feel differently.

As a kid, he explained, he had been bewildered and saddened by South Africa’s “whites only” signs. Officially classed as “Indian,” Rawoot’s own grandmother had white heritage, and “my dad’s lighter than you,” he told me. “I thought, We’re a family, and we’ve got different shades here, and we’re fine. So why are they”—whites—”different? Why?”

He used to go with his aunt to the central train station, where whites, coloreds, Indians, Chinese and blacks mixed in the main hall—though they were going different directions. The image of that swirling cosmopolitanism stayed with him. It was what he had hoped for when Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black president in 1994. “But it didn’t really happen,” he said, gazing out on the spring.

Instead, 15 dusty miles from Newlands, in Khayelitsha, the vast, million-strong township built in the ‘80s for Cape Town’s black residents, most families live in shacks and suffer from food insecurity. Cindy Mkaza—an educator who grew up and works there—told me the fun of the drought hadn’t quite reached her pupils. Most of them don’t have gardens or showers anyway, and for years, the under-resourced water supply has cut off without notice. “It’s like they were already in that [drought] life,” she said. Significantly more problematic was the fact that, in the townships and lower-middle-class neighborhoods, there are often many more people living in a single home than in the wealthy areas, and the city’s water restrictions don’t take the size of the household into account unless a resident undertakes an onerous appeals process. Shaheed Mohammed, who lives in another impoverished township called Athlone, recounted to me that his neighbor had to awaken each morning at 4 a.m. to harvest water in buckets from the tap for his large extended family before a restrictive device that the city placed on his plumbing itself woke up, kicked in and cut off the flow.

When I told Mkaza about the woman on the Facebook page who said she felt “humbled” having to worry about water, she just laughed. She said her mother’s neighbors, who could rarely afford the $3 it takes to hop a minibus taxi into the city, were unaware of richer Capetonians’ efforts: “They assume affluent people are upset, and like, ‘Oh my God, I’m not going to be able to swim?’” And she worried that if things really got out of control, middle- and upper-class people would still have more options than the poor have: to drill a borehole, to move away.

Mohammed did sense a new curiosity from white or higher-class neighbors he wasn’t used to feeling much love from, or for. “It’s actually been fascinating,” he admitted. “There’s a new mindset. A shift.” At meetings he attended for a group called the Water Crisis Coalition, whose membership is primarily people of color, he’s noticed Capetonians he doesn’t normally see coming to the townships—white folks, wealthy folks, even a Zionist. “It was tough, because a majority of us are pro-Palestinian,” Mohammed said. “A couple of people didn’t want that guy to be at the meeting. But the rest of us said, ‘If you want to have a special meeting [about Israel], go outside.’”

Historically, Mohammed reflected, in so many ways, “we’re on the margins. But we’ve always dreamt of this type of unity. We haven’t been sure whether the rhetoric sometimes put out that whites are the ‘colonialists’—always the oppressor—is really true, or has to be true.” Mohammed was pleased to see that his new allies had been willing to contribute some skills and resources he and his companions didn’t have. “These people often have easier access to the Internet. They can lodge objections to the government’s treatment of larger households.”

More than that, Mohammed felt touched by the whites’ and wealthier people’s recognition of his utility. At one Water Crisis Coalition meeting, white attendees praised a giant march people of color held in the 1960s to protest racial injustice, as an inspiration for how people can band together for change. One white woman told him: “We need the support of the Cape Flats. Without the support of the Cape Flats, we are nothing.”

In South Africa, generally, the wealthy lifestyle has been considered the most worthwhile lifestyle. This is one of the country’s enduring wounds. But the drought has liberated people, at times, to acknowledge a wider range of helpful behaviors and forms of knowledge—amateur knowledge as well as expert, “non-white” knowledge as well as Western. One upper-class Capetonian told me he learned how to create his DIY rainwater-harvesting system by watching a YouTube video uploaded by an elderly man on the Cape Flats. Palesa Morudu, a black Capetonian who publishes fiction for teenagers in the townships, recalled hearing another black Capetonian on the radio say he felt satisfied that rich people now seemed to respect elements of his so-called “poor” lifestyle as actually more economical and ecologically sound than the way they had been living.

The drought had prompted changes far beyond attitudes to water. A car guard in a rich neighborhood told me he’d noticed residents walking on the street more—something that, in certain South African neighborhoods, the wealthy almost never do. At his spring, Rawoot called my attention to a group of porters who earn coins by pushing people's jugs. In South Africa, informal laborers, like car guards, often clash with each other over their turf. But, here, the porters who’d arrived most recently were sitting patiently on a curb, ceding business to the more veteran workers. “They now spontaneously treat each other with a different kind of respect,” Rawoot said. “[It is a] culture of courtesy.”

It is a primary human fear that, without imposed order, people, especially those who have long been at odds, will tend to descend into every-man-for-himself brutality; even more so these days, when Brexit and Trump, for some, have made the popular will synonymous with self-destructive tribalism and elites like the managers of Cambridge Analytica inform us that human beings are just bundles of volatile fears and longings for power that respond only to the crassest manipulation. We call it wisdom, now, to assume people are motivated by things like self-interest, status and fear. It’s not savvy to wonder if we can be motivated, en masse, at times, by things like the wish to show respect, or by love.

5 - THE POWER VS. THE PEOPLE

I went to see Lance Greyling, Cape Town’s director of enterprise and investment, because he promised to tell me something few people understood about the drought. In the city government building’s vast and modern entry hall, tourists snapped selfies with a five-story-high picture of Mandela. Banners advertised the mayor's top priorities: HIV prevention, housing developments, community gardens. There was no mention of the drought.

Greyling admitted he barely even heard the word “water” when he joined the government in 2015. Rainfall patterns had been gently trending downward for decades, but an electricity shortage seemed much more urgent. Then the awareness of a potential drought crisis escalated rapidly. By May 2017, the mayor was leading a prayer session at the foot of Table Mountain to beseech the heavens for rain. Anthony Turton, a leading water-management expert, declared Cape Town needed an “act of God.” God, or some kind of really, really big, fat, awesome machine.

Greyling, a jolly 44-year-old, laughs, now, at the desperate ideas the government solicited so it didn’t have to rely solely on Capetonians to change their behavior: A desalination barge from Saudi Arabia. Towing an iceberg from Antarctica. Every option was so expensive. One of the repeatedly asked questions was, “Can we even ask the citizens to pay for any of this?”

In November, the city hired strategic communications specialists, who felt that the best course of action was to freak people the hell out. Greyling’s revelation was that it wasn’t only nature that had prompted Capetonians’ mind-shift. Abandoning their formerly gentle, cheerful entreaties to save water, city officials placed a wild bet on fear-mongering, shaming and force. They deployed the water-restriction device Mohammed mentioned—popularly called the “Aqua-Loc”—which acts on heavy water users like a bariatric-surgery band acts on the stomach: If you even attempt to draw more than the current daily water allotment, it just shuts off your taps. Technicians are now installing 2,500 such devices a week. And in January, the mayor declared the ominous “Day Zero” was no longer a possibility but a near certainty. The provincial governor warned of impending “anarchy.” “Up till now,” the governor added mournfully, “over 50 percent of [Cape Town] residents have ignored entreaties to save water.”

We might turn out to be more willing than we expect to live a harder way.

It worked. City officials saw water consumption plummet. The shameful revelation that half of Capetonians were outright ignoring the disaster caused particular hand-wringing on the Facebook page, as well as determined vows to do better. But Greyling told me he knew the government’s most dystopian claims were “not exactly true.” The majority of people in Cape Town had reduced their water usage, though some hadn’t managed to get below the restriction. The implication that “Day Zero” was some God-given red line after which the city’s taps would “run dry” also wasn’t quite accurate; it simply represented the dam level below which the city had judged it would need to more aggressively ration water.

In a sense, these actions were extremely courageous. Greyling said the message the government wanted to send the public was, in part, “Look, guys, we haven’t got this completely. This is actually in your hands.” For a government to lead with force while simultaneously admitting its limitations—instead of promising the world in return—is a stunning reversal of the way contemporary politics are practiced.

But the government hasn’t gotten much credit for this. Nor will it, probably. Daniel Aldrich, a disaster resilience researcher at Northeastern University, told me that his multi-country research suggested that a loss of trust in government after a disaster was typical, even inevitable. He’d conducted extensive fieldwork in Japan after the 2011 tsunami, which, he said, helped turn Japan from “one of the most trusting countries to the least.” People forge new bonds in the face of a common enemy, initially nature, he explained; once that enemy dissipates, though, unhappy at the thought of giving up their new faith in each other, they look around for a new target.

Moreover, the thing that especially pisses people off during a disaster, he said, is the sense that they’ve been manipulated. “Anything that you do that’s going to make citizens think you’ve lied to them is going to be a much longer-term problem,” Aldrich said.

Another unfortunate downside to any successful campaign to reduce people’s consumption of a government-managed public good is a drop in government revenue from the taxation of that provision. Cape Town had a “step tariff” taxing heavier water users at a higher rate per liter, so its success at shaming the greedy wealthy ended up sort of backfiring. At a time when the city still has to contemplate even greater water scarcity due to climate change and population growth, and look into pricey infrastructure projects, it is grappling with a massive $166 million budget shortfall in the Water and Sanitation Department. To address the shortfall, in December, the city proposed an additional tax on water. People were very hurt. You said we did so well, and now you want to punish us for what we’ve done?

When the leader of the mayor’s party announced in early March that Capetonians ought to celebrate their drastic water-consumption reduction and that they might have averted Day Zero, residents seethed instead. Some called the government dumb for telling the updated truth, potentially freeing citizens to return to their lazy ways. Others wondered if the crisis had been entirely fabricated in order to get them to pay higher taxes. A few even piloted drones over Cape Town’s largest dam to see if it was secretly full of water. (It wasn’t.)

“In the effort to light a fire under people’s asses, the city government might have lit a fire under their own asses,” John Nankin, one of the Capetonians who posted a drone photo of the dam to Facebook, told me. “When we vote again, I don’t think people will forgive them.” By 2025, half of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed areas. This makes Cape Town a funny case: On the one hand, a template for how to daringly and effectively handle a daunting resource crisis; on the other, a potential cautionary tale about how forceful leadership may end in the community turning against the government, crippling future problem-solving.

By the time I visited Cape Town, an ever-amplifying distrust and hostility loop between government and the citizens seemed to be settling into place. It’s not our fault, it’s all your fault, was how Greyling characterized the feedback he’d been getting. He seemed hurt by this. I found officials associated with the city government more and more seemed to buy their own initially tactical line that citizens were ignorant or only controllable by force. Greyling sighed when we discussed Mohammed’s activist group. “I’m afraid many of their views are misguided,” he said. And when I brought up Rawoot’s spring, he groaned.

According to Rawoot, as well as a witness, the councillor for the neighborhood with the spring called him “crazy” at a March public meeting and confronted him afterwards. A professor writing a sociology paper about the spring told me some officials “couldn’t believe” Rawoot “would be doing it just to help. They insisted he must be getting money from someone to undermine the government’s image.” Though there’s little evidence citizens would blame government for mishaps at a privately managed spring, city officials have called it a public nuisance, a health hazard shambolically designed by people who lack experience in central planning. They want to divert the water to a city-managed swimming pool attended by guards, which would almost certainly destroy its spirit. “Fights were breaking out” at the spring until the city posted police there, Greyling told me. Both Cindy Mkaza, who gathers water at the spring, and the professor said that fights are exceedingly rare. When I described the beautiful scene I experienced at the spring to another person who has worked for the government, he warned me, “I don’t have any other facts. But assume there’s a lot more to know about this if you want the whole story.”

6 - AND THEN THE FLOOD

When I returned home to Johannesburg, I flushed the toilet. But I paused before doing it, to think. A therapist once encouraged me to go on vacation to a different locale with a boyfriend I was struggling with, saying the location change might help us see ourselves in a different light. “But we’ll just come back home to the same place,” I objected.

“A memory,” she said, “is also a possibility.”

It’s true: We can only really imagine what we have already experienced. That’s why the aliens in science-fiction movies look like human beings. It’s actually a hopeful thought. In general, we agree that we face the unimaginable: resource competition, continuing globalization and its attendant cultural stresses, the potential fissuring of the economic system on which modern civilization has been built. The feeling is that the longer we wait to avert these changes, the harder it will be to deal with them.

James Workman, a writer and water analyst, captured the prevailing anxiety in his 2009 book Heart of Dryness. “We don’t govern water,” he wrote. “Water governs us.” Without some certainty around this critical resource—with its steady presence, largely hidden in industrialized society, made more unpredictable by climate change—society could fall apart. “The unvarnished anthropological record of human nature,” Workman worried, shows that "each of us looks out for his or her personal interest." People left ungoverned by something they can fully trust and rely on won't be able to govern themselves.

Cape Town suggests an opposite possibility. It could be that human beings are just waiting for something that gives them a challenge, a chance to rise above their politics-exhausted cynicisms and prove they can be good neighbors, stand for more than just money and success, and find ingenious tricks, together, to outwit their new tormentors. It could be that certain kinds of disasters—particularly the natural, which feel more neutral and acceptable than politically driven ones—may wedge open spaces for change in other areas in which we feel stuck. “There is a crack in everything God has made,” Emerson said, “vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares, even into the wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted to make bold holiday.” “The wound is where the light enters,” said Rumi. Maybe we know society’s long contemporary holiday of development and self-enrichment will soon be over. Maybe more of us than admit it are sick of it, and know we can’t pay for it much longer. Maybe we know, deep down, that we will have to go back to the work of being humans embedded in nature, and not above it. Maybe parts of this will be a relief to some of us, even a joy. We might turn out to be more willing than we expect to live a harder way.

It’s difficult to know which of the changes in Cape Town will last. But they will at least be a memory.

I remember driving from the Tarlings’ home, away from the mountains back toward Cape Town, when, unpredicted by the weather service, it began to pour rain. I get a lot of rain in Johannesburg. It’s a pain; our roof leaks. It was nighttime, and I didn’t know the neighborhood. But still, on a new instinct, or a dormant one awoken, I swung over to the side of the road and quietly watched the drops on my windshield gather and catch the glow from the streetlamps, like the swirl of lights that introduces a movie on a cinema screen, or the birth of a tiny universe. I logged onto the Facebook page. Four hundred people had posted already. “Just told a room full of people in a meeting and we all cheered!” Lesley wrote. “Take an umbrella but we are not gonna stop the rain,” Moegsien wrote. “Raining in Mitchell’s Plain now,” Carmelita wrote. “Raining in Sea Point,” Gillian wrote. “Thank you, Lord! Our precious Redeemer!” Cobie wrote. “Algamdulilah,” Bahia wrote. “Thank you Rain Fairy!” Wayne wrote. “Praise his Noodliness. R’amen,” Roxanne said.

It didn’t take long for them to find her. Soon after Michele Dauber started teaching at Stanford Law School in the fall of 2001, a few female students came to her office and told her they had been sexually assaulted. After a time, she came to expect that if she kept her door open, especially in the first three months of the school year, a girl she had never met would come in, crying. “I know before she’s made it all the way through the door what she’s going to say,” Dauber said.

Dauber, now 53, is small and intense, with a wavy mop of graying hair. She seemed to understand the students’ distress in a way that other professors didn’t. She fought for the students in Stanford’s byzantine system; then, when recourse failed to come, she fought to change the system. The students in her class on college sexual assault, many of whom were themselves survivors, seemed “in awe” of her, a friend told me. Once, Dauber even let a student who no longer felt safe on campus live for a while in her Palo Alto home, along with her family, four chickens and a rescued cat. And then, on January 18, 2015, a friend of Dauber’s own daughter was assaulted—by a 19-year-old Stanford student named Brock Turner.

Before Donald Trump bragged on tape about grabbing women by the pussy, before the Harvey Weinstein stories unleashed a national reckoning over sexual assault, there was the Brock Turner case—a lurid, unforgettable embodiment of campus rape culture. The young woman passed out behind a dumpster near a Stanford fraternity. The young man, a potential Olympic swimmer, thrusting on top of her. The two Swedish students riding past who saw him and gave chase. The trial in which Turner’s father lamented that his son’s life was being destroyed over “20 minutes of action.”

But what seared the case into public memory was the victim’s statement to the court at Turner’s sentencing hearing. “You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today,” she began. The then-22-year-old, known as Emily Doe, recounted waking up in the hospital and learning that she had been found with her underwear off and her dress hiked up to her waist, dirt and pine needles in her vagina. She described, in excruciating detail, the effect of the assault and the trial. “You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today,” she wrote. Turner had informed the court he hoped to educate other young people that “one decision has the potential to change your entire life.” Emily’s response was devastating: “A life, one life, yours, you forgot about mine.”

After BuzzFeed published the entire 7,200-word statement, it was shared 11 million times in four days. CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield took the first half of her show to read it aloud, stopping to calm her quavering voice. Nineteen members of Congress, Republican and Democrat, read it on the floor of the House. Emily Doe was sitting in her pajamas eating cantaloupe when she learned that Vice President Joe Biden had written her a heartfelt open letter. She got messages of support from as far away as Botswana and India. The statement, Dauber said, “was the manifesto of the Me Too movement. This was a harbinger.”

Michele Dauber reminds her assistant of a military bulldozer called the D9. “It can go through a mountain or a house or through everything and it doesn’t stop even when missiles are shot at it,” the assistant explained. JEFF CHIU/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Emily and one of Dauber’s daughters had been “inseparable” friends in middle and high school, according to a letter Dauber wrote to the court. The two slept over at each other’s houses; Emily joined the family on vacation. Dauber described her as a “lovely, warm, talented, funny girl.”

At Turner’s June 2016 sentencing, Dauber sat with Emily. There was one case before Turner’s—that of a man named Ming Hsuan Chiang, who had been accused by his former fiancée of brutal domestic violence. “The photos of her that she showed in court looked like CSI: Miami,” Dauber recalled.

In a plea deal that Chiang’s lawyer had negotiated with the district attorney’s office, Chiang pleaded no contest to a charge of battery causing serious bodily harm. The deal entailed a sentence of 72 days in county jail, which was accepted by the judge, Aaron Persky. But because California’s jails are overcrowded, a progressive measure gives convicts one day off per day served for good behavior, effectively halving sentences. That meant Chiang would spend only 36 days in jail. In addition, the deal allowed him to serve his time on weekends, so Chiang wouldn’t lose his job as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. Pending good behavior, Persky indicated he would also consider downgrading the felony to a misdemeanor, so that Chiang wouldn’t lose his work visa. Even though the woman had ultimately agreed to the deal, in court she had protested the very idea that her assailant was able to negotiate a more favorable sentence for himself. “When I get beaten, can I ask for a better offer?” she said, her voice breaking. “Can I ask for a ‘discount’ beating?”   

Dauber and Emily watched this unfold in horror. “The whole courtroom grinds to a halt,” Dauber recalled. “Can the clerk stop what she’s doing and call down to the jail and find out what time Mr. Batterer is going to get to work on Monday? I mean, it was surreal.” By the time Turner’s case came up and Emily stood to read her soon-to-be-viral statement, Dauber felt in her gut that the same thing was about to happen to her.

“Emily Doe’s statement was the manifesto of the Me Too movement,” Dauber said. “This was a harbinger.”

The investigation and trial had shown that Turner and Emily met at a frat party, where they were both drinking. But while Emily’s memory goes black early in the evening, Turner claimed she had agreed to go back to his room. On the way there, he said, they slipped on the path behind the dumpster and started kissing. When the police found them, Emily was unconscious and partly naked. Turner’s pants were still on, but the rape kit showed that he had digitally penetrated her. Turner admitted this, but claimed that Emily Doe had consented before passing out, which Emily vehemently denied—she was so deeply unconscious that she did not revive for hours after she was taken to the hospital.

The jury sided with Emily. In March 2016, Turner was convicted on all three felony charges, including assault with intent to commit rape and penetration of an unconscious person. Under California law, he could have served a maximum of 14 years in state prison, but the district attorney had asked for six. Instead, Persky sentenced Turner to just six months in county jail—which would be only three months under the same measure that had applied in Chiang’s case. Persky also sentenced Turner to three years of probation and ordered him to register as a sex offender. Since Turner’s felony convictions made him ineligible for probation, Persky had to read into the record why he felt Turner deserved an exemption. When the judge cited the “severe impact” that a prison sentence would have on a young person without a criminal record, Dauber was dumbfounded. “There was no moment in the case in which he said to Turner, ‘Young man, you are being sentenced because you have done a bad thing,’” Dauber told me. “Instead there’s this incredible solicitude.”

After what she had witnessed, Dauber was convinced that Persky needed to go. As an elected judge, he could be voted out, but the next primary was five days after Turner was sentenced. Persky was running unopposed and the filing date to challenge him had passed. Dauber couldn’t bear the thought of all the other Emily Does that Persky might brush aside before the next election in six years. And since California is one of eight states that allows judges to be recalled by popular vote, she decided to launch a campaign to have him removed from the bench. There have been only two successful judicial recalls in California’s history, the last one in 1932.

“Since you are going to disrobe Persky, I am going to treat you like ‘Emily Doe,’” wrote the person who sent Dauber a letter containing white powder.

Over the next year and a half, Dauber raised more than $1 million from over 5,000 donors, most of whom contributed less than $100. She mobilized scores of volunteers and won endorsements from local politicians, unions and prominent feminists, including Kirsten Gillibrand, Lena Dunham and Anita Hill. This January, having accumulated nearly 95,000 signatures, Dauber got the recall on the ballot in Santa Clara County for the June 5 election.

The Me Too movement has supercharged Dauber’s campaign. But it has also fueled the opposition to her effort—joined by much of the state’s legal establishment—and created a deep hostility toward Dauber and her tactics. On February 14, a letter arrived at Dauber’s Stanford office. The message inside read, “Since you are going to disrobe Persky, I am going to treat you like ‘Emily Doe.’ Let’s see what kind of sentencing I get for being a rich white male.” A white powder fell from the envelope.

Dauber froze. “This can’t be happening,” she thought as Stanford evacuated part of the building. The powder turned out to be harmless, but the episode shook her deeply. These days, she mostly works from home. She has plastered her office door at Stanford with printouts of the rape and death threats that she regularly receives. On a recent spring afternoon, Dauber was wearing a gray T-shirt that said “UNFORTUNATELY FOR HIM, HE RAN INTO SOME VERY STRONG WOMEN,” but she wasn’t feeling as confident. “It was naïve of me to think that we could do something like this, that directly challenges so many powerful institutions, and not encounter an intense backlash,” she admitted. Her crusade against Persky had turned into something far uglier and far more personal than she had ever imagined.

The site of Emily Doe's assault. ROBIN ABCARIAN/LA TIMES/GETTY

“I felt pine needles scratching the back of my neck and started pulling them out my hair. I thought maybe, the pine needles had fallen from a tree onto my head. My brain was talking my gut into not collapsing. Because my gut was saying, help me, help me.” - EMILY DOE

“He’s going to be home for the Labor Day barbecue with Mom and Dad,” Dauber said for about the tenth time. It was September 1, 2016, the day before Brock Turner’s release, and Dauber had planned a protest for the next morning in front of the Santa Clara County jail. We were sitting in her office at the Stanford Law School, where Dauber was simultaneously talking to me and her two teaching assistants, fielding media calls and proudly showing off a matching tattoo she had just gotten with a young feminist ally. “Yup. I like it. It’s a really good quote. Really good. Devastating. Yup. Good strong quote. OK. Thanks. Byeeee,” she said into her phone. On hearing that the recall campaign had just been endorsed by Democratic Senate candidate Loretta Sanchez, Dauber reacted with an expletive that, under her “no swearing” ground rules, I could not reproduce. She considered my pen frozen above my notepad and relented. “You can just say, ‘Amazeballs!’”

I had reached out to Dauber in the summer of 2016, when her campaign had just started. She agreed to talk, although she had an evolving set of additional rules. I was not to report on her children. She would not talk about her personal life. She would not talk about Emily Doe, their relationship or how Emily was faring. She also refused under any circumstances to pass along a message to her. Even considering an interview request would be too upsetting, Dauber explained.

To describe Dauber as intense would be an understatement. She speaks rapidly and at length; our interviews regularly stretched past the four-hour mark. She would call me at all hours and glut my phone with endless text messages. She is frenetic and frazzled and funny and winningly open—unusual qualities for a seasoned political activist who is well-connected among Palo Alto’s tech elite. (Her husband, Ken, is an engineer at Google and sits on the local school board.) At the time Dauber launched the recall, she was also serving on Hillary Clinton’s finance committee and would become an active fundraiser and bundler for the campaign. At the 2016 Democratic convention, I watched her pitch feminist attendees on the Persky recall with the force of an industrial fire hose. When California representative Jackie Speier stopped to say hello, Dauber was momentarily overcome. “She said I’m powerful!” she shouted to me over the din of a hotel lobby. “Which is amazing because she is such a badass, you have no idea!”

Judge Persky is “very interested in what will work for the abuser and it’s really to the exclusion of the victim. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t see her,” Dauber said.

To get the recall on the ballot, Dauber needed nearly 60,000 signatures—representing 20 percent of the votes cast in the last election for that seat. She was hiring professional signature gatherers, at a cost of around $5 a signature. Major donors to the operation included the founder of LinkedIn and the daughter of the co-founder of Intel. Joe Trippi, the veteran Democratic operative, offered some of his California-based communications staff as volunteers. “She has this ability to persuade people to help her,” observed her friend, the author Jon Krakauer, who said he too has gotten “sucked in.” 

Dauber didn’t want her efforts to be dismissed as some obscure local matter, so she assembled a coalition that reached far beyond Santa Clara. Feminist Majority, a national advocacy organization, committed to raise $100,000. GRLCVLT, a feminist secret society on Facebook, hosted a Brooklyn fundraiser featuring indie bands and powerful speeches from the actresses Amber Tamblyn and Rose McGowan, along with merchandise like little clutches resembling female genitalia, down to the strategically placed brass knob. At the event, Dauber immersed herself in earnest conversations with young women—“I’ve become, like, a feminist icon to them,” she explained—and was buttonholed by an intense McGowan for a good portion of the evening.

Scenes from the fundraiser hosted by GRLCVLT in Brooklyn. TWITTER

To convince voters that Persky was unfit for the bench, Dauber knew she needed to demonstrate that Turner’s sentence was not an isolated bad decision. Her teaching assistant, a graduate student named Emma Tsurkov, was also working on the recall. Dauber asked her to dig into the previous 18 months in which Persky had been hearing criminal cases. Tsurkov found some cases that appalled them both. In 2015, Ikaika Gunderson, an aspiring 21-year-old football player, had beaten and choked his girlfriend, then pushed her out of a parked car. Gunderson pleaded no contest to a felony count of domestic violence. Persky agreed to delay Gunderson’s sentencing for a year so he could attend school at the University of Hawaii and try out for the football team, provided he took a domestic violence class and attended weekly AA meetings. Robert Chain had been caught with child pornography, including an image of an infant being penetrated. Chain had expressed remorse and pleaded guilty. He got off with time served: two days in jail. In 2016, Keenan Smith, a football player at the College of San Mateo, was convicted of domestic violence after hitting his girlfriend and punching a bystander who tried to defend her. After he pleaded guilty to misdemeanors as part of a plea deal, he was sentenced to 120 days in a weekend work program.

To Dauber, it was evidence of a damning pattern. “He’s very interested in what will work for the abuser and it’s really to the exclusion of the victim,” she said. “As far as I can tell, he doesn’t see her.”

Seeking to unleash a barrage of damning stories—“like, boom, boom, boom”— Dauber passed Tsurkov’s findings at strategic intervals to The Guardian, BuzzFeed and The Mercury News, which all published articles that aligned with Dauber’s conclusions. Tsurkov, who once served in a combat engineering unit in the Israeli army, compared her boss to a military bulldozer called the D9. “It can go through a mountain or a house or through everything and it doesn’t stop even when missiles are shot at it,” Tsurkov explained. “She sometimes reminds me of that.”

By the time Dauber’s rally got going in front of the Santa Clara County jail in downtown San Jose on September 2, 2016, Turner was already en route to his family’s home in Ohio. (“He’s not my problem,” Dauber had told me that morning. “I’m not protesting him.”) Flanked by Sanchez, survivors, activists and a dozen state and national politicians, Dauber addressed the crowd of about 100 protesters and the assembled media with a calm but forceful conviction. Often, when she speaks, it is almost impossible to imagine a counterargument.

I asked John Smith why he was exposing Emily Doe’s identity. “She’s a prop,” he said.

And yet, despite Dauber’s rigorous preparations, the event didn’t go as smoothly as she’d hoped. An activist with “STILL NOT ASKING FOR IT” scrawled on her bare chest in red lipstick kept threatening to get into the shot of Dauber’s CNN interview. At another point, an older man I'll call John Smith was spotted in the crowd. Smith had somehow figured out Emily Doe’s identity, even though Persky had ordered it to be redacted from the court records. He had been posting her real name on social media for several weeks. Dauber said she had enlisted her Silicon Valley connections to try and scrub the name from various websites. But now Smith was standing in full view of the cameras, holding up a dry-erase board with the victim’s name scrawled on it for everyone to see.

Dauber quietly moved toward Smith and pounced. She grabbed the board and took off running toward the police. When they refused to intervene, Dauber became frantic. She had worked so hard to protect Emily's privacy. Dauber erased the name with her sleeve and gave his board to the police. Smith spent the rest of the rally getting in loud skirmishes with various women and complaining that Dauber was “weaponizing” rape. I asked him why he was so intent on exposing Emily’s identity. “She’s a prop,” Smith said, recording me with his flip cam.

When it was all over, Dauber sank onto a concrete ledge under a tree, convinced that she had ruined everything. “I’m afraid that he’s going to, like, post some viral video of me erasing her name off his board,” she said in a fast, pressured stream. “I had, like, a full-bore panic attack. I mean, I can’t violate his free speech, I’m not the state, so it doesn’t matter. But I also probably didn’t have the right to touch his board.”

She stopped and looked at me.

“Does it make me look crazy?” she pleaded.

Then another problem occurred to her. “This isn’t helping to talk to a reporter about this,” she muttered.

“Ugh, God,” she groaned. “I’m probably just going to throw up now.”

Brock Turner leaves the Santa Clara County jail after serving three months. STEPHEN LAM/REUTERS

Dauber may be a hero to many Stanford students, but when I visited the campus in April, I discovered that much of the faculty does not feel the same way. Twenty-nine Stanford Law professors have signed a letter against the recall. Robert Weisberg, who teaches criminal law and describes himself as a progressive feminist, grew visibly angry when he spoke about Dauber. The recall, he argued, was “a gratuitous and vindictive campaign” and “an exploitation of the Me Too movement.”

“You can’t not respect [Dauber], whether you agree with her or not. And you better come prepared if you’re going to disagree with her.”

Dauber has always been an outsider at Stanford. She grew up in Pennsylvania and Indiana, and ran away from home under circumstances she adamantly refuses to discuss. Nor will she say much about having her first daughter, Amanda, at 17; being temporarily homeless; getting a GED and then a college degree in social work while battling drug and alcohol addiction; and being married to an abusive man with whom she had two more kids. “I wasn’t as good of a student as I wanted to be, I wasn’t as good of a parent as I wanted to be,” she told me. “I had to make compromises in every area.” And yet living in a poor neighborhood in Chicago made her acutely aware that she had “benefited from white privilege”—educated parents and a house full of books. She eventually left her first husband and has been sober for 29 years.

Dauber didn’t deny that she has experienced sexual assault but didn’t want to say more. “It’s not even an interesting fact,” she told me curtly. “I don’t think that this is the reason I’m doing [the recall]. Quite frankly, if every college professor who is a survivor stood up for this, we wouldn’t be where we are.”

After college, Dauber wanted to get a law degree. At the time, she was bringing up three kids, relying on welfare. She was accepted by Northwestern’s law school, as well as its sociology department for a Ph.D. When she discovered that she would receive a stipend, she told me, it “was the happiest day of my life.”

In law school, Dauber stood out for her “shredding intellect,” said her friend Russlynn Ali. “She was sophisticated. She was unique. She had children. A life that would cripple most people, she had overcome with grace.” Ali added: “You can’t not respect her, whether you agree with her or not. And you better come prepared if you’re going to disagree with her.” While at Northwestern, Michele met Ken Dauber, a divorced father of one, whom she married in 1997.

Dauber giving a commencement speech at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1993. COURTESY OF MICHELE DAUBER

One summer, Dauber took a job at a corporate law firm in Washington, D.C., hoping to earn enough money to buy a used minivan. It was 1996, the height of Newt Gingrich’s effort to gut the welfare state, and Dauber was still on food stamps. The gulf between her and her affluent colleagues was “this vertigo experience,” she recalled. When President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law, Dauber took some cardboard from the office trash and furiously scribbled SHAME on it in black marker. She said she marched down to the White House expecting to join a big protest, only to find that she was protesting alone. After deciding that the corporate life was not for her, she lobbied hard to clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a progressive icon on California’s U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

Reinhardt died in March, but I spoke to him last year about Dauber, with whom he had remained close. “No one who’s met Michele can forget her,” he told me. “She was always very concerned about sex inequality, force and violence.” During her clerkship in 1998, she helped to raise money to fund scholarships for students doing public-interest law. “She was very aggressive, and got all the clerks to contribute—even the ones who didn’t agree with her,” Reinhardt recalled, affectionately describing her as a “tigress.” He had mixed feelings about the recall, but told me he admired Dauber’s pursuit of what she felt was right, no matter whom she alienated: “Michele is never going to take the middle path.”

In 2001, Dauber, who had just given birth again, was hired by Stanford Law School—a development that seemed nothing short of miraculous to her. The family settled into a craftsman house in Palo Alto. Ken went to work at Google. Dauber finished her dissertation, which would become an acclaimed book on the history of U.S. government disaster relief. In 2007, she got tenure. Then, the next year, her daughter Amanda died by suicide.

Dauber reeled. For a time, she went to work as a wilderness ranger at Yosemite. “It was a way to get her bearings,” said Krakauer. In the following years, she also spent time with Emily Doe. “Emily and her daughter were in the same herd, as she put it, and she was their den mother,” Krakauer said. (Later, Dauber and her husband would occasionally discuss Amanda’s death in the press after launching a campaign to raise awareness of teen suicides in Palo Alto’s highly competitive schools.)

After she returned to work, Dauber began to advocate more forcefully for victims of sexual assault. The university’s procedures had long disturbed her. Offenses had to be proved beyond the reasonable doubt standard of a court of law. Students could be cross-examined by the person who assaulted them. In 2009, securely tenured, Dauber wrote to the vice provost calling for policy change.

Two years later, she became co-chair of Stanford’s Board on Judicial Affairs, which oversees the process of disciplining students. As a first step, she started collecting statistics. Stanford only adopted standardized disciplinary procedures for sexual assault in 1997. By 2009, Dauber said, the university had received reports of 175 forcible rapes on its campus. Of those incidents that involved identifiable students, only four resulted in hearings, which in turn resulted in just two findings of responsibility and only one expulsion. (Stanford disputes Dauber’s methodology.) “It was the most subversive thing you could do: gather data and put it out there,” Dauber said. “You can’t get that toothpaste back in the tube.”

Dauber’s committee worked with the provost’s office in its years-long revision of the rules. The new process included lowering the burden of proof to a “preponderance of evidence” and providing for an investigator who reported back to a trained five-person panel. The accuser and accused never had to be in the room together. According to Dauber, adjudications shot up under the new rules—but findings of responsibility did not increase proportionally. In 2014, the panel found that a Stanford student had committed an “unwanted sexual act” against a senior named Leah Francis. But the punishment was a five-quarter suspension, to begin after graduation. The student would be allowed to return for graduate school, after effectively taking a year off. With Dauber’s help, Francis sought his expulsion. When Stanford rejected their appeal, Dauber publicly critized the decision. “I really couldn’t be more disappointed,” she told The Mercury News.

The episode frayed the trust that had existed between Dauber and Stanford. She wasn’t the only faculty member to criticize the decision, “but she was the one working with the provost,” said Shelley Correll, Dauber’s ally and the director of Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. “Her criticism probably felt relentless.” Said Dauber: “All hell broke loose in my career.”

Stanford formed another sexual assault task force, this time without Dauber, and rolled back many reforms she had advocated for. Now, a three-person panel had to unanimously find a student responsible of wrongdoing. This time, Dauber vented to The New York Times. “The victim should not need to garner three votes to win while the respondent needs to garner only one,” she said.

ELIJAH NOUVELAGE/REUTERS

Stanford, Dauber told me during one Christmas vacation, “is one of the most unfriendly, if not the most unfriendly school to victims of sexual assault.” She was waving off her husband, who was urging her to get off the phone and go skiing with the family. Stanford is “at the bright center of the universe today,” she went on. "And we think that because we’re good at engineering, we’re good at everything.” (A Stanford representative said in a statement, “We do not know on what basis she is making these comparisons. We strongly encourage victims of sexual harassment and sexual violence to come forward, so they can receive support and care and so that the university can investigate and adjudicate their cases.”)

The recall, a Stanford professor argued, was “a gratuitous and vindictive campaign” and “an exploitation of the Me Too movement.”

I asked literature professor David Palumbo-Liu, one of Dauber’s few faculty allies, if she is really such a black sheep at the university. “At the moment, that’s probably accurate,” he replied.

Still, because she is tenured, Dauber can’t be fired. I pointed out to her that there was a certain irony in the fact that she, unlike Persky, is insulated from political pressure to do difficult, perhaps unpopular things. Dauber dismissed the comparison. The system allows judicial recalls, so why not use that tool? “He is a judge who self-evidently does not have tenure,” she said. “The question isn’t, ‘Couldn’t we select our judge another way?’ The question is, ‘How do we select them in California?’”

GABRIELLE LURIE/AFP/GETTY

“So one year later, as predicted, a new dialogue emerged. Brock had a strange new story, almost sounded like a poorly written young adult novel with kissing and dancing and hand holding and lovingly tumbling onto the ground, and most importantly in this new story, there was suddenly consent.” - EMILY DOE

After the Labor Day rally, I went to the Santa Clara County Superior Court, Room 89—the same courtroom where Turner had been sentenced and where Persky was still presiding. As it happened, Turner’s last day in jail was also Persky’s last day on the criminal bench. In an effort to tamp down the controversy, the judge asked to be reassigned from hearing criminal cases, though this did nothing to satisfy his critics, since many sexual assault cases end up in civil court.

The last defendants on his docket were two young Hispanic women awaiting sentencing on nonviolent drug charges. The bailiffs, the court reporter, the clerk, and the public defender were gossiping about Turner’s journey to the airport shortly after dawn (“they’re treating him like O.J. Simpson, helicopters following his car”) and my presence in the courtroom. (“She has her computer out.” “Clearly high profile.” “Get her out of here.”)

Eventually, Persky emerged, looking wan in his black robe. He raced through the women’s cases, handing them over to supervised release rather than prison. “Don’t use drugs,” he admonished them softly. As he left, one of the women called out, “Have a good last day, Mr. Persky!” Surprised, he turned his head and murmured, “Thank you. Good luck.”

Persky was a more popular figure in the Santa Clara courthouse than his public image would suggest, for reasons that the women’s public defender, Gary Goodman, was eager to explain in the hallway. Goodman, a fervent Persky supporter, had donated $250 to the judge’s defense effort. “He has high integrity, he follows the law,” Goodman insisted. “You won’t find a lawyer who has been in front of him and says that he hasn’t been treated with respect and fairness.”

The Persky whom Goodman knows is a registered Democrat and a lifelong liberal. A few years older than Dauber, he grew up in San Francisco. His father was a psychiatrist, his mother a French teacher. He went to Stanford, where he captained the lacrosse team and wrote music columns for the college paper, and then to law school at Berkeley. In 1997, he joined the district attorney’s office, where he prosecuted sex crimes and juvenile offenders. He ran for a seat on the Santa Clara County Superior Court in 2002, on a platform of criminal justice reform. He lost, but was appointed to fill a vacancy the following year.

Most judges are former prosecutors, inclined to hand down the tough sentences they once sought as lawyers. But despite Persky’s six years in the district attorney’s office, as a judge he has seemed almost constitutionally averse to locking people up. “My clients are all indigent and most of them are nonwhite,” said Barbara Muller, a public defender in Santa Clara County who has appeared before Persky several times. “I have never seen him treat my clients differently than those clients who can afford private attorneys.” A Bay Area judge who was not authorized to speak to the press said, “He gives light sentences. Generally, the problem is the sentences are too heavy.”

Goodman felt that Dauber had knowingly distorted the facts of the Turner case and Persky’s record on the bench. When sentencing Turner to six months, Persky was accepting the probation department’s recommendation, as he has done in every trial, according to a review by The Associated Press. When he considered the damage a prison term would do to Turner, Persky had been following California sentencing guidelines, which allow lenience for youthful or elderly defendants with no significant criminal record. The state’s prison overcrowding crisis also generally motivates judges to seek alternative punishments and minimal incarceration for new offenders. “He’s a 19-year-old with no criminal record. It should be very hard to send them to jail,” Goodman said. Many Persky supporters also dispute the premise that Turner was let off lightly, since he will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. “If this were my client, I’d say take prison over sex offender registration,” Goodman told me.

An anti-recall rally in February 2018. PAUL CHIN/THE CHRONICLE

In December 2016, the Commission on Judicial Performance cleared Persky of any wrongdoing. Its report stated that a “comparison to other cases handled by Judge Persky that were publicly identified does not support a finding of bias.” Dauber’s critics in the California legal community have pointed out that four cases are not evidence of a pattern. Moreover, where Dauber sees Persky favoring male defendents, they see a judge rubber-stamping plea deals struck between the district attorney and the accused—a standard procedure in which the judge has little agency. “The system in California is very DA-driven,” says Ellen Kreitzberg, a former public defender who teaches law at Santa Clara University and who opposes the recall. “They decide how to charge the defendant, they decide the plea deal. The judge can decide not to take the plea deal but it very rarely happens. The judge is secondary. Every case that Michele Dauber cites is a plea bargain, except for Brock Turner’s.”

Kreitzberg also said that it was not unusual for a judge to take steps to prevent a convict from losing a job (as in the Chiang case) or a chance of a career (as in the cases of Gunderson or Keenan Smith). In fact, she argued, this should be the desired approach. Often, Kreitzberg explained, California judges find themselves grappling with the question: “How do we hold this person accountable without losing them forever to the criminal justice system? It’s in the victims’ interests to make sure they never offend again.”

Even Jeff Rosen, the Santa Clara district attorney whose office prosecuted Turner and who was “outraged” by the sentence, told me he did not consider it out of bounds. “It was a lawful sentence, and there was no legal basis to appeal it,” said Rosen, who has become an outspoken voice against the recall. “Most of the judges in the state of California would’ve done the same.”

For all of these reasons, Goodman saw Persky as the second victim in the case, after Emily Doe, with Dauber playing the second aggressor, after Brock Turner. “She’s a bully,” he nearly spat. “She’s ruined a man’s reputation based on things that are factually inaccurate.”

As we were talking, Persky walked past, now just a man in slacks and a crisp shirt. I called out to ask if we could set up a time to speak.

“He’s not allowed to talk to you,” Goodman said, as Persky smiled, tipped his straw hat and disappeared down the sunny hallway.

Removing a judge from the bench has been controversial ever since Western states adopted recalls during the Progressive Era. In 1911, President Howard Taft vetoed Arizona’s entry into the Union specifically because the territory allowed the practice. Judicial recalls, he wrote in his veto message, were “likely to subject the rights of the individual to the possible tyranny of a popular majority.” He also called them “legalized terrorism.” Populists like William Jennings Bryan, meanwhile, countered that they offered a way to wrestle back power from the special interests.

Today, Dauber echoes the progressives and the populists, while against her stands nearly the entire California legal establishment. The Santa Clara County Bar Association, a group of retired judicial officers from Santa Clara County, the California Judges Association, 90 California law professors and more than 400 public defenders and attorneys publicly came out against the recall. These opponents take different positions on Turner’s sentence, but all warn that removing Persky would set a dangerous precedent.

“One of my greatest concerns is that we’ll create a system where judges will be worried about getting bounced out by people raising a lot of money,” said one legal scholar. “And that’s inherently not progressive.” The Bay Area judge—who believed Persky “made a mistake” and that Turner should have received a two-year prison term—told me emphatically that the threat of a recall doesn’t “leave room for judges to do what’s unpopular.” Rosen, the district attorney, agreed: “I don’t want judges holding their finger up to the wind and making the decision based upon what public sentiment is.”

“Our prisons are full of poor black and brown people who did way less terrible things than Brock Turner and never got even a fraction of the solicitude shown to him,” Dauber said.

In particular, the recall’s critics believe that judges may feel pressured to hand down harsher punishments to avoid a backlash. They referred me to a 2015 Brennan Center for Justice study showing that judges give longer sentences in the period before judicial elections. Already, Rosen and others told me, some local judges had come to fear “getting Perskied.”

In September 2016, California Governor Jerry Brown signed two bills inspired by the Turner case and written by Rosen’s office. They expand the legal definition of rape and make the sexual assault of an unconscious person punishable by a mandatory minimum of three years. Among both legal experts and sexual assault advocates, the bills were divisive—and not along predictable lines. Some questioned the introduction of a new mandatory minimum in a state that has been trying to wind back mass incarceration for years, arguing that this law will disproportionately affect poor people and minorities. "When we broaden those criminal definitions, it can broaden the swath of persons that can be criminalized," said Emily Austin, director of advocacy for the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

The law’s proponents, however, argued that there was a fundamental difference between mandatory sentences for, say, nonviolent drug offenses, and those for sexual assault. The criminal justice system has failed to take sexual crimes seriously for decades—and they are uniquely difficult cases to try, given the challenges of proving that a sexual act was nonconsensual. A recent study found that for every 100 rapes, only one perpetrator will get prison time.

As for Dauber, she responds to the critiques of her position like a trained lawyer: prepared, forceful, no concessions. “It’s really disorienting to me to see people who portray themselves as advocates against mass incarceration and for the equal treatment of minority defendants arguing for probation for a white, privileged athlete at the most elite school in America who was convicted by a jury of three serious felonies and served no time in prison,” she said. “Our prisons are full of poor black and brown people who did way less terrible things than Brock Turner and never got even a fraction of the solicitude shown to him.” She herself had refused to endorse the new mandatory minimum law. “It doesn’t solve the problem of one bad judge by tying the hands of a thousand good judges,” she told me. “Better to get rid of the one bad judge.”

Dauber believes that in some essential way, Persky misunderstands his role. “I think he sees himself almost like a social worker, you know?” she says. “Like his job is to rehabilitate these people. Rehabilitation is an important goal of punishment, but I don’t think that what he’s doing is the right way. Because without accountability and consequences, I think your chances for rehabilitation, particularly for sex offenses, is lower. I think there has to be both.”

Given the enormous stakes, I wondered how Emily Doe felt about the very public fight that Dauber was waging to get justice for her. While Dauber was neither her parent nor her attorney, she portrayed herself as the sole gatekeeper to Emily Doe. She still refused to pass along an interview request because she said it would be too traumatic for Emily, although the recall had kept the details of the assault in the local media on a regular basis. I felt that I was obligated to give Emily, an adult, an opportunity to respond if she chose to, out of basic journalistic fairness. I had seen Emily’s real name on John Smith’s board and was able to find her email address. During my visit in September 2016, I decided to let Dauber know that I wanted to contact Emily without publicly revealing her identity.

I knocked on Dauber’s office door. From inside, she said she couldn’t talk right now. But as I turned to go, she came out, quickly closing the door behind her. She looked nervous and on edge.

“What do you want?” she barked.

When I explained my intentions, Dauber grew irate. Absolutely not, she said. There was no option I could present that would pacify her, nothing, that is, except swearing to her then and there that I wouldn’t attempt to contact Emily in any way. The more I tried to explain my reasoning, the angrier Dauber became. I would have to accept Dauber’s “no comment” on Emily’s behalf. My tape recorder wasn’t running and I wasn’t taking notes, but Dauber caught herself. “This conversation is off the record,” she said and ducked back into her office, shutting the door.

By the next morning, Dauber had come around to the idea of my sending questions to Emily through the district attorney’s office. But she also informed me that due to her concerns about my ethics, the profile was off.

“If you are hoping that one of my organs will implode from anger and I will die, I’m almost there. You are very close. This is not a story of another drunk college hook­up with poor decision making. Assault is not an accident. Somehow, you still don’t get it.” - EMILY DOE

LaDoris Cordell, the de facto leader of the opposition to the recall. SUMA JANE DARK

On November 15, 2016, exactly one week after Donald Trump was elected president despite being accused of sexual assault by a dozen women, Glamour magazine presented a Women of the Year award to Emily Doe. The actresses Gabourey Sidibe, Freida Pinto and Amber Heard read her court statement on stage. Emily herself watched from home, while Dauber collected the award and delivered her speech on her behalf. “Thank you for seeing me through my words and giving me a voice without having to see me physically,” she said.

Dauber was in bad shape after Clinton’s defeat. “I cried out loud,” she recalled. “Like, public, ugly crying for, like, a week.” She threw herself into the recall with renewed zeal. The following fall, the revelation of Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual predation triggered a wave of high-profile firings and resignations. Suddenly, Dauber’s local ballot initiative was part of a national attempt to figure out how to deal with the perpetrators and enablers of rape culture.

By this point, Dauber was talking to me again. In December 2017, I had reached out to her volunteer press secretary and was surprised to get a reply from Dauber herself. Her den mother instincts had kicked into overdrive when she heard that I had gotten Emily’s name from John Smith’s board and that I wanted to contact her over her objections. She denied that she had been angry, just upset. She said she found it “troubling” that I “obtained the victim's name from someone who attempted to publicize the victim's identity.”

When I flew out to see her in April, it was clear that her campaign had become grueling. Endorsements from Democratic politicians and luminaries were no longer falling in her lap. One night, I watched her corner Jeff Bleich, a Democratic candidate for California lieutenant governor, at a meeting of local Democratic activists. Dauber had wanted his endorsement because he was the former president of the California bar association—a useful foil to the phalanx of lawyers and judges aligned against her. But Bleich was nonsensically noncommittal, offering to endorse the recall, but only privately. He explained that he hadn’t had a chance to fully study the complex issues involved. “I don’t have time for three-hour conversations. It’s a factually intense case that you’ve made,” he said, squirming and eyeing the door, which was blocked by Dauber’s diminutive figure.

Dauber would not budge. For every objection he raised, she had an implacable multi-point rebuttal. I recognized the vise he was in—and the way he seemed to relent out of exhaustion just to extricate himself from the conversation. Before he was out of earshot, Dauber was gleefully planning to tout the endorsement on social media, until one of her volunteers talked her into a more subtle approach.

As we drove back to Palo Alto, Dauber kept turning over something Bleich had said. “I know a lot of people who know victims of abuse, who know the system is bullshit,” he’d said. “They think [the perpetrators] should all go to jail for three to five years and experience everything that people of lower socio-economic classes experience, but for them this is about Aaron Persky.” It was all just guild loyalty, Dauber concluded in disgust: lawyers who didn’t want to offend the judges they might one day have to face in court.

Boxes in Dauber's home containing the petition to recall Persky. TWITTER

The recall fight had turned extremely nasty, the intensity more typical of a national campaign. Dauber was distributing an article reporting that Persky’s side had hired a political consultant who worked for Trump in Arizona. Dauber’s opponents passed me information that she was working with a woman who had been a partner at the firm that had produced the Willie Horton ad.

“I can’t prove it, but I think Dauber wrote the victim letter,” Cordell said.

Improbably, this war was raging inside one of the most liberal communities in the nation—Hillary Clinton carried the county by over 50 points—among people who probably agreed with each other most of the time. The leaders of the opposition were largely women, including women of color. They were law professors, public defenders, respected opponents of the death penalty, criminal justice reformers, former judges, pioneering feminists and even survivors of sexual assault, many of whom believed the system was broken for victims. And they were incensed at Dauber for implying that recall opponents weren’t serious about rape. “This is a progressive family fight and each side is trying to position itself as the most righteous,” Rosen told me. “Sometimes, the intraparty fights are the most vicious.”

The de facto leader of the anti-recall campaign is LaDoris Cordell, a retired California Superior Court judge and staunch advocate of criminal justice reform. When I visited her in her sunny Palo Alto ranch-style house, she estimated that during her 19 years on the bench, she had sentenced thousands of people.

Initially, Cordell, who is black and gay, had been appalled by Turner’s short jail term. She told CBS News at the time that the mitigating factors Persky cited were “basically code for white privilege.” Later, when Dauber and Tsurkov dug up the case of Gunderson, the would-be University of Hawaii football player, Cordell told BuzzFeed, “There are so many problems with how this case was handled that I'm not even sure where to start.”

But as a former judge, the idea of recalling Persky was anathema to her. So, too, were Dauber’s tactics. Cordell cited the time when Dauber tweeted “Please enjoy this song,” linking to a ditty by a New Jersey duo called “F*ck Brock Turner” that encouraged him to “take a nosedive off the top of a cliff.” (Dauber later apologized.)

Cordell showed me a picture of a protester holding an assault rifle outside Turner’s parents’ home in Ohio. In the summer of 2016, a small crowd had gathered there, carrying signs with slogans like “If I rape Brock will I only do 3 months?” and “Shoot your local rapist.” “Brock Turner has become the poster boy for everything about rape culture,” Cordell said. “His life is ruined. When is enough enough?” Cordell hadn’t known Persky before the recall, but she was similarly affronted that Dauber had characterized him as a totem of white privilege. “His wife is a woman of color!” Cordell exclaimed, brandishing a blown-up Persky family portrait. “He has biracial kids!”

In Cordell’s telling, other recall opponents were too scared of Dauber to speak up until she stepped in. “She’s a bully, and bullying is not going to work with me,” Cordell said. She now seemed as consumed by the recall as Dauber was: “The recall is my life, 24/7.” Cordell spent much of our nearly three-hour interview discussing not the legal arguments, but Dauber herself, whom she described as “a smart, relentless, troubled human being.” She and her allies spoke of Dauber in terms that veered into deep suspicion, even paranoia.

For instance, Barbara Babcock, who in 1972 became the first woman appointed to teach at Stanford Law School, questioned whether Emily Doe really had a problem with Turner’s sentence. She pointed out that Emily Doe had told the female probation officer she didn’t want Turner to “rot in jail.” Emily had explained in court that these words had been “slimmed down to distortion and taken out of context,” but Babcock perceived a more malign influence: “Michele got ahold of her.”

A protest outside Brock Turner's parents' home in Ohio, after Turner's release. SPLASH NEWS

Emily Doe’s statement, too, was the subject of fevered speculation among the anti-recall crowd. “I can’t prove it, but I think Dauber wrote the victim letter,” Cordell told me. Babcock echoed her suspicion. “It’s so sophisticated for someone who was so young,” she said. Persky’s lawyer, a fellow Stanford alum named Jim McManis, was also sure that Emily hadn’t written the statement. “A person whose identity I am not at liberty to disclose says that it was written by a professional battered women's advocate,” McManis explained. “I can't verify it, but the person who told me this, I value her judgment.”

I had seen some of Emily Doe’s other writing and believed the statement was her work—her voice, with its emotional charge, was immediately recognizable. The tone also sounded nothing like Dauber’s cerebral wood chipper. “I didn’t even suggest one change after I read it because it would be like changing something in the Mona Lisa. It’s a masterpiece,” Dauber fumed. “I think it’s deeply insulting not only to Emily Doe but to every other victim of sexual assault,” she went on, gathering speed. “This is a woman who had her agency taken away from her and that letter was her effort to regain some of that agency. And now they’re undermining her agency. It is unforgivable!” She paused. “You think that’s too much?”

In February, after Dauber reported receiving the envelope with white powder, Cordell told the local press that it had “the hallmarks of a publicity stunt.” Even though a man was arrested two weeks later—on charges of mailing threatening material to Dauber, Donald Trump Jr. and half a dozen others—Cordell insisted to me that the incident was “a hoax.”

During our conversation, Cordell also hinted that she had information from Dauber’s personal history that would reveal her motives. Later that evening, I got an email from Margaret Russell, another anti-recall lieutenant. Russell is a law professor at the Santa Clara University who sits on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union. Her email contained years-old documents about Amanda Dauber, the child Dauber lost to suicide. I later found out that the anti-recall campaign had sent these to several reporters, but none had printed their contents.

When I asked Russell why she was sending the documents to me and how they were relevant, Russell wrote back a long, bristling letter—now she was suspicious of my motivation, too. She felt the documents explained Dauber’s behavior. “You may disagree, but I think her relationship with these young women helps fill the void created by the daughter she could not save,” she wrote. “I have tried to look at her with compassion and humanity. But she is so destructive that I feel ethically obligated to oppose her efforts to destroy (lots of) people and to destroy the judiciary.” That the recall’s opponents were doing exactly what they accused Dauber of doing to Persky—launching a personal, psychological attack—seemed entirely lost on them.

“In newspapers my name was 'unconscious intoxicated woman,' ten syllables, and nothing more than that. For a while, I believed that that was all I was. I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am.” - EMILY DOE

In April, Cordell invited Dauber to debate her at an event hosted by the Silicon Valley Republicans at a country club in the hills of Los Altos. Dauber canceled at the last minute and sent Marcus Cole, a fellow Stanford Law School professor and a black Republican, in her stead. “I bet this is the most black people they’ve had here!” Cordell whispered to me as the introductions got going. Once onstage, her argument leaned heavily on Brock Turner’s version of the night of the assault—in particular his assertion that Emily Doe had consented, which the jury had rejected. “They were making out, and at some point, he says to her, ‘Can I finger you?’” Cordell said. “According to his testimony, she said, ‘Yeah.’ Her underwear comes off, and he fingers her.” She made the attendant gesture as guests continued eating their poached salmon and rice.

When the debate was over, there was far less clarity than before the two sides had presented their arguments. I spoke to people who had supported the recall before the event but changed their minds by the time it ended, and vice versa. The vast majority, however, expressed profound confusion.

On May 8, less than a month before the ballot, The Mercury News endorsed the recall, and Persky finally broke his silence in a press conference hosted by Cordell. By this point, he was working from home as a night judge, on call from 5 pm to 8 in the morning. He had removed the numbers from the front of his house after his address was posted online. The judicial system was based on the promise, Persky said in his quiet voice, “that judges would rule on the facts and the law, not on public opinion.” He was still unable to discuss the specifics of the Turner case, but he highlighted a number of landmark judicial decisions in which judges had gone against popular opinion and granted rights to a minority, such as Brown v. Board of Education. Persky declined my request for an interview, but in an emotional conversation with The Associated Press, he said he had no regrets about how he had handled the Turner case, and accused the recall campaign of reducing a complex criminal case to a hashtag.

Aaron Persky said he had no regrets about how he handled the Turner case. JEFF CHIU/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The two-year effort had taken its toll on Dauber, too. Her family was tired; she was tired. In a moment of exhaustion, she had totaled her car and was now cruising around liberal Palo Alto in a pick-up truck. But she had not lost an iota of her righteous self-assurance. “I know that what I’m doing is the right thing,” she said. I told her that multiple people had described her as a bully. “If I thought I had bullied someone, I would have apologized,” she said, clearly stung. “I have a history of being thoughtful, pragmatic and willing to compromise. I also have been unfortunately thrust into the role by Stanford of being a public critic, and that has not been a pleasant experience. It’s not fun be to be a whistleblower.” Still, she didn’t plan on relenting. “I’m going to keep trying to make Stanford a better place as long as I’m there,” she said.

The young woman who had inspired her crusade remained out of sight. I sent questions for Emily to the district attorney’s office; a spokesperson responded that “Emily Doe is not communicating with the media.” Meanwhile, Palo Alto is now peppered with the recall campaign’s flyers and lawn signs bearing Brock Turner’s mugshot from the night he assaulted her.

Brock Turner is living with his parents in Dayton. Records show that he was briefly enrolled at Sinclair Community College. His lawyer said that he was not doing interviews; a person familiar with his situation told me he was trying to keep a job and get an education. In December, Turner appealed his conviction. His legal adviser, John Tompkins, who refused to comment on the record, has told reporters that “what happened is not a crime.” Turner’s chief arguments are that there was not enough evidence to convict him on any of the three counts, that Persky should have permitted more of Turner’s character witnesses to testify, that Emily Doe consented before passing out, and that by referring so many times to the dumpster, Emily’s lawyer had prejudiced the jury “because of the inherent connotations of filth, garbage, detritus and criminal activity frequently generally associated with dumpsters.” 

The dumpster is gone now. Last year, Dauber proposed turning the site of the assault into a small seated garden with a plaque quoting from Emily Doe’s statement, the words that had launched a movement. Stanford was open to the idea, but the project stalled over a disagreement between Dauber and Stanford over which quote to use. One of the quotes Stanford had suggested was “I’m right here, I’m okay, everything’s okay, I’m right here,” which Dauber felt missed the point entirely. Negotiations broke down, the fight spilled into the national media and no plaque was installed.

The spot where Emily Doe was assaulted was once a dirt trail behind a dumpster known to Stanford undergraduates as the “Scary Path.” Three years later, it is a clean, well-lighted place. Wooden benches sit atop local stones and a terra-cotta floor. During the day, the California pines offer shade and dappled sunlight. A fountain gurgles quietly. It is an incongruously peaceful testament to the clanging battle that started here. Without Emily Doe’s words, though, it is just two benches and a fountain, easy to overlook as just another place to sit. There is no ready lesson.

The site of Emily Doe's assault, now transformed. STANFORD DAILY

I have met Trump haters before, lots of them, the kind who seize upon every conspiracy theory and refuse to give him any benefit of any doubt. The four people I recently spent the morning with at Solly’s Tavern in D.C. (sans booze, don’t worry) were not Trump haters. They were, however, Trump quitters.

All of them, at some point over the course of the last nine months, had left their posts within the current administration, having decided that they could better serve their country from outside the government than from within. They weren’t happy about quitting, either. They were civil servants who wanted to remain civil servants, who, except for one, had worked under presidents of both parties. They had disagreed with superiors over the years, they had been fearful of new regulations and wary of political appointees, but they stayed on because that’s the nature of career work in government. This was different.

When they came together for this discussion two weeks ago, the rapport was instantaneous. The vibe was as convivial and familiar as a reunion, except for the fact that they had been strangers five minutes before. They hailed from different parts of the bureaucracy, they ranged widely in age and background, but they had undergone such similar mental calculations since Trump’s election. Would their friends at work feel betrayed by their quitting? Would they be opening up their job to someone with views antithetical to their own? Having spent most of their lives in back offices, did they really feel comfortable taking such a public stand? Once we got into the interview proper, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, they were candid, funny and furious. They may not work for the government anymore, but they all still see themselves as public servants.

All right, Sharon, you were the first to flee. Let’s start with election night. What were you thinking? What did it feel like?

You had no doubt you had to go?

Walt, you stuck around until July. Talk to me about the moment when you realized your world had fundamentally changed.

“Whenever someone would talk about the government as The Man, I always used to joke that, well, apparently the man is a 5-foot-3 lesbian from Queens.” Sharon McGowan

Mike, civil servants at the Environmental Protection Agency have long struggled with political appointees. Why do you think the situation is so much worse now?

It’s a hard habit to break.

Was there a specific thing that made you decide this is it, I’m putting in my papers, I’m done?

Ned, like Walt, you worked for an institution that’s supposedly above politics. But tension with a new administration is not necessarily a new thing at the CIA. How was this different?

So fast-forward to January. What was that experience like?

When did you start thinking about getting out?

“I became concerned that I would be window-dressing for corruption.” - Walter Shaub

What are commonalities in all the stories we’re hearing?

Walt, I heard you had a mental checklist that helped you decide whether to stay or go.

What are relationships with your former colleagues like now?

“I wish I would’ve stayed because even though I don’t think I would’ve made a huge impact, I still feel like I could’ve been a voice.” - Mike Cox

“I was more than content to be a bureaucrat for the rest of my life. And, frankly, I hope to go back into public service when the coast is clear.” - Ned Price

Were you at least able to engage in some good gallows humor before you left?

I wonder if this is all going to have a chilling effect on young people aspiring to go into public service.

I

It was a warm Sunday this February, and the afternoon tourists and joggers across from Grant Park kept moving around the vehicle in their midst. Alone inside his car, Jedidiah wept. On the phone docked to his dashboard, the 30-year-old Chicago activist and Baptist minister set a gospel song to repeat and started recording on Facebook Live. He begged forgiveness for giving up and cursed the city that he loved but had robbed him of everything. “Every relationship I had, I lost it because I was too busy fighting for y’all,” he sobbed. “I’ve only lost because of y’all.” Then he pressed a Glock 19 to his temple.

The concentric neighborhoods around the city center were prospering like never before. But Jedidiah had spent the last decade in that other Chicago, far beyond the Loop. In African-American communities battered by violence and joblessness and disrepute, he showed up at hundreds of crime scenes. He assisted grieving families, raised funds for funerals and negotiated with warring corner gangs to avert reprisals. He filled his rented apartment on the South Side with young people in need of shelter. On Sundays, 50 members of his church, Chosen Generation, crowded into a nearby commercial space to hear him preach. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Bernie Sanders and the Obama administration have all sought out his insights and influence.

Jedidiah has a long, muscular face, with wide-set eyes that turn fierce when his brows tighten. Short and lean with a clean-shaven head, he bears himself as if he’s a much larger man. In conversations, he listens with a stern intensity, but he has a laugh like a car failing to turn over—a nasal gchuhh, gchuhh, gchuhh that invariably sends him stumbling. I first met Jedidiah in the summer of 2014, when he was camping out in the park in front of the DuSable Museum of African American History, near the Obamas’ South Side home. The weekend before, 82 people had been shot and 14 killed in the city, almost all of them in a handful of black neighborhoods. That was unacceptable to Jedidiah. He announced that he would sleep in the park until the city delivered the jobs and economic investment needed to stanch the bloodshed. He didn’t own a tent or a generator. He hadn’t figured out where he’d use the bathroom or what might constitute victory. Saul Alinsky he was not. But just as he improvised all his sermons, he believed there was no time to waste mulling over strategy while people suffered.

We hooked up again last November, in the days after Donald Trump was elected president. Jedidiah has always maintained a quixotic belief in the ideal of the village cooperative, and he’d gone to calm a racial furor in Mount Greenwood, a mostly white enclave on the edge of the black South Side. In my post-election fugue, I tagged along, since Jedidiah looked to be among the few people attempting to straddle the fault lines of the city and the country—divisions that have only become more glaring since. During a unity march he helped organize in Mount Greenwood, Jedidiah was set upon by both crowds of angry white residents and fellow black activists, who castigated him for being too conciliatory. I watched as a hockey mom edged her way politely past neighbors until she reached the police line at a metal barricade. Then she screamed herself hoarse: “How much are you getting paid? Yeah, you, smiley! How many killed in your own neighborhood? Go home!” As if Jedidiah wasn’t home already.

For despite the criticisms of this new generation of young black activists—that they care only about police shootings and not other troubles besetting their communities—Jedidiah was so profoundly invested in his neighborhood that its misfortunes devastated him. “I see lives being destroyed, and I don’t know what to do,” he once told me. “It creates a burden in me, an unrest in my resting. Literally, I lay in my bed and my heart beats so heavy for the city that it drives me to tears.”

This truth is shared by numerous organizers grouped under the Black Lives Matter moniker. Once they raised their voices in protest, they were compelled to do more and more. People looked to them to be social service providers, youth counselors, politicians, economic developers and policy experts on criminal justice, housing, schools and healthcare. A catalogue of impossible jobs, all of them overwhelming and unpaid and carried out on the fly with mostly an absence of mentors.

Many of these activists were unprepared for the emotional anguish, the self-recrimination and financial burden, the media spotlight, the attacks from outside and within the movement. Their personal trauma became an unspoken side effect of the work. Edward Crawford, one of the most prominent protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, died this spring from what was believed to be a suicide. Last year in Columbus, a 23-year-old Black Lives Matter activist named MarShawn McCarrel shot himself in the head on the steps of the Ohio statehouse. “I feel like he did so much for so many people that he forgot to take care of himself,” his mother mourned.

“Every activist and organizer I know is traumatized in their own way,” DeRay Mckesson, one of the leading figures of the Black Lives Matter movement, said. “They’ve sacrificed job stability, relationships, educational opportunities to fight against a system that was literally killing people. They’re still processing those sacrifices. We are young people who are trying to figure out how to build a better world and still be healthy and sane and strong and loving and a partner and a brother and a sister.”

In Chicago, Jedidiah was a hope to mend the riven city, and that made him another one of its casualties. Earlier on that Sunday in February, he had sent me a text that began, “Please make sure you tell my truth Ben. I never took any money or jobs. I really wanted to see a better Chicago for all people.” I didn’t realize it was a suicide note until a mutual friend phoned to tell me about the Facebook Live video while I was at a grocery store with my two children. I drove home with the horrible feed playing in my lap, screaming at the phone for Jedidiah to stop, my kids confused in the backseat. Jedidiah was waving the gun, holding it to his chest and head. Hearts and sad-faced emojis bubbled up over the livestream, the views multiplying to nearly 100,000. It was happening right then, and every unendurable moment looked to be his last. I frantically texted and called. I could hear his phone ringing on the video. “Stop calling me!” he shouted through his tears. So I and probably a hundred other people called him more.

Officers surrounded his car, halting traffic on Lake Shore Drive. At one point, police cruisers rammed Jedidiah on two sides, pinning his vehicle. “Drop your weapon!” the cops ordered. Jedidiah ignored the command. He decided to let them do what too often occurs when the police confronted a black man with a gun. But the officers knew Jedidiah. They’d listened to his demands at protests and watched him on the news; at shooting scenes, they’d sought his help to prevent retaliatory violence. A sergeant kneeled on the ground beside him. Another officer cried, apologizing as he clasped on the cuffs.

II

Jedidiah was born Darryl Eugene Coleman. Coleman was his mother’s boyfriend’s name. His mother, Ottoweiss Cook, a minister herself, took Jedidiah to a prophetic church when he was 13, and a woman he didn’t know pulled him aside. “God told me to tell you that He’s going to change your name,” she said. Soon after, his mother called him into the living room and there stood a stranger who looked like him. It was his father, Grayling Brown, who said giddily that God had told him he had a son, and God said the son’s name was Jedidiah. The name appears only once in the Old Testament, like an oversight in editing: After David and Bathsheba beget Solomon, the Almighty sends word through a prophet to call the child Jedidiah, which means “beloved of the Lord.” But Solomon he remains. A year later, Jedidiah legally changed his first and last names. “You can’t tell me God isn’t real,” he exclaimed when he recounted this story to me in his kitchen.

Becoming a new person in his mid-teens was difficult. “My entire life, I felt unloved and misunderstood, and I felt a purpose at the same time, like I could make a difference,” he told me. He was always an outsider, even to himself. There was that “duality,” he said. He grew up on the South Side, but his mother, wanting better for him, insisted he attend schools in the suburbs, and he never once went to the same school two years in a row. He carried a briefcase with a coded lock on it, and with great formality each day he’d undo the clasps and pull out the homework he hadn’t even attempted.

A perennial new kid, Jedidiah made few close friends and fought often. He brought home classmates who were outsiders like himself and took in homeless people, expecting his mother, step-father and their church members to help feed and care for them. “He was marked by God to be different. He didn’t fit in,” his mother told me. As a teenager, Jedidiah stood on the guardrail of a bridge, considering whether to leap. The police chased him from the ledge, jolting him with a Taser. He said a doctor at the hospital cautioned him that he was taking on too much.

“I thought I was a joke between God and Jesus, here for sport,” Jedidiah said. “I was the anti-Christ, the worst human being possible. Then I decided God kept me for a reason. I had the ability to help because I saw things others couldn’t see. I told people, ‘I am as flawed as you.’” After high school, he ran a successful program serving 150 youth in an all-black suburb south of Chicago. He was ordained, and people from the suburb followed him to the South Side when he established his church.

In his teens, he also began to help take care of his first cousin’s baby, a boy 16 years his junior named Travis. “He was technically my cousin, raised as my nephew, but he became my son,” Jedidiah explained, realizing that what was normal for him might not make sense to me. Travis, he said, had a wisdom about him even as a small child, an openness and honesty. “That kid is unreal,” Jedidiah said. “He’s been here before.”

• JEDIDIAH AND TRAVIS •COURTESY OF JEDIDIAH BROWN

Jedidiah rented a two-story building along a business corridor where many of the storefronts no longer housed businesses. He lived in the apartment upstairs, with young people laid out everywhere, and used the commercial space below for church services. In 2014, he started an organization called Young Leaders Alliance, which he headquartered in the storefront as well. Many African Americans had moved out of the city, a quarter-million since 2000, leaving communities on the South and West Sides that were even poorer and more perilous than before. Jedidiah made a point of getting to know the teenagers who idled on corners, but too frequently he ended up seeing one of their bodies splayed on the concrete fringed by yellow police tape. This was the spring of 2014, still months before a police officer killed Michael Brown in Ferguson and the first large wave of organizing under the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag.

Jedidiah didn’t have a background in organizing. He didn’t know how to run Young Leaders Alliance, especially as people contacted him on Facebook, asking to start chapters across the city and in other states. But he told me that when he sought guidance from an older guard of black activists—civil rights leaders, the heads of churches, black nationalists—they rebuffed him. He was told he had to earn the right to organize in Chicago.

That summer he called on the residents of his South Shore neighborhood to join him for a rally. He borrowed a coffin from a local funeral home and rolled it onto the street to represent the scourge of violence. He wore a dark suit and tie—he felt he always had to project authority and churchly rectitude. To his surprise, 400 people showed up, clogging the intersection. They included guys from opposing gangs, the cliques he’d convinced to gather peacefully. When the police appeared, Jedidiah announced into a bullhorn, “Don’t come to stop us. Join us.” As the group marched through the streets, people leaned out of apartment windows, shouting their support. Jedidiah made sure everyone who wanted to speak was given the bullhorn. “It was a mistake,” he recalled with a laugh. “People said all kinds of crazy shit. But that was my brand—they made up the village.”

In the following days, he received calls from pastors and politicians and city officials. Now they wanted to work with him. Pat Quinn, then the Illinois governor, requested a meeting, and pretty soon Emanuel was waking Jedidiah up with the occasional morning phone call, asking for updates on his neighborhood. Suddenly, Jedidiah could reach out to city administrators to get a homeless woman into a shelter; after shootings, he was able to contact police commanders on their cell phones, acting as an intermediary between the cops and the guys firing at one another. Glen Brooks, the Chicago Police Department’s director of public engagement, told me that Jedidiah “has definitely reduced tensions at shootings and allowed everyone else to go home safely.”

Invigorated by his success, Jedidiah entered the race for alderman. He was in a local park a couple of weeks later, meeting with at-risk young adults, when an 18-year-old South Sider—I’ll call him Cordell to protect his identity—tried to shoot him. One of Cordell’s friends had just been killed, and he mistook Jedidiah for a rival’s relative. Jedidiah ran for his life. After the incident made the news, Cordell realized he’d targeted the wrong person and wrote Jedidiah on Facebook to apologize.

Cordell had been shot several times himself. He avoided public transportation and the many parts of the city he deemed dangerous, making it hard for him to keep a job. His circumstances had become all too common: Nearly half of the young black men in Chicago are neither in school nor employed, according to a recent study from the University of Illinois. Cordell told me that many young people he knew found a twisted solace in violence. “Negativity is a way to make them feel better about themselves,” he said. “They lost so much, the only thing in their head is they want the other person to feel what they feel.”

Jedidiah was ecstatic to hear from Cordell. He asked the young man to tag along while he worked, and they visited a mourning family together. After that, Cordell started regularly attending a mentoring program Jedidiah helped run. “Jedidiah became that big brother or father figure, inspiring him to be better and do different,” said Cordell’s aunt, who was one of the people who raised him after his mother’s death and father’s incarceration. “He stopped hanging out in the street. He started to say positive things about life. I promise you, without Jed stepping up, my nephew would be dead by now.”

III

I'VE NOW HEARD Jedidiah speak dozens of times, addressing city officials, television cameras, people on the street. Even more than his pastorly locutions, it’s his unmannered rawness that is most striking. Completely immersed in the moment, he braids together bits of Scripture, snatches of recent conversations, current events and his recurring themes of community and fairness—“letting the spirit come out of me,” as he puts it. At his most steely and authoritative, he remains vulnerable, his anger, confusion or awe laid bare. After listening to him address a gathering in Evanston, a political consultant named Bobby Burns volunteered to manage his aldermanic campaign. “It was one of the top three most inspiring speeches I’ve ever heard,” Burns told me. “He speaks so passionately. You can tell that the health of the community he serves directly impacts the health of Jedidiah.”

In the spring of 2015, Jedidiah showed up at a march that was heading to police headquarters. Protesters were demanding the firing of an officer who shot 22-year-old Rekia Boyd in the back of the head while off-duty. Jedidiah was surprised not to recognize any of the young black Chicago activists gathered there. Maybe they were college kids, he thought, with their clothes ripped and covered in buttons. Many wore black hoodies and just about everyone had a hairstyle like an art project. Jedidiah loved what he saw. He had told me, obliquely, that he himself often struggled with his “two realities” and an “inward suffering.” But these protesters, he said admiringly, “felt they could be free and express themselves at a level I never did.”

• JEDIDIAH HAS BEEN PREACHING SINCE HE WAS A TEENAGER. •

The march was put together by Black Youth Project 100, an activist group very different from Jedidiah’s. It began the week in 2013 that George Zimmerman was exonerated for the killing of Trayvon Martin, as a convening of 100 black millennials, among them students, artists and trained organizers. A University of Chicago political scientist provided guidance, and BYP100 grew to several chapters across the country, with headquarters in Chicago. Charlene Carruthers, the 32-year-old national director, noted that existing organizations in the city, such as the Nation of Islam, were also unapologetically black. “But we’re the only one led by young people, led by women and queer folk,” she told me.

Too often people mistake Black Lives Matter for a social or political monolith, imagining that every young, black protester since Ferguson is a card-carrying member. I once heard a white Chicagoan ask Jedidiah, quite sincerely, if he could instruct all the Black Lives Matter people not to demonstrate in her neighborhood. But the movement is comprised of hundreds of different groups, each with its own motivating principles, distinct politics and methods. A number, like BYP, have proved especially attractive to young LGTBQ people of color, who felt spurned by the conservatism of the black church. They saw the fights against racism, sexism and homophobia as interconnected—“the different kind of struggle you go through daily when you have a marginalized identity within a marginalized community,” DeRay Mckesson said. But other young protesters believed that embracing an LGBTQ agenda diverted attention away from the black men—the Michael Browns, Eric Garners and Freddie Grays—who were being killed by police. “We’re fighting for their liberation,” Carruthers said. “They may not be fighting for ours.”

Although a pastor himself, Jedidiah blamed the city’s black churches for focusing more on their own growth than on embattled young people in their neighborhoods—“being a house of the hireling and not of the shepherd,” he called it, citing the book of John. He had structured Young Leaders Alliance like a church because it was all he knew. He appointed treasurers and secretaries, and he required members to pay dues, like tithing, a sizable $25 a month. “It came to seem antiquated very quickly,” he admitted. “The new protest groups were more palatable to my generation. They had the cool hashtag. They’re rapping and doing poetry and jumping in a circle shouting, ‘We gonna be all right!’” Jedidiah couldn’t help marveling at the way they flouted the politics of respectability and inspired young people who’d been politically disengaged. He saw them as the missing puzzle piece. “That’s not my lane, not my skill set,” he said. “But if I could partner with them—because I also do stuff in the neighborhoods they can’t do—then we can change the city.” And so he introduced himself to a couple of the people at the BYP event.

“We know who you are,” someone cut him off. A few guys who appeared to be functioning as marshals told him he needed to march in the back. Later, Jedidiah recalled, a woman announced loud enough for him to hear that they didn’t need “these coon pastors.” “I was completely rejected,” he said.

Jedidiah tended to work (and sometimes compete) with other maverick South Side activists who seemed to plunge themselves into a never-ending cascade of crises. Lamon Reccord, a reed-thin 18-year-old with his hair cut into a flowering plume, had become a fixture at protests of the police, positioning himself inches from cops in militarized riot gear and glaring flintily into their eyes. But he also headed out alone many nights on what he called safety patrols, hoping his presence would discourage acts of violence. He cleaned up empty lots and washed blood from the sidewalks. “It’s extremely stressful as an activist,” said Aleta Clark, a 28-year-old single mother who sells T-shirts for her anti-violence organization, Hugs No Slugs, and uses the proceeds to feed the homeless and to host events for children. “We don’t get paid, and the world depends on us. Every day something else is going on. There’s so much that’s needed to be done.”

• AT PROTESTS, LAMON RECCORD WOULD POSITION
HIMSELF INCHES FROM POLICE OFFICERS. •

Once, I was at a community meeting when an angry, tearful mother stood up and accused Jedidiah and the other activists there of ignoring the issue of autism in their neighborhoods. She said cuts to social services had forced her to stay home with her autistic son. No way, I thought, could Jedidiah and his friends take on something like behavioral therapy in addition to everything else they were trying to do. But here they were, faced with this woman’s desperation. A barrel-armed organizer named Artriss Williams, known as Butta, said his uncle worked at a treatment facility an hour west of Chicago. He offered to take the mother there. Vance Henry, a deputy chief of staff to Emanuel, told me he simply couldn’t comprehend the extremes of fearlessness, impracticality and resolve displayed by young black activists like Jedidiah. The best he could do was recite a few wishful words from Martin Luther King Jr.: “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”

But Jedidiah felt more maladjusted than most. “This work won’t accept me if I be all of myself,” he said. “That cripples me.” One day, after some impromptu meetings at city hall, we sat down in a crowded Wendy’s in the Loop. A man was going table to table begging for cash, and Jedidiah handed him a $5 bill and asked for three singles back, saying he didn’t have much money himself. He’d spoken to me before about wrestling with his faith in ways that, for him, were uncharacteristically guarded, and I asked him about a fast he said he’d undertaken for what sounded like an improbable 40 days.

Instead of answering, he went silent for a half-minute. When he finally spoke, he said, “You ready? I’m going to give you something that’s difficult. I made a vow to my mother never to embarrass her. The biggest conflict for me—” He paused. “I want to be true to myself, and I’ve not been able to do that becau—” Trailing off, he tried again. “I’ve grown up in conflict with my own self. I couldn’t express my bisexuality. Wait, what’d you ask to make me say that?” A propulsive laugh doubled him over. “I tried to fast like Jesus did in the Bible to eliminate all the same-sex desires,” he went on. “You got an exclusive. I’m giving it to you.” His sexuality, he explained, was a big part of the duality that had always afflicted him. “I’m listening to preachers say I’m an abomination to the God that I love.”

When he was around 16, Jedidiah tried to tell to his mother about his attraction to both women and men. She said he was still her son but couldn’t “shake hands” with behavior that God doesn’t agree with. He had to leave her house, and they had little contact for two years. “I’m still holding on to my faith that God will reverse that mindset,” she told me recently. Jedidiah had long wanted to tell Charlene Carruthers, so she could see that BYP's issues were also his own. But he worried that guys on the streets, along with pastors and many of the activists he worked with, were going to reject him when they found out. “I have to keep quiet while BYP folks yell obscene shit to me,” Jedidiah told me. “It’s a hard place to be in, fighting for people through all that pain.”

There were other ways in which Jedidiah seemed out of step with the uncompromising political moment. In 2015, he endorsed Emanuel’s successful bid for a second term, even though the mayor had closed nearly 50 public schools in black and Latino neighborhoods. Jedidiah said he was swayed by Barack Obama’s support for his former chief of staff. Sticking by the mayor didn’t help Jedidiah’s own campaign—he finished fifth.

Seven months after the mayor's reelection, a judge ordered the city to release the video showing a Chicago police officer shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald multiple times at close range. The police had called the 2014 shooting justified, and the 10 officers on the scene, as well as the top police officials who saw the video, kept silent or maintained the false narrative. The video was held from the public for more than a year. Fearing that Chicago would become the next Ferguson or Baltimore, Emanuel tried to meet with young activists before the video’s circulation. Most refused. “Hell no,” Malcolm London, then a leader with BYP100, told me. “You can’t kill us and tell us how to respond.” Many of the protesters were calling for Emanuel’s resignation and the immediate firing of the police chief and the state’s attorney who had failed to bring charges. Some of the activist groups were demanding that public funds be disinvested from the police force and even that the department be abolished altogether.

Jedidiah was one of the handful of young leaders to take the meeting with the mayor. “My approach has always been to exhaust diplomacy,” he said. “I am not anti-police or anti-government. I’m anti-brutality and anti-corruption. I’ve never been of the ‘Fuck the police’ logic.” But he later said that meeting with Emanuel was one of the worst mistakes he ever made. “It was a time to be more abrasive than diplomatic,” Jedidiah said. “Reform wasn’t possible without it.” The board of Young Leaders Alliance removed him as the head of his own organization. “Jedidiah lost his tribe,” said Corey Brooks, the pastor of a large South Side church, who as an outspoken black Republican knew about intertribal divisions. “Most great activists never make it past shouting to create systems and structures. Jedidiah achieved that and had to go back to the shouting.”

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, three days after the release of the McDonald video, Jedidiah joined a protest that shut down Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile” on the busiest shopping day of the year. Days later, the mayor fired the police chief he’d been defending. Other officials who’d reviewed the video resigned. And Emanuel admitted in a speech that a dangerous code of silence existed within the Chicago Police Department.

• JEDIDIAH AT THE THANKSGIVING WEEKEND PROTEST. •

The Black Friday rally was a success, showing the power of this new civil rights movement. But it also brought to the surface the internal divisions within the swelling protests. Along Michigan Avenue there were clashes over who could direct the demonstration and who speak into bullhorns and in front of television cameras. Jedidiah marched alongside independent activists he knew. They skirmished with Jesse Jackson, Congressmen Bobby Rush and a cadre of aging civil rights leaders, business leaders and one-time Black Panthers. The young black feminists and queer organizers refused to be marginalized. In a scrum in front of the historic Water Tower, the different factions denounced one another for being too old, too church, too gay, not street enough and too compromised. A woman was punched and a three-way fight broke out. Jedidiah had to recognize that to some of his fellow activists he, too, was the enemy.

IV

BY THE START of 2016, Jedidiah was living in an apartment several blocks south of his old place, offering free lodging to a half-dozen boarders. He rented a nearby storefront for church services and took a security job at a downtown office building. He still rushed to just about every calamity in the city. At one event, he and Travis stood alongside Emanuel on the steps of a church for the ritual reading of the names of those killed by gun violence. After every victim was announced, Travis shouted, “Oh my God!” “Oh no!” Travis experienced each individual life lost as an unbearable weight. Turning to the mayor, Travis pleaded, “You have to do something about this.”

At 14, Travis was gangly and awkward, less popular with other children than he was endearing to the many adults who ended up looking after him. Jedidiah and Travis’ mother had a contentious relationship. Whenever Jedidiah criticized her, Travis would silence him: “She’s a beautiful person, and I only get one mom.” Travis looked after Jedidiah’s well-being too. They were at Jedidiah's apartment one day when Travis said he knew his secret. “You’re bi and that’s OK,” Travis told him, half-smiling in the way he always did. “You’re so unhappy. You’re trying to please everyone else. Be yourself. Be free.” Jedidiah was shocked that Travis could be so observant. He also felt unconditionally loved.

Still, Travis was a teenager demanding of attention. He often wanted the two of them to go downtown or swimming in the lake, and to his frustration, Jedidiah was usually too busy. “There’s something wrong with my uncle,” Travis would tell other family members. “He won’t talk to me.”

But Jedidiah couldn’t slow down. The violence in Chicago was reaching unprecedented levels—762 murders in 2016, a two-decade high, and an average of 12 shooting victims a day. And then there was the rise of Trump. Jedidiah had seen the clips of Trump supporters shoving black women and sucker-punching black men, urged on by the candidate himself. In March 2016, when a Trump rally was scheduled for Chicago, Jedidiah declared, “Not in my city.” He would go to the event to defend his people.

Once inside the crowded arena, though, he saw the empty stage and an unoccupied lectern, and before he knew it he was leaping over the barricades and scuffling with security guards twice his size. A man wearing an American flag as a cape jumped on his back, and a video of Jedidiah spinning around and landing a right hook became a viral sensation. He didn’t regret his impulsiveness, although he said it led to death threats and the loss of his job. The Bernie Sanders campaign, which had consulted with Jedidiah, distanced itself. But he did wish he’d remembered to shout his message of unity, something like “Power to the village.” Rather, what emerged from his mouth was Hillary Clinton’s lame retort, which he didn’t even believe: “America is already great!”

One of his connections in the governor’s office called in a favor, and Jedidiah got a new job as an auxiliary police officer for another security firm, patrolling South Side business districts and public housing complexes. The job suited him. In his uniform, his Glock on his hip, he provided the kind of community policing he believed the city needed. He arrested the people running the drug operations, but he also befriended the young dealers and buyers, addressing the women as “queen” and the grizzled lookouts as “old school.” He shared his cell number freely, and people phoned him in a panic, asking him to break up fights or to calm the mentally agitated.

He was often stationed at the Trumbull Park Homes, a small public housing development in the Wild 100s, the increasingly desolate three-digit streets of the far South Side. One of his partners, a female officer, told me they made quite a team once they figured out that locking up the same residents each day was pointless. Jedidiah regularly bought juice and candy for the many children at Trumbull from a corner deli. “He is very gentleman. Everyone loves him,” the store’s Middle Eastern owner said. “He makes sure no one does the stupid thing.”

And he continued to rush around as if it was also his job to save the city from all its dysfunction. (“Just don’t do it in your uniform,” his boss said of his endless activism.) In August of last year, an 18-year-old was shot in the back and killed while fleeing the police. Jedidiah was afraid of another cover-up. He was working his contacts on the force and in the community, trying to determine what really happened, when Travis asked if they could do something fun together. Jedidiah told him he had no time—there was a big situation in the city he had to address. When Travis persisted, Jedidiah got annoyed. He sent him away for a few days to stay with Travis’ mother in Indiana.

Jedidiah was at the Trumbull Homes that week when he got the call—Travis was in an Indiana hospital and Jedidiah should go there right away. Jedidiah broke 100 miles per hour on the highway. He didn’t even notice the tollway barrier until he crashed through it. Two troopers—both white—pulled him over and one of them trained a gun on him. Jedidiah thought of Sandra Bland. He thought of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, both killed by police only weeks earlier. And yet he couldn’t stop bawling that he had to get to his kid. “It felt like my brain was being torn apart,” he recalled. With the troopers shouting at Jedidiah, a supervisor approached the vehicle. He happened to be black, and he asked Jedidiah for Travis’ name and the name of the hospital, warning Jedidiah that he better not be making up this emergency. Several minutes passed. The supervisor returned. “You need to get to the hospital,” he said.

“And that’s when I knew,” Jedidiah told me, crying at the memory. Travis had gone swimming with a friend and drowned in Lake Michigan. “I thought of the last words I said to him—‘You need to go back to your momma,’” he said. “I was completely not there, trying to deal with that shooting situation. I didn’t apologize and get to say I love him. It kills me.”

V

MOUNT GREENWOOD is one of the farthest points of Chicago that cops, firemen and other municipal workers can live while fulfilling their residency requirement. Its main street has an old five-and-dime feel—light poles strung with blue ribbons and bars garlanded with shamrocks. Early last November, a couple hundred residents harried a small band of activists who’d come to protest the police shooting of a 25-year-old black man in the neighborhood. The locals chanted, “Blue Lives Matter” and “Trump.” They circled the protesters, threatening to lynch them. So on the night of the presidential election, three months after Travis’ death, Jedidiah implored people to meet him in Mount Greenwood after voting. “We will get the election updates on the very grounds where white supremacy obviously thinks it’s safe to thrive in Chicago!” he announced on Facebook.

Word of his impending arrival spread through Mount Greenwood, with calls to defend the neighborhood from “the terrorist/hate group Black Lives Matter.” Jedidiah was met by raised middle fingers and jubilant howls from several hundred people massed on the streets. Someone swung a flagpole. Jedidiah said an older woman called him a “dumb nigger,” and the cop separating them broke rank and said, “Mom, you’re embarrassing me.” Amid the tumult, Jedidiah took a bullhorn from a fellow activist. “If black lives matter and blue lives matter,” he bellowed, “then what are we fighting for?”

Forced to flee, Jedidiah endured the additional blow of the election results in his apartment. “The people who talked about lynching—that thinking, that ideology—they won,” he said in disbelief. And yet it was because of the loss that he returned to Mount Greenwood the following week. He met with local clergy, politicians and business leaders, along with officials from the police department and the mayor’s office. “There are a lot of black and white people who are ignorant and ill-informed,” he told the group. “But we can get out the message that we’re not all bad and we’re listening to one another.” For six hours over two consecutive days, Jedidiah did listen and explain and demand. “A black assertion of our quality of life does not equate to an attack on white people,” he said. It was a commanding performance, halted only when he bowed his head mid-sentence and large tears began to hit the table in front of him one after another.

One person came with Jedidiah for the meeting the first day—me. He’d invited other activists, but they all said they wouldn’t negotiate with white racists and oppressors. They told Jedidiah he was naïve. Ja’Mal Green, a 21-year-old whom Jedidiah had once considered a protégé, dismissed him on social media as a puppet with a slave mentality. Jedidiah believed he was doing the harder thing, trying to bring the segregated city together. Yet the pain of being forsaken—by the very people he felt he served—it buckled him. “America broke my heart,” he said of Trump’s election. “Black people broke my spirit.”

• THE CONSERVATISM OF JEDIDIAH'S CHURCH HAD WEIGHED
HEAVILY ON HIM FOR YEARS. •

Mount Greenwood broke him in other ways as well. Two of his colleagues at the security firm told me that Chicago cops started harassing them because of their affiliation with Jedidiah, pulling them over, blinding them with flashlights and claiming to be looking for “Mr. Brown.” The firm’s owner showed me posts from the community blog for the Mount Greenwood ward that shared his personal details—his address, his children’s schools, the fields where he coached T-ball. Jedidiah decided he had to resign to avoid endangering anyone. Without a job, he eventually received a five-day eviction notice. His fridge went empty. He stowed his car to avoid the repo man. But he didn’t feel he could tell anyone. He believed that word of his financial troubles would affirm racist stereotypes and longtime assaults on his character. It was then that he stepped down as the pastor of his church and quit activism too. “Chicago has taken too much,” he said. “I don’t have another 10 years to give.”

Other activists were energized by Trump’s election—the structures of racism and inequality they’d long decried were at least out in the open for all to see. “Now is the prime opportunity that radical transformation demands,” Charlene Carruthers told me. But for Jedidiah, his vision of the unifying village had come to seem preposterous.

In relinquishing his responsibilities, Jedidiah did find a certain liberation. The conservatism of his church had weighed heavily on him for years, the contradictions between his own complicated personal life and the congregation’s beliefs forcing him to become a distorted version of himself. He wanted me to write about his sexuality now, he explained, to honor Travis’ candor with him. “I’m not going back to that level of intense dishonesty that contributes to this unhappiness,” he said. He started dressing more casually, in a kind of SWAT chic—black “Chicago” baseball cap turned backward, black work boots and a black sweatshirt tucked into black jeans. He got his first tattoo—Travis’ name across his chest. One Monday he told me that he’d been at clubs over the weekend with a girlfriend, staying out until 5 a.m. A man dancing beside him said, “You’re the guy from the news, the activist. Aren’t you a pastor?” Jedidiah said not anymore. “Can I get your number then?” the man asked. When Jedidiah told me the story, his legs jellied with laughter.

• Jedidiah celebrated his 31st birthday with a newfound sense of freedom. •

But although he kept repeating that he was retired from activism, he couldn’t stop himself from responding when he learned of people suffering. On the morning in January that the Department of Justice delivered its damning investigation of the Chicago police, finding that the CPD had routinely and systematically used excessive force against minorities, I went with Jedidiah to the home of a 21-year-old murder victim. We were accompanied by Cordell, the 18-year-old who had tried to shoot Jedidiah a few years earlier, and also Martin Johnson. Known as the “Crime Chaser,” Martin listened to police scanners at all hours and raced off to stream video of the crime scenes—to force the police to do their jobs, he explained. He’d filmed the aftermath of Shadara Muhammad’s homicide earlier that week. She’d been struck by a car, her lifeless body left in the bushes like roadkill. As we drove to the public housing development where she’d lived with her family, Jedidiah said he couldn’t bear that this young woman’s death had gone largely unremarked and uninvestigated, as if her black life truly did not matter. “I’m still a resident of Chicago,” he said.

The Muhammads’ two-story rowhouse was spare and neat, 10 paces between the front and back doors. Graduation photos hung on the wall, and a couple of young children peered down from the stairs leading to the second floor. Their mother sat in pajamas on a sofa, curled into herself. Her oldest son warned her to stop crying or she might have to be strapped down again. An aunt, a neighbor and a niece started to explain in a rush that they hadn’t been allowed to see Shadara’s body, that a detective hadn’t even introduced herself. The mother began to wail, and Jedidiah realized that he had to take control of the room. It was a magical thing to witness.

“It’s OK to be angry with God,” he said, cradling Shadara’s mother in his arms.

“OK,” she whimpered.

“I lost my 14-year-old son, and I was very angry with God.” The cramped box of the living room fell silent. “I’m going to pray, and we’re going to figure out what’s going on,” he went on, his voice an enthralling crescendo. “Father God, I’m asking you to give this mother comfort in her moment of grief. Stabilize her thoughts and heart. Cause the memory of her child to be what leads her in fighting for the justice she deserves.” After the chorus of “amens,” he asked what kind of person Shadara was, and the mood brightened, the family calling out her traits—a manager at True Religion jeans, a dancer, petite like her mom, funny. Jedidiah asked permission to act as their spokesperson. “I am going to stand with you all,” he assured them. “We are family as of today.”

There was some confusion about conflicting vigils and competing GoFundMe pages. An older sister was waiting on the T-shirts with Shadara’s face printed on them, and she and her brother debated the tattoos they were getting in her honor. In neighborhoods racked by death, these were among the evolving conventions. The Crime Chaser, who stood with his bleating police scanners in a rolling case by his side, pointed to Jedidiah as a way to conclude the meeting. “Remember that guy who ran onto the Trump stage and had to be dragged off?” he asked. “That was him.” The room erupted with cries of delight. “I like that in you, brother,” the aunt said, and she hugged Jedidiah and then pulled him in to embrace him a second and a third time.

Minutes later, Jedidiah was phoning a police contact to get the name of the detective overseeing Shadara’s case. I was standing beside him when he reached the detective and asked if they could meet. “No,” she said flatly. Just that morning, Emanuel had agreed that the police urgently needed to gain back the trust of black communities. The CPD closes between 20 and 30 percent of its murder cases, a historic low. How many wasted opportunities were there like this one to change the public’s perception of the cops? “You are telling me you will not work with me and I can possibly help you on this case?” Jedidiah asked. “Do you want to wait until after the press conference to talk to me?” That got the detective to agree. Jedidiah also arranged for the media to attend the vigils. Stories about Shadara appeared in the news, along with a hotline for anyone to call with information. The police checked cameras around the crime scene and announced that they were looking for the driver of a white Mercedes SUV. The car was located the next day.

The effort, Jedidiah explained, was draining. “Could you imagine doing that every day?” he asked me. But he admitted he felt as good as he had in months. “I’m going to treat those kids to a meal, and know that auntie and that attitude they got,” he said of the Muhammads. “I didn’t know them before this tragedy. There aren’t even words for it. I feel an unbelievable sense of joy. It’s a gift.”

VI

A few days later, he embarked upon an ambitious new campaign. He said it came to him like a vision while on a pilgrimage to Atlanta for Martin Luther King Day. He would lead a march through all 77 of Chicago’s communities, convening block meetings and assemblies along the way. By collecting donations, he’d be able to create opportunities in areas brought low by crime and hopelessness. “I’m getting excited about Chicago again,” he told me. “I’m going to get louder.”

On the Monday when Jedidiah started his walk, the temperature was in the teens, the wind spirit-crushingly cold. That day, he covered three blocks on the distant South Side. No one answered at most of the homes. But a retired African-American cop gave him a dollar. And a woman cracked her door just wide enough to slip him a $5 bill. A man who’d lived in the neighborhood for 26 years said his children had abandoned Chicago; his son wanted him to relocate as well. “You can’t run away from your problems,” he said. “You have to face them. I just need a leader to work with.” For an hour, Jedidiah was joined by Lamon Reccord, who, at 18, had already worked on numerous political campaigns. He gave Jedidiah tips on how to hone his pitch, his energy intoxicating. Jedidiah treated each donation as a minor miracle. “I am so humbled and hope filled!” he tweeted when someone gave $100.

But he still had no job, and an eviction was looming. There was a night when he dashed to a corner near his apartment after seven people, including a 12-year-old boy, were shot at a memorial for a slain friend. Then Jedidiah learned that a 15-year-old had been murdered. And after that a 19-year-old activist he knew died in a car crash. Then in separate incidents on the same evening, an 11-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl were both shot in the head; each would eventually die of her wounds. Jedidiah didn’t know the families, but he blamed himself nonetheless. If someone could do that to children in his city, then he had failed to change enough hearts.

On a Sunday morning in February, he showed up at the hospital where the 11-year-old, Takiya Holmes, was still on life support. He was hoping to pray with those holding vigil or at least buy them a meal. One of Takiya’s cousins, a 26-year-old named Rachel Williams, was then an organizer with BYP100. Rachel had often called the girl her baby, and encouraged Takiya to become an “activist nerd” like herself. Just as Jedidiah did, Rachel worked with families in the city who’d lost loved ones. But now it was her own little cousin tottering near death, and it was Takiya’s three-year-old brother who’d be haunted by seeing his sister “breathing blood.” “This one feels like daggers stabbing me, and it doesn’t go away,” Rachel told me. She, too, would soon scale back her activism. At the hospital that day, Rachel saw Jedidiah only as an interloper parading for the news cameras. “This is not the family you want to do this with,” she said, as they began to argue. She yelled at him to get out.

Jedidiah reeled from the hospital to his family’s post-church meal. He was weeping as he entered the restaurant. “I don’t know why these people hate me so much,” he told the table. “I just wanted to help.” He failed Takiya Holmes and her family, he said. And he failed Travis, who was never far from his thoughts. Jedidiah said he shouldn’t have taught Travis to be fearless. Then maybe he would not have braved the waters that were too rough for him. That’s when Jedidiah’s younger sister, trying to console him in a way, corrected him. Travis hadn’t drowned accidentally. It was a suicide. Travis, who could seemingly tell Jedidiah anything, didn’t share with him the other side of what he felt. Or maybe he had tried to speak of his fears that he was a burden, the cause of his family’s dysfunction, and Jedidiah just hadn’t noticed.

“I can’t live with this thought I indirectly killed the greatest human ever trying to do for this ungrateful-ass grave called Chicago,” Jedidiah texted me not long after he left the restaurant. When his child needed him most, he had charged off to help some people he’d never even met. “In my religion, hell is the place you go for suicide,” Jedidiah told me later. “If that kid is eternally damned because of me, I deserve to be there too.” So he grabbed his gun and veered off Lake Shore Drive near the Loop.

“I can never recover from this,” he cried on Facebook Live that afternoon, his finger tensing against the Glock’s trigger. “I wasn’t there for him because I was trying to be there for you all.”

VII

THAT NIGHT, the police confiscated his gun and took him to the hospital. Jedidiah told a psychiatrist he hadn’t pulled the trigger because he thought God might be sending him a sign. When it looked like he’d be committed to a mental institution, he kicked open a door and bolted.

I showed up at his apartment the next day, along with dozens of people who were overjoyed that he was alive yet fearful for his state of mind. Jedidiah cried for stretches, overcome with shame and despair. His mother perched on a chair in a corner. His father positioned himself silently beside his son. The police superintendent called to check on Jedidiah. So did an aide to the mayor, a congressman and the mother of Sandra Bland.

Jedidiah joked to his visitors that he fled the hospital because black people don’t believe in therapy. But then an activist friend sitting at the kitchen table offered cautiously that he’d spent time in a mental hospital. He said he wasn’t sure he’d be alive without it. Several other organizers shared that they had battled depression after everything they’d experienced in the streets. Their desperate efforts to rescue everyone meant they were tortured by the inevitable failures. Lamon said 15 of his friends had been killed in Chicago over the last couple of years and he’d gone into a dark place too many times to count. Others told Jedidiah they had thought about dying and, in some cases, had tried to kill themselves—they’d just had the sense not to put it on blast on Facebook Live.

But there was an unexpected upside to Jedidiah’s livestream: He learned he wasn’t alone. In the afternoon, 10 activists showed up and sat in a half-moon around him, with one, William Calloway, leading what seemed like an intervention. Jedidiah had clashed with several of them, disagreeing over technique or just elbowing for room in the same fervent, exhausting space. They told Jedidiah stories of their own torment. The work they did in Chicago at times consumed them like a fire, and they’d each taken breaks to cool their overheated minds—if not also to stay solvent or patch up their personal lives. Some had quit activism altogether to preserve their sanity. William insisted that Jedidiah step away to heal.

• JEDIDIAH AND LAMON RECCORD •

“A lot of these people fought me,” Jedidiah told me. “Now we communicate on common ground.” He soon left for California, where one of his sisters lived. He met with a therapist, who told him that what he suffered from was caring too much. That was a diagnosis he could embrace. I saw Jedidiah regularly in Chicago over the following months. At 31, he was rebooting, he said. He wouldn’t give up on the city that hadn’t given up on him. Sure, some people still laid into him on social media, saying his suicide attempt was a publicity stunt. In September, he led weeks of protests outside a suburban hotel, after speculation swirled around the death there of a 19-year-old African American woman found in a walk-in freezer. His reemergence brought a new round of attacks on his motives and character. But most places he went, people stopped him, saying, “You’re the activist Jedidiah Brown!” They mentioned something he’d done that they admired or that had given them direction. Teenagers called him a role model. A gang chief thanked him for treating his guys with respect.

Recently, Jedidiah decided to take on Rahm Emanuel and run for mayor in 2019. It would be the people’s campaign, he said, a way to highlight the plight of black neighborhoods and demand the same quality of life as in other parts of the city. The T-shirts he had made declared, “I’m running for mayor with Jedidiah Brown.” His car had finally been repossessed, so now he took the bus or Uber to spread his message. He still believed he could convince the people of Chicago that they, too, needed to care too much.

Several times a week, a U.S. Air Force pilot takes off from the Royal Air Force base in Mildenhall, England, and heads for the northernmost edge of NATO territory to gather intelligence on Russia. One of these pilots is 40-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Webster, a veteran of many such expeditions and a hard guy to rattle. On a typical flight, his four-engine, silver and white RC-135 jet will rise gracefully over the old World War II bomber bases in East Anglia. It then flies over the North Sea and Denmark, taking care to remain within international airspace. When Webster reaches the Baltic Sea, the surveillance operation begins in earnest. Behind the cockpit, the fuselage of his plane is crammed with electronic equipment manned by some two dozen intelligence officers and analysts. They sit in swivel chairs, monitoring emissions, radar data and military communications harvested from below that appear on their computer screens or stream through their headphones. Inside the plane, it is chilly. The air smells faintly of jet fuel, rubber and warm wiring. The soft blue carpet helps absorb the distant thrum of the engines, and so it is also surprisingly quiet—at least until the Russians show up.

As the Polish coast fades into the distance, Webster may swing left to avoid passing directly over the heavily armed Russian base at Kaliningrad. This is where, without warning, a Russian SU-27 fighter may materialize as if out of nowhere, right outside the cockpit window, flying so close that Webster can make out the tail markings. No matter how often this happens—and lately, it has been happening a lot—these encounters always give Webster a jolt. For one thing, he and his crew can’t see the planes coming. Although his jet is carrying millions of dollars worth of the most sophisticated listening devices available to man, it lacks a simple radar to spot an incoming plane. So the only way Webster can find out what the Russian jet is doing—how close it’s flying, whether it’s making any sudden moves—is to dispatch a junior airman to crouch on the floor and peer through one of the 135’s three fuselage windows, each the size of a cereal box and inconveniently placed just below knee level.

In normal times, being intercepted isn’t a cause for concern. Russian jets routinely shadow American jets over the Baltic Sea and elsewhere. Americans routinely intercept Russian aircraft along the Alaskan and California coasts. The idea is to identify the plane and perhaps to signal, “You keep an eye on us, we keep an eye on you.” These, however, are far from normal times. Every few weeks, a Russian pilot will get aggressive. Instead of closing in on the RC-135 at around 30 miles per hour and skulking off its wing for a while, a fighter jet will careen directly toward the American plane at 150 miles per hour or more before abruptly going nose-up to bleed off airspeed and avoid a collision. Or it might perform the dreaded “barrel roll”—a hair-raising maneuver in which the Russian jet makes a 360-degree orbit around the 135’s midsection while the two aircraft hurtle along at 400 miles per hour. When this happens, there is only one thing the U.S. pilot can do: pucker up,^[1] fly straight and hope his Russian counterpart doesn’t smash into him. “One false move and you may have a half second to react,” one RC-135 pilot told me.

By now, it is widely recognized that Russia is waging a campaign of covert political manipulation across the United States, Europe and the Middle East, fueling fears of a second Cold War. But it’s less understood that in international airspace and waters, Russia and the U.S. are brushing up against each other in perilous ways with alarming frequency. This problem, which began not long after Russia’s seizure of the Crimea in 2014, has accelerated rapidly in the past year. In 2015, according to its air command headquarters, NATO scrambled jets more than 400 times to intercept Russian military aircraft that were flying without having broadcast their required identification code or having filed a flight plan. In 2016, that number had leapt to 780—an average of more than two intercepts a day. There has been a similar increase in Russian jets intercepting US or NATO aircraft, as well as a significant uptick in incidents at sea in which Russian jets run mock attacks against American warships.

Russia is hardly the only source of anxiety for the Pentagon. American and Chinese ships and aircraft have clashed in the South China Sea; in early 2016, Iran seized 10 Navy sailors after their boats strayed into its waters. But senior U.S. officials view run-ins with Russia as the most dangerous, because they are part of a deliberate strategy of intimidation and provocation by Russian president Vladimir Putin—and because the stakes are so high. One false move by a hot-dogging Russian pilot could send an American aircraft and its crew spiraling 20,000 feet into the sea. Any nearby U.S. fighter would have to immediately decide whether to shoot down the Russian plane. And if the pilot did retaliate, the U.S. and Russia could quickly find themselves on the brink of open hostility.

“We are now at maximum danger,” said Admiral James Stavridis, a former commander of NATO.

With these issues in mind, I traveled to Germany this winter to talk with U.S. Air Force General Tod D. Wolters, who commands American and NATO air operations. We sat in his headquarters at Ramstein Air Base, a gleaming, modern complex where officers in the uniforms of various NATO nations bustle efficiently through polished corridors. “The degree of hair-triggeredness is a concern,” said Wolters, a former fighter pilot who encountered Soviet bloc pilots during the Cold War. “The possibility of an intercept gone wrong,” he added, is “on my mind 24/7/365.” Admiral James G. Stavridis, the commander of NATO from 2009 to 2013 and now Dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, is more blunt. The potential for miscalculation “is probably higher than at any other point since the end of the Cold War,” he told me. “We are now at maximum danger.”

This may sound counter-intuitive, given President Donald Trump’s extravagant professions of admiration for Putin. But the strong consensus inside the U.S. military establishment is that the pattern of Russian provocation will continue—and not just because the various investigations into the Trump campaign’s links with Russia make détente politically unlikely. Antagonizing the West is central to one of Putin’s most cherished ambitions: undermining NATO. By constantly pushing the limits with risky intercepts and other tactics, Putin forces NATO to make difficult choices about when and how to respond that can sow dissension among its members.

In addition, a certain belligerence towards the U.S. is practically a political necessity for Putin. The Russian leader owes his popularity to “the tiger of patriotic mobilization,” said Leon Aron, the director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Given the country’s diminished status in the world and its stalled economy, he added, militarized fervor for the motherland “is the only thing going for his regime.” Meanwhile,^[2] since the departure of Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, his foreign policy team is now dominated by officials who advocate a hard line on Russia.^[3] For all these reasons, Philip Breedlove, who retired last summer after three years as supreme allied commander of NATO, isn’t optimistic that Russia will back off anytime soon. “We’re in a bad place and it’s getting worse rather than better,” he told me. “The probability of coming up against that unintended but strategic mess-up is, I think, rising rather than becoming less likely.” When Breedlove’s successor, General Curtis Scaparrotti, took command in May 2016, he grimly warned a gathering of diplomats and officers of a “resurgent Russia” and cautioned that NATO must be ready “to fight tonight if deterrence fails.”

All of this is happening at a time when most of the old Cold War safeguards for resolving tensions with Russia—treaties, gentlemen’s understandings, unofficial back channels—have fallen away. When a Russian jet barrel-rolls a U.S. aircraft, a senior U.S. official hops in a car and is driven to the white marble monolith on Wisconsin Avenue that houses the Russian embassy. There, he sits down with Sergey Kislyak, the ambassador who has recently attained minor fame for his surreptitious meetings with various Trump associates. A typical conversation, the U.S. official told me, goes something like this: “I say, ‘Look here, Sergey, we had this incident on April 11, this is getting out of hand, this is dangerous.’” Kislyak, the official said, benignly denies that any misbehavior has occurred. (When I made my own trip to the embassy late last year, a senior official assured me with a polite smile that Russian pilots do nothing dangerous—and certainly not barrel-rolls.)

Among the many senior officers I spoke to in Washington and Europe who are worried about Russia, there was one more factor fueling their anxiety: their new commander-in-chief, and how he might react in a crisis. After a Russian fighter barrel-rolled an RC-135 over the Baltic Sea last April, Trump fumed that the Obama administration had only lodged a diplomatic protest. He considered this to be a weak response. “It just shows how low we’ve gone, where they can toy with us like that,” he complained on a radio talk show. “It shows a lack of respect.” If he were president, Trump went on, he would do things differently. “You wanna at least make a phone call or two,” he conceded. “[But] at a certain point, when that sucker comes by you, you gotta shoot. You gotta shoot. I mean, you gotta shoot.”

One day in the mid-1980s, I stood with a cluster of American troopers on a hillside observation post near the Fulda Gap, on the border between East and West Germany. If there was going to be a war, it would come here. The Red Army would pour across the border and attempt to bludgeon the smaller U.S. and NATO forces into surrender. Each side had deployed nuclear weapons close at hand.

The soldiers at the border post were tense, serious. A few nights earlier, a man had tried to escape from the East, sprinting jaggedly across a stretch of plowed ground, somehow avoiding snipers, landmines and teams of killer dogs. The East German police shot him as he scaled a chain-link fence mere yards from the safety of West Germany. Impaled on the barbed wire, he bled slowly to death as the Americans watched in horror, his fading cries cutting through the night.

From my vantage point on top of an old concrete bunker, I looked across the misty farmland. A mile or two away were the emplacements of the Soviet Red Army. “See ‘em? Right there!” a sergeant told me. Not sure whether I was looking in the right place, I raised my hand to point. The sergeant swiftly knocked it down. “We don’t point!” he exclaimed, almost panicked. Russian and American commanders had banned such gestures, since they could so easily be mistaken for someone raising a weapon. Among troops on the front line, there was an unmistakable sense that catastrophic war was more likely to be set off by an accident than by an intentional invasion.

Looking back, it seems nothing short of miraculous that the Cold War actually remained cold. On so many occasions, misunderstandings and confusion could have erupted into mutual annihilation. One of the most frightening near-misses came in 1983, when the aging Soviet leadership in the Kremlin was convinced that an attack by the U.S. was imminent. They had been badly rattled by President Ronald Reagan’s declaration that the Soviet superpower was an “evil empire” destined for “the ash-heap of history,” and by his talk of developing a so-called Star Wars defense system capable of zapping any target from space. And so when Soviet spies began reporting on a large-scale US-NATO military exercise, code-named Able Archer, the Kremlin concluded that they were witnessing preparations for a massive conventional and nuclear offensive.

Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty on December 8, 1987. It was the first time that the two sides committed to reducing their nuclear arsenals.(Alfred Gescheidt/Getty Images)

It did look like the real thing. The Pentagon sent tanks, artillery and 19,000 troops into Germany for weeks of mock combat operations. Bombers were loaded with dummy nuclear warheads in a rehearsal of procedures for transitioning from conventional to nuclear war. In Moscow, the General Staff began calling up military reserves and canceling troop leaves. Factories conducted air raid drills. Fighter and bomber squadrons were put on heightened alert. And inside the Kremlin, senior leaders considered a preemptive nuclear strike to avoid defeat, according to a top-secret U.S. intelligence report produced six years later. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency picked up some of this, but officials simply didn’t believe the Soviets thought the U.S. intended to launch a nuclear attack. After all, they reasoned, these rehearsals were an annual event and the U.S. and NATO had even issued press releases describing Able Archer as a training exercise. They didn’t realize that in Moscow, these assurances were waved aside as lies.

The Soviets decided not to act, for reasons that remain unclear—but misunderstandings like these alarmed both sides. The U.S. and Russia together had more than 61,000 nuclear warheads, many mounted on missiles targeted at each other and on hair-trigger alert. And so, beginning in the late 1980s, the United States, Russia and their allies started developing a set of formal mechanisms for preventing accidental war. These treaties and agreements limited the size of deployed forces, required both sides to exchange detailed information about weapon types and locations and allowed for observers to attend field exercises. Regular meetings were held to iron out complaints. Russian and American tank commanders even chatted during military exercises. The aim, ultimately, was to make military activities more transparent and predictable. “They worked—we didn’t go to war!” said Franklin C. Miller, who oversaw crises and nuclear negotiations during a long Pentagon career.

And yet few of these agreements have survived Putin’s regime and the brewing animosity between Moscow and Washington. The problem, a senior U.S. official explained, isn’t that the agreements are faulty or outdated, but rather that the Russians can no longer be trusted to observe them.

The result is that the U.S and Russia are now more outwardly antagonistic than they have been in years. Since the Cold War ended in 1991, NATO has accepted 10 European countries formerly allied with the Soviet Union. In response, Russia has expanded its military; engaged in powerful cyberwar attacks against Estonia, Germany, Finland, Lithuania and other countries; seized parts of Georgia; forcibly annexed Crimea; sent its troops into Ukraine; and staged multiple no-notice exercises with the ground and air power it would use to invade its Baltic neighbors. In one such maneuver last year, Russia mobilized some 12,500 combat troops in territory near Poland and the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. According to a technical analysis by the RAND Corp., a lightning Russia strike could carry its troops into NATO capitals in the Baltics in less than 60 hours.

Last year, NATO shifted its official strategy from “assurance”—a passive declaration to stand by its allies—to “deterrence,” which requires sufficient combat power to repel armed aggression. The alliance also approved a new multinational response force, some 40,000 troops in all. In January, under a separate Obama administration initiative, the United States rushed a 4,000-strong armored brigade combat team to Poland and the Baltic states. (Lieutenant General Tim Ray, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Europe, explained that its objective is to “to deter Russian aggression” by stationing “battle-ready” forces in forward positions.) Army engineers have started strengthening eastern European runways to accept heavier air shipments and are reconfiguring some eastern European railroads to handle rail cars carrying tanks and heavy armor. This March, a U.S. combat aviation brigade arrived in Germany with attack gunships, transport and medevac helicopters and drones, and is deploying its units to Latvia, Romania and Poland.

So far, these efforts to shore up NATO have proceeded despite the Trump administration’s occasional shows of disdain for the military alliance.^[4] In late March, Scaparrotti acknowledged that he had not yet briefed the president about NATO-Russia relations. However, Trump’s secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, recently made a point of affirming that NATO is the “fundamental bedrock” of American security. Any change to that policy would be met with fierce opposition in Congress from defense stalwarts like Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is demanding that the United States use “all elements of American power” against Russia.

This February, the two top commanders of the United States and Russia met in Azerbaijan, in a rare effort to bring some stability to U.S.-Russia relations. A month later, they met again in Turkey to review a procedure to prevent accidents involving aircraft operating over Syria. But that’s a narrow issue. A broader restoration of the Cold War-era constraints on military activity seems unlikely. Increasingly, each side sees the other as an adversary. A senior Russian diplomat put the blame squarely on the United States. “We are being seen as an object to deter—as the enemy,” he told me. “In that case, how are we going to talk?”

What this means is that there are few remaining mechanisms to defuse unexpected emergencies. In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in late March, Scaparrotti acknowledged that he has virtually no contact with Russian military leaders. (“Don’t you think that would be a good idea?” Independent Senator Angus King of Maine queried. “If you could say, ‘Wait a minute, that missile was launched by accident, don’t get alarmed’?”) In 2014, in response to Russia’s intervention in Crimea, Congress passed a law halting almost all military-to-military communications. Even the spontaneous and informal exchanges that used to occur among Russian and American officers have largely ended.

Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, who commands U.S. Army forces in Europe, told me last year that he knew his Russian counterpart—at the time, Colonel-General Andrei Kartapolov—but had no direct contact with him. If a problem arose—say, a U.S. Special Forces sergeant serving as a trainer in Ukraine suddenly encountered a Russian commando and gunfire broke out—Hodges couldn’t have called Kartapolov to cool things off. There are no other direct lines of communication. Once, Hodges told me, he sat next to the general at a conference. He filled Kartapolov’s water glass and gave him a business card, but the gestures were not reciprocated and they never spoke.

In December 2015, a Turkish F-16 jet shot down a Russian SU-24 fighter on the Turkish-Syrian border. The Russian fighter plummeted in flames and its co-pilot was killed by ground fire. The surviving pilot, Captain Konstantin Murakhtin, said he’d been attacked without warning; Turkey insisted that the Russian plane had violated its airspace. Within days Putin had deftly turned the incident to his advantage. Instead of seeking to punish Turkey, he accused the U.S. of having a hand in the incident, without any evidence. Then he coaxed Turkey, a NATO member, into participating in joint combat operations over Syria. He also engineered Syrian peace talks in which the United States was pointedly not invited to participate. It was a bravura performance. Russia, says Breedlove, the retired NATO commander, “is playing three-dimensional chess while we are playing checkers.”

Putin’s favored tactic, intelligence officials say, is known as “escalation dominance.” The idea is to push the other side until you win, a senior officer based in Europe explained—to “escalate to the point where the adversary stops, won’t go farther. It’s a very destabilizing strategy.” Stavridis cast it in the terms of an old Russian proverb: “Probe with a bayonet; when you hit steel withdraw, when you hit mush, proceed.” Right now, he added, “the Russians keep pushing out and hitting mush.”

This mindset is basically the opposite of how both American and Soviet leaders approached each other during the Cold War, even during periods of exceptional stress such as the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Having endured the devastation of World War II, they understood the horror that lurked on the far side of a crisis. “When things started to get too close, they would back off,” said Miller, the retired Pentagon official.

The term of art for this constant recalibration of risk is “crisis management”—the “most demanding form of diplomacy,” writes Sir Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London. Leaders had to make delicate judgments about when to push their opponent and when to create face-saving off-ramps. Perhaps most critically, they had to possess the confidence to de-escalate when necessary. Skilled crisis management, Freedman writes, requires “an ability to match deeds with words, to convey threats without appearing reckless, and to offer concessions without appearing soft, often while under intense media scrutiny and facing severe time pressures.”

A recent textbook example came in January 2016, when Iran seized those 10 U.S. Navy sailors, claiming that they had been spying in Iranian waters in the eastern Persian Gulf. President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, immediately opened communications with his counterpart in Tehran, using channels established for negotiating the nuclear deal with Iran. By the next morning, the sailors had been released. The U.S. acknowledged the sailors had strayed into Iranian waters but did not apologize, asserting that the transgression had been an innocent error. Iran, meanwhile, acknowledged that the sailors had not been spying. (The peaceful resolution was not applauded by Breitbart News, headed at the time by Stephen Bannon, who is now Trump’s chief White House strategist. Obama, a Breitbart writer sneered, has been “castrated on the world stage by Iran.”)

Today, thanks to real-time video, the men in the Kremlin and White House can know—or think they know—as much as the guy in the cockpit of a plane or on the bridge of a warship.

Neither Putin nor Trump, it’s safe to say, are crisis managers by nature. Both are notoriously thin-skinned, operate on instinct, and have a tendency to shun expert advice. (These days, Putin is said to surround himself not with seasoned diplomats but cronies from his old spy days.) Both are unafraid of brazenly lying, fueling an atmosphere of extreme distrust on both sides. Stavridis, who has studied both Putin and Trump and who met with Trump in December, concluded that the two leaders “are not risk-averse. They are risk-affectionate.” Aron, the Russia expert, said, “I think there is a much more cavalier attitude by Putin toward war in general and the threat of nuclear weapons. He continued, “He is not a madman, but he is much more inclined to use the threat of nuclear weapons in conventional [military] and political confrontation with the West.” Perhaps the most significant difference between the two is that Putin is far more calculating than Trump. In direct negotiations, he is said to rely on videotaped analysis of the facial expressions of foreign leaders that signal when the person is bluffing, confused or lying.

At times, Trump has been surprisingly quick to lash out at a perceived slight from Putin, although these moments have been overshadowed by his effusive praise for the Russian leader. On December 22, Putin promised to strengthen Russia’s strategic nuclear forces in his traditional year-end speech to his officer corps. Hours later, Trump vowed, via Twitter, to “greatly strengthen and expand” the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. On Morning Joe the following day, host Mika Brzezinski said that Trump had told her on a phone call, “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” And in late March, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was becoming increasingly frustrated with Russia, throwing up his hands in exasperation when informed that Russia may have violated an arms treaty.

Some in national security circles see Trump’s impulsiveness as a cause for concern but not for panic. “He can always overreact,” said Anthony Cordesman, senior strategic analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a veteran of many national security posts throughout the U.S. government. “[But] there are a lot of people [around the president] to prevent an overreaction with serious consequences.” Let’s say that Trump acted upon his impulse to tell a fighter pilot to shoot a jet that barrel-rolled an American plane. Such a response would still have to be carried out by the Pentagon, Cordesman said—a process with lots of room for senior officers to say, “Look, boss, this is a great idea but can we talk about the repercussions?”

And yet that process is no longer as robust as it once was. Many senior policymaking positions at the Pentagon and State Department remain unfilled. A small cabal in the White House, including Bannon, Jared Kushner and a few others, has asserted a role in foreign policy decisions outside the normal NSC process. It’s not yet clear how much influence is wielded by Trump’s widely respected national security adviser, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster. When lines of authority and influence are so murky, it increases the risk that a minor incident could boil up into an unintended clash, said retired Marine Corps General John Allen, who has served in senior military and diplomatic posts.

To complicate matters further, the relentless pace of information in the social media age has destroyed the one precious factor that helped former leaders safely navigate perilous situations: time. It’s hard to believe now, but during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, for instance, President Kennedy and his advisers deliberated for a full 10 weeks before announcing a naval quarantine of the island. In 1969, a U.S. spy plane was shot down by North Korean jets over the Sea of Japan, killing all 31 Americans on board. It took 26 hours for the Pentagon and State Department to recommend courses of action to President Richard Nixon, according to a declassified secret assessment. (Nixon eventually decided not to respond.) Today, thanks to real-time video and data streaming, the men in the Kremlin and White House can know—or think they know—as much as the guy in the cockpit of a plane or on the bridge of a warship. The president no longer needs to rely on reports from military leaders that have been filtered through their expertise and deeper knowledge of the situation on the ground. Instead, he can watch a crisis unfold on a screen and react in real time. Once news of an incident hits the internet, the pressure to respond becomes even harder to withstand. “The ability to recover from early missteps is greatly reduced,” Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has written. “The speed of war has changed, and the nature of these changes makes the global security environment even more unpredictable, dangerous, and unforgiving.”

And so in the end, no matter how cool and unflappable the instincts of military men and women like Kevin Webster, what will smother the inevitable spark is steady, thoughtful leadership from within the White House and the Kremlin. A recognition that first reports may be wrong; a willingness to absorb new and perhaps unwelcome information; a thick skin to ward off insults and accusations; an acknowledgment of the limited value of threats and bluffs; and a willingness to recognize the core interests of the other side and a willingness to accept a face-saving solution. These qualities are not notably on display in either capital.

Since we chose a retrograde misogynist to be the most powerful person on Earth, now seems like a good time to talk about sexual harassment, political correctness and how things actually get better in this country.

Thirty years ago and for a millennium or two before that, Trumpian sexual harassment was closer to the norm. Nearly everything our new president has been accused of—cornering random women and kissing them, groping employees, firing his staff for reporting their managers—was an accepted occupational hazard for women regardless of what occupation they held.

When we look back at the bad old days of sexism, we usually focus on the way attitudes have changed. And indeed they have. Most Americans, if poll numbers are any indication, find Trump’s alleged behavior repellant. The blatant, sneering “C’mere toots” sleaziness he represents hasn't disappeared, of course, but it's become less palatable, the kind of thing men have to dig up phrases like “locker room talk” to defend.

But when we tell the story of this huge (and incomplete) shift in attitudes, we tend to overlook the quieter shifts in the legal system that were just as consequential. In a 1979 case in which a woman sued three of her supervisors for harassing her, a District Court judge found that “the making of improper sexual advances to female employees [was] standard operating procedure, a fact of life, a normal condition of employment”—but still refused to award her any damages. Until 1986, the only form of sexual harassment that was illegal was quid pro quo harassment, where your boss explicitly said something like, “Sleep with me or lose your job.”

The fact that employers these days are responsible for preventing harassment, and are on the hook for millions of dollars in punitive damages if they don’t, is not a coincidence. It's the result of decades of work by women’s groups, and dozens of victims risking their livelihoods to come forward and call bullshit on the Trumpian impunity that used to be the norm.

Which brings us to a new Highline video series called “I Misremember the 90s.” Over the next few months, the series will re-examine some of the decade’s seminal events in an effort to pluck out the big ideas we missed, the figures we misunderstood and the half-truths that hardened into conventional wisdom. We hope that, by trying to understand the ’90s, we can live and think better now.

And the first episode is about the Anita Hill hearings. It’s true that they woke America up to the sleeping giant of sexual harassment. Just two years after Hill came forward to accuse Clarence Thomas of telling her about his porn habits at work, harassment cases had nearly doubled. Less than a year after the hearing, 19 women were elected to the House of Representatives and four to the Senate. The press called 1992 “The Year of the Woman.”

But that’s not the whole story. You’ve got to watch the video for that.

When politicians take money from megadonors, there are strings attached. But with the reclusive duo who propelled Trump into the White House, there’s a fuse.

Last December, about a month before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Rebekah Mercer arrived at Stephen Bannon’s office in Trump Tower, wearing a cape over a fur-trimmed dress and her distinctive diamond-studded glasses. Tall and imposing, Rebekah, known to close friends as Bekah, is the 43-year-old daughter of the reclusive billionaire Robert Mercer. If Trump was an unexpected victor, the Mercers were unexpected kingmakers. More established names in Republican politics, such as the Kochs and Paul Singer, had sat out the general election. But the Mercers had committed millions of dollars to a campaign that often seemed beyond salvaging.

That support partly explains how Rebekah secured a spot on the executive committee of the Trump transition team. She was the only megadonor to frequent Bannon’s sanctum, a characteristically bare-bones space containing little more than a whiteboard, a refrigerator and a conference table. Unlike the other offices, it also had a curtain so no one could see what was happening inside. Before this point, Rebekah’s resume had consisted of a brief run trading stocks and bonds (including at her father’s hedge fund), a longer stint running her family’s foundation and, along with her two sisters, the management of an online gourmet cookie shop called Ruby et Violette. Now, she was compiling lists of potential candidates for a host of official positions, the foot soldiers who would remake (or unmake) the United States government in Trump’s image.

Rebekah wasn’t a regular presence at Trump Tower. She preferred working from her apartment in Trump Place, which was in fact six separate apartments that she and her husband had combined into an opulent property more than twice the size of Gracie Mansion. Still, it quickly became clear to her new colleagues that she wasn’t content just to chip in with ideas. She wanted decision-making power. To her peers on the executive committee, she supported Alabama senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general and General Michael Flynn for national security adviser, but argued against naming Mitt Romney secretary of state. Her views on these matters were heard, according to several people on and close to the transition leadership. Rebekah was less successful when she lobbied hard for John Bolton, the famously hawkish former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, to be deputy secretary of state. And when Bolton was not named to any position, she made her displeasure known. “I know it sounds sexist, but she was whiny as hell,” says one person who watched her operate. Almost everyone interviewed for this article, supporters and detractors alike, described her style as far more forceful than that of other powerful donors.

Rebekah Mercer is rarely photographed. However, occasionally she can be found in the background of news photos, uncredited in the captions. Here she is arriving at Trump Tower on December 8, with Nick Ayers and Kellyanne Conway.DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

But then the Mercers aren’t typical donors in most senses beyond their extreme wealth. (The exact number of their billions is unknown.) Robert Mercer is a youthful-looking 70. As a boy growing up in New Mexico, he carried around a notebook filled with computer programs he had written. “It’s very unlikely that any of them actually worked,” he has said.“I didn’t get to use a real computer until after high school.” Robert went on to work for decades at IBM, where he had a reputation as a brilliant computer scientist. He made his vast fortune in his 50s, after his work on predicting financial markets led to his becoming co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s most successful quantitative hedge funds. A longtime colleague, David Magerman, recalls that when Robert began working at Renaissance in 1993, he and his wife, Diana, were “grounded, sweet people.” (Magerman was suspended from Renaissance in February after making critical comments about Robert in The Wall Street Journal.) But “money changed all that,” he says. “Diana started jetting off to Europe and flying to their yacht on weekends. The girls were used to getting what they wanted.”

At Renaissance, Robert was an eccentric among eccentrics. The firm is legendary for shunning people with Wall Street or even conventional finance backgrounds, instead favoring scientists and original thinkers. Robert himself, by all accounts, is extremely introverted. Rarely seen in public, he likes to spend his free time with his wife and three daughters. When, in 2014, Robert accepted an award from the Association for Computational Linguistics, he recalled, in a soft voice and with quiet humor, his consternation at being informed that he was expected to give “an oration on some topic or another for an hour, which, by the way, is more than I typically talk in a month.” Sebastian Mallaby’s account of the hedge-fund elite, More Money Than God, describes him as an “icy cold” poker player who doesn’t remember having a nightmare. He likes model trains, having once purchased a set for $2.7 million, and has acquired one of the country’s largest collections of machine guns.

For years, Robert has embraced a supercharged libertarianism with idiosyncratic variations. He is reportedly pro-death penalty, pro-life and pro-gold standard. He has contributed to an ad campaign opposing the construction of the ground zero mosque; Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, a group that is associated with fringe scientific claims; and Black Americans for a Better Future—a vehicle, the Intercept discovered, for an African-American political consultant who has accused Barack Obama of “relentless pandering to homosexuals.” Magerman, Robert’s former colleague at Renaissance, recalls him saying, in front of coworkers, words to the effect that “your value as a human being is equivalent to what you are paid. ... He said that, by definition, teachers are not worth much because they aren't paid much.” His beliefs were well-known at the firm, according to Magerman. But since Robert was so averse to publicity, his ideology wasn’t seen as a cause for concern. “None of us ever thought he would get his views out, because he only talked to his cats,” Magerman told me.

Robert’s middle daughter Rebekah shares similar political beliefs, but she is also very articulate and, therefore, able to act as her father’s mouthpiece. (Neither Rebekah nor Robert responded to detailed lists of questions for this article.) Under Rebekah’s leadership, the family foundation poured some $70 million into conservative causes between 2009 and 2014.^[1] The first candidate they threw their financial weight behind was Arthur Robinson, a chemist from Oregon who was running for Congress. He was best known in his district for co-founding an organization that is collecting thousands of vials of urine as part of an effort it says will “revolutionize the evaluation of personal chemistry.” Robinson didn’t win, but he got closer than expected, and the Mercers got a taste of what their money could do. In 2011, they made one of their most consequential investments: a reported $10 million in a new right-wing media operation called Breitbart.

“I don’t know any of your fancy friends,” Robert Mercer told Sheldon Adelson, “and I haven’t got any interest in knowing them.”

That the family gravitated toward Andrew Breitbart’s upstart website was no accident. The Mercers are “purists,” says Pat Caddell, a former aide to Jimmy Carter who has shifted to the right over the years. They believe Republican elites are too cozy with Wall Street and too soft on immigration, and that American free enterprise and competition are in mortal danger. “Bekah Mercer might be prepared to put a Democrat in Susan Collins’ seat simply to rid the party of Susan Collins,” a family friend joked by way of illustrating her thinking. So intensely do the Mercers want to unseat Republican senator John McCain^[2] that they gave $200,000 to support an opposing candidate who once held a town hall meeting to discuss chemtrails—chemicals, according to a long-standing conspiracy theory, that the federal government is spraying on the public without its knowledge. In short, unlike other donors, the Mercers are not merely angling to influence the Republican establishment—they want to obliterate it. One source told me that, in a meeting with Sheldon Adelson and Robert Mercer a few years ago, the casino mogul asked Robert if he was familiar with certain big Republican players. According to the source, Robert shut him down. “I don’t know any of your fancy friends,” he replied, “and I haven’t got any interest in knowing them.”

And so it seemed almost inevitable that their paths converged with Bannon’s when he took over Breitbart in 2012. The Mercers recognized Bannon as an ideological ally. They also appreciated how quickly he improved the website’s finances. Unlike many people in their orbit, Bannon wasn't obsequious: According to one person who often spends time with them, he made zero effort to dress up around his benefactors, often appearing in sweatpants and “looking almost like a homeless person.” Bannon was respectful around Robert, says this person, but with Rebekah he was more apt to say precisely what he thought: “He worked for Bob; he worked with Rebekah.”

Although the Mercers had initially been persuaded to back Texas senator Ted Cruz in the Republican primary, Bannon preferred Trump, and by the time of the Republican National Convention the Mercers were with him. Rebekah made her move last August, at a fundraiser at the East Hampton estate of Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets. According to two sources, one who strategized with the Mercers and another who worked closely with Trump, Rebekah insisted on a 30-minute face-to-face meeting with Trump, in which she informed him that his campaign was a disaster. (Her family had pledged $2 million to the effort about a month earlier, so she felt comfortable being frank.) Trump, who knew her slightly, was willing to listen. He had been disturbed by recent stories detailing disorganization in his campaign and alleging ties between Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and pro-Russia officials in Ukraine. Rebekah knew of this and arrived at her meeting with “props,” says the source who strategized with the Mercers: printouts of news articles about Manafort and Russia that she brandished as evidence that he had to go. And she also had a solution in mind: Trump should put Bannon in charge of the campaign and hire the pollster Kellyanne Conway.^[3]

By the following morning, Rebekah was breakfasting at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with the two people he trusts most, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, to talk through the proposal in more detail. Within four days, Trump did exactly as Rebekah had advised. Manafort was out. Bannon was in charge. Trump also brought on David Bossie, the president of Citizens United, with whom the Mercers and Bannon had been close for years. Less than four months later, Mercer's handpicked team had pulled off one of the greatest upsets in American politics. Through a bizarre combination of daring and luck, the insurgents had won. Now, they were Trump’s version of the establishment—which is to say, a very volatile one.

On July Fourth weekend in 2014, members of the Mercer clan (Robert, Rebekah and her husband, Sylvain Mirochnikoff) went to visit some new friends. They traveled on Robert’s 203-foot luxury superyacht, the Sea Owl, and anchored just off the WASP enclave of Fishers Island in New York’s Long Island Sound. Their destination, a medieval-style granite castle called White Caps, towered over the shoreline. This was the summer home of Lee and Alice Hanley, Reagan conservatives who’d made their fortune in Texas oil and gas but lived mostly between Greenwich, Connecticut, and Palm Beach, Florida. Like the Mercers, the Hanleys were convinced that the American political establishment was rotten to its foundations. Unlike the Mercers, though, they were popular and vigorous socialites. They loved to entertain and to act as connectors between politicians and donors in their assorted properties, even on their private jet.

That holiday weekend, Lee Hanley revisited the subject of a poll he’d commissioned in 2013 from Pat Caddell, a longtime friend. Hanley had wanted to truly understand the mood of the country and Caddell had returned with something called the “Smith Project.” The nickname alluded to the Jimmy Stewart movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” because its results were so clear: Americans were hungry for an outsider. It didn’t matter whether the candidate came from the left or the right; voters just wanted somebody different. They had lost all faith in the ruling class—the government, the media, Wall Street. “It showed the entire blow-up of the country coming,” Caddell told me. “A whole new paradigm developing.”

No Republican had yet emerged as a front-runner in the 2016 primary, but the Hanleys believed Ted Cruz could take Caddell’s insights and ride them all the way to the White House. They saw Cruz as a unicorn: a dedicated fiscal and social conservative who had broken with his party repeatedly. They were dismissive of Trump. “He doesn't understand politics or geopolitics or anything about the running of the government,” Alice Hanley told me recently.

Rebekah Mercer saw the Koch network as hopelessly soft on trade and immigration and was hungry for a way to promote her own more hard-line ideology.

Robert Mercer and Cruz had met before during a conference in February 2014, when Lee Hanley had invited them to the five-diamond Breakers resort in Palm Beach for a grilling session. Robert was impressed by Cruz’s intellect, according to a person at the meeting, but worried that the 43-year-old senator was too young and might struggle to capture voters’ imaginations. Still, Robert warmed to him over the course of many weekends at various Hanley homes. Apparently, Cruz can hold his alcohol (his preference is cabernet), which is a prized attribute in the Hanleys’ circle.

As the Mercers weighed whether to get involved in a presidential race, their calculus was quite different from that of other megadonors, most of whom run massive corporate empires. Various people who have worked with the Mercers on campaigns told me they didn’t pressure their candidates to adopt policies that would benefit the family’s financial interests, such as favorable regulations for hedge funds. Instead, their mission was a systemic one. Steve Hantler, a friend of Rebekah’s, says she was determined to “disrupt the consultant class,” which she saw as wasteful and self-serving. She wanted to disrupt the conservative movement, too. Rebekah saw the Koch network as hopelessly soft on trade and immigration and was hungry for a mechanism to promote a more hard-line ideology. According to Politico and other sources, she was frustrated at the time that no one was taking her seriously. As it happened, however, the family owned what seemed to be an ideal vehicle for achieving her goals.

Around 2012, Robert Mercer reportedly invested $5 million in a British data science company named SCL Group. Most political campaigns run highly sophisticated micro-targeting efforts to locate voters. SCL promised much more, claiming to be able to manipulate voter behavior through something called psychographic modeling. This was precisely the kind of work Robert valued. “There’s no data like more data,” he likes to say. Robert had made his money by accumulating piles of data on human behavior (markets might move in a certain direction when it rains in Paris, for instance), in order to make extremely precise and lucrative financial bets. Similarly, SCL claimed to be able to formulate complex psychological profiles of voters. These, it said, would be used to tailor the most persuasive possible message, acting on that voter’s personality traits, hopes or fears. The firm has worked on campaigns in Argentina, Kenya, Ghana, Indonesia and Thailand; the Pentagon has used it to conduct surveys in Iran and Afghanistan. Best of all, from the Mercers’ perspective, SCL operated entirely outside the GOP apparatus. (A source close to Rebekah said she wanted a “results-oriented” consultant.) As Rebekah saw it, SCL would allow the Mercers to control the data operation of any campaign they supported, giving the family enormous influence over messaging and strategy.

And it would be Rebekah who would actually carry out this plan. Robert preferred to focus on his work at Renaissance, often operating from his Long Island mansion, Owl’s Nest. “He wouldn’t look under the hood, because that’s not what he does,” says Bob Perkins, one of Caddell’s associates who worked on the Smith Project. Besides, Rebekah was the political animal in the family. (Her older sister Jenji has practiced law; her younger sister Heather Sue is, like Robert, a competitive poker player).

This was a relatively new phenomenon. Rebekah isn't known to have been particularly political earlier in adulthood, while gaining a master’s degree in management science and engineering from Stanford, or in early motherhood. (She has four children with her French-born husband, who became an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.) But, after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, which significantly loosened restrictions on political spending, Rebekah decided it was time to “save America from becoming like socialist Europe,” as she has put it to several people. She started attending Koch events and donating to the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing think tank based in Arizona. The family’s political advocacy accelerated rapidly. It was in 2012 that she really attracted attention in GOP circles when, not long after Mitt Romney lost the presidential race, she stood up before a crowd of Romney supporters at the University Club of New York and delivered a scathing but detailed diatribe about his inadequate data and canvassing operation. “Who is that woman?” people in attendance asked.

With SCL, Rebekah finally had the chance to prove she could do better. The company’s American branch was renamed Cambridge Analytica, to emphasize the pedigree of its behavioral scientists. And Rebekah started flying Alexander Nix, the firm’s Old Etonian CEO, around the country to introduce him to her contacts. Nix, 41, is not a data scientist (his background is in financial services), but he is a showy salesman. Dressed in impeccably tailored suits, he is in his element on stage making presentations at large conferences. He can, however, come across as arrogant. (“I love the fact that you're telling your story, but I'm the one giving the interview,” he told me in a conversation.)

Alexander Nix at Cambridge Analytica's New York office. Rebekah Mercer was impressed by Nix's command of data and artistry on the polo field.JOSHUA BRIGHT/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES

According to Perkins and Caddell, Rebekah and Nix met with them a few times to discuss how CA could use the Smith Project. Rebekah was clearly impressed by Nix. In one meeting, according to Perkins, she gushed about his polo prowess and asked him to show off cellphone photos of himself on horseback. (Nix says he doesn’t recall this meeting or others with the three. He also doesn’t remember displaying such a picture and can “think of no good reason why Bob or Pat would be interested in horses.") The political veterans were skeptical. “I didn’t understand what Nix was talking about,” Perkins told me bluntly. Caddell says he was perplexed when Nix wouldn’t show him the instruments CA used to predict voter behavior. He also thought the firm didn’t grasp the seismic shift underway in American politics. And yet to his great surprise, Bannon vouched for CA, telling Caddell its scientists were “geniuses.” Caddell knew that Bannon was beholden to the Mercers—they were, after all, Breitbart’s part-owners. According to The New York Times, however, Bannon was also vice president of CA’s board. “Even if he did not have a financial investment, he intellectually owned it, which was invaluable,” says a fellow political strategist. After he learned of Bannon’s involvement, Caddell stopped asking Bannon questions about CA.

In the end, Bannon helped seal the deal between the Mercers and Cruz, with CA as the glue. In the fall of 2014, Toby Neugebauer, a garrulous oil-and-gas billionaire from Texas, took Cruz and his campaign manager, Jeff Roe, to the “Breitbart Embassy,” the website’s Washington headquarters near the Capitol. Bannon flitted in and out. Nix, as usual, did most of the talking. After Neugebauer and Roe visited SCL’s London headquarters, the Cruz team agreed that CA could play a key role in their operation, running models and helping with research. However, it was made clear to Rebekah and Nix that the entire data analytics operation would be supervised by Chris Wilson, CEO of the research firm WPA. A source close to Cruz told me that Wilson’s operation had played a crucial role when Cruz ran for the Senate with only 2 percent name recognition in Texas and defeated a far better-known opponent. Why, then, was CA necessary at all? “No one ever said directly that the quid pro quo for hiring CA was that the Mercers would support Cruz,” says someone close to Roe. Nevertheless, after CA was engaged, Neugebauer took a private jet to the Bahamas to meet Robert Mercer on the Sea Owl. When Neugebauer asked him to donate to Cruz’s bid, Robert was matter-of-fact. The family would start with $11 million.

All modern political campaigns have to balance their need for exorbitant sums of money with the obsessions of the people who want to give them that money. Roe, the straight-talking manager of the Cruz operation, has observed that running a campaign is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube of complicated personalities and uncomfortable dependencies. He has also told people that he is careful not to get too close to the donors who make his campaigns possible, because they can be so easily annoyed by the most trivial of things—his laugh, for instance, or the way he eats a bread roll.

In the case of the Cruz campaign, the donor obsession in question was Cambridge Analytica. And it wasn’t long before Roe and his team suspected that Nix had promised them a more impressive product than he could deliver. On March 4, 2015, Cruz, Roe, Wilson and others gathered in the Hyatt in Washington D.C. for an all-day meeting with Nix and a group of CA senior executives. Wilson took notes on his computer. According to multiple members of the Cruz team, Wilson was dismayed to learn that CA’s models weren’t fully ready for his focus groups the following week. As far as the team could tell, the only data CA possessed that the campaign didn’t already have appeared to be culled from Facebook. In addition, they recalled, CA hadn’t set itself up with Data Trust, the Republican National Committee’s repository of voter information. At one point, they recall, Nix explained that the National Rifle Association’s database of members would be a valuable way to target donors. Wilson typed an emoji with rolling eyes next to the statement because it was so obvious. He told people that he came away thinking, “Red flag, red flag, red flag.”

In response to an extensive set of questions, Nix disputed this account of the meeting. He denied that Cambridge Analytica had obtained any data via Facebook—a source of controversy for the firm ever since The Guardian reported in 2015 that CA based its data on research “spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission.” Nix also claimed that it was the Cruz team that didn’t have access to the RNC’s Data Trust for much of the cycle and that “all data used for the majority of the campaign was provided by Cambridge Analytica.” However, Mike Shields, then the RNC’s chief of staff and Data Trust’s senior adviser, told me the Cruz campaign was in fact the second to sign an agreement with Data Trust, in 2014.

Meanwhile, the red flags kept coming. Wilson found the data scientists that CA sent to Houston to be highly efficient at the day-to-day work of his research operation. But according to Cruz staffers, when he began to test CA’s specialized models, he found that they were notably off, with, for example, some male voters miscategorized as women. In phone surveys, staffers said, CA’s predictions fell short of the 85 percent accuracy the campaign expected. (“Different models have differing levels of accuracy,” Nix said in his response. “I suspect these numbers have been taken out of context to make us look bad. In many previous articles the Cruz campaign have highly rated the quality of our data scientists.”) By September, CA’s first six-month contract was up. A CA employee in the campaign’s Houston office accidentally left the invoice in the photocopier, and Wilson happened to fish it out. The invoice totaled an eye-popping $3,119,052 for work that Wilson estimated to be worth $600,000 at most. “I can’t fucking believe it,” Wilson told Roe, who concurred.

Jeff Roe (left) with Ted Cruz (right), who ultimately fell out of Rebekah Mercer's favor. “We felt to some extent she was being manipulated by Bannon," a Cruz adviser said.ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES

Nix disputed this account too, noting that the firm’s fee was “clearly stated in our statement of work and contract.” However, a former consultant for the campaign, Tommy Sears, attended budget meetings “for two if not three days” over the matter. “There was an understanding between both parties that the totality of the contract through March 2016 would be $5.5 million,” he says. “The heartburn felt by the Cruz team was that over $3 million had already been spent by September 1, 2015.”

When the Cruz team decided not to pay the full $3 million, bedlam ensued. A phone call was scheduled with Rebekah, Bannon and CA’s attorney. “I understand she’s a nice lady,” Wilson says politely of Rebekah. According to multiple people on the call, she accused Wilson of undermining CA. Bannon, meanwhile, unleashed a torrent of profanities at the Cruz team. Someone on the call gave me a censored version of his outburst: “The only reason this campaign is where it is right now is because of our people and I. My recommendation to the Mercers is just to pull them out of there and we’ll have them on another campaign by Monday.” Bannon’s language was so foul it was difficult to listen to, says one person on the call who had never met him before. Another of the political pros, who knew Bannon well, wasn’t shocked. “That’s Steve doing business,” he says.

The Cruz team was taken aback by Rebekah’s reaction. Some even wondered if she’d been given all the facts. One person who was close to the campaign says, “She is somewhere between the daughter of a brilliant hedge fund manager and mathematician and somebody who runs a bakery in New York. She clearly has a skill set, but the skill set we’re discussing here regarding the understanding of the value of data and analytics doesn’t fall into that area. She is operating under the information she’s been given.”

“If Rebekah Mercer was broke and wasn’t a major donor in the Republican party,” says a Cruz adviser, “nobody would spend two seconds trying to know her… She’s not fun. She’s just like a series of amoeba cells.”

The two sides were also diverging ideologically. In the summer of 2015, according to two sources, Rebekah reprimanded Cruz for an April article he’d co-authored with House Speaker Paul Ryan in The Wall Street Journal in support of free trade. She and Bannon told Cruz that he should adopt the positions of Jeff Sessions, whose views on trade and immigration were more in line with the conservative base. By this time, Cruz and his team were becoming increasingly concerned about Bannon’s relationship with Rebekah. Bannon (who declined to comment for this article) was now blatantly pro-Trump. Over the course of the primary, Breitbart would publish around 60 pieces disputing that Cruz was eligible to be president because he had been born in Canada. Cruz repeatedly called Rebekah to complain, but she insisted that she had to be “fair and impartial.” One of his advisers says, “We felt to some extent she was being manipulated by Bannon.” A person close to Bannon counters: “There's absolutely no way anyone could manipulate Rebekah Mercer." 

After the first debate in South Carolina, Rebekah gave Cruz a “dressing down” on his performance, according to three sources. “Given what was going on around him—and what he must have truly felt—he behaved like an absolute gentleman,” says a person close to Cruz. Rebekah was incensed that Trump had a tougher immigration policy than Cruz did—she particularly liked Trump’s idea for a total ban on Muslims. Subsequently, Cruz proposed a 180-day suspension on all H1-B visas.

Meanwhile, even though the Cruz staffers generally got along well with their CA counterparts—they sometimes took the visitors country-western dancing —the firm remained a source of friction. In retrospect, Wilson told people, he believed that Nix resented the campaign for allocating work through a competitive bidding process, rather than favoring CA. Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Wilson assigned a contract to a firm called Targeted Victory. CA then locked its data in the cloud so it couldn’t be accessed by Roe’s team. The data remained unavailable until, a Cruz campaign source said, it was pretty much too late to be useful. Cruz won the Iowa caucuses anyway.

The Cruz operation became so fed up with Nix that they pushed back, hard, on CA’s bill for its second six-month contract. Wilson was able to negotiate the fees down after, as Cruz staffers recalled, a CA representative accidentally emailed him a spreadsheet documenting the Houston team’s salaries. (Nix said CA had intended to send the spreadsheet.) Still, the campaign wound up paying nearly $6 million to CA—which represented almost half of the money the Mercers had pledged to spend on Cruz’s behalf.

The acrimony lingered long after Cruz exited the race in May. When he decided not to endorse Trump at the GOP convention, the Mercers publicly rebuked him. In a statement, Cruz was diplomatic: “We were delighted to work with Cambridge Analytica, they were a valuable asset to my campaign, and any rumors to the contrary are completely unfounded.” (The source close to Rebekah added, “I was with Rebekah the other day and Ted Cruz was falling all over her. It’s not fair to blame CA's methodology for Cruz's loss.”) Others from Cruz’s team, however, remain bitter about the whole experience. “If Rebekah Mercer was broke and wasn’t a major donor in the Republican Party,” says one, “nobody would spend two seconds trying to know her. … She’s not fun. She’s just like a series of amoeba cells.”

One of the great challenges in reporting this story was that almost every single person in Trump’s orbit claims sole credit for his extraordinary victory on November 8. The multiplying narratives of his win can be difficult to untangle, but it is true that his operation ran somewhat more smoothly after Rebekah Mercer helped to replace Manafort with Bannon. This wasn’t necessarily because Bannon himself was a particularly deft manager—he much preferred to focus on big-picture strategy, especially Trump’s messaging in rallies. Most of the details were left to his deputy, David Bossie—at least until October, when Bossie and Trump got into an argument over Trump’s impetuousness on Twitter and Bossie was kicked off the campaign plane, according to multiple sources. But one undeniable benefit of having Bannon in charge was that Rebekah trusted him.

Bannon, several sources said, can be charming when he chooses to be. And he has a record of successfully cultivating wealthy patrons for his various endeavors over the years. At the same time, certain of his ventures have involved high drama. The most spectacular example is the Biosphere 2, a self-contained ecological experiment under a giant dome in the Arizona desert that was funded by the billionaire Texan Ed Bass. Hired as a financial adviser in the early 1990s, Bannon returned in 1994 and used a court order to take over the project, following allegations that it was being mismanaged. He showed up one weekend along with “a small army of U.S. marshals holding guns, followed by a posse of businessmen in suits, a corporate battalion of investment bankers, accountants, PR people, and secretaries,” according to a history of the project called Dreaming the Biosphere. In an effort to thwart Bannon’s takeover, some of the scientists broke the seal of the dome, endangering the experiment.

Because of his relationship with the Mercers, Bannon was able to avoid some of the tensions over Cambridge Analytica that had plagued the Cruz campaign. Before taking the job, he phoned Brad Parscale, a 41-year-old San Antonio web designer who had made websites for the Trump family for years. Although Parscale had never worked in politics before, he now found himself in charge of Trump’s entire data operation. According to multiple sources, Parscale told Bannon that he had been hauled into an unexpected meeting with Alexander Nix earlier that summer. Parscale, who is fiercely proud of his rural Kansas roots, immediately disliked the polished Briton. He informed Nix he wasn’t interested in CA’s psychographic modeling. Parscale and Bannon quickly bonded, seeing each other as fellow outsiders and true Trump loyalists. Bannon told Parscale: “I don't care how you get it done—get it done. Use CA as much or as little as you want.” Parscale did ultimately bring on six CA staffers for additional support within his data operation. But he had his own theory^[4] of how Trump could secure victory—in the final weeks, he advised Trump to visit Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, three states no one thought Trump could take. The campaign never used CA’s psychographic methodology, as a CA staffer who worked on the campaign later publicly acknowledged at a Google panel.

For the most part, Rebekah kept a low profile during the last phase of the election. On the few occasions that she appeared at Trump Tower, she sat in Bannon’s 14th-floor office. “Most people had no idea who she even was,” says one person who was there regularly. “The idea that she was on the phone to Trump or anyone all the time, that’s nonsense,” says a different source from the transition. The Mercers did intervene when a tape surfaced of Trump bragging to NBC’s Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women—by making a rare statement in Trump’s defense. In a statement to The Washington Post, they said: “If Mr. Trump had told Billy Bush, whoever that is, earlier this year that he was for open borders, open trade and executive actions in pursuit of gun control, we would certainly be rethinking our support for him. …. We are completely indifferent to Mr. Trump’s locker room braggadocio.”

Bannon in the East Wing of the White House on January 22, with Mercer (uncredited) in the background. ANDREW HARRER-POOL/GETTY IMAGES

On election night at Trump Tower, Robert Mercer was nowhere to be seen. Rebekah was in Bannon’s office. Staffers and Trump children wandered in and out of Parscale’s office, because he was usually the first person to have any actual information. Parscale, unlike almost everyone else, including Trump’s children, was convinced his boss was going to win. Trump himself remained glued to the television, refusing to believe anything until victory was officially declared. No one I talked to recalls where Rebekah was in the blur of the celebration.

But people certainly remember her presence during the transition. One night, Rebekah called Trump and told him he absolutely had to make Bannon his White House chief of staff. Trump himself later described the phone call—in a manner an observer characterized as affectionately humorous—to a crowd of about 400 people at the Mercers’ annual costume party at Robert’s mansion on December 3. This year’s theme: “Heroes and Villains.” A guest recalls that Rebekah was dressed in something “that fitted her very well, with holsters.” To the gathering, Trump recounted being woken up at around midnight— Rebekah told friends it was around 10 p.m.—and being bewildered by the late-night tirade. “Rebekah who?” he eventually asked. Everyone laughed,” says the observer. As it happened, Bannon didn’t actually want to be chief of staff, believing himself to be ill-suited to the role. He was named chief strategist instead.

Rebekah had more than personnel decisions on her mind, however. She was particularly focused on what was referred to on the transition as the “outside group.” After the election, it was widely agreed that the GOP needed a nonprofit arm, supported by major donors, to push the president’s agenda across the country, much as the Obama team had set up Organizing for America in 2009. The most important component of any organization like this is its voter database, since it can be used to seek donations and mobilize supporters behind the president’s initiatives. Rebekah wanted CA to be the data engine, which would essentially give her control of the group. And if the venture were successful, she would have an influence over the GOP that no donor had ever pulled off. Theoretically, if the president did something she didn’t like, she could marshal his own supporters against him, since it would be her database and her money. A friend of Rebekah explains: “She felt it was her job to hold the people she’d got elected, accountable to keep their promises.”

“I’m expecting to be fired by the summer,” Bannon has told friends.

On December 14, there was a meeting to discuss the outside group in a glass-walled conference room on the 14th floor of Trump Tower. Brad Parscale sat at the head of the table. Around him were roughly 12 people, including Rebekah; Kellyanne Conway; David Bossie; Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer; Jason Miller, then Trump’s senior communications adviser; and Marc Short, Mike Pence’s senior adviser. Parscale was known to be livid that Alexander Nix had gone on a PR blitz after the election, exaggerating CA’s role. Even worse, Parscale had heard that Nix had been telling people, “Brad screwed up. We had to rescue Brad.” (Nix denied this, saying, “Brad did a brilliant job.”)

And so when Rebekah pushed for CA to run the new group’s data operation, Parscale pushed back. “No offense to the Mercers,” he said, according to multiple attendees. “First, this group is about Trump, not about the Mercers. Second, I don’t have a problem with hiring Cambridge, but Cambridge can’t be the center of everything, because that’s not how the campaign ran.” (He did, however, suggest that Rebekah be on the board.) “No offense taken,” Rebekah replied.

But she would subsequently complain about the exchange to Bannon and others, and continued to lobby for CA to be at the center of the new organization. The situation became so testy that before the inauguration, Jared Kushner brought in Steve Hantler, Rebekah’s friend, to referee. Hantler, a quiet, gentlemanly sort, proposed that the venture be led by someone he knew would be acceptable to both sides: Nick Ayers, a senior adviser to Pence. The “outside group” is now named America First Policies. Parscale is a member, and its first national TV ads have appeared. Ayers has also been cultivating a friendship with Donald Trump Jr., who, sources say, may eventually want to lead the group himself.

The Mercers, however, have withdrawn completely. When it came to the question of whether America First should employ CA, it was Parscale’s view that prevailed: CA has no role in the group at all. “Tens beat nines in poker,” says someone involved with the formation of America First, meaning that Parscale’s close rapport with the Trump family carried greater weight than Rebekah’s connection with Bannon. Rebekah’s relationship with Jared and Ivanka is said to be diminished. Nearly every person I spoke to—Trump supporters, Cruz supporters, fellow donors, friends of Rebekah—agreed on one point: to regain some of her standing, she should fire Alexander Nix. (“We are hoping that she reads your piece and does it,” says a person she works with closely.)

On December 19, Rebekah attended a memorial service in Palm Beach for Lee Hanley, who had died four days before the election. Someone who spoke to her there was expecting her to be thrilled about the election and the position she now occupied. Instead, Rebekah was very low, says this person. She complained about John Bolton being passed over.^[5] She was also said to be furious at the appointment of Mitt Romney’s niece, Ronna Romney McDaniel, to chair the RNC: To Rebekah, McDaniel personified the very GOP establishment that her family had worked so hard to cast out. “She was emotional,” says the person who was there. “She was talking about how there's no rhyme or reason to the people he's appointing, and that Ivanka was acting like first lady, and Melania was very upset about it.” When asked about this, a person very close to Rebekah said, "She thinks Ivanka is wonderful and amazing and she thinks Melania is wonderful and amazing. She's very policy-oriented and not involved in personalities.”

In the end, Rebekah Mercer’s mistake was that she thought she could upend the system and then control the regime she had helped to bring to power. Helping to elect a president wasn’t enough: She wanted the machinery to shape his presidency. Instead, the chaos simply continued. An administration full of insurgents, it turns out, functions in a near-constant state of insurgency.

Bannon is said to be exhausted and stretched. He is largely responsible for the relentless pace of initiatives and executive orders in the early weeks of the administration, because he doesn’t expect to be in the White House forever. “I’m expecting to be fired by the summer,” he has told friends, likening himself to Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister, who was instrumental in enforcing Britain’s Reformation but ended up being beheaded by his boss. A source close to Bannon says that he may have “joked about being fired,” but disagreed that Bannon is tired: “I don't think he even thinks in those terms. He is used to an intense schedule.” His focus, the source says, “is working for the president to deliver on the promises to the American people for the first 100 days and then beyond on the overall agenda of Making America Great Again.” Bannon returns Rebekah’s phone calls when he can. But, according to someone who knows both well, “relations are strained.” Another person who works with both of them says, “I think Bannon, once he finally built a relationship with Trump, didn't need Rebekah as much … and he doesn't care about that. He only cares about the country.” The source close to Bannon says that Rebekah and the chief strategist remain “close friends and allies.”

As this piece was going to press, several sources warned me not to count Rebekah out. She still has a stake in Breitbart, which holds tremendous sway over Trump’s base and has recently gone on a no-holds-barred offensive against the GOP health care plan. And on March 13, Politico reported that some Trump officials were already disillusioned with America First, which they felt had been slow to provide much-needed cover for his policy initiatives. There was talk of turning instead to a new group being launched by Rebekah Mercer. And so she may yet get another chance to realize her grand ambitions. “She’s used to getting everything she wants, 100 percent of the time,” says another person who knows her well. “Does she like getting 90 percent? No.”

“I used to get so excited when the meth was all gone.”

This is my friend Jeremy.

“When you have it,” he says, “you have to keep using it. When it’s gone, it’s like, ‘Oh good, I can go back to my life now.’ I would stay up all weekend and go to these sex parties and then feel like shit until Wednesday. About two years ago I switched to cocaine because I could work the next day.”

Jeremy is telling me this from a hospital bed, six stories above Seattle. He won’t tell me the exact circumstances of the overdose, only that a stranger called an ambulance and he woke up here.

Jeremy is not the friend I was expecting to have this conversation with. Until a few weeks ago, I had no idea he used anything heavier than martinis. He is trim, intelligent, gluten-free, the kind of guy who wears a work shirt no matter what day of the week it is. The first time we met, three years ago, he asked me if I knew a good place to do CrossFit. Today, when I ask him how the hospital’s been so far, the first thing he says is that there’s no Wi-Fi, he’s way behind on work emails.

“The drugs were a combination of boredom and loneliness,” he says. “I used to come home from work exhausted on a Friday night and it’s like, ‘Now what?’ So I would dial out to get some meth delivered and check the Internet to see if there were any parties happening. It was either that or watch a movie by myself.”

1.That’s not his real name. Only a few of the names of the gay men in this article are real.

Jeremy^[1] is not my only gay friend who’s struggling. There’s Malcolm, who barely leaves the house except for work because his anxiety is so bad. There’s Jared, whose depression and body dysmorphia have steadily shrunk his social life down to me, the gym and Internet hookups. And there was Christian, the second guy I ever kissed, who killed himself at 32, two weeks after his boyfriend broke up with him. Christian went to a party store, rented a helium tank, started inhaling it, then texted his ex and told him to come over, to make sure he’d find the body.

1.That’s not his real name. Only a few of the names of the gay men in this article are real.

For years I’ve noticed the divergence between my straight friends and my gay friends. While one half of my social circle has disappeared into relationships, kids and suburbs, the other has struggled through isolation and anxiety, hard drugs and risky sex.

None of this fits the narrative I have been told, the one I have told myself. Like me, Jeremy did not grow up bullied by his peers or rejected by his family. He can’t remember ever being called a faggot. He was raised in a West Coast suburb by a lesbian mom. “She came out to me when I was 12,” he says. “And told me two sentences later that she knew I was gay. I barely knew at that point.”

This is a picture of me and my family when I was 9. My parents still claim that they had no idea I was gay. They’re sweet.

Jeremy and I are 34. In our lifetime, the gay community has made more progress on legal and social acceptance than any other demographic group in history. As recently as my own adolescence, gay marriage was a distant aspiration, something newspapers still put in scare quotes. Now, it’s been enshrined in law by the Supreme Court. Public support for gay marriage has climbed from 27 percent in 1996 to 61 percent in 2016. In pop culture, we’ve gone from “Cruising” to “Queer Eye” to “Moonlight.” Gay characters these days are so commonplace they’re even allowed to have flaws.

Still, even as we celebrate the scale and speed of this change, the rates of depression, loneliness and substance abuse in the gay community remain stuck in the same place they’ve been for decades. Gay people are now, depending on the study, between 2 and 10 times more likely than straight people to take their own lives. We’re twice as likely to have a major depressive episode. And just like the last epidemic we lived through, the trauma appears to be concentrated among men. In a survey of gay men who recently arrived in New York City, three-quarters suffered from anxiety or depression, abused drugs or alcohol or were having risky sex—or some combination of the three. Despite all the talk of our “chosen families,” gay men have fewer close friends than straight people or gay women. In a survey of care-providers at HIV clinics, one respondent told researchers: “It’s not a question of them not knowing how to save their lives. It’s a question of them knowing if their lives are worth saving.”

I’m not going to pretend to be objective about any of this. I’m a perpetually single gay guy who was raised in a bright blue city by PFLAG parents. I’ve never known anyone who died of AIDS, I’ve never experienced direct discrimination and I came out of the closet into a world where marriage, a picket fence and a golden retriever were not just feasible, but expected. I’ve also been in and out of therapy more times than I’ve downloaded and deleted Grindr.

“Marriage equality and the changes in legal status were an improvement for some gay men,” says Christopher Stults, a researcher at New York University who studies the differences in mental health between gay and straight men. “But for a lot of other people, it was a letdown. Like, we have this legal status, and yet there’s still something unfulfilled.”

This feeling of emptiness, it turns out, is not just an American phenomenon. In the Netherlands, where gay marriage has been legal since 2001, gay men remain three times more likely to suffer from a mood disorder than straight men, and 10 times more likely to engage in “suicidal self-harm.” In Sweden, which has had civil unions since 1995 and full marriage since 2009, men married to men have triple the suicide rate of men married to women.

All of these unbearable statistics lead to the same conclusion: It is still dangerously alienating to go through life as a man attracted to other men. The good news, though, is that epidemiologists and social scientists are closer than ever to understanding all the reasons why.

Whether we recognize it or not, our bodies bring the closet with us into adulthood.

Travis Salway, a researcher with the BC Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver, has spent the last five years trying to figure out why gay men keep killing themselves.

“The defining feature of gay men used to be the loneliness of the closet,” he says. “But now you’ve got millions of gay men who have come out of the closet and they still feel the same isolation.”

We’re having lunch at a hole-in-the-wall noodle bar. It’s November, and he arrives wearing jeans, galoshes and a wedding ring.

“Gay-married, huh?” I say.

“Monogamous even,” he says. “I think they’re gonna give us the key to the city.”

Salway grew up in Celina, Ohio, a rusting factory town of maybe 10,000 people, the kind of place, he says, where marriage competed with college for the 21-year-olds. He got bullied for being gay before he even knew he was. “I was effeminate and I was in choir,” he says. “That was enough.” So he got careful. He had a girlfriend through most of high school, and tried to avoid boys—both romantically and platonically—until he could get out of there.

By the late 2000s, he was a social worker and epidemiologist and, like me, was struck by the growing distance between his straight and gay friends. He started to wonder if the story he had always heard about gay men and mental health was incomplete.

When the disparity first came to light in the ’50s and ’60s, doctors thought it was a symptom of homosexuality itself, just one of many manifestations of what was, at the time, known as “sexual inversion.” As the gay rights movement gained steam, though, homosexuality disappeared from the DSM and the explanation shifted to trauma. Gay men were being kicked out of their own families, their love lives were illegal. Of course they had alarming rates of suicide and depression. “That was the idea I had, too,” Salway says, “that gay suicide was a product of a bygone era, or it was concentrated among adolescents who didn’t see any other way out.”

And then he looked at the data. The problem wasn’t just suicide, it wasn’t just afflicting teenagers and it wasn’t just happening in areas stained by homophobia. He found that gay men everywhere, at every age, have higher rates of cardiovascular disease, cancer, incontinence, erectile dysfunction,⁠ allergies and asthma—you name it, we got it. In Canada, Salway eventually discovered, more gay men were dying from suicide than from AIDS, and had been for years. (This might be the case in the U.S. too, he says, but no one has bothered to study it.)

“We see gay men who have never been sexually or physically assaulted with similar post-traumatic stress symptoms to people who have been in combat situations or who have been raped,” says Alex Keuroghlian, a psychiatrist at the Fenway Institute’s Center for Population Research in LGBT Health.

Gay men are, as Keuroghlian puts it, “primed to expect rejection.” We’re constantly scanning social situations for ways we may not fit into them. We struggle to assert ourselves. We replay our social failures on a loop.

The weirdest thing about these symptoms, though, is that most of us don’t see them as symptoms at all. Since he looked into the data, Salway has started interviewing gay men who attempted suicide and survived.

“When you ask them why they tried to kill themselves,” he says, “most of them don’t mention anything at all about being gay.” Instead, he says, they tell him they’re having relationship problems, career problems, money problems. “They don’t feel like their sexuality is the most salient aspect of their lives. And yet, they’re an order of magnitude more likely to kill themselves.”

The term researchers use to explain this phenomenon is “minority stress.” In its most direct form, it’s pretty simple: Being a member of a marginalized group requires extra effort. When you’re the only woman at a business meeting, or the only black guy in your college dorm, you have to think on a level that members of the majority don’t. If you stand up to your boss, or fail to, are you playing into stereotypes of women in the workplace? If you don’t ace a test, will people think it’s because of your race? Even if you don’t experience overt stigma, considering these possibilities takes its toll over time.

For gay people, the effect is magnified by the fact that our minority status is hidden. Not only do we have to do all this extra work and answer all these internal questions when we’re 12, but we also have to do it without being able to talk to our friends or parents about it.

John Pachankis, a stress researcher at Yale, says the real damage gets done in the five or so years between realizing your sexuality and starting to tell other people. Even relatively small stressors in this period have an outsized effect—not because they’re directly traumatic, but because we start to expect them. “No one has to call you queer for you to adjust your behavior to avoid being called that,” Salway says.

James, now a mostly-out 20-year-old, tells me that in seventh grade, when he was a closeted 12-year-old, a female classmate asked him what he thought about another girl. “Well, she looks like a man,” he said, without thinking, “so yeah, maybe I would have sex with her.”

Immediately, he says, he panicked. “I was like, did anyone catch that? Did they tell anyone else I said it that way?”

This is how I spent my adolescence, too: being careful, slipping up, stressing out, overcompensating. Once, at a water park, one of my middle-school friends caught me staring at him as we waited for a slide. “Dude, did you just check me out?” he said. I managed to deflect—something like “Sorry, you’re not my type”—then I spent weeks afterward worried about what he was thinking about me. But he never brought it up. All the bullying took place in my head.

“The trauma for gay men is the prolonged nature of it,” says William Elder, a sexual trauma researcher and psychologist. “If you experience one traumatic event, you have the kind of PTSD that can be resolved in four to six months of therapy. But if you experience years and years of small stressors—little things where you think, Was that because of my sexuality?—that can be even worse.”

Or, as Elder puts it, being in the closet is like someone having someone punch you lightly on the arm, over and over. At first, it’s annoying. After a while, it’s infuriating. Eventually, it’s all you can think about.

And then the stress of dealing with it every day begins to build up in your body.

Growing up gay, it seems, is bad for you in many of the same ways as growing up in extreme poverty. A 2015 study found that gay people produce less cortisol, the hormone that regulates stress. Their systems were so activated, so constantly, in adolescence that they ended up sluggish as grownups, says Katie McLaughlin, one of the study’s co-authors. In 2014, researchers compared straight and gay teenagers on cardiovascular risk. They found that the gay kids didn’t have a greater number of “stressful life events” (i.e. straight people have problems, too), but the ones they did experience inflicted more harm on their nervous systems.

Annesa Flentje, a stress researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, specializes in the effect of minority stress on gene expression. All those little punches combine with our adaptations to them, she says, and become “automatic ways of thinking that never get challenged or turned off, even 30 years later.” Whether we recognize it or not, our bodies bring the closet with us into adulthood. “We don’t have the tools to process stress as kids, and we don’t recognize it as trauma as adults,” says John, a former consultant who quit his job two years ago to make pottery and lead adventure tours in the Adirondacks. “Our gut reaction is to deal with things now the way we did as children.”

Even Salway, who has devoted his career to understanding minority stress, says that there are days when he feels uncomfortable walking around Vancouver with his partner. No one’s ever attacked them, but they’ve had a few assholes yell slurs at them in public. That doesn’t have to happen very many times before you start expecting it, before your heart starts beating a little faster when you see a car approaching.

But minority stress doesn’t fully explain why gay men have such a wide array of health problems. Because while the first round of damage happens before we come out of the closet, the second, and maybe more severe, comes afterward.

"You go from your mom's house to a gay club where a lot of people are on drugs and it's like, this is my community? It's like the fucking jungle."

No one ever told Adam not to act effeminate. But he, like me, like most of us, learned it somehow.

“I never worried about my family being homophobic,” he says. “I used to do this thing where I would wrap a blanket around myself like a dress and dance around in the backyard. My parents thought it was cute, so they took a video and showed it to my grandparents. When they all watched the tape, I hid behind the couch because I was so ashamed. I must have been six or seven.”

By the time he got to high school, Adam had learned to manage his mannerisms so well that no one suspected him of being gay. But still, he says, “I couldn’t trust anyone because I had this thing I was holding. I had to operate in the world as a lone agent.”

He came out at 16, then graduated, then moved to San Francisco and started working in HIV prevention. But the feeling of distance from other people didn’t go away. So he treated it, he says, “with lots and lots of sex. It’s our most accessible resource in the gay community. You convince yourself that if you’re having sex with someone, you’re having an intimate moment. That ended up being a crutch.”

He worked long hours. He would come home exhausted, smoke a little weed, pour a glass of red wine, then start scanning the hookup apps for someone to invite over. Sometimes it would be two or three guys in a row. “As soon as I closed the door on the last guy, I’d think, That didn’t hit the spot, then I’d find another one.”

It went on like this for years. Last Thanksgiving, he was back home to visit his parents and felt a compulsive need to have sex because he was so stressed out. When he finally found a guy nearby who was willing to hook up, he ran to his parents’ room and started rifling through their drawers to see if they had any Viagra.

“So that was the rock-bottom moment?” I ask.

“That was the third or fourth, yeah,” he says.

Adam’s now in a 12-step program for sex addiction. It’s been six weeks since he’s had sex. Before this, the longest he had ever gone was three or four days.

“There are people who have lots of sex because it’s fun, and that’s fine. But I kept trying to wring it out like a rag to get something out of it that wasn’t in there—social support, or companionship. It was a way of not dealing with my own life. And I kept denying it was a problem because I had always told myself, ‘I’ve come out, I moved to San Francisco, I’m done, I did what I had to do as a gay person.’”

For decades, this is what psychologists thought, too: that the key stages in identity formation for gay men all led up to coming out, that once we were finally comfortable with ourselves, we could begin building a life within a community of people who’d gone through the same thing. But over the last 10 years, what researchers have discovered is that the struggle to fit in only grows more intense. A study published in 2015 found that rates of anxiety and depression were higher in men who had recently come out than in men who were still closeted.

“It’s like you emerge from the closet expecting to be this butterfly and the gay community just slaps the idealism out of you,” Adam says. When he first started coming out, he says, “I went to West Hollywood because I thought that’s where my people were. But it was really horrifying. It’s made by gay adults, and it’s not welcoming for gay kids. You go from your mom’s house to a gay club where a lot of people are on drugs and it’s like, this is my community? It’s like the fucking jungle.”

“I came out when I was 17, and I didn’t see a place for myself in the gay scene,” says Paul, a software developer. “I wanted to fall in love like I saw straight people do in movies. But I just felt like a piece of meat. It got so bad that I used to go to the grocery store that was 40 minutes away instead of the one that was 10 minutes away just because I was so afraid to walk down the gay street.”

The word I hear from Paul, from everyone, is “re-traumatized.” You grow up with this loneliness, accumulating all this baggage, and then you arrive in the Castro or Chelsea or Boystown thinking you’ll finally be accepted for who you are. And then you realize that everyone else here has baggage, too. All of a sudden it’s not your gayness that gets you rejected. It’s your weight, or your income, or your race. “The bullied kids of our youth,” Paul says, “grew up and became bullies themselves.”

“Gay men in particular are just not very nice to each other,” says John, the adventure tour guide. “In pop culture, drag queens are known for their takedowns and it’s all ha ha ha. But that meanness is almost pathological. All of us were deeply confused or lying to ourselves for a good chunk of our adolescence. But it’s not comfortable for us to show that to other people. So we show other people what the world shows us, which is nastiness.”

Every gay man I know carries around a mental portfolio of all the shitty things other gay men have said and done to him. I arrived to a date once and the guy immediately stood up, said I was shorter than I looked in my pictures and left. Alex, a fitness instructor in Seattle, was told by a guy on his swim team, “I’ll ignore your face if you fuck me without a condom.” Martin, a Brit living in Portland, has gained maybe 10 pounds since he moved there and got a Grindr message—on Christmas Day—that said: “You used to be so sexy. It’s a shame you messed it up.”

For other minority groups, living in a community with people like them is linked to lower rates of anxiety and depression. It helps to be close to people who instinctively understand you. But for us, the effect is the opposite. Several studies have found that living in gay neighborhoods predicts higher rates of risky sex and meth use and less time spent on other community activities like volunteering or playing sports. A 2009 study suggested that gay men who were more linked to the gay community were less satisfied with their own romantic relationships.

“Gay and bisexual men talk about the gay community as a significant source of stress in their lives,” Pachankis says. The fundamental reason for this, he says, is that “in-group discrimination” does more harm to your psyche than getting rejected by members of the majority. It’s easy to ignore, roll your eyes and put a middle finger up to straight people who don’t like you because, whatever, you don’t need their approval anyway. Rejection from other gay people, though, feels like losing your only way of making friends and finding love. Being pushed away from your own people hurts more because you need them more.

The researchers I spoke to explained that gay guys inflict this kind of damage on each other for two main reasons. The first, and the one I heard most frequently, is that gay men are shitty to each other because, basically, we’re men.

“The challenges of masculinity get magnified in a community of men,” Pachankis says. “Masculinity is precarious. It has to be constantly enacted or defended or collected. We see this in studies: You can threaten masculinity among men and then look at the dumb things they do. They show more aggressive posturing, they start taking financial risks, they want to punch things.”

This helps explain the pervasive stigma against feminine guys in the gay community. According to Dane Whicker, a clinical psychologist and researcher at Duke, most gay men report that they want to date someone masculine, and that they wished they acted more masculine themselves. Maybe that’s because, historically, masculine men have been more able to blend into straight society. Or maybe it’s internalized homophobia: Feminine gay men are still stereotyped as bottoms, the receptive partner in anal sex.

A two-year longitudinal study found that the longer gay men were out of the closet, the more likely they were to become versatile or tops. Researchers say this kind of training, deliberately trying to appear more masculine and taking on a different sex role, is just one of the ways gay men pressure each other to attain “sexual capital,” the equivalent of going to the gym or plucking our eyebrows.

“The only reason I started working out was so I would seem like a feasible top,” Martin says. When he first came out, he was convinced that he was too skinny, too effeminate, that bottoms would think he was one of them. “So I started faking all this hyper-masculine behavior. My boyfriend noticed recently that I still lower my voice an octave whenever I order drinks. That’s a remnant of my first few years out of the closet, when I thought I had to speak in this Christian Bale Batman voice to get dates.”

Grant, a 21-year-old who grew up on Long Island and now lives in Hell’s Kitchen, says he used to be self-conscious about the way he stood—hands on hips, one leg slightly cocked like a Rockette. So, his sophomore year, he started watching his male teachers for their default positions, deliberately standing with his feet wide, his arms at his sides.

These masculinity norms exert a toll on everyone, even their perpetrators. Feminine gay men are at higher risk of suicide, loneliness and mental illness. Masculine gay men, for their part, are more anxious, have more risky sex and use drugs and tobacco with greater frequency. One study investigating why living in the gay community increases depression found that the effect only showed up in masculine gay guys.

The second reason the gay community acts as a unique stressor on its members is not about why we reject each other, but how.

In the last 10 years, traditional gay spaces—bars, nightclubs, bathhouses—have begun to disappear, and have been replaced by social media. At least 70 percent of gay men now use hookup apps like Grindr and Scruff to meet each other. In 2000, around 20 percent of gay couples met online. By 2010, that was up to 70 percent. Meanwhile, the share of gay couples who met through friends dropped from 30 percent to 12 percent.

Usually when you hear about the shocking primacy of hookup apps in gay life—Grindr, the most popular, says its average user spends 90 minutes per day on it—it’s in some panicked media story about murderers or homophobes trawling them for victims, or about the troubling “chemsex” scenes that have sprung up in London and New York. And yes, those are problems. But the real effect of the apps is quieter, less remarked-upon and, in a way, more profound: For many of us, they have become the primary way we interact with other gay people.

“It’s so much easier to meet someone for a hookup on Grindr than it is to go to a bar by yourself,” Adam says. “Especially if you’ve just moved to a new city, it’s so easy to let the dating apps become your social life. It’s harder to look for social situations where you might have to make more of an effort.”

“I have moments when I want to feel desired and so I get on Grindr,” Paul says. “I upload a shirtless picture and I start getting these messages telling me I’m hot. It feels good in the moment, but nothing ever comes of it, and those messages stop coming after a few days. It feels like I’m scratching an itch, but it’s scabies. It’s just going to spread.”

The worst thing about the apps, though, and why they’re relevant to the health disparity between gay and straight men, is not just that we use them a lot. It is that they are almost perfectly designed to underline our negative beliefs about ourselves. In interviews that Elder, the post-traumatic stress researcher, conducted with gay men in 2015, he found that 90 percent said they wanted a partner who was tall, young, white, muscular and masculine. For the vast majority of us who barely meet one of those criteria, much less all five, the hookup apps merely provide an efficient way to feel ugly.

Paul says he’s “electrified waiting for rejection” as soon as he opens them. John, the former consultant, is 27, 6-foot-1 and has a six-pack you can see through his wool sweater. And even he says most of his messages don’t get replies, that he spends probably 10 hours talking to people on the app for every one hour he spends meeting for coffee or a hookup.

It’s worse for gay men of color. Vincent, who runs counseling sessions with black and Latino men through the San Francisco Department of Public Health, says the apps give racial minorities two forms of feedback: Rejected (“Sorry, I’m not into black guys”) and fetishized (“Hi, I’m really into black guys.”) Paihan, a Taiwanese immigrant in Seattle, shows me his Grindr inbox. It is, like mine, mostly hellos he has sent out to no reply. One of the few messages he received just says, “Asiiiaaaan.”

None of this is new, of course. Walt Odets, a psychologist who’s been writing about social isolation since the 1980s, says that gay men used to be troubled by the bathhouses in the same way they are troubled by Grindr now. The difference he sees in his younger patients is that “if someone rejected you at a bathhouse, you could still have a conversation afterwards. Maybe you end up with a friend out of it, or at least something that becomes a positive social experience. On the apps, you just get ignored if someone doesn’t perceive you as a sexual or romantic conquest.” The gay men I interviewed talked about the dating apps the same way straight people talk about Comcast: It sucks, but what are you gonna do? “You have to use the apps in smaller cities,” says Michael Moore, a psychologist at Yale. “They serve the purpose of a gay bar. But the downside is that they put all this prejudice out there.”

What the apps reinforce, or perhaps simply accelerate, is the adult version of what Pachankis calls the Best Little Boy in the World Hypothesis. As kids, growing up in the closet makes us more likely to concentrate our self-worth into whatever the outside world wants us to be—good at sports, good at school, whatever. As adults, the social norms in our own community pressure us to concentrate our self-worth even further—into our looks, our masculinity, our sexual performance. But then, even if we manage to compete there, even if we attain whatever masc-dom-top ideal we’re looking for, all we’ve really done is condition ourselves to be devastated when we inevitably lose it.

“We often live our lives through the eyes of others,” says Alan Downs, a psychologist and the author of The Velvet Rage, a book about gay men’s struggle with shame and social validation. “We want to have man after man, more muscles, more status, whatever brings us fleeting validation. Then we wake up at 40, exhausted, and we wonder, Is that all there is? And then the depression comes.”

Our distance from the mainstream is also the source of our wit, our resilience, our empathy, our superior talents for dressing and dancing and karaoke.

Perry Halkitis, a professor at NYU, has been studying the health gap between gay people and straight people since the early ’90s. He has published four books on gay culture and has interviewed men dying of HIV, recovering from party drugs and struggling to plan their own weddings.

That’s why, two years ago, his 18-year-old nephew James showed up trembling at his doorstep. He sat Halkitis and his husband down on the couch and announced he was gay. “We told him, ‘Congratulations, your membership card and welcome package are in the other room,’” Halkitis remembers. “But he was too nervous to get the joke.”

James grew up in Queens, a beloved member of a big, affectionate, liberal family. He went to a public school with openly gay kids. “And still,” Halkitis says, “there was this emotional turmoil. He knew rationally that everything was going to be fine, but being in the closet isn’t rational, it’s emotional.”

Over the years, James had convinced himself that he would never come out. He didn’t want the attention, or to have to field questions he couldn’t answer. His sexuality didn’t make sense to him—how could he possibly explain it to other people? “On TV I was seeing all these traditional families,” he tells me. “At the same time, I was watching a ton of gay porn, where everyone was super ripped and single and having sex all the time. So I thought those were my two options: this fairy-tale life I could never have, or this gay life where there was no romance.”

James remembers the exact moment he decided to go into the closet. He must have been 10 or 11, dragged on a vacation to Long Island by his parents. “I looked around at our whole family, and the kids running around, and I thought, ‘I’m never going to have this,’ and I started to cry.”

I realize, the second he says it, that he is describing the same revelation I had at his age, the same grief. James’ was in 2007. Mine was in 1992. Halkitis says his was in 1977. Surprised that someone his nephew’s age could have the same experience he did, Halkitis decided his next book project would be about the trauma of the closet.

“Even now, even in New York City, even with accepting parents, the coming out process is challenging," Halkitis says. “Maybe it always will be.”

So what are we supposed to do about it? When we think of marriage laws or hate crime prohibitions, we tend to think of them as protections of our rights. What’s less understood is that laws literally affect our health.

One of the most striking studies I found described the spike in anxiety and depression among gay men in 2004 and 2005, the years when 14 states passed constitutional amendments defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. Gay men in those states showed a 37 percent increase in mood disorders, a 42 percent increase in alcoholism and a 248 percent increase in generalized anxiety disorder.

The most chilling thing about those numbers is that the legal rights of gay people living in those states didn’t materially change. We couldn’t get married in Michigan before the amendment passed, and we couldn’t get married in Michigan after it passed. The laws were symbolic. They were the majority’s way of informing gay people that we weren’t wanted. What’s worse, the rates of anxiety and depression didn’t just jump in the states that passed constitutional amendments. They increased (though less dramatically) among gay people across the entire country. The campaign to make us suffer worked.

Now square that with the fact that our country recently elected a bright orange Demogorgon whose administration is publicly, eagerly attempting to reverse every single gain the gay community has made in the last 20 years. The message this sends to gay people—especially the youngest ones, just grappling with their identity—couldn’t be clearer and more terrifying.

Any discussion of gay mental health has to start with what happens in schools. Despite the progress taking place around them, America’s educational institutions remain dangerous places for kids, filled with aspiring frat boys, indifferent teachers and retrograde policies. Emily Greytak, the director of research for the anti-bullying organization GLSEN, tells me that from 2005 to 2015, the percentage of teenagers who said they were bullied for their sexual orientation didn’t fall at all. Only around 30 percent of school districts in the country have anti-bullying policies that specifically mention LGBTQ kids, and thousands of other districts have policies that prevent teachers from speaking about homosexuality in a positive way.

These restrictions make it so much harder for kids to cope with their minority stress. But luckily, this doesn’t require every teacher and every teenage lacrosse bro to accept gay people overnight. For the last four years, Nicholas Heck, a researcher at Marquette University, has been running support groups for gay kids in high schools. He walks them through their interactions with their classmates, their teachers and their parents, and tries to help them separate garden-variety teenage stress from the kind they get due to their sexuality. One of his kids, for example, was under pressure from his parents to major in art rather than finance. His parents meant well—they were just trying to encourage him into a field where he would encounter fewer homophobes—but he was already anxious: If he gave up on finance, was that surrendering to stigma? If he went into art and still got bullied, could he tell his parents about it?

The trick, Heck says, is getting kids to ask these questions openly, because one of the hallmark symptoms of minority stress is avoidance. Kids hear derogatory comments in the hall so they decide to walk down another one, or they put in earbuds. They ask a teacher for help and get shrugged off, so they stop looking for safe adults altogether. But the kids in the study, Heck says, are already starting to reject the responsibility they used to take on when they got bullied. They’re learning that even if they can’t change the environment around them, they’re allowed to stop blaming themselves for it.

So for kids, the goal is to hunt out and prevent minority stress. But what can be done for those of us who have already internalized it?

“There has been a lot of work with queer youth, but there’s no equivalent when you’re in your 30s and 40s,” Salway tells me. “I don’t even know where you go.” The problem, he says, is that we’ve built entirely separate infrastructures around mental illness, HIV prevention and substance abuse, even though all the evidence indicates that they are not three epidemics, but one. People who feel rejected are more likely to self-medicate, which makes them more likely to have risky sex, which makes them more likely to contract HIV, which makes them more likely to feel rejected, and so on.

In the last five years, as evidence of this interconnectedness has piled up, a few psychologists and epidemiologists have started to treat alienation among gay men as a “syndemic”: A cluster of health problems, none of which can be fixed on their own.

Pachankis, the stress researcher, just ran the country’s first randomized controlled trial of “gay-affirming” cognitive behavior therapy. After years of emotional avoidance, many gay men “literally don’t know what they’re feeling,” he says. Their partner says “I love you” and they reply “Well, I love pancakes.” They break it off with the guy they’re seeing because he leaves a toothbrush at their house. Or, like a lot of the guys I talked to, they have unprotected sex with someone they’ve never met because they don’t know how to listen to their own trepidation.

Emotional detachment of this kind is pervasive, Pachankis says, and many of the men he works with go years without recognizing that the things they’re striving for—having a perfect body, doing more and better work than their colleagues, curating the ideal weeknight Grindr hookup—are reinforcing their own fear of rejection.

Simply pointing out these patterns yielded huge results: Pachankis’ patients showed reduced rates of anxiety, depression, drug use and condom-less sex in just three months. He’s now expanding the study to include more cities, more participants and a longer timeline.

These solutions are promising, but they’re still imperfect. I don’t know if we’ll ever see the mental health gap between straight people and gay people close, at least not fully. There will always be more straight kids than gay kids, we will always be isolated among them, and we will always, on some level, grow up alone in our families and our schools and our towns. But perhaps that’s not all bad. Our distance from the mainstream may be the source of some of what ails us, but it is also the source of our wit, our resilience, our empathy, our superior talents for dressing and dancing and karaoke. We have to recognize that as we fight for better laws and better environments—and as we figure out how to be better to each other.

I keep thinking of something Paul, the software developer, told me: “For gay people, we’ve always told ourselves that when the AIDS epidemic was over we’d be fine. Then it was, when we can get married we’ll be fine. Now it’s, when the bullying stops we’ll be fine. We keep waiting for the moment when we feel like we’re not different from other people. But the fact is, we are different. It’s about time we accept that and work with it.”

All Sarah Loiselle wanted was a carefree summer. There was no particular reason she was feeling restless, but she’d been single for about a year and her job working with cardiac patients in upstate New York could be intense. So when she learned that a Delaware hospital needed temporary nurses, she leapt at the chance to spend a summer by the beach. In June 2011, the tall, bubbly 32-year-old drove her Jeep into the sleepy coastal town of Lewes. She and her poodle, Aries, moved into a rustic apartment above a curiosity shop that once housed the town jail. The place was so close to the bay that she could go sunbathing on her days off. It didn’t bother Loiselle that she’d be away from her friends and family for a while: She felt like she’d put her real life on hold, that she was blissfully free of all her responsibilities.

And then she met a guy. She’d never dated online before, but an acquaintance convinced her to try a site called PlentyOfFish. Loiselle, who has a slender face framed by auburn hair, soon found herself messaging with 36-year-old Andrel Martinez, a muscular Delaware state trooper. She was intrigued enough to drive an hour with him to Ocean City, Maryland, for what she thought was a great date: They had dinner, strolled along the beach and danced at a waterfront club. Right away she noticed Martinez’s height (he is more than 6 feet tall) and the way he carried himself, with a confidence she would come to associate with cops. Loiselle was hardly a meek person, but his presence made her feel safe. She thought it was sweet when he reached back through a crowd to take her hand.

They started seeing each other regularly. And as the summer went by, Loiselle began to feel like she could really trust him. One night over dinner, she talked about her family. Loiselle had left home young, after she’d become pregnant at 18. She’d placed her baby up for adoption—but she was proud that she was still in touch with her daughter, whose birthday was tattooed on her hip. That night, Loiselle said, Martinez got choked up and said he loved her and wanted to be with her so they could turn their lives “into something beautiful.” When her contract was up at the end of the summer, Loiselle found a new job and stayed in Delaware.

Sarah Loiselle felt like she could really trust Andrel Martinez.PAULA BAIRD MIGNOGNO

They moved in together, talked about having a child. But as the months grew colder, doubts crept in. Some of Loiselle’s new friends found Martinez overbearing. Stephanie Botti, whom she met through work, went to a club with the new couple and recalled Martinez “getting all weird about these guys who want nothing to do with us,” inserting himself between them with “aggressive body language.” Loiselle noticed that he seemed to be constantly questioning her or telling her what to do—probably a cop thing, she figured. And she didn’t like it when, she said, Martinez would talk disparagingly about her daughter’s adoption. By the winter, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to break up with him. But she thought it might be a good idea to check out a few apartments, just in case.

She was on her way to look at a place when Martinez called. Loiselle came up with some cover story, but when she got home, she said, his police car was parked in the driveway. That surprised her, because she’d thought he was supposed to be at work. When she walked into the darkened kitchen, she said, she found Martinez standing there, his hands resting on his gun belt. “Where were you?” he asked. Before she could answer, she said, he made a comment about the very building she’d just visited. He said he’d just happened to see her there. That was when she realized that leaving him might be harder than she’d anticipated.

He would stand and stare at her, using what she called his “interrogation voice.”

When Loiselle discovered she was pregnant, in January 2012, she decided to try to make the relationship work. But Martinez “had this expectation of the woman of the house,” she said. “He wanted me to be super fun and hot and sexy and meet all of his needs. I was pregnant and felt like crap.” At one point, she said, Martinez gave her a self-help book for police wives. The message seemed pretty obvious to her: She needed to get in line, to be more supportive of her man.

In September they had a daughter, whom we’ll call Jasmine. But after the birth, Loiselle and Martinez fought a lot. Martinez has said that Loiselle would belittle him and call him worthless. Loiselle’s friends, meanwhile, thought he was controlling. She “needed to do what he wanted her to do,” Botti observed. “Otherwise he was going to escalate.” Another friend, Danielle Gilbert, said, “If Sarah was somewhere with me, he would have to know where she was, or if she didn’t tell him, he would find out, which I found really odd. I was like, ‘Does he have somebody spying on you? Is he spying on you?’”

Loiselle was increasingly unnerved by how quickly Martinez could swing from sweet and loving to angry and sullen. On one occasion, she said, he held her down and dug his fingers into her neck to demonstrate pressure points. When she started crying and asked him to stop, he laughed, saying he was just playing around, she recalled. He called her a “motherfucking cunt” or a “bitch,” she said, and would stand and stare at her, using what she called his “interrogation voice.” She believed he knew precisely how much pressure, mental or physical, he needed to exert to make her do exactly what he wanted. And she had a gnawing fear of what might happen if she didn’t comply.  

If domestic abuse is one of the most underreported crimes, domestic abuse by police officers is virtually an invisible one. It is frighteningly difficult to track or prevent—and it has escaped America’s most recent awakening to the many ways in which some police misuse their considerable powers. Very few people in the United States understand what really happens when an officer is accused of harassing, stalking, or assaulting a partner. One person who knows more than most is a 62-year-old retired cop named Mark Wynn.

Wynn decided to be a police officer when he was about 5 years old because he wanted to put his stepfather in prison. Alvin Griffin was a violent alcoholic who terrorized Wynn’s mother, a waitress and supermarket butcher. Looking back, Wynn compares his childhood in Dallas to living inside a crime scene. “There was always blood in my house,” he said.

The cops sometimes showed up, usually after a neighbor called to complain about the screaming, but they didn’t do much. Wynn doesn’t remember them ever talking to him or his four siblings. He does remember clinging to his mother while a police officer threatened to arrest her if they had to come back to the house again. “There was no one to help us,” he said. “We were completely isolated.” Wynn has often spoken of the time he tried to kill his stepfather when he was 7—how he and his brother emptied out the Mad Dog wine on Griffin’s bedside dresser and replaced it with Black Flag bug spray. A few hours later, Griffin downed the bottle as the boys waited in the living room. Griffin didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with the wine. But he didn’t die, either.

Years later, when Wynn was around 13 and all but one of his siblings had left home, he was watching television when he heard a loud crack that sounded like a gunshot. He found his mother splayed on the floor of their tiny kitchen, blood pooling around her face. Griffin had knocked her out with a punch to the head. Wynn watched as Griffin stepped over her, opened the fridge, pulled out a can of beer and drank it. That night, Griffin got locked up for public drunkenness and Wynn, his sister and his mother finally got out, driving to Tennessee with a few belongings. Griffin never found them.

Mark Wynn with his stepfather, Alvin Griffin, in 1961. COURTESY OF MARK WYNN

Wynn became a police officer in the late 1970s and after a few years, he wound up in Nashville. Then as now, domestic complaints tended to be one of the most common calls fielded by police. And Wynn was disturbed to find that he was expected to handle them in much the same way as the cops from his childhood had—treat it as a family matter, don’t get involved. He remembers that officers would write cursory summaries on 3 by 5 inch “miscellaneous incident” cards rather than full reports. To fit what he regarded as essential details in the tiny space provided, Wynn would print “really, really small,” he said. “The officers I worked with used to get pissed off at me,” he added. They couldn’t understand why he bothered.

But Wynn had entered the force at a pivotal moment. In the late 1970s, women’s groups had turned domestic violence into a major national cause, and abused women successfully sued police departments for failing to protect them. Over the next decade, states passed legislation empowering police to make arrests in domestic incidents and to enforce protective orders. Wynn eagerly embraced these changes and in the late 1980s, the Department of Justice asked him to train police chiefs on best practices. He went on to lead one of the country’s first specialized investigative units for family violence. By the passage of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which poured more than $1 billion into shelters and law enforcement training, the U.S. was finally starting to treat domestic violence as a crime. “It was like stepping out of the Dark Ages,” Wynn said.

And yet when officers themselves were the accused, cases tended to be handled in the old way. Wynn would hear stories around his station, like an assailant who received a quiet talk from a colleague instead of being arrested. “Officers thought they were taking care of their fellow officer,” said David Thomas, a former police officer and a consultant for the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). “But what they were doing was colluding with a criminal.”

It is nearly impossible to calculate the frequency of domestic crimes committed by police—not least because victims are often reluctant to seek help from their abuser’s colleagues. Another complication is the 1996 Lautenberg Amendment, a federal law that prohibits anyone convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse from owning a gun. The amendment is a valuable protection for most women. But a police officer who can’t use a gun can’t work—and so reporting him may risk the family’s livelihood as well as the abuser’s anger. Courts can be perilous to navigate, too, since police intimately understand their workings and often have relationships with prosecutors and judges. Police are also some of the only people who know the confidential locations of shelters. Diane Wetendorf, a domestic violence counselor who wrote a handbook for women whose abusers work in law enforcement, believes they are among the most vulnerable victims in the country.

In 1991, a researcher at Arizona State University testified to a congressional committee about a survey she’d conducted of more than 700 police officers. Forty percent admitted that they had “behaved violently against their spouse and children” in the past six months (although the study didn’t define “violence.”) In a 1992 survey of 385 male officers, 28 percent admitted to acts of physical aggression against a spouse in the last year—including pushing, kicking, hitting, strangling and using a knife or gun. Both studies cautioned that the real numbers could be even higher; there has been startlingly little research since.  

Even counting arrests of officers for domestic crimes is no simple undertaking, because there are no government statistics. Jonathan Blanks, a Cato Institute researcher who publishes a daily roundup of police misconduct, said that in the thousands of news reports he has compiled, domestic violence is “the most common violent crime for which police officers are arrested.” And yet most of the arrested officers appear to keep their jobs.

Philip Stinson, an associate professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, uses an elaborate set of Google news alerts to identify arrests of law enforcement personnel and then attempts to track the outcome through news reports and court records. Between 2005 and 2012, he found 1,143 cases in which an officer was arrested for a crime of domestic violence. While he emphasized that his data is incomplete, he discovered convictions in only 30 percent of the cases. In 38 percent, officers either resigned or were fired and in 17 percent, he found no evidence of adverse consequences at all. Stinson noted that it wasn’t uncommon for police to be extended a “professional courtesy” in the form of a lesser charge that might help them avoid the Lautenberg Amendment. Officers could be booked for disorderly conduct instead of domestic assault. If they were charged with domestic violence, the prosecutor might allow them to plead to a different offense. Stinson has identified dozens of officers who are still working even after being convicted.

Through public records requests, we also obtained hundreds of internal domestic abuse complaints made about police officers between 2014 and 2016 in 8 of the 10 largest cities in the country. Officers can be penalized internally whether or not criminal charges are filed—although the penalties may be minor and many complaints are not substantiated. An ABC 7 investigation this February found that nine of every 10 domestic violence allegations made against Chicago police officers by spouses or children resulted in no disciplinary action.

What is striking in many of the internal complaints, as well as incidents we found in news reports, is the degree of alleged violence and how often it appears to coincide with the misuse of police authority. An officer in New Jersey was indicted in January after he allegedly used his identification to enter the hotel room of a woman he was dating, fired a gun in her direction, assaulted her to get her to recant a statement, and attacked an officer who was working with investigators. He pleaded not guilty. So did a veteran Cleveland officer who was arrested the same month for allegedly beating his girlfriend with his service gun, firing shots near her head, then sexually assaulting her at gunpoint. Last September, an officer in Indiana was arrested for assaulting his ex-girlfriend for years—after previously alleging that she had abused him. (The case has not yet gone to trial.) And in 2013, a San Antonio police officer allegedly hit his wife with a gun and pointed it at his children. He ultimately pleaded no-contest to “making an obscene gesture.” Because he was not convicted of a domestic violence offense, he kept his officer’s license.

Despite the scarcity of data, the IACP has acknowledged that domestic violence is likely “at least” as prevalent within police families as in the general population. Which is significant: One third of women are estimated to experience sexual or physical violence or stalking by a partner during their lifetime. This is why, since the late 1990s, Wynn has focused on exposing the problem of abusive officers and persuading police departments to address it. As he sees it, the issue triggers every possible defensive instinct a cop might possess: romantic, protective, fraternal, tribal: “It’s the last frontier of policing.”

The first time that Sarah Loiselle tried to get help was March 21, 2013. Some days earlier, she’d been preparing to give Jasmine a bath. Then, she said, Martinez informed her that he wanted to do it. By her account, he took the baby from her arms and, when she tried to follow him into the bathroom, pushed her out and shut the door. It felt to her like he was demonstrating that he was in total control. Around this time, she emailed a therapist the couple had been seeing. “[I am] starting to become afraid for our safety and going to separate from him,” she wrote. After she quietly moved the base of Jasmine’s car seat out of Martinez’s vehicle, she said, he started questioning her in his interrogation voice again: What did you go outside for? Where are you going to go? That night, she lay in bed in the guest room, heart pounding. “It’s like a grizzly is in front of you,” she recalled. “Get down, cover your head with your hands and hope he stops.” She left with Jasmine the next morning while Martinez was still sleeping and went straight to the family courthouse.   

There, staff explained Loiselle’s options: Under Delaware law, the state could confiscate Martinez’s firearms if she were granted a protective order. Afraid of making him even angrier if something happened to his job, she decided not to file. That night, she sent him a text message:

In another message he added:

The next day, Loiselle was blindsided when Martinez filed for emergency custody of Jasmine. He called Loiselle emotionally unstable and said he was worried for his daughter’s safety. Among other things, he cited the fact that Loiselle had placed her first child up for adoption. Loiselle filed for a protective order, describing the bathroom incident and other behavior that had made her frightened to stay with him. (She later detailed her allegation that he used pressure points on her in a separate proceeding.) Eventually, she dropped her petition in exchange for 50-50 custody of Jasmine, she said.

For a while, Loiselle stayed with a friend, Paula Mignogno, who recalled that they tried to park Loiselle’s car where it couldn’t be seen from the road. But then Loiselle started hearing from various people that Martinez was looking for her. He showed up in uniform at the hospital where she used to work, according to a nurse who asked not to be named out of concern for her safety. As a police officer, Martinez was able to get into the ER, where the nurse said he cornered her in a utility room full of soiled linens and demanded to know where Loiselle and Jasmine were. She pushed past him, she said, and Martinez followed, yelling that he would find out one way or another. Feeling threatened, the nurse contacted Martinez’s station. “I was basically told that this was a domestic issue, it has nothing to do with his job, it has nothing to do with Delaware State Police,” she said.

By April 2013, Loiselle was living about a five-minute drive from Martinez’s house. She’d chosen the location so they could exchange their daughter before work, she said. The couple’s babysitter, Brielle Blemle, said she saw Martinez parked on the main road outside the apartment complex more than once. Loiselle bought blinds. Another time, Blemle said, a state trooper’s vehicle briefly followed her as she left Loiselle’s place. “There was literally nothing we could do,” she said. “And Sarah did try.” Loiselle and the nurse made complaints with Martinez's station. Loiselle said she also left several messages there but got no response. (Her lawyer, however, received a letter from Martinez’s attorney instructing Loiselle and her “friend” to stop making allegations of stalking or harassment to the state police.) Then, in May, Loiselle was shopping in Walmart when Martinez suddenly showed up in the baby food aisle. He insisted it was a coincidence, but after a tense exchange Loiselle called the police, to establish some kind of official record. This time, she contacted a large dispatch center instead of Martinez’s station. But the Walmart encounter didn’t give police much to go on, and after interviewing Martinez, they took no further action.

An abusive officer, said David Thomas, a police consultant, is “a master manipulator with a Ph.D.”

The couple briefly reconciled later in the summer, but Martinez’s controlling behavior surfaced again, Loiselle said. One of her few close friends in the area, Cortney Lewis, recalled that Loiselle was uncharacteristically timid around him. Lewis, a no-nonsense hairdresser in her early twenties, also got the impression Martinez only wanted Loiselle to be friends with the wives of his own close buddies. Then, in early 2014, some months after Loiselle and Martinez had finally split up for good, Lewis heard that Loiselle had been asking a lot of personal questions about her. She wanted to know, for instance, whether Lewis or one of her relatives had ever been in trouble with the police. Furious, Lewis confronted her friend, and Loiselle explained that Martinez had raised some concerns about her family. Lewis wondered: Had Martinez been looking up private information about her in police databases? She decided to report her suspicions, even though Loiselle begged her not to “poke the bear.” “He’s not the fucking president,” Lewis said.

On January 15, 2014 Loiselle was at home when there was an unexpected knock on her door. The man standing outside introduced himself as Sergeant Jeffrey Whitmarsh. He was wearing dress clothes, not a uniform, and Loiselle started shaking. She brought Whitmarsh into her living room, where her daughter’s toys were scattered all over the floor and just stared at him, afraid that he was there to somehow protect Martinez or his department.

Whitmarsh tried to put her at ease. “I can’t put myself in your shoes Sarah, I just can’t,” he told her, according to a transcript of the conversation. He explained that he had been investigating Lewis’s complaint. He also made a point of saying that he worked about an hour and a half away, so he didn’t know law enforcement people in this part of the state. Whitmarsh opened a binder and showed Loiselle some printouts, which he said were only a snapshot of searches Martinez had run in DELJIS, the Delaware police database that houses close to 12 million records, including addresses, car tags, driver’s licenses, fingerprints, arrest history, protective orders, police reports, even nicknames. Loiselle had trouble focusing. She had suspected that Martinez might be using his police authority to keep track of her, but never anything like this. As she tried to keep it together, Whitmarsh said, “The concern I have [is]: How far he is going to learn as much as he can about you?”

Ultimately, Loiselle would learn that Martinez had looked up vehicle registrations on cars parked inside her apartment complex on fifteen dates and had run searches on the owners, according to the Delaware State Police. Police also said that between July 2012 and December 2013, Martinez had run or attempted dozens of searches—on Loiselle, her friends, colleagues, casual acquaintances, ex-boyfriend, Facebook friends, a day care provider and the nurse at the hospital, among others. And he had searched for information on his new girlfriend, too. When exchanging Jasmine, Loiselle had sometimes caught glimpses of her—a woman with blonde hair in a banana clip, hidden behind the tinted windows of Martinez’s car.

In 2011, Karen Tingle was working as an emergency medical technician not far from Lewes. She had been a 911 dispatcher for years before realizing that she wanted to be the person responding to the distress call, not the person picking up the phone. She adored her job, but she was also a bit lonely. At 34, she had two children and three ex-husbands—the result, she thought, of an overly trusting nature. “I always look for the best in people,” she said. “You can tell me something and I will believe you until I have a good reason to know otherwise.”

That October, not long after Loiselle had first moved in with Martinez, Tingle had profiles on Match and PlentyOfFish. In pictures, she looked toned and tan, with a slender face framed by thick blonde hair. When she got a message from a guy called Andrel Martinez, she recognized him—he was a state trooper she knew of through work. He was also Tingle’s type: a strong personality with a protective side. On their first date, he seemed gentle and funny. When Martinez started dropping by the ambulance station with a cup of coffee or a Butterfinger bar, Tingle was flattered. Her best friend and fellow EMT, Jackie Marshall, recalls him showing up “pretty much every shift.”

“I always look for the best in people,” Karen Tingle said.MELISSA JELTSEN

They dated casually for almost a year, Tingle said, although they sometimes went for extended periods without seeing each other. Tingle attributed this to the demands of Martinez’s job, but whenever she pressed for more commitment, he told her he wasn’t ready, she said. Then one day in the summer of 2012, Tingle was killing time between calls when a colleague said she’d heard Martinez had gotten a woman pregnant. Apparently, they were having a baby shower the very next day. The co-worker, who asked not to be named, said Tingle was visibly stunned. Tingle later learned that the rumor was true and that the woman’s name was Sarah Loiselle.

Martinez didn’t deny the pregnancy, Tingle recalled, but told her that it happened after a one-night stand and that he hardly even knew Loiselle. Tingle stopped seeing him, but said they started dating again about six months after the baby was born. Almost immediately, Tingle got pregnant.

They were separated for most of Tingle’s pregnancy. During this period, she was crushed to learn that Loiselle hadn’t been a random hookup at all. She and Martinez had dated seriously, even lived together—and now they seemed to be seeing each other again. And yet after Martinez and Loiselle broke up for the last time, Tingle decided to forgive him. She didn’t want to raise another child alone and she thought Martinez would be a good father. She started living in the house he’d once shared with Loiselle in the winter of 2013. Days before Christmas, Tingle gave birth to a girl we’ll call Kate, with Martinez by her side.

But Loiselle remained a constant presence in their lives. Tingle recalled Martinez telling her that his ex-girlfriend was a “vindictive female” who was making up vicious lies in order to take his child. She was moved by how relentlessly he was fighting for Jasmine—Loiselle must be a real piece of work, she thought. Her mother, Janice Arney, was outraged, too. “He led us to believe that Sarah was a horrible mother, and he was trying, through the court system, to get [Jasmine] away from her,” Arney said. Once, Tingle recalled, Martinez had gone into a Walmart while she stayed in the car. After he came out, Tingle said, they were still in the parking lot when Martinez got a tip-off on his phone from a police dispatcher: Loiselle had just called the cops on him. (Loiselle said she heard about this from Martinez himself, who bragged to her that he had “friends who look out for him.” The dispatcher and the Delaware State Police declined to comment.)

One day in January 2014, two state police officers showed up at the house to tell Martinez he was being suspended with pay and had to turn over his gun and badge immediately. Tingle couldn’t understand what was happening, although she suspected it must have something to do with Loiselle. Still, she did her best to keep things normal. Martinez, an enthusiastic cook, whipped up steaks or Cuban sandwiches for family dinners. But in March, the couple were driving to pick up Tingle’s oldest daughter, who we'll call Kristen, when a police minivan loomed behind them, lights flashing. In Tingle’s recollection, Martinez pulled over to let the van pass but it stayed on him. He stopped the car, got out and learned that he was being arrested. By the time Tingle got home, it was full of police searching for evidence.

Martinez was charged with harassment and felony stalking, as well as 60 counts stemming from his DELJIS searches of Loiselle and others, according to a criminal complaint. Still, Tingle stood by Martinez: As far as she was concerned, Loiselle was crazy. Four days later, Martinez was placed on suspension without pay and benefits. He was at home all the time. That was when, Tingle said, his temper got worse.

A few months after his arrest, he cornered Tingle against a wall and punched through it next to her head, she said. It was the first time he’d done anything like that, and when he promised it would never happen again, she believed him. She didn’t feel like she could abandon him when he was under such terrible stress—and she badly wanted Kate to have a father. That spring, they moved out of Martinez’s place and into her home on the corner of her parents’ farm to save money. Her mother bought a tricycle for the kids; the family sometimes roasted weenies at a firepit by a small pond. In June 2014, at a clerk of the peace, Tingle and Martinez got married.

On a dreary Friday earlier this year, Mark Wynn was pacing in front of a group of police officers and prosecutors in a hotel ballroom in Portland, Oregon. He’d warmed up the audience with a few well-worn jokes in his mellow drawl, and now he was getting to the tricky part. “This can be kinda weird. Stay with me now,” he said. “This, in my mind, is who people of policing are.” He reeled off a list of characteristics that officers are encouraged to master—to control their emotions, to interrogate when suspicious, to match aggression when challenged, to dominate when threatened. These hard-won habits were “a good thing,” he reassured the group. But they could also “super-charge” abusive officers. “You got an offender in the ranks—man, you got a mess on your hands,” he concluded. “Because they now are using what you gave them to be a better abuser, no question about it.”

Police officers can find their instincts hard to turn off when they leave the station—a phenomenon known as “authoritarian spillover.” Seth Stoughton, an assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina, still finds himself slipping into “cop mode,” although he hasn’t been a police officer in more than a decade. When he was still on the force, Stoughton once became convinced his wife was lying about a big scratch on their car. “Let me be clear, I interrogated her using a number of the techniques I had learned as a cop,” he said. “It was not a good scene.” It also turned out that he was wrong, and to this day, the memory makes him uneasy. (His wife, Alisa, said she “felt very attacked and uncomfortable. I had never seen that side of Seth before.”)

Because police are trained to use a continuum of force that starts with non-physical tactics and ends with lethal violence, behavior that seems routine to them can be terrifying for family members. Punching or grappling, for instance, might only rank a 5 or a 6 on the use-of-force scale, wrote Ellen Kirschman in a book for law enforcement families called I Love A Cop. But for family, yelling might feel like a four and pushing could be a 7. One study of more than 1,000 Baltimore police officers found that officers with stronger authoritarian attitudes—such as a need for “unquestioning obedience”—were more likely to be violent toward a partner.  

Since the late 1990s, Mark Wynn has focused on exposing the problem of abusive police officers.Courtesy of Mark Wynn

Wynn is careful to emphasize that police work doesn’t turn people into abusers. He has come to believe that the most dangerous offenders are those who enter the force with abusive tendencies, which are intensified by the job and the power that comes with it. Officers learn “command presence”—how to control a situation by physically and verbally projecting strength. They are taught to dominate suspects with precise techniques like digging into a pressure point or locking a wrist. They possess access to databases and other resources that can be used to facilitate abuse—license plate data, for instance, could be used to closely monitor a person’s travel patterns. They may even be capable of locating a person if she changes her name or social security number. An abusive police officer, said David Thomas, the IACP consultant, is “a master manipulator with a Ph.D.”

“So the question is, ‘Do we break the code?’” Wynn asked his audience. Over the years, he’d come across numerous cases of officers protecting their own—arriving at court in uniform to intimidate a victim, driving by the house of a colleague’s wife to report on her movements. But the urge to shelter a fellow officer, he cautioned, isn’t necessarily sinister. He recalled once assigning a detective to investigate abuse allegations against a colleague. The detective looked at the file and blanched: The officer in question had saved his life, twice. Wynn knew what that meant. He put another detective on the case.

One potential solution is to establish a mandatory procedure to be followed when an officer is accused of abuse, covering everyone from the responding officer to the chief. “You cannot treat this case like any other case,” said Wynn, who has been lobbying police chiefs since 1999 to adopt a policy developed by the IACP. And yet most departments don’t have such a protocol. (The Delaware State Police wouldn’t comment on whether it has one.) Ultimately, Wynn believes that the most effective solution of all is to screen prospective police officers for any history of domestic violence or sexual misconduct. He also advises departments to check whether they have protective orders anywhere they’ve lived or worked. Still, many of the chiefs Wynn talks to remain skeptical of his proposals, he said: “They say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t happen here. We’ve never had that problem.’”

The first time Tingle tried to get help was on September 9, 2014. Driving home from a dinner date, the couple had started arguing in the car. Their accounts of what happened next diverge radically. According to Martinez, Tingle hit herself and threatened to report him to the police. But in Tingle’s telling, Martinez grabbed her hair and struck her face into the dashboard and then the passenger window, causing a sharp stab of pain. She asked him to let her out, at first calmly and then frantically. He refused and started recording her on his phone, locking the doors. She screamed and banged on the window, waving at other cars for help. About the only thing they agree on is that he recorded her.

A driver of a nearby white Ford truck, Michael Gustin, noticed the commotion inside the car. He recalled watching in shock as a woman climbed out of the window at a stop light. Tingle ran over and asked Gustin if he could take her to the closest police station, he said—“in distress, like, in a panic.” He recalled that her face looked swollen and bruised and that she said her husband had hit her. Gustin drove her to the Seaford Police Department. When they arrived, he said, Martinez was already there.

Tingle ran into the station with her husband right behind her. Before she could do anything, she said, Martinez identified himself as a state trooper. According to the brief description in a domestic incident report, Tingle said Martinez had struck her head on the dashboard—behavior categorized as “offensive touching.” Martinez was allowed to leave.

One of the photographs taken by Tingle's friend, Jackie Marshall.COURTESY OF KAREN TINGLE

After the police brought Tingle home, her friend Jackie Marshall, who’d been babysitting, took a few photos. In one, a large bruise is visible on the side of Tingle’s face. “I told her that day that she was going to end up dead if she didn’t do something about it,” Marshall said.

Martinez was never arrested or charged. When asked why, a spokesperson for the Seaford Police Department said the case was referred to the state attorney general’s office, which has to approve or cooperate with the arrest of a police officer. However, Carl Kanefsky, a spokesperson for the Delaware Department of Justice, said there was no such requirement and that it was the Seaford Police Department which determined that criminal charges couldn’t be sustained.

About a week after the incident in the car, there was also a major development in Martinez's case with Loiselle. In a plea deal, prosecutors dropped dozens of charges, including the one for felony stalking. In exchange, Martinez pleaded guilty to two counts of illegally obtaining criminal history. “It was the judgment of experienced prosecutors, including those who prosecute domestic violence cases, that there wasn’t enough evidence to proceed on all of those counts,” said Kanefsky.

By this point, Tingle wanted to leave Martinez. She just didn’t know how. Most of all, she worried that if she broke up with him, he would take Kate away from her. So she simply tried to stay out of his way.  On November 6, the couple got into a fight in Tingle’s bedroom. Tingle said she picked up 10-month-old Kate and was walking away when Martinez grabbed a heavy lamp off the bedside table, pulling his arm back as though he was going to hit her. Instead, she said, he dropped the lamp and grabbed her by the throat. While she was still clutching Kate, he pushed her into the bathroom by the neck.

Tingle couldn’t breathe, she said: “I thought I was getting ready to die, and so was [Kate].” She recalled the bathroom sink digging into her back and the sound of Kate screaming while she tried not to drop her. Martinez’s face was right up in hers and she wet herself. “I have never seen a look in someone’s eyes that evil before in my life, and I hope I never see it again,” she said.

Somehow, she said, she managed to knee Martinez and make it back into their room. When Martinez shut himself inside the bathroom, she said, Tingle hastily placed Kate in the carrier and ran for the car. She had only driven five minutes down the road when Martinez called. ‘You forgot something,’” she recalled him saying and then it hit her: Fourteen year-old Kristen was still in the house.

So she went back. When she walked in the door, Martinez took her phone, keys and wallet, she said, and told her she wasn’t going anywhere. She didn’t attempt to call the police. Martinez had told her once that if they tried to arrest him again, he wasn’t going, Tingle said, and she was afraid of what he meant by that. So she put Kate to sleep and told Kristen to stay in her room and keep the door closed. Then she got into bed next to Martinez.

The following day, Martinez had to leave the house to pick up Jasmine and Tingle acted as though she was going to work as usual, putting on her uniform and doing her hair. As soon as he drove away, she collected Kristen from school and went to the state police in Bridgeville. On the way, she texted Martinez and told him the relationship was over. He replied:

At the station, she told a detective what had happened. The probable cause affidavit notes that red marks were visible on her neck. As photos were taken for evidence, she was flooded with relief. She arrived home that evening just as Martinez was being led away by police—he had come to the house, despite her texts, to cook hot dogs with Jasmine. Martinez was charged with strangulation, second-degree unlawful imprisonment, menacing, endangering the welfare of a child and malicious interference with emergency communications. The police left Jasmine with Tingle. And that was how Tingle and Loiselle met late that night—when Tingle brought Loiselle her sleepy daughter. By then, Tingle’s head was aching and she was too exhausted to really talk.

But the two women spoke in the coming days. Loiselle would only call Tingle from a restricted number at first, because she was worried that Tingle might go back to Martinez. Slowly, though, they peeled back the layers of their stories. Tingle dug up her online dating emails from Martinez going back to 2011, when Loiselle had just moved in with him, and they discovered the extent of his deception. Loiselle had known for a while that Martinez had a new wife and another baby—but she had no idea that he’d been entangled with Tingle for nearly the whole time she’d known him. Tingle, for her part, was taken aback to find Loiselle so friendly and big-hearted—nothing like the unhinged woman Martinez had described. For the first time, both women realized, they had found someone who believed their story, every word.  

Andrel Martinez discussed his case for around half an hour on the phone earlier this year. He didn’t seem remotely defensive or guarded; in fact, he could be funny, even charming. Occasionally, he punctuated his narrative with a rueful chuckle, as if to say: Can you believe this? His story, he observed, had become like “something out of a Tom Clancy novel.”   

He’d lost his job in March 2015, after his DELJIS credentials were revoked. That June, he also accepted a plea deal in the strangulation case. In 45 states, including Delaware, strangulation is classified as a felony. It is one of the most reliable predictors of a future homicide in domestic violence cases—but it is also notoriously hard to prosecute and often reduced to a lower charge in a plea bargain. Martinez pleaded no contest to assault in the third degree, a violent misdemeanor. The judge suspended the one-year prison sentence for a year of probation on the condition that Martinez had no contact with Tingle or her children.

On the phone, Martinez had a ready explanation for just about everything. Loiselle, he explained, was a “controlling” girlfriend. She had started making allegations because he had sought equal custody of Jasmine, he said, describing one of the protective orders she’d sought as “frivolous” and “false.” As for Tingle, Martinez said she’d invented accusations of violence. “She hit herself and then said, ‘I’m going to tell the police you did it,’” he said, letting out a high-pitched laugh.” He referenced cellphone recordings of Tingle that he said supported his version of events but had been withheld by the state in legal proceedings. (His previous attorney has also said in court that Martinez has “multiple recordings” of Loiselle that disprove her stalking claims.) On several points, Martinez’s accusations mirrored those of both women. In a written document from one proceeding, Martinez accused Loiselle of berating him, threatening him, forcibly taking their daughter from him, driving by his residence and questioning his friends. He, too, expressed disappointment in the authorities’ response. “I was a good cop,” he said. “[I] tried to understand both sides of the story before I acted, and I felt like that was never given to me.”

Martinez after his arrest.DSP

Over and over, Martinez emphasized his devotion as a dad. In court documents, he admits to using DELJIS “in an effort to check into the safety and welfare of [my] daughter.” He elaborated on his thinking on the phone. “I’m going through a custody dispute where I was threatened. The cop instinct came out in me to be vigilant upon myself, to be vigilant upon my kids,” he explained. “[But] I never used anything from [DELJIS] other than peace of mind and perhaps knowing, ‘Hey, I can put that face with a name now if I’m approached in public.’” The whole experience had taught him a huge lesson, he said: He had picked the wrong women. “You don't let the devil into your house that easily,” he said. Near the end of the call, he stated, “I don't feel I was the aggressor in any sense of the entire situation.” (Some time afterward, he tried to take our conversation off the record.)

We went to extensive lengths to investigate Martinez’s claims. Martinez wouldn’t share the recordings he mentioned. Kanefsky, the Delaware justice department spokesman, said prosecutors “were not provided nor did they ever hear any such recording.” The state police declined to comment on extensive questions and are not required to release internal investigative files. Martinez said he couldn’t provide more information because he is still involved in legal proceedings: In a suit against the state police, he claims he was subjected to harsher punishment because he is Hispanic, alleging that people involved in the DELJIS investigation and others had made racist comments. (The Delaware State Police rejected these claims in a court filing.) His attorney responded to a detailed list of questions by saying simply: “Mr. Martinez disputes the accuracy of all statements made by your sources.”

We also contacted Martinez’s family and a number of his friends. Gordon Smith is a local father’s rights activist who made headlines several years ago after his ex-wife was arrested for fabricating domestic violence allegations (she eventually pleaded guilty to falsely reporting an incident.) He recalled that Martinez had reached out to him around the time of his first arrest. Smith was sympathetic: Domestic violence was real, he explained, but it had become a “cottage industry” in Delaware, where it could be used to “get an upper hand in a divorce custody battle.” Smith admitted he was “definitely surprised” when he learned that more than one woman had accused Martinez of abuse. Still, he felt his friend was treated unfairly at the DELJIS hearing, which he attended. “Having the two individuals [Loiselle and Tingle] sitting there, in my opinion, prejudiced the whole thing,” Smith said. (Martinez’s mother spoke in his defense at the hearing but declined to comment for this story.)

“What about some police courtesy?” Martinez asked. “Aren’t I still a police officer?”

Loiselle and Tingle’s stories have remained consistent—in months of interviews with us, in pages of court documents, in police reports when the incidents occurred. We also discovered additional instances where Martinez’s behavior was called into question. In July 2015, his parole officer observed that Martinez was “covertly recording” a home visit. The next week, he was caught attempting to smuggle an Olympus digital voice recorder into the probation office in his waistband. (It was recording at the time, according to a court document.) Another incident occurred at the visitation center where Loiselle and Martinez were supposed to exchange their daughter, using separate entrances and under staff supervision. Martinez was about to return Jasmine to Loiselle when he said he was going to take her to the emergency room instead because she had a diaper rash. The trooper who had escorted Loiselle to the center had known Martinez for more than 10 years. He advised him he would be arrested for violating a court order if he left with Jasmine. “What about some police courtesy?” Martinez asked him, according to the trooper’s report. “Aren’t I still a police officer?” The trooper reminded him he’d been suspended.

Both women were disappointed with the outcome of the various cases, but prosecutors did appear to pursue the charges against Martinez aggressively. DELJIS, too, moved quickly after Lewis reported her concerns. Peggy Bell, the organization’s executive director, declined to comment on specifics, but emphasized it was rare for officers to lose database access: Only one or two a year have their credentials permanently revoked. (Bell herself said she won’t even look up an address to send an officer a bereavement card.)

We also spoke to one officer who was familiar with Martinez’s case. He was not authorized to talk on the record, so he met for lunch, arriving in uniform at a restaurant. He said he had become “very concerned why this guy wasn’t being dealt with a little more forcefully by the state police.” It seemed to him that Martinez was “manipulating the system” and that the police “doubted the victims and made him a victim.”

The officer was clearly troubled—not just by this case but by its implications. Law enforcement needed to be more aware of the effects of emotional abuse, not just physical harm, he observed. He talked about how police possess a unique authority and trust that could be wielded against a victim in destructive ways. “They call domestic violence [and] rape a crime of power,” he said. But “the ultimate power” was the ability to arrest someone. “And the way the state police are viewed in this state?” he added. “We’re viewed very well.”

After he left, the waitress remarked that at the restaurant, they loved their police officers.

Earlier this year, Karen Tingle was living in an isolated village on a mountain, a long way from her former home. After Martinez accepted the plea deal in the summer of 2015, Tingle kept noticing strange things. She found tracks through the corn field next to her home. She was followed by a vehicle she didn’t recognize. After writing a panicked email to her state representative, Tingle was granted a meeting with the Delaware attorney general, Matt Denn, who ordered Martinez to be fitted with an ankle bracelet as an additional condition of his probation and approved funding for a security system in Tingle’s home.

But the strange things didn’t stop. In September of that year, Tingle showed up at the Bridgeville police barracks. Her “face was red, eyes watery and blood shot [sic] and she had tears coming from her eyes,” Corporal M. Sammons wrote in an affidavit. He described watching Tingle hand another officer “a red card with a message to a wife from Hallmark. Inside the card it was signed 'CUNT' and also had a picture of a child with a message written on it: 'DEAD MISTAKE.'” The child in the photo was Kate.

Sammons requested the GPS data from Martinez’s ankle bracelet, which showed he hadn’t been to Tingle’s house. This, Sammons wrote, “does not prove he did not have someone deliver [the card] on his behalf.” A few months later, a grand jury indicted Martinez for felony stalking. The charge, which requires proof of at least three incidents, was eventually dropped: Kanefsky, the Delaware justice department spokesman, cited the evidence that Martinez “was not in locations requisite to prove the stalking charge.” He also noted that “the evidence was not necessarily at odds with the victim’s version of events.” To Martinez, this episode was just another example of how the system had failed him. “I went 14 months with a GPS on my leg facing felony charges, and it seemed like she was just going every month to the police station,” he said. “All kinds of shit...and then the state dismissed the case. Crazy.”  As for Tingle, the state relocated her in late 2016 under a confidential program it uses in limited cases for witnesses or victims who need protection.

Tingle left her home in Delaware after a number of unsettling incidents.MELISSA JELTSEN

When we visited her, a thick blanket of snow covered the ground and the roads were slippery with black ice. We talked in the spacious living room of her furnished house. It was awkward sitting on other people’s furniture, Tingle remarked from a voluminous blue sectional. Her boyfriend, whom we’ll call Ryan, brought her a grilled ham and cheese sandwich. Tingle and Ryan started dating in 2015, some months after she had split with Martinez. Tingle found him kind and strikingly non-judgmental. He’d quickly adopted the role of protector—triple checking that doors were locked, monitoring the vehicles parked outside—and when Tingle moved, he came with her. As we talked, Tingle shifted uneasily on the couch: She was heavily pregnant and it was hard to get comfortable. Kate, now 3, bounced around the living room, giddy to have a guest. They didn’t have many visitors, Tingle explained, because they were trying to keep their location secret. She wouldn’t register her car or most of her bills to her new address. All it would take, Ryan explained, was a court filing accidentally made public, a tag on a social media post, and Martinez could find them.

Tingle has moved again since our visit. She looks after her baby. She waits tables, which seems a long way from the EMT career that once gave her such pride. “I never understood why women stayed after I took them to the hospital beaten to a pulp,” she wrote in a text message. “Now I understand. All those women I thought were stupid, now it’s me.” When she talks about that terrifying final night with Martinez, her voice, already deceptively girlish, is barely audible.

One of her few comforts is her friendship with Sarah Loiselle, who had been placed temporarily in the confidential protection program in 2014 and relocated. She, too, has since moved again. Loiselle doesn’t really like to talk about the precautions she takes to keep her location secret, although she has enrolled Jasmine in a federal program that would alert her if Martinez ever tried to get their daughter a passport.  

Sarah Loiselle and Karen Tingle.COURTESY OF KAREN TINGLE

Their friendship is an unlikely one. Tingle is one year older, but she views Loiselle as a kind of big sister. To her, Loiselle is elegant and well-dressed while she was raised on a farm and looks it. Loiselle admits that she is more direct and outspoken. “I’m not that type of person,” Tingle said, adding quietly: “Maybe I don’t stand up for myself.” She solicits Loiselle’s advice on everything—how much baby aspirin to give a teething child, how to deal with lawyers. (After we started reporting this story, Martinez moved to seek joint custody of both Jasmine and Kate.)  

For the past two years, Tingle, Loiselle and their daughters have all met up to celebrate Jasmine’s birthday. On one visit, after a full day of celebration and cake, the women sat outside as the night closed in and Tingle felt safe and happy. She considered moving somewhere near Loiselle so their improbable family could be together more often. Loiselle argued against it. She wanted Tingle and her daughters to be closer, too. But she thought it was far too risky for all of them to live in the same place, just like “sitting ducks.” And so the women went back to their new lives and kept on trading little jokes and updates on their jobs and kids and ups and downs—pretty much anything but Martinez. On a recent day, Tingle opened a Snapchat message from Loiselle. “Wish you were here,” it read, over a photo of an empty beach.

This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

1

The first thing Dr. Amy Goldberg told me is that this article would be pointless. She said this on a phone call last summer, well before the election, before a tangible sensation that facts were futile became a broader American phenomenon. I was interested in Goldberg because she has spent 30 years as a trauma surgeon, almost all of that at the same hospital, Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia, which treats more gunshot victims than any other in the state and is located in what was, according to one analysis, the deadliest of the 10 largest cities in the country until last year, with a homicide rate of 17.8 murders per 100,000 residents in 2015.

Over my years of reporting here, I had heard stories about Temple’s trauma team. A city prosecutor who handled shooting investigations once told me that the surgeons were able to piece people back together after the most horrific acts of violence. People went into the hospital damaged beyond belief and came walking out.

That stuck with me. I wondered what surgeons know about gun violence that the rest of us don’t. We are inundated with news about shootings. Fourteen dead in San Bernardino, six in Michigan, 11 over one weekend in Chicago. We get names, places, anguished Facebook posts, wonky articles full of statistics on crime rates and risk, Twitter arguments about the Second Amendment—everything except the blood, the pictures of bodies torn by bullets. That part is concealed, sanitized. More than 30,000 people die of gunshot wounds each year in America, around 75,000 more are injured, and we have no visceral sense of what physically happens inside a person when he’s shot. Goldberg does.

Even though Amy Goldberg has been treating gun patients for 30 years, the sense of horror has never completely gone away. On the cover: A bullet she keeps in her office. She pulled it out of a patient's heart during her residency.

She is the chair of Temple’s Department of Surgery, one of only 16 women in America to hold that position at a hospital. In my initial conversation with her, which took place shortly after the mass shooting in Orlando, where 49 people were killed and 53 injured by a man who walked into a gay nightclub with a semi-automatic rifle and a Glock handgun, she was joined by Scott Charles, the hospital’s trauma outreach coordinator and Goldberg’s longtime friend. Goldberg has a southeastern Pennsylvania accent that at low volume makes her sound like a sweet South Philly grandmother and at higher volume becomes a razor. I asked her what changes in gun violence she had seen in her 30 years. She said not many. When she first arrived at Temple in 1987 to start her residency, “It was so obvious to me then that there was something so wrong.” Since then, the types of firearms have evolved. The surgeons used to see .22-caliber bullets from little handguns, Saturday night specials, whereas now they see .40-caliber and 9 mm bullets. Charles said they get the occasional victim of a long gun, such as an AR-15 or an AK-47, “but what’s remarkable is how common handguns are.”

Goldberg jumped in. “As a country,” Goldberg said, “we lost our teachable moment.” She started talking about the 2012 murder of 20 schoolchildren and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Goldberg said that if people had been shown the autopsy photos of the kids, the gun debate would have been transformed. “The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead. Ten-year-old kids, riddled with bullets, dead as doornails.” Her voice rose. She said people have to confront the physical reality of gun violence without the polite filters. “The country won’t be ready for it, but that’s what needs to happen. That’s the only chance at all for this to ever be reversed.”

She dropped back into a softer register. “Nobody gives two shits about the black people in North Philadelphia if nobody gives two craps about the white kids in Sandy Hook. … I thought white little kids getting shot would make people care. Nope. They didn’t care. Anderson Cooper was up there. They set up shop. And then the public outrage fades.”

Goldberg apologized and said she wasn’t trying to stop me from writing a story. She just didn’t expect it to change anything.

2

The hospital’s main building is a nine-story tower on North Broad, the street that traces a north-south line through Philadelphia. If you think of Broad as the city’s spinal column, the hospital is about level with the heart. Stand on the sidewalk outside the hospital and look south on a clear day and you can see the pale marble and granite of City Hall, about 4 miles away, near Philly’s pelvis.

You can go to Temple for high-end elective surgery, like getting a knee replacement or a heart transplant, same as at any other major teaching hospital in the country. As Jeremy Walter, Temple Hospital’s amiable director of media relations, reminded me more than once, “Temple isn’t just a hospital that treats drug addicts and gun victims.” Still, it was founded 125 years ago by a Samaritan to provide free care, and that public-service mission persists. Some of the most violent blocks in the city are within a 4-mile radius of the hospital, and crime victims funnel in.

I first met Goldberg one weekday last summer, in the hospital lobby. I had arranged to stay and observe for 24 hours, accompanied every moment by Walter, who carried a trauma pager and a yellow folder of consent forms. The rule was that I could observe a surgery if the patient or a family member consented, and if I wanted to do an interview, the patient had to sign a form. Goldberg is 5 feet 2 inches tall, with a runner’s build. She wore a gray mock-turtleneck sweater with no sleeves. Her hair is short and there was a little gel in it that made it spiky. She explained that there are two main categories of trauma: blunt and penetrating. Blunt trauma is like a beating, a fall. Penetrating is a gun or stab wound. “Unfortunately we get a lot of penetrating traumas,” she said. Temple sees 2,500 to 3,000 traumas per year, around 450 of which were gunshot wounds in 2016.

The trauma pager buzzed shortly after noon. LEVEL 1 PED, it said—a pedestrian struck by a car. I followed Goldberg to the ER, and she disappeared behind a windowless set of double doors, into the trauma resuscitation area. A few moments later she emerged and waved me inside.

The trauma unit at Temple University Hospital, in a rare moment of calm.

The trauma area is a rectangular room with three bays, each of which can accommodate two patients side by side when it’s busy. It’s an organized place—there are small trays on wheels for different surgical procedures, each tray holding a particular complement of instruments—but the tubes and cables snaking from poles and machines make it feel a bit chaotic to the untrained eye. The goal of a trauma surgeon is to limit the amount of time that a patient spends in a trauma bay, to stabilize the patient until he can be transferred for a CT scan or to the OR for surgery. The temperature in the room feels about five degrees hotter than in the rest of the hospital. The air doesn’t seem to move.

The pedestrian was awake but silent. This concerned Goldberg because by all rights he should have been screaming in pain. He looked to be in his late 20s. He had black hair and his shirt had been removed. He spoke Spanish. There was a laceration above his right eye and a small amount of blood on the sheets near his head. Goldberg and about 20 other doctors and nurses in blue scrubs clustered around him, checking vital signs, asking questions. Goldberg wore purple latex gloves. She tapped lightly on the patient’s left forearm with one hand. The arm was broken.

“No dolor?” she asked in Spanish. No pain? He shook his head. “Really?” she said. “No?”

Goldberg walked over to another doctor and said, “So are you troubled by the fact that he’s not screaming? He has an arm that’s so freaking broken and he’s not screaming.” She frowned. “I’m troubled by that.”

The patient’s vital signs appeared stable but Goldberg was worried about internal bleeding. A lack of pain could indicate a hidden injury. He needed a CT scan.

Staff wheeled the patient out of the trauma unit and into a nearby procedure room for the scan. Goldberg took off her latex gloves and threw them in a biohazard trash can. Two police officers had been observing from a distance with pens in hand and notepads open. One of the cops, a large man with a buzzcut, got Goldberg’s attention by saying, “Doc.”

“I’m Goldberg.”

The officer asked what the police should put down in their report for the patient’s condition. She said critical. This has been Goldberg’s policy for years, she explained to me as she exited the trauma bay and walked down a hallway toward the CT scanner. “I always make the patients critical until I know they’re fine. It’s a jinx thing.”

Goldberg is superstitious. On days when she’s on call, she shaves her legs. She can’t say why, she just started doing it years ago and now she will not deviate. She’s been wearing the same style of tan Timberlands for 15 years; her current pair, given to her by a colleague when she became chair of surgery, has the Temple logo inked on the heels. She parks her gray BMW in the same spot every time. “It’s so hard to take care of patients without making mistakes that you need every edge.” She recently hired a sports psychologist to talk to the residents about strategies for peak performance. Visualization. Positive self-talk. Breathing. For most of her career, she has stopped at the same Dunkin’ Donuts to order a large coffee with cream and two Sweet‘N Lows. A few years ago, the store stopped carrying Sweet‘N Low so she bought a box and left it there; they keep it under the counter for her. “It’s pink,” she told me once. “Sweet‘N Low is pink, Equal is blue, Splenda is yellow. And that is how you have to build a good system, believe it or not. So nobody makes a mistake.”

Goldberg, a superstitious sort, has been wearing Timberlands on the job for 15 years.

In the hallway next to the ER, she opened a door and I followed her into a small darkened room where six young doctors sat at computers. A window looked into the bay next door that held the CT scanner. “Billie Jean” played at low volume from a tinny speaker. Goldberg watched through the window as staff moved the patient from his gurney onto the bed of the machine. He cried out. Goldberg said, “That seems more appropriate.” Now they gave him some pain medicine. She looked at me and winced. “He has a broken humerus. I mean, you can feel it.” She streaked the thumb of her right hand against her fingers. “It’s one of my least favorite injuries. You can feel the bones rubbing together.” The CT scan showed some clotted blood in the patient’s head, appearing on the screen as patches of white. Goldberg ordered some additional scans.

When a shooting comes across the trauma pager, the code is GSW. There were no GSWs that night, only assaults. One patient was an older man who had been beaten up and complained of stomach pain. Another had been stabbed in the abdomen during a fight. His assailant was brought in too, in handcuffs, a white-haired man in a red T-shirt, his left eye bloodied and swollen shut.

The injuries weren’t life-threatening. Goldberg attended to the patients in the trauma unit. When she wasn’t there, she went on rounds, taking the elevator up to the eighth and ninth floors to check in with patients recovering from earlier traumas. She walked fast from one place to the other and I would lose her sometimes behind corners and doors and she’d have to double back for me. These are busy shifts even when there aren’t a lot of fresh traumas coming in. During a down moment Goldberg mentioned that she was thinking about scaling back her call schedule now that she’s chair of surgery, with large administrative and educational responsibilities. “I’ve been doing this 30 years,” she said. “Do I need to be on call? Do I need to do Saturdays?”

The pager stayed quiet overnight and through late morning, when Goldberg’s call shift ended. I arranged to return and shadow her again on her next shift, in two days. I left the hospital before lunch. The following morning the trauma pager blew up. LEVEL 1 GSW TO CHEST. LEVEL 1 MULTIPLE GSW TRANSFER FROM EPISC (Episcopal Hospital). LEVEL 1 SECOND GSW MALE.

3

Goldberg didn’t know much about guns or gun violence until she got to Temple. She grew up in the quiet Philadelphia suburb of Broomall. Her father owned a dairy business in the city, her mother was a schoolteacher. She was an intense kid who really believed the religious ideas she was learning at Jewish summer camp “in a big, bad way.” When she was 11, she woke up to see a light through her window and feel a tremor underfoot, and she wondered if it was God’s doing.

She went on to study psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. She particularly loved anatomy. “It’s a miracle,” she told me. “The creation of a person, you know. It’s the heart beating and the lungs bringing air. It is so miraculous.” Surgery, for Goldberg, was a way of honoring the miracle. And trauma surgery was the ultimate form of appreciation, because a surgeon in trauma experienced so much variety. She might be operating on the carotid artery in the neck, or the heart in the chest, or the large bowel or small bowel in the abdomen, or the femoral artery in the thigh, at any given moment, on any given night.

In her first or second year of residency at Temple, when she was in her mid-20s, she helped treat a young boy who had been shot in the chest by his sibling who picked up a loaded gun that was lying around. The doctors couldn’t save him. The senselessness made her so angry. Goldberg listened as a senior resident informed the boy’s mother. “I’m sorry,” the resident said, “he has passed.” The mother didn’t react; she didn’t seem to understand what she had just heard. Goldberg spoke up. “He died. We’re so sorry. He died.” It was a lesson: Be direct. “You have to find a very compassionate way of being honest,” she said.

“You think you know what happens here? Because I thought I knew. But there’s nothing that can prepare you.”

She finished her residency in 1992 and decided to stay at Temple, and the feeling of wrongness only intensified. There was a teenage boy in August 1992 who was shot in the heart. His heart stopped beating. Goldberg revived it. He lived. But some weeks later he came in again, with a shooting injury to his brachial artery, in the upper arm. He almost bled out, almost died again, but the surgeons got him back, again. “And then of course the third time he came in, he was shot through the head, and he was dead,” Goldberg said.

She started thinking that Temple should find a way to intervene—to try to talk to patients while they’re in the hospital so they would never need to come back. But she didn’t have the authority yet. She was just a trauma surgeon, a good one, and getting better. She had good hands and good judgment and a methodical approach to the craft. And as five years stretched into 10, and 10 into 20, Goldberg built up a deep well of experience in doing the things that are necessary to save the lives of gun victims, the things that are never shown on TV or in movies, the things that stay hidden behind hospital walls and allow Americans to imagine whatever they like about the effects of bullets or not to imagine anything at all. “You think you know what happens here?” Scott Charles asked me. “Because I thought I knew. But there’s nothing that can prepare you for what bullets do to human bodies. And that’s true for pro-gun people also.”

The main thing people get wrong when they imagine being shot is that they think the bullet itself is the problem. The lump of metal lodged in the body. The action-movie hero is shot in the stomach; he limps to a safe house; he takes off his shirt, removes the bullet with a tweezer, and now he is better. This is not trauma surgery. Trauma surgery is about fixing the damage the bullet causes as it rips through muscle and vessel and organ and bone. The bullet can stay in the body just fine. But the bleeding has to be contained, even if the patient is awake and screaming because a tube has just been pushed into his chest cavity through a deep incision without the aid of general anesthesia (no time; the patient gets an injection of lidocaine). And if the heart has stopped, it must be restarted before the brain dies from a lack of oxygen.

It is not a gentle process. Some of the surgeon’s tools look like things you’d buy at Home Depot. In especially serious cases, 70 times at Temple last year, the surgeons will crack a chest right there in the trauma area. The technical name is a thoracotomy. A patient comes in unconscious, maybe in cardiac arrest, and Goldberg has to get into the cavity to see what is going on. With a scalpel, she makes an incision below the nipple and cuts 6 to 10 inches down the torso, through skin, through the layer of fatty tissue, through the muscles. Into the opening she inserts a rib-spreader, a large metal instrument with a hand crank. It pulls open the ribs and locks them into place so the surgeons can reach the inner organs. Every so often, she may also have to break the patient’s sternum—a bilateral thoracotomy. This is done with a tool called a Lebsche knife. It’s a metal rod with a sharp blade on one end that hooks under the breastbone. Goldberg takes a silver hammer. It looks like—a hammer. She hits the top of the Lebsche knife with the hammer until it cuts through the sternum. “You never forget that sound,” one of the Temple nurses told me. “It’s like a tink, tink, tink. And it sounds like metal, but you know it’s bone. You know like when you see on television, when people are working on the railroad, hammering the ties?”

“It’s just the worst,” Charles told me. “They’re breaking bone. And everybody—every body—has its own kind of quality. And sometimes there’s a big guy you’ll hear, and it’s the echo—the sound that comes out of the room. There’s some times when it doesn’t affect me, and there are some times when it makes my knees shake, when I know what’s going on in there.”

Some of the simple tools surgeons employ in the trauma bay, including the Lebsche knife and silver hammer used to break the sternum while opening chest cavities.

Now the chest is open, and Goldberg can work. If the heart has stopped, she can try to get it beating again. This may involve open cardiac massage—literally holding the heart in her hands and massaging it to get blood flowing up to the brain again. If there’s bleeding in the cavity, she can control it by putting a metal clamp on the heart or on the lung. She can also clamp the aorta, the largest artery in the body, so that instead of the blood going down into the bowels, where it’s needed less, the blood goes up to the brain.

“These crossing bullets are just so challenging,” she said. “Where is the injury? Is it in the chest? Is it in the abdomen? You’re down there, looking, and sometimes you find it, and sometimes you don’t. And sometimes it just really hurts as you work your way through.” She meant that it hurts when patients suffer. Hurts them and hurts her.

There are some gun victims who die quickly, right there in the trauma bay, or soon after being transferred up to the OR. Others develop cascades of life-threatening complications in the following days that surgeons race to manage.

Goldberg said she saw a movie a few years ago that captures what it’s like to operate under these conditions. It was a documentary about the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped underground for months in 2010. “They interviewed them all. And the miner that had the hardest time down there was the youngest guy. Not the oldest guy. It was the youngest guy. And they said, why? Why did you have such a hard time? And he said, God and the Devil were with me.” Goldberg thought that was perfect. “That’s what I had been searching for, for years, in how you feel in the operating room. God and the Devil are with you. You start a case. A young person. Shot. They come in talking. You go upstairs. They have this devastating injury. The Devil. You suck. You’re gonna kill this guy. You call yourself a good trauma surgeon. You’re the worst. And you just plow ahead and plow ahead and plow ahead. You find what’s injured. You control it. God. Oh, you are the best. You’ve done a great job. Then you’re working. You find another injury you didn’t expect. You suck, you suck, you suck.”

During trauma surgery, tissue in the lower extremities can die, causing gangrene, in which case surgeons might have to amputate the leg at higher and higher points, first at the shin, then at the knee, then at the thigh.

It’s possible for a surgeon to get distracted by the wrong wound. The most dangerous wounds don’t always look the worst. People can get shot in the head and they’re leaking bits of brain from a hole in the skull and that’s not the fatal wound; the fatal wound is from another bullet that ripped through the chest. One patient a few years ago was shot in the face with a shotgun at close range over some money owed. He pulled his coat up over his mangled face and walked to the ER of one of Temple’s sister hospitals, approaching a nurse. She looked at him. He lowered the coat. The nurse thought to herself what you might expect a person to think in such a situation: “Daaaaaamn.” He was stabilized, then transferred to Temple. He lived.

The price of survival is often lasting disability. Some patients, often young guys, wind up carrying around colostomy bags for the rest of their lives because they can’t poop normally anymore. They poop through a “stoma,” a hole in the abdomen. “They’re so angry,” Goldberg said. “They should be angry.” Some are paralyzed by bullets that sever the spinal column. Some lose limbs entirely. During trauma surgery, when the blood flow is redirected to the brain and heart by an aortic clamp, blood goes away from other areas, and tissue in the lower extremities can die, causing gangrene, in which case surgeons must amputate the leg at higher and higher points, first at the shin, then at the knee, then at the thigh, to stay ahead of the necrotic tissue as it spreads. The femur bone may have to be disarticulated—removed entirely from the socket, and discarded. There was a woman several years ago whose boyfriend shot her in the leg. The bullet clipped the femoral artery and she bled. Goldberg was on call that day. She had to amputate the woman’s legs to save her life. “I’m so haunted by that,” she said.

Eighty percent of people who are shot in Philadelphia survive their injuries. This statistic surprises people when they hear it. They tend to think that when people get shot in the belly or the chest or the face, they die. But the reality is that people get shot and then they are going to survive, because trauma surgeons are going to save them, and that’s when the real suffering begins.

4

Rafi Colon was shot once in the abdomen with a 9 mm handgun during a home invasion in September 2005. The bullet tore through his intestines. Trauma surgeons at Temple had to open his abdomen to repair the injuries, but fistulas developed, holes that wouldn’t heal, and until they healed, the incision couldn’t be closed. He spent the next 11 months in the hospital, immobilized in bed, with an open wound down the front of him that had the circumference of a basketball. It got to the point where it was a normal thing for him to look down and think, oh, those are my intestines, there they are.

“It became second nature,” he told me recently over lunch at a Panera Bread in the Philly suburbs. “It wasn’t like a gruesome thing.” The holes in his intestines leaked stomach acid and burned away the surrounding tissues and skin, leaving less skin available to eventually stretch over the wound and close it. Colon learned to sop up the excess acid from his exposed intestines with gauze pads and later with a machine that sucked the acid through a tube. When his friends came to visit, they had a hard time looking at him. He messed with them once by asking a buddy to get him a Rita’s water ice, Philadelphia’s version of a snow cone. He knew what would happen when he ate it. The water ice was red, the Swedish Fish flavor from that summer, and 30 seconds after he swallowed it, the red water ice came oozing out of the hole in his intestine. His friends bolted.

Over the course of his long recovery, from the fall of 2005 into the spring and summer of 2006, Colon got a feel for the rhythms of the Trauma Service. Lying there in the bed, he occupied himself by counting the number of times each day that trauma codes were announced over the PA system. It seemed like the busiest times were Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. He’d ask the doctors, how many yesterday, was it 17? “They’d say, ‘No, 18.’” He could tell when the residents were stressed out by how many Diet Cokes they drank. There were days when the doctors were so busy with fresh traumas that they didn’t make rounds until 7 or 8 at night. “They would say, ‘Yeah, it was a busy day.’ I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I heard.’”

Rafi Colon in his stairwell at home. Though his neck and stomach scars are still visible years after being shot, he can't terrify friends with his water ice trick anymore.

It ultimately took 14 surgeries to repair the damage done by one bullet. Temple’s surgeons stretched his abdominal wall closed with the help of some muscle from another part of his body and an artificial mesh. If you see Colon today, the only way you can tell he was wounded is that he walks with a minor tilt; he calls it “my Keyser Söze limp.”

Goldberg was part of the team of doctors who cared for him. They talked about muscle cars and sports. (She liked the Eagles; his team was the Giants.) He remembers that she was the doctor who would notice when he was feeling despair and let him eat a little something that the nurses wouldn’t necessarily allow, like a small chip of ice, or sometimes a piece of candy. He couldn’t eat normally—he was being fed intravenously—but “the fact that I could get a piece of ice, it was like heaven.”

She has gotten more sensitive over the years, she said. When you’re a young trauma surgeon, you’re developing skills, like how to put a bowel back together. Her medical training was all about learning to operate, to recognize the kinds of patterns that she now teaches to students and young doctors. I once saw her give a lecture to 11 medical students who had just completed their surgical rotation. Goldberg diagrammed anatomy and formulae on a whiteboard and asked questions about how the students would diagnose various hypothetical patients. But she also asked the students to share their experiences with patients and their feelings about those cases. One student spoke about stitching together the chest of a young shooting victim who had died after surgeons attempted to resuscitate him in the trauma area; the student’s first thought was that he was excited to practice stitching a chest, then he felt guilty for being excited. Another student recalled being surprised when a patient asked for his business card even though he was just a lowly medical student. “Yeah,” Goldberg said. “He trusted you.”

Often when Goldberg meets a shooting victim, it turns out she once treated a sibling, parent, cousin or friend. “I’m a family doctor, a little bit, because I’ve been here so long,” she said. One day at the hospital, I saw her go on rounds, meeting with patients in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) on the ninth floor. A sign on a bulletin board said WELCOME TO SICU! YOUR HEALING STARTS HERE! The letters were surrounded by gold stars.

Talking to patients seemed to energize Goldberg. She was alternately lighthearted and serious. The patients were uniformly docile and tired. They were on pain medication that slowed their speech. The first patient, shot in the neck, was a young man accompanied by his girlfriend, who sat next to him on the bed with an expression of concern. “When I was shot, I fell on my face,” he said. The second patient was older. A tube to drain fluids was snaking out of his chest. He held out a trembling left hand and smiled. “A little bit of the shakes,” he said. Goldberg told the man he was scheduled to be released the following Monday. He had been caught in some kind of crossfire. “We will miss you,” Goldberg said, “but there comes a day.”

“Cut the umbilical cord, huh?” he said, and laughed softly.

Goldberg descended to the eighth floor to meet with another gun victim. She knocked on his door and said hello in her friendly voice. There were two large men inside the room in T-shirts and shorts. She assumed they were his family, but when she entered, the men rushed over to her and said that the patient was a suspected shooter himself. They were plainclothes cops, guarding him.

“I don’t want to know,” she said. “It’s better if I don’t know.”

She went over to the side of the patient’s bed as the cops watched and said she was Dr. Goldberg and she wanted to explain what was happening and help him if he needed anything.

He looked young. He seemed afraid. There was an open wound in his chest, a vertical incision from below his nipples to his belly button, rising and falling with his breath. Surgeons had needed to remove one of his kidneys, his spleen and part of his stomach to repair the damage of the bullet and save his life. After the surgery the tissue swelled, which happens sometimes, and they couldn’t immediately stitch the incision closed, so they had to leave it open. The edges of the wound were pink and raw.

Goldberg reached out and held his left hand in her hand while telling him what organs he’d lost.

“You don’t need your spleen. You do need your kidney,” she said. “But luckily, God gave us two.”

He nodded slightly. She asked how he was feeling. All he said was, “Pain.”

Goldberg said they would try to help with that and rubbed her fingers across his hand in a gesture of tenderness.

Gunshot victim Lamont Randell, shot twice during a robbery, begins his long recovery process.

5

The key distinction for Goldberg isn’t innocent or guilty, it’s rational or irrational. Gun violence is irrational, there’s no pattern to it. Police statistics show that shootings decrease in the cold winter months and pick up when the weather warms, but any given trauma shift in the winter can be busy and any shift in the summer perfectly quiet.

Goldberg has always found the senselessness of violence frustrating, and when she was promoted to chief of trauma 15 years ago, she started thinking about how to engineer some control, to help patients “above and beyond just being a trauma surgeon.” She imagined a comprehensive approach to prevent shootings and keep patients from showing up in a trauma bay in the first place. She knew this would involve talking to people in the community, but she also knew she was a flawed messenger. “Who’s going to listen to this white Jewish girl say that guns in the inner city aren’t good for you? Nobody’s going to listen to me say that. I wouldn’t listen to me.” She went looking for help, and found Scott Charles.

A big, energetic guy with glasses and a master’s degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, Charles has been working to reduce youth violence since 1988. When he was growing up in Sacramento, two of his older brothers were shot and his sister committed suicide with a gun, and at 19 one of his best friends was shot and killed. He moved to Philadelphia when his sociologist wife got hired by Penn, and two years later, he joined a nonprofit that designed service-learning projects in public schools. Some of his students from North Philly started collecting the stories of families who had lost children to gun violence, which is how Charles made the connection to Goldberg—Temple had treated one of the victims, Lamont Adams, a 16-year-old from North Philly who was shot and killed in 2004 after a false rumor was allegedly spread about him.

Goldberg hosted a tour for Charles and his students, inviting them into the trauma unit and explaining what gun patients experience there. She was immediately impressed by the way he dealt with the kids. She told him she’d create a new outreach position for him at Temple, that she’d get up “in people’s faces” until she made sure it happened.

“She said, ‘Don’t go anywhere else,’” Charles recalled. “‘I’m going to write you a check for one year of your salary. If I don’t get this position for you, you can cash the check, it’s yours, and take another job.’ And I was like—this white lady’s crazy. My wife was like, who’s this lady who keeps calling you at 11 o’clock at night? ‘It’s this crazy doctor.’”

Charles accepted, joining Temple in August 2005, and since then he and Goldberg have developed a suite of ambitious programs in collaboration with other Temple doctors and staff. “The thing that allows us to do so much of this is she carries a big stick,” Charles said. “Who was going to get in her way?”

There are three programs aimed at preventing violence before it happens. Cradle to Grave is an expansion of that first tour Charles took at Temple. He brings groups of kids and adults into the trauma area and shows them how surgeons save gun patients. He has his own copies of the various surgical instruments for demonstration purposes, removing them from a travel bag: chest tube, rib-spreader, hammer, Lebsche knife. He introduces the visitors to Goldberg if she’s available. He tells the story of Lamont Adams, asking a volunteer to pretend to be Lamont and then placing a circular red sticker on the location of each of Lamont’s 24 bullet wounds (entry and exit). On his chest. His abdomen. His thigh and arms. And most disturbing of all, the two bullet wounds on his hand, a sign that Lamont was trying to shield his face from the bullets at close range.

Charles also runs the Fighting Chance program, a series of training sessions for community members, where doctors show people in neighborhoods how to give first aid to gunshot victims, to apply tourniquets and stop blood loss in the seconds immediately following a shooting, before the EMTs or police arrive. Recently, Charles has also become a sort of Johnny Appleseed of gun locks, handing them out to parents who want to keep their children from getting hurt in accidents. He keeps boxes of them at the hospital and distributes the locks with no questions asked. Sometimes he lugs them to subway stations and offers them to commuters.

When Goldberg first saw Scott Charles talk to a group of children, she knew she needed him on her team.

That’s prevention. Temple has also created an intervention component, called Turning Point, where shooting victims get extra counseling while they’re still in the hospital. “They come in, they’re very scared,” Goldberg said. “‘Am I gonna die? Where’s my Mom?’ Then, as soon as they would recover, they would not be so scared anymore, which maybe wasn’t good.” So if a victim is between 18 and 30 years old, he’s offered a series of supports in addition to the usual visits with Charles and a social worker. Temple asks the patients if they want to talk to a trauma survivor. And they are given an opportunity to view a video of their own trauma-bay resuscitation. (The surgeries in the trauma area are videotaped for quality control.) About half say yes. Charles shows them the video. They get psychological counseling for any PTSD symptoms, as well as case management services to help them get high-school diplomas or jobs.

Turning Point was initially controversial within the hospital. Some doctors thought it was cruel to show patients videos of their own surgeries, especially patients who had done nothing wrong. But Goldberg argued that she wasn’t judging anyone’s past or even asking about it. “The only way I know how to deal with a problem is, let’s break it down. Let’s try to educate,” she said.

Breaking it down has involved doing science. Goldberg and her team have needed to gather data about questions that have never been rigorously answered, a common situation when it comes to gun violence. For instance, when a paramedic first finds a gun or stabbing victim, nobody knows if it’s better to administer IV fluids and put a tube down the victim’s throat on the spot, or if the medic should simply race the victim to the hospital. Trauma surgeons have long suspected that the latter option is preferable—most shooting victims actually arrive at Temple in the back of police cruisers, a practice the cops call “scoop and run”—but there has never been a long-term randomized study.

So Temple launched one. It’s called the Philadelphia Immediate Transport in Penetrating Trauma Trial (PIPT), an elaborate undertaking that has involved close coordination with emergency personnel and also dozens of community meetings where doctors explained how the study works (over the next five years, some victims of penetrating trauma will receive immediate transport and some won’t) and how people can opt out of the study (by wearing a special wristband). In that same spirit, Goldberg has been gathering data on the Turning Point program. For years, patients have been randomized into a control group and an experimental group. One group gets typical care and the other gets Turning Point, and then patients in both groups answer a questionnaire that quantifies attitudes toward violence.

In November the hospital published its first scientific results from Turning Point, based on 80 patients. According to Temple’s data, the Turning Point patients showed “a 50% reduction in aggressive response to shame, a 29% reduction in comfort with aggression, and a 19% reduction in overall proclivity toward violence.” Goldberg told me she was proud of the study, not only because it suggested that the program was effective, but also because it represented a rare victory over the status quo. Turning Point grew out of her experience with that one patient in 1992, the three-time shooting victim who died the third time. It took her that long to get the authority, to gather the data, to get it published, to shift the system a little bit.

Twenty-four years.

6

Each time I went to the hospital, I asked Goldberg what else was going on with her aside from work. She usually talked about running. She likes to run along the Schuylkill River while listening to music and thinking about nothing at all. She competes in a few half-marathons a year.

I never learned much about Goldberg’s personal life. She lives alone in an apartment in Center City. She has a rowing machine there and access to a treadmill in the building’s gym. Her religious faith is still strong—it’s not that she goes around talking about it, she told me, it’s just that she has worked for 30 years in trauma and seen a lot of death, and it’s hard to do that and not feel something about God. I noticed one day she was wearing a white Lokai bracelet, a ring of plastic capsules said to contain mud from the Dead Sea and water from Mount Everest. “The highs and the lows, to stay even-keeled,” she said. “I probably need 10 of them, five on each hand.”

The major non-running events in her life tend to be awards ceremonies. She has reached the point in her medical career where people gather and say nice things about her, and there are plates of olives and prosciutto. Her med-school alma mater, Mount Sinai in New York, recently invited her to give a special lecture at Grand Rounds, a hallowed medical tradition. On March 16 Temple threw a party for her “investiture,” a ceremony where she passed from being merely the chair of surgery to being the George S. Peters MD and Louise C. Peters Chair in Surgery. Endowed chairs at universities are a big deal. Past colleagues from all over the country came to speak about her qualities. One compared her to Teddy Roosevelt’s famous Man in the Arena, “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood … who spends himself or herself in a worthy cause.” (“Herself” is not actually a part of Roosevelt’s quote, but the guy modernized it for Goldberg.) She gave a brief acceptance speech focusing on the importance of teamwork to medical excellence. She said she used to dream about being a sports coach, and now she’s coaching the next generation of surgeons. As she once put it to me, “One of us can’t give perfect care. But together, maybe, we can give perfect care.”

In a perverse way, the more efficiently Goldberg does her job inside the hospital, the more invisible gun violence becomes everywhere else.

One of the speakers at the investiture called Goldberg a “realistic idealist,” and when I saw her later, she said she’d been thinking about the phrase. At first it surprised her that people saw her that way, but she realized it captured something true. “When I get angry, and hurt,” she told me, “it’s because I can still be a little naïve.” Even after all this time, the sense of horror she first experienced as a resident treating gun patients has never completely gone away.

One evening when I was at the hospital, I saw what she meant. Two shooting victims came in, a man and a woman, about two hours apart, and were quickly patched up. The man was shot twice, in a wrist and a thigh—four holes, not life-threatening. The woman was shot once in the thigh with a small entry wound but no exit wound—a stray bullet that struck her while she was walking down the street. In the trauma bay, the surgeons taped a paper clip over the entry wound so they could identify that spot on the X-ray. Goldberg wheeled the monitor over to show me the X-ray image: paper clip and bullet. “Very small,” she said, pointing to the slug, “like a .22.” As so many other patients do, the patient asked the trauma surgeons if they were going to take the bullet out, and the surgeons explained that they fix what the bullet injures, they don’t fix the bullet.

They left the wound open to prevent infection and put a dressing on it. “We’ll probably send her home tonight,” Goldberg said. “Isn’t that awful?”

She meant it as a strictly human thing. There’s no medical reason for a patient to be in a hospital longer than necessary. The point was the ridiculousness of the situation. A woman gets shot through no fault of her own, she comes to the hospital scared, and if she’s OK, Goldberg says, “It’s like, here, take a little Band-Aid.” The woman goes home, and for everyone else in the city, it’s as though the shooting never happened. It changes no policy. It motivates no law. In a perverse way, the more efficiently Goldberg does her job inside the hospital, the more invisible gun violence becomes everywhere else.

Which is why she pours so much of herself into the outreach programs, the scientific studies and any other method she has of finding control and making the problem visible. Then, as always with Goldberg, there’s call. “We care,” she told me once. “We’re gonna be here. We’re gonna be here. We’re gonna be here, and then you know what, we’re still gonna be here. And then we’re still here. That kind of thing.”

The last time I saw Goldberg, I was eating breakfast in the hospital’s basement cafeteria, one corridor away from the morgue where bodies are kept, pending transport. It was at the end of a relatively quiet overnight call shift in late March. She walked in with a coffee, looking calm and fresh. The forecast showed rising temperatures. The crust of snow on the sidewalks would soon melt, the days would lengthen, people would leave their houses to enjoy the weather. Spring was coming, and the shootings would pick back up.