XX Files
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Washington Post Magazine
Suspended Disbelief
What's the worst thing that can happen to a marriage? Terminal illness? Addiction? An affair that jackhammers through a family's honor and bank account? Or maybe one spouse suddenly announces, "I don't think I ever loved you," evoking memories of rare carnal encounters and the bored sighs they elicited.
No. For my friend, worse happens.
Police come to her door with a devastating allegation about her husband....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/16/AR2009011602424.html
..And a response to the controversy this essay incited:
A Writer’s Diary: When a Controversial Work Unravels
By Wanda Fleming
On January 25, 2009, my essay, Suspended Disbelief appeared in the Washington Post Magazine. The piece recounted the story of a friend whose husband had been accused of molesting an eight year child as she sat on his lap and viewed a movie with family and friends. Nearly a year after the gathering, he would be convicted of not one, but two misdemeanor counts of child sexual abuse. The children were 8 and 10 year old girls.
An error in my piece, and an unwitting but important omission, sparked a firestorm. Incensed, relatives of the girls called the newspaper, submitted angry comments on the newspaper board and sent my husband an inflamed email. Within days, the Magazine submitted a two-line correction. Four weeks later, editor Tom Shroder printed an apology and a letter from one girl’s grandmother.
Since then, I have received numerous inquiries about what actually transpired. These have ranged from the serious and factual, for example, “How many girls was this guy convicted on anyway?” (The answer is two.) to the seemingly banal, such as, “Were these people black? (The answer is “No, none of them.”).
In the aftermath of the publication, I responded to no one other than the Magazine’s editor. After some distance and reflection, here are my answers to the most salient questions:
What was the impetus for the essay?
How well did you know these people?
In my essays, I often grapple with difficult subjects and attempt to place a personal face on them. I view writing as a privilege and seek to be ethical and intelligent in my work.
The impetus for Suspended Disbelief was an account a woman revealed to me in 2007. We had come to know each other through my business which she and her family had begun to patronize. To this day, I have only seen the husband two or three times. And with the exception of salutations, I have conversed with him once, a brief conversation about the weather.
When the wife and I had coffee, she was greatly distressed, and the conversation was emotional and protracted. The details I described were the best of my honest recollection. At the time of our meeting, I was not writing for the Washington Post, and XX Files did not even exist. The story however disturbed me on many levels, and shortly thereafter I began to write the essay.
Suspended Disbelief was submitted to the Washington Post in March 2008 and after light editing, was published in January 2009. While I apprised the family of its pending publication, neither the convicted man nor his wife ever saw the essay until it hit the stands.
What was the message of Suspended Disbelief?
The subheading of the essay presented the message clearly: “Guilty or not, it’s a tragedy.” And ironically, this has once again echoed. For all parties involved, it continues to be a mess of tragic proportions.
The piece neither sought to impugn the honesty of the girls nor exonerate the convicted man. Indeed, I intimated that his innocence was questionable and therefore made me more protective of my own child. Ultimately, I thrust my arm out in an almost feral reaction to his appearance on our porch.
The essay, however, did lay out the consequences of such a charge and the ricocheting effects of incarceration. It asked readers to contemplate the impact on the convict’s marriage and family, particularly if the accused was innocent as he and his family continue to insist. The piece was in effect a tightrope that I sought to walk, but managed instead to tumble from.
What went wrong?
Crimes, particularly deviant ones trigger intense public reaction. Most of us have intractable responses to such matters. We hold firm to our beliefs on how they should be handled and how justice should be meted. In the case of sex crimes, it is common to hear the sentiment, “Cut off the guy’s balls, and send him to an island.” It is also not unusual to hear, “If a guy does his time, the government should stay out of his business.” These reactions stay fixed even when we are not privy to details of individual cases. When writing about such contentious topics, making an error, even unknowingly, encourages the intensification of already deep seated sentiments.
As written in Suspended Disbelief, pressure was indeed placed upon the man and his family to accept plea offers. They were informed that rejecting them might lead to a long prison term. I said the man accepted a plea, but I was wrong. He did not. Convinced that he was innocent, and that such acceptance was tantamount to an admission of guilt, he refused the offers.
There has been some discussion about this error. Did it favor the convict and his family? From their vantage point, ironically, it did not. They were disappointed to see the error for they viewed the plea rejection as suggestive of his innocence.
Others, however, particularly the family of the victims, viewed my error differently. They see the man’s conviction as vital for it points out that an “impartial” party, in this case, a judge in a bench trial, found the man guilty. And indeed they are correct; the case became no longer the girls versus the man. Someone agreed that he did it, and that someone was a Court judge.
The important omission? What was it?
In a 750 word “personal essay,” much is omitted. The literary genre maintains the precarious distinction of demanding an intimate tale from an unwavering personal perch. Many readers have asked me why the newspaper and I were so assailed when the piece was clearly a personal essay based on a coffee shop conversation, not an A section expose. In my reflection on the matter, I believe that the fairest answer is that this situation was less about traditional reporting (for which there is sorely little XX Files space), and more about leaving no stone unturned in the pursuit of facts. This was a delicate case on a very disturbing topic. And in the midst of it, I left a stone unturned.
Since the essay’s publication, I have learned that by the time the case had wound through the judicial system, it had gone from a girl on a lap to two sets of sisters back to two girls. The case moved from a felony to misdemeanors, and bypassed a jury trial to end with a bench trial.
Ultimately, the man was convicted by a judge on the testimony of two girls.
My essay did not mention two girls. It merely mentioned the precipitating event. Would this information have made the man appear guiltier. In the eyes of many, it would have.
The truth about “facts”
The truth about any feature writing, particularly short pieces, is that many known facts never appear in print. In Suspended Disbelief, I took deliberate pains to remove what some writers call “markers” or identifiers. In 2008, my biggest fear was that neighbors, co-workers or friends of any of the characters would recognize the subjects.
In my first versions, the essay detailed the families’ neighborhood and the profession of the convicted man. It described his children and the school where the portrayed victim attended. Hair was flaxen and windows covered with frost. By the time the piece had been submitted, however, no one knew where anyone lived. No one knew what anyone looked like. And the case could have occurred any winter day in Podunk, USA. Still, the family of the featured victim discerned the case and recoiled vehemently. This begs the question, can true anonymity be assured without deliberate fabrications and vaguely sketched composites?
Tied to this is the ongoing skirmish over “facts.” What facts? Whose facts? Which facts should appear in such a piece?
By the time newspaper, had issued the apology and printed the grandmother’s letter, the case appeared to be utterly open and shut. Frankly this is untrue. As the case made its way through the system, statements, stories and scenarios shifted and expanded. Not the least among the most troubling facts was the presence of one victim’s own parent in the same room while the alleged sex abuse occurred. Do this and other unpublicized “facts” vindicate the man? Not necessarily, but they do begin to explain why the convict’s family was aghast and disbelieving.
What now?
From my perspective, as a writer the worst part of this situation has been the realization that I erred in my work. For my error and any omissions, I apologize. Errors erode the veracity of stories. They weaken the reputation of publications, particularly high-profile ones. And they curtail converations that may have been had and that are gravely needed--in this case ones about morality and justice.
As a human being, what is the worst part of this? It’s the constant gnaw that will not leave me, the knowledge that someone in this miasma is lying, and doing so repeatedly, flagrantly, and without remorse. Since that day in the coffee shop, this story has haunted me, not merely because I too have children and a spouse, but because the anger of all parties and the cries of being wronged, are so overwhelming.
“How far into the weeds do you really want to go with this?” a friend and lawyer asked recently.
To uncover the truth? I thought. Pretty far I guess, pretty far.
Wanda E.Fleming
March l7, 2009
This case is now on appeal. I continue to write.
