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The price of shame | Monica Lewinsky | TED — Transcript

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0:12You're looking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade.
0:18Obviously, that's changed,
0:20but only recently.
0:22It was several months ago that I gave my very first major public talk,
0:27at the Forbes "30 Under 30 Summit" --
0:301,500 brilliant people, all under the age of 30.
0:35That meant that in 1998, the oldest among the group were only 14,
0:41and the youngest, just four.
0:44I joked with them that some might only have heard of me from rap songs.
0:50Yes, I'm in rap songs.
0:52(Laughter)
0:53Almost 40 rap songs.
0:56(Laughter)
0:58But the night of my speech, a surprising thing happened.
1:02At the age of 41, I was hit on by a 27-year-old guy.
1:08(Laughter)
1:09I know, right?
1:12He was charming, and I was flattered,
1:14and I declined.
1:17You know what his unsuccessful pickup line was?
1:20He could make me feel 22 again.
1:23(Laughter)
1:27(Applause)
1:30I realized, later that night,
1:32I'm probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be 22 again.
1:38(Laughter)
1:41(Applause)
1:47At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss.
1:52And at the age of 24,
1:55I learned the devastating consequences.
1:59Can I see a show of hands of anyone here
2:02who didn't make a mistake or do something they regretted at 22?
2:09Yep. That's what I thought.
2:12So like me, at 22, a few of you may have also taken wrong turns
2:18and fallen in love with the wrong person,
2:21maybe even your boss.
2:24Unlike me, though,
2:26your boss probably wasn't the president of the United States of America.
2:30(Laughter)
2:31Of course, life is full of surprises.
2:35Not a day goes by that I'm not reminded of my mistake,
2:40and I regret that mistake deeply.
2:45In 1998, after having been swept up into an improbable romance,
2:52I was then swept up into the eye of a political, legal and media maelstrom
2:57like we had never seen before.
3:01Remember, just a few years earlier,
3:03news was consumed from just three places:
3:07reading a newspaper or magazine,
3:09listening to the radio
3:11or watching television.
3:12That was it.
3:14But that wasn't my fate.
3:18Instead, this scandal was brought to you
3:21by the digital revolution.
3:24That meant we could access all the information we wanted,
3:27when we wanted it, anytime, anywhere.
3:32And when the story broke in January 1998,
3:37it broke online.
3:39It was the first time the traditional news was usurped by the internet
3:44for a major news story --
3:47a click that reverberated around the world.
3:52What that meant for me personally
3:54was that overnight, I went from being a completely private figure
4:00to a publicly humiliated one, worldwide.
4:05I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale
4:11almost instantaneously.
4:15This rush to judgment, enabled by technology,
4:18led to mobs of virtual stone-throwers.
4:21Granted, it was before social media,
4:24but people could still comment online,
4:28e-mail stories,
4:29and, of course, e-mail cruel jokes.
4:34News sources plastered photos of me all over
4:38to sell newspapers, banner ads online,
4:41and to keep people tuned to the TV.
4:45Do you recall a particular image of me, say, wearing a beret?
4:53Now, I admit I made mistakes --
4:56especially wearing that beret.
4:58(Laughter)
5:00But the attention and judgment that I received --
5:02not the story, but that I personally received --
5:06was unprecedented.
5:08I was branded as a tramp,
5:12tart,
5:13slut,
5:15whore,
5:17bimbo,
5:18and, of course, "that woman."
5:22I was seen by many,
5:24but actually known by few.
5:28And I get it: it was easy to forget
5:31that that woman was dimensional,
5:34had a soul
5:36and was once unbroken.
5:41When this happened to me 17 years ago, there was no name for it.
5:46Now we call it "cyberbullying" and "online harassment."
5:52Today, I want to share some of my experience with you,
5:55talk about how that experience has helped shape my cultural observations,
6:01and how I hope my past experience can lead to a change
6:04that results in less suffering for others.
6:09In 1998, I lost my reputation and my dignity.
6:15I lost almost everything.
6:19And I almost lost my life.
6:25Let me paint a picture for you.
6:29It is September of 1998.
6:32I'm sitting in a windowless office room
6:35inside the Office of the Independent Counsel,
6:39underneath humming fluorescent lights.
6:42I'm listening to the sound of my voice,
6:46my voice on surreptitiously taped phone calls
6:50that a supposed friend had made the year before.
6:54I'm here because I've been legally required
6:57to personally authenticate all 20 hours of taped conversation.
7:04For the past eight months, the mysterious content of these tapes
7:09has hung like the sword of Damocles over my head.
7:12I mean, who can remember what they said a year ago?
7:17Scared and mortified, I listen,
7:22listen as I prattle on about the flotsam and jetsam of the day;
7:27listen as I confess my love for the president,
7:31and, of course, my heartbreak;
7:34listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self
7:40being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth;
7:45listen, deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself,
7:51a self I don't even recognize.
7:56A few days later, the Starr Report is released to Congress,
8:00and all of those tapes and transcripts, those stolen words, form a part of it.
8:06That people can read the transcripts is horrific enough.
8:11But a few weeks later,
8:14the audiotapes are aired on TV,
8:16and significant portions made available online.
8:22The public humiliation was excruciating.
8:26Life was almost unbearable.
8:33This was not something that happened with regularity back then in 1998,
8:38and by "this," I mean the stealing of people's private words, actions,
8:43conversations or photos,
8:46and then making them public --
8:48public without consent,
8:51public without context
8:53and public without compassion.
8:57Fast-forward 12 years, to 2010,
9:01and now social media has been born.
9:04The landscape has sadly become much more populated with instances like mine,
9:09whether or not someone actually made a mistake,
9:13and now, it's for both public and private people.
9:18The consequences for some have become dire, very dire.
9:26I was on the phone with my mom in September of 2010,
9:30and we were talking about the news of a young college freshman
9:34from Rutgers University,
9:36named Tyler Clementi.
9:38Sweet, sensitive, creative Tyler was secretly webcammed by his roommate
9:44while being intimate with another man.
9:48When the online world learned of this incident,
9:51the ridicule and cyberbullying ignited.
9:56A few days later,
9:58Tyler jumped from the George Washington Bridge
10:01to his death.
10:03He was 18.
10:07My mom was beside herself about what happened to Tyler and his family,
10:12and she was gutted with pain
10:14in a way that I just couldn't quite understand.
10:18And then eventually, I realized she was reliving 1998,
10:24reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night,
10:30reliving -- (Chokes up)
10:31sorry -- reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom door open,
10:37and reliving a time when both of my parents feared
10:41that I would be humiliated to death,
10:43literally.
10:48Today, too many parents haven't had the chance
10:52to step in and rescue their loved ones.
10:55Too many have learned of their child's suffering and humiliation
10:58after it was too late.
11:02Tyler's tragic, senseless death was a turning point for me.
11:06It served to recontextualize my experiences,
11:10and I then began to look at the world of humiliation and bullying around me
11:14and see something different.
11:18In 1998, we had no way of knowing
11:21where this brave new technology called the internet would take us.
11:26Since then, it has connected people in unimaginable ways --
11:30joining lost siblings,
11:32saving lives,
11:34launching revolutions ...
11:37But the darkness, cyberbullying, and slut-shaming that I experienced
11:41had mushroomed.
11:44Every day online, people -- especially young people,
11:49who are not developmentally equipped to handle this --
11:52are so abused and humiliated
11:55that they can't imagine living to the next day.
11:58And some, tragically, don't.
12:01And there's nothing virtual about that.
12:04Childline, a UK nonprofit that's focused on helping young people on various issues,
12:11released a staggering statistic late last year:
12:15from 2012 to 2013, there was an 87 percent increase
12:22in calls and e-mails related to cyberbullying.
12:26A meta-analysis done out of the Netherlands
12:29showed that for the first time,
12:31cyberbullying was leading to suicidal ideations
12:36more significantly than offline bullying.
12:40And you know, what shocked me -- although it shouldn't have --
12:43was other research last year
12:45that determined humiliation was a more intensely felt emotion
12:51than either happiness or even anger.
12:56Cruelty to others is nothing new.
13:00But online, technologically enhanced shaming is amplified,
13:05uncontained
13:07and permanently accessible.
13:11The echo of embarrassment used to extend only as far as your family, village,
13:16school or community.
13:19But now, it's the online community too.
13:22Millions of people, often anonymously, can stab you with their words,
13:27and that's a lot of pain.
13:29And there are no perimeters around how many people can publicly observe you
13:34and put you in a public stockade.
13:39There is a very personal price to public humiliation,
13:45and the growth of the internet has jacked up that price.
13:52For nearly two decades now,
13:53we have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation
13:58in our cultural soil, both on- and offline.
14:03Gossip websites, paparazzi, reality programming, politics,
14:08news outlets and sometimes hackers
14:12all traffic in shame.
14:14It's led to desensitization and a permissive environment online,
14:19which lends itself to trolling, invasion of privacy and cyberbullying.
14:25This shift has created what Professor Nicolaus Mills calls
14:29"a culture of humiliation."
14:32Consider a few prominent examples just from the past six months alone.
14:38Snapchat, the service which is used mainly by younger generations
14:43and claims that its messages only have the life span of a few seconds.
14:47You can imagine the range of content that that gets.
14:51A third-party app which Snapchatters use to preserve the life span of the messages
14:56was hacked,
14:58and 100,000 personal conversations, photos and videos were leaked online,
15:04to now have a life span of forever.
15:08Jennifer Lawrence and several other actors had their iCloud accounts hacked,
15:13and private, intimate, nude photos were plastered across the internet
15:17without their permission.
15:18One gossip website had over five million hits
15:23for this one story.
15:26And what about the Sony Pictures cyberhacking?
15:30The documents which received the most attention
15:33were private e-mails that had maximum public embarrassment value.
15:40But in this culture of humiliation,
15:42there is another kind of price tag attached to public shaming.
15:47The price does not measure the cost to the victim,
15:50which Tyler and too many others --
15:52notably, women, minorities and members of the LGBTQ community --
15:57have paid,
15:59but the price measures the profit of those who prey on them.
16:05This invasion of others is a raw material,
16:08efficiently and ruthlessly mined, packaged and sold at a profit.
16:15A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity,
16:21and shame is an industry.
16:25How is the money made?
16:27Clicks.
16:29The more shame, the more clicks.
16:31The more clicks, the more advertising dollars.
16:37We're in a dangerous cycle.
16:39The more we click on this kind of gossip,
16:42the more numb we get to the human lives behind it.
16:46And the more numb we get, the more we click.
16:51All the while,
16:52someone is making money off of the back of someone else's suffering.
16:58With every click, we make a choice.
17:01The more we saturate our culture with public shaming,
17:04the more accepted it is,
17:06the more we will see behavior like cyberbullying, trolling,
17:11some forms of hacking
17:13and online harassment.
17:15Why? Because they all have humiliation at their cores.
17:23This behavior is a symptom of the culture we've created.
17:27Just think about it.
17:30Changing behavior begins with evolving beliefs.
17:34We've seen that to be true with racism, homophobia
17:37and plenty of other biases,
17:39today and in the past.
17:42As we've changed beliefs about same-sex marriage,
17:45more people have been offered equal freedoms.
17:49When we began valuing sustainability,
17:52more people began to recycle.
17:55So as far as our culture of humiliation goes,
17:58what we need is a cultural revolution.
18:02Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop,
18:06and it's time for an intervention on the internet and in our culture.
18:11The shift begins with something simple,
18:13but it's not easy.
18:15We need to return to a long-held value of compassion,
18:20compassion and empathy.
18:23Online, we've got a compassion deficit,
18:25an empathy crisis.
18:29Researcher Brené Brown said, and I quote,
18:32"Shame can't survive empathy."
18:36Shame cannot survive empathy.
18:42I've seen some very dark days in my life.
18:46It was the compassion and empathy from my family, friends, professionals
18:53and sometimes even strangers
18:54that saved me.
18:57Even empathy from one person can make a difference.
19:02The theory of minority influence,
19:04proposed by social psychologist Serge Moscovici,
19:08says that even in small numbers,
19:10when there's consistency over time,
19:13change can happen.
19:15In the online world, we can foster minority influence
19:19by becoming upstanders.
19:21To become an upstander means instead of bystander apathy,
19:25we can post a positive comment for someone or report a bullying situation.
19:30Trust me, compassionate comments help abate the negativity.
19:35We can also counteract the culture by supporting organizations
19:39that deal with these kinds of issues,
19:41like the Tyler Clementi Foundation in the US;
19:44in the UK, there's Anti-Bullying Pro;
19:47and in Australia, there's PROJECT ROCKIT.
19:52We talk a lot about our right to freedom of expression.
19:58But we need to talk more about our responsibility
20:01to freedom of expression.
20:04We all want to be heard,
20:06but let's acknowledge the difference between speaking up with intention
20:11and speaking up for attention.
20:15The internet is the superhighway for the id.
20:19But online, showing empathy to others benefits us all
20:24and helps create a safer and better world.
20:27We need to communicate online with compassion,
20:30consume news with compassion
20:33and click with compassion.
20:36Just imagine walking a mile in someone else's headline.
20:43I'd like to end on a personal note.
20:47In the past nine months,
20:49the question I've been asked the most is "Why?"
20:52Why now?
20:53Why was I sticking my head above the parapet?
20:57You can read between the lines in those questions,
20:59and the answer has nothing to do with politics.
21:03The top-note answer was and is "Because it's time."
21:09Time to stop tiptoeing around my past,
21:12time to stop living a life of opprobrium
21:15and time to take back my narrative.
21:18It's also not just about saving myself.
21:23Anyone who is suffering from shame and public humiliation
21:26needs to know one thing:
21:29You can survive it.
21:32I know it's hard.
21:34It may not be painless, quick or easy,
21:38but you can insist on a different ending to your story.
21:42Have compassion for yourself.
21:46We all deserve compassion
21:49and to live both online and off in a more compassionate world.
21:55Thank you for listening.
21:57(Applause and cheers)

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