“A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” That old saw is now hopelessly out of date.
These days, a malicious falsehood can become global news in a matter of seconds, especially if it contains suggestions that pants might have come off. Human beings love to share shocking gossip, and internet technology means that we can do so at terrifying speed and scale.
Social media now resembles the lower-rent tabloids of old, rife with fantastical pieces about aliens or sex slaves and the occult
Take, for instance, the incredible tale of the feline JPMorgan executive who “sexually harassed” a junior male staff member. As the world knows by now, Lorna Hajdini, a 37-year-old Albanian in the bank’s leveraged finance division, has been accused of repeatedly forcing herself on a married Asian employee, apparently drugging him with Viagra and Rohypnol in order to turn him into her “office sex slave.” She allegedly humiliated him racially, too, calling him “my little brown boy” and using her seniority to have her wicked way.
The sordid details read like the AI-written script for a cheap adult movie. “I bet your little Asian, fish head, wife doesn’t have these cannons,” said Hajdini, apparently, having removed her shirt. “If you don’t f–k me soon, I’m going to ruin you,” she also allegedly told him, when he resisted her advances.
It is, of course, palpable nonsense. Who could possibly believe that an Albanian 30-something would use the word “cannons” in that context? The story is taken from a clearly hysterical New York lawsuit. And an investigation from JPMorgan Chase found the allegations were based on no reliable evidence. Hajdini says she hasn’t even visited one of the places where she allegedly assaulted her victim. “Lorna categorically denies the allegations,” her lawyers said in a statement. “She never engaged in any inappropriate conduct with this individual of any kind.”
The Hajdini case is in fact a perfect example of the abuse of “litigation privilege.” A complainant can make almost any claim, never mind how untrue, into a lawsuit and then be immune from legal counterclaims because a legal suit is protected from libel or defamation. If the accuser is caught directly leaking the allegations to a journalist, he can be sued. But nefarious lawyers usually find a sly way to leak the information, thus causing massive reputational harm to the accused without fear of repercussions. It’s a grubby business.
But beyond the obvious calumny, what’s fascinating about this story is how the broader public couldn’t refrain from spreading such titillating rubbish. The veracity hardly matters, and anyone with a social media account – that is, almost everyone – probably saw the story yesterday because it had been so widely shared.
Social media is warping our conceptions of truth in ever more radical ways. We now increasingly live in an online surreality, and we have become simultaneously credulous and disbelieving of everything. The effect is that social media now resembles the lower-rent tabloids of old, rife with fantastical pieces about aliens or sex slaves and the occult.
The difference is that whereas once people might have turned their noses up at the National Enquirer or the Daily Star, now almost everyone willingly suspends their disbelief and shares the trashy material. Because, unless you happen to be the Lorna Hajdini figure in the story, it’s entertaining. After a day or so, the less sensational truth emerges, but by then everyone has moved on to the next ridiculous story or generated so many memes that the fantasy has taken on a kind of folkloric status. In such a climate, real scandals – the hard-to-follow machinations of our corrupt leaders – tend to pass us all by unnoticed.
This article originally appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
Comments