Writing about Dr. V (A Losing Proposition)

Because the world is what it is and because I live in it, I feel obligated to write a response to the recently published, praised, criticized and now apologized for Grantland piece "Dr. V's Magical Putter" by Caleb Hannan.  Clocking in at around 8,000 words, the piece is the perfect low-culture, high-drama story for a journalistic atmosphere that puts increasing emphasis on the Longformification of news. After all, there can be no think pieces if we have nothing to think about.

As I write my response to this, it should be noted that I am only a journalist in the barest sense of the word. Like Hannan, my reporting has largely been confined to the world of sports. Unlike Hannan, I've never published anything that took up more than a few days of research, much less the seven months he spent reporting this story.

Unlike Hannan (as far as I know), I studied a field (religion) that actively intersects with many issues at play in his piece, namely, privilege, in-groups vs out-groups, patriarchy, oppression and LGBT issues. 

Despite this, like Hannan, I would have been utterly unprepared to report the story he eventually published. 

The gist of the story, if you haven't read it, is that Hannan was inspired to research a new putter he saw pitched on Youtube. The enigmatic Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, inventor of the putter, agreed to let Hannan do a story on her work, on the basis that he focus on the creation and not the creator. 

(In order to avoid doing what Hannan did and exploit the mystery of Vanderbilt for the sake of narrative, I'll say up front that he learns that Vanderbilt is a trans woman.) 

Over the course of his investigation, Hannan discovered that Vanderbilt was not the brilliantly educated inventor that she told him she was. Vanderbilt claimed to be a doctor of physics with degrees from both MIT and Wharton, she did not possess those degrees. Nor did she work on the stealth bomber for the Department of Defense, another one of her claims. 

The "science" that Hannan was ostensibly reporting on turned out to be as scientific as those stupid focus necklaces that baseball players wear. 

This in itself is a pretty good story that would probably have occupied 10 minutes of your average Grantland reader's day.

Hannan didn't stop there.

In addition to uncovering Vanderbilt's phony credentials, Hannan also learned that Vanderbilt was a trans woman, which served to simultaneously explain why he was having so much trouble with his background check and also to "send a chill up his spine." 

Armed with this new information, Hannan tries to flesh out more of Vanderbilt's background. It's certainly chaotic - featuring several lawsuits, out of control finances and a suicide attempt. 

Vanderbilt is undoubtedly duplicitous. She is also a trans woman. These two things are not to be conflated, but the way Hannan writes the story, it sounds like they inevitably must be. 

In his efforts to confront Vanderbilt about this new information, Hannan only served to agitate the inventor. His excitement over his find eventually led to him outing Vanderbilt to an investor.

The story ends with Vanderbilt dead from suicide and Hannan wrapping up his piece rather abruptly, claiming that, "Writing a eulogy for someone who by all accounts despised you is an odd experience." 

This story came across my radar on the day it was published, with many of the sportswriters I follow praising it as a solid piece of reporting. I opened it, but didn't read it, because, well, I don't care about golf that much and I have a job and can't devote all my time to reading 8,000 word articles about a sport I don't follow. 

It came across my radar again a few days later, when the activist side of my feed started tweeting angrily about the story and responding to it. This is when I decided to read it.

Well first, I read a piece that my friend Audrey wrote on Autostraddle. Audrey's critique is relatively even-handed and instructional. She focuses less on the uproar the story caused within the activist community and more on educating people on how to report on trans issues. What I find most admirable about her work is that she manages to communicate a profound sadness that doesn't overwhelm the didacticism of the piece. 

Then I read Josh Levin's piece at Slate, because it had been recommended to me on Twitter. Levin's piece is more of a meditation on ethics and empathy within journalism. When you're in journalism school, you learn a lot about the first and only a little about the second. I remember in an early journalism class (one I shared with Audrey, in fact) being offput by the cavalier way my instructor talked about the subjects of some of her previous stories, as if they were merely performers in a narrative, rather than living human beings. As I understand it (keeping in mind that I have very little newsroom experience), most of the time, empathy is less important that a good story. 

It's through these two lenses that I actually first read Hannan's story. 

As I read, I looked for signs of malicious intent within what Hannan wrote, but I struggled to see it. What I found instead was inexperience, ineptness and a lack of compassion. 

(The paragraph that I just wrote is troubling to me as a human being. Regardless of Hannan's ambitions, his story likely deeply traumatized Vanderbilt and assuredly traumatized many trans people and allies that read it. I should, by all accounts, accept this as justification enough to let the story be what it is and not offer my own commentary. I will never understand what it's like to read this story through the eyes of a trans person, and any observations that I make are so much chaff to the winds of the internet. I have the luxury of writing about it almost dispassionately. 

[I'll confess that my lack of passion {or compassion} for a story in which someone takes their own life probably doesn't bother me as much as it should. Death, even tragic and avoidable death, is an aspect of the human experience that one inherently becomes desensitized to - unless it strikes you in a vulnerable part of your own soul. I don't believe this to be an admirable trait, but it's also probably necessary if you want to function - particularly as a journalist.]

I will say that I have no desire to defend or to vilify Hannan, and I don't know how much of that I can ascribe to my own privilege. Do I, as a young, cis writer, somehow feel a subconscious urge to defend/identify with someone who made several mistakes that I could easily see myself making? 

[Again, this line of questions raises further doubts within me. Is it appropriate for me to even consider my own thoughts and feelings on this story when nothing will change except that maybe my friends on Facebook will be made aware of this controversy? The trauma that the story inflicted will remain, and I will remain incapable of fully processing it.

{Of course, is this line of questioning inherently devaluing of my own contribution <however meager> to the discourse? Should I automatically recuse myself from writing about things just because I can't feel them in the way that others can, or in the way that I would like to?

<We descend down the nautilus further and ask, Does it matter how I feel? Are my thoughts germane to the discourse on any level? Is all of this just an exercise in stupid hubris? This whole exercise sort of makes me feel like I'm being callous in the face of tragedy, and that's not the person I want to be.>}])

I found the following issues with Hannan's piece:

He was clearly trying to tell me something, which is why he began emphasizing certain words. Every time he said “she” or “her” I could practically see him making air quotes. Finally it hit me. Cliché or not, a chill actually ran up my spine.

Hannan's eureka moment is remarkably poorly worded. Not only does the spine chill imagery conjure up a sinister vibe, it's at this point that he (perhaps unintentionally) begins to suggest a correlation between Vanderbilt's gender and her duplicitous business practices.

Here is what I now know about Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, inventor of the Oracle GX1 putter. She was born a boy on July 12, 1953, in Philadelphia. She was given the name Stephen Krol, a person who has not received degrees from MIT or the University of Pennsylvania. She has been married at least twice, and the brother of one of Krol’s ex-wives says Dr. V has two children, possibly more.

This information may be pertinent to Hannan's investigation, but it isn't necessarily pertinent to the story of Essay Anne Vanderbilt, professional huckster. Also, a cursory viewing of any of the style guides for writing about trans people (which, in the wake of this, have been widely tweeted) would have immediately let Hannan know that the phrase "she was born a boy" is not appropriate.

(I am kind of interested to see how the language that we use when we talk about trans people evolves. "She was born a boy" contains an inherent disconnect between pronoun and noun, but functions as a piece of descriptive [if offensive] language. I wonder, as trans people and their stories become more integrated into the mainstream, if the rhetorical edifice that has been created around the group will begin to naturally erode? I suppose not anytime soon, especially as some of the more perverse denizens of the internet seem to take great joy in misusing pronouns solely for the purpose of hurting people. There's also the move toward gender neutral pronouns, which I don't see taking off, for no other reason than that people can't be bothered.)

Things get more complicated from there. Were I Hannan, I would probably have done my best to report the story without outing Vanderbilt or revealing her previous name, but he's already decided on his course of action.

She worked as general manager at Trax Bar and Grill, an LGBT bar in Kent, Washington. She was the subject of three separate harassment claims from her time there, including one from a male coworker who said she made “inappropriate comments about her breasts and genitalia.”

Again, we have a seeming conflation of Vanderbilt's identity with her aberrant behavior. Relating these harassment claims themselves is a bit of an ethical quandary outside of the outing issue. Hannan is clearly painting a picture of an unstable person who is defrauding her investors, but are these misdeeds germane to his story? (I don't think they are, but I also don't think anyone would have attacked Hannan for publishing them if the story had just been about a shady inventor, with no mention of Vanderbilt's trans status.)

Hannan continues with some more pronoun waffling, but seems to be doing his best to use masculine pronouns when referring to Vanderbilt at the time she identified as male and feminine ones when she identifies as female. (Again, style guides say to always use the pronoun that the subject requests, but I don't think Hannan was being deliberately hurtful in this instance.)

The darkest discovery was something that occurred after Krol had decided to live as Dr. V. In 2008, she tried to kill herself with an overdose of prescription drugs and carbon monoxide poisoning from closing herself in a garage with her car running.

What should have been a warning sign to Hannan about the potential destruction that his story could unleash instead turns into another chalk on the "Vanderbilt is Unstable" ledger. Upon realizing the depths of her troubles, he should have tried to find a graceful way to wrap up the story or spiked it.

(I'm not naive enough to believe any editor would spike a story like this.

[Also, this isn't to say that a history of self-destructive behavior is reason enough to stop reporting a story. In this instance, however, Hannan was reporting on what appeared to be a particularly at-risk person from a particularly at-risk group.])

What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself.

Stop doing this, Hannan. Stop equating her deceit with her identity.

Things get even weirder once Hannan backs off of his quest to uncover Vanderbilt's past. He goes back and talks to the investors that he seems to believe he is protecting, and they all seem to like the putter and take no issue with Vanderbilt's fabrications. So this whole expose eventually comes to naught, which could have been a funny ending, if Hannan had just written about his obsessive quest to expose a fraud who didn't actually hurt anyone. Instead, he exposes Vanderbilt's trans status to her investor and provokes her further. Vanderbilt eventually breaks off contact.

Over the course of what was now eight months of reporting, Dr. V had accused me of being everything from a corporate spy to a liar and a fraud. She had also threatened me. One of the quotes I was able to type down during our last conversation was this: “You have no idea what I have done and what I can do.” It’s not all that menacing when transcribed, but her tone made it clear she believed she could harm me. Yet despite all that, the main emotion I felt while reading her desperate, last-ditch email was sadness. Although there were times when I had been genuinely thrilled with the revelation that Dr. V’s official narrative didn’t line up with reality, there was nothing satisfying about where the story had ended up. People had been hurt by Dr. V’s lies, but she was the person who seemed to be suffering most.

Well, no one appeared to have been hurt in any lasting way, and any suffering imposed on Vanderbilt appears to have come from Hannan's prying. How much is related to her being exposed as a fraud and how much is related to her being exposed as trans, I can't say.

This doesn't excuse Vanderbilt's behavior. Had Hannan published the story without outing her to anyone, I would say that she earned any consequences that came her way. When you defraud people and agree to a story about said fraudulent enterprise, I can't blame a journalist for digging.

That's beside the point, though, as we'll never know what would have happened if Hannan had published that version of the piece.

Not long after she sent her email, I got a call from a Pennsylvania phone number that I didn’t recognize. It was Dr. V’s ex-brother-in-law, who represented the closest I had gotten to finding someone who could tell me what she’d been like in her previous life. “Well, there’s one less con man in the world now,” he said. Even though he hated his former family member, this seemed like an especially cruel way to tell me that Dr. V had died. All he could tell me was what he knew — that it had been a suicide.

The fallout from Vanderbilt's suicide (and it's reveal) are handled almost clinically. Hannan wraps up his piece and that's about it. There's no mention of the high incidence of suicide amongst the trans community and no real soul-searching by Hannan about whatever role he may or may not have played. It just ends, and then the commentary begins.

Some of that commentary suggests that Hannan's story is the reason that Vanderbilt killed herself. This is reductive and a bad way to talk about suicide and mental illness. Suicide is a uniquely personal act, and, just as it would be unfair to blame Vanderbilt's partner for her previous attempt, so would it be unfair to blame Hannan for her death.

Beyond all of the points I made throughout Hannan's piece, the thing that most baffled me was that it seemed that no one at Grantland thought to ask for the input of a trans writer or editor. Grantland is bothersome in many ways, but it is an outlet that strives for inclusivity. That they wouldn't think to use this simple stop-gap truly baffled this blogger.

(I didn't know at the time whether they had any trans writers. I would soon learn that they do not, but ESPN as a whole does.)

Other points about the gross insensitivity of the piece stand, and as I read them, I somewhat morbidly awaited the official response from Grantland.

I truly had no idea what to expect, as deliverer of said response was to be Grantland's Editor-in-Chief Bill Simmons.

Simmons is an avowed bro who has never done any reporting in his life. He somehow ended up the head of the most prestigious of ESPN's many appendages with his scintillating insights into which 80s starlet Rajon Rondo most embodies. Why any outlet looking to do serious reporting would entrust him with editorial oversight is beyond my ken.

I was surprised by the thoughtfulness of his piece when it went up this afternoon.

In it, Simmons apologizes and offers up the best explanation that he can.

To be clear, Caleb only interacted with her a handful of times. He never, at any time, threatened to out her on Grantland. He was reporting a story and verifying discrepancy issues with her background. That’s it. Just finding out facts and asking questions. This is what reporters do. She had been selling a “magical” putter by touting credentials that didn’t exist. Just about everything she had told Caleb, at every point of his reporting process, turned out not to be true. There was no hounding. There was no badgering. It just didn’t happen that way.

I have no way of knowing whether Simmons is telling the truth here, but if he is, I understand why Grantland and Hannan didn't seem to recognize how destructive the story could be to Vanderbilt. As far as Vanderbilt (and Hannan) knew at the time, the story wasn't going to out Vanderbilt.

Of course, Vanderbilt may not have believed Hannan when he claimed that he wouldn't out her. She may have seen his unearthing of her past as a violation of the "science not the scientist" agreement, and therefore been disinclined to trust him.

(I, personally, don't believe that Hannan violated said agreement when he researched Vanderbilt's credentials. He did not do so with malicious intent, and, when he discovered that she was a fraud, the story of the science and the scientist became inseparable - gender identity notwithstanding.)

Caleb’s biggest mistake? Outing Dr. V to one of her investors while she was still alive. I don’t think he understood the moral consequences of that decision, and frankly, neither did anyone working for Grantland. That misstep never occurred to me until I discussed it with Christina Kahrl yesterday. But that speaks to our collective ignorance about the issues facing the transgender community in general, as well as our biggest mistake: not educating ourselves on that front before seriously considering whether to run the piece.

This is unconscionable and speaks to the worst parts of sports reporting. It's a male dominated field that, up until the past decade, was the bastion of the "moralist" using thinly-veiled codewords to perpetuate racist and sexist ideas that were really only tenable in the backward world of sport. Recently, it's been a field at war with itself, as the progressive voices doing battle with the fuddy-duddies are dismissed as illegitimate by established powers.

Grantland is one of the outlets that attempts a synthesis of these styles, and it's baffling to me that Hannan (who is only 31) didn't realize how inappropriate it was for him to out Vanderbilt, even in "private." It's even more baffling that someone on the Grantland staff didn't recognize this.

As we debated internally whether to run the piece, four issues concerned us. First, we didn’t know about any of the legal ramifications. That’s why we had multiple lawyers read it. Second, we were extremely worried — obviously — about running a piece about a subject who took her own life during the tail end of the reporting process. How would that be received externally? Was the story too dark? Was it exploitative? Would we be blamed for what happened to her? And third, we worried about NOT running the piece when Caleb’s reporting had become so intertwined with the last year of Dr. V’s life. Didn’t we have a responsibility to run it? The fourth issue, and this almost goes without saying: Not only did we feel terrible about what happened to Dr. V, we could never really know why it happened. Nor was there any way to find out.

1) Don't lead with that, Bill. It seems callous.
2) Justifiable concerns.
3) Irrelevant.
4) Tasteless, but honest?

Maybe that should have been enough of a reason to back off. In fact, we almost did. Multiple times. We never worried about outing her posthumously, which speaks to our ignorance about this topic in general. (Hold that thought.) We should have had that discussion before we posted the piece. (Hold that thought, too.) In the moment, we believed you couldn’t “out” someone who was already dead, especially if she was a public figure.

Not knowing that post-humous outing was wrong is ridiculous and stupid, but believable, and again leads me to think that neither Hannan nor Grantland had any malicious intent in reporting the story. This could be wishful conjecture on my part, and I acknowledge it as such. Simmons is also really stretching the definition of "public figure."

(I don't know why I seem to want to believe that Hannan and Grantland didn't intend to out Vanderbilt while she was alive, especially after their bungling makes it clear that their grasp of trans issues is less a grasp and more some sort of half-hearted swat. I do though. I don't know if it's because I want to believe this all could have been avoided. Come to think of it, I don't know why I'm seeking a justification for this story to exist at all. My life would not be any different if this story had never been reported, but Vanderbilt may still be alive.)

Whether you believe we were right or wrong, let’s at least agree that we made an indefensible mistake not to solicit input from ANYONE in the trans community. But even now, it’s hard for me to accept that Dr. V’s transgender status wasn’t part of this story. Caleb couldn’t find out anything about her pre-2001 background for a very specific reason. Let’s say we omitted that reason or wrote around it, then that reason emerged after we posted the piece. What then?

Simmons is correct in saying they should have solicited input from the trans community. He's incorrect in saying that Vanderbilt's identity is a part of the story, had Grantland not reported it, Deadspin or some other blog would have eventually unearthed that part of it and Grantland would likely have been praised for doing the right thing in not reporting it.

Before we officially decided to post Caleb’s piece, we tried to stick as many trained eyeballs on it as possible. Somewhere between 13 and 15 people read the piece in all, including every senior editor but one, our two lead copy desk editors, our publisher and even ESPN.com’s editor-in-chief. All of them were blown away by the piece. Everyone thought we should run it. Ultimately, it was my call. So if you want to rip anyone involved in this process, please, direct your anger and your invective at me. Don’t blame Caleb or anyone that works for me. It’s my site and anything this significant is my call. Blame me. I didn’t ask the biggest and most important question before we ran it — that’s my fault and only my fault.

I don't have much to add here. Simmons takes responsibility, but in a way that really has no consequences or meaning beyond being a symbolic act that any editor would do.

That mistake: Someone familiar with the transgender community should have read Caleb’s final draft. This never occurred to us. Nobody ever brought it up. Had we asked someone, they probably would have told us the following things … 

1. You never mentioned that the transgender community has an abnormally high suicide rate. That’s a crucial piece — something that actually could have evolved into the third act and an entirely different ending. But you missed it completely. 

2. You need to make it more clear within the piece that Caleb never, at any point, threatened to out her as he was doing his reporting. 

3. You need to make it more clear that, before her death, you never internally discussed the possibility of outing her (and we didn’t). 

4. You botched your pronoun structure in a couple of spots, which could easily be fixed by using GLAAD’s style guide for handling transgender language. 

5. The phrase “chill ran down my spine” reads wrong. Either cut it or make it more clear what Caleb meant. 

6. Caleb never should have outed Dr. V to one of her investors; you need to address that mistake either within the piece, as a footnote, or in a separate piece entirely.
(And maybe even … ) 

7. There’s a chance that Caleb’s reporting, even if it wasn’t threatening or malicious in any way, invariably affected Dr. V in ways that you never anticipated or understood. (Read Christina Kahrl’s thoughtful piece about Dr. V and our errors in judgment for more on that angle.) 

To my infinite regret, we never asked anyone knowledgeable enough about transgender issues to help us either (a) improve the piece, or (b) realize that we shouldn’t run it. That’s our mistake — and really, my mistake, since it’s my site. So I want to apologize. I failed.

It's here where I admit that I don't know what I would do if I had been Bill Simmons in this situation. Neither his publication, nor his writer, planned on or threatened to out Vanderbilt. Still, she killed herself, possibly due to pressure from Hannan's reporting. What do you do with the story now that she's dead? You could do what they did, you could spike it, or you could try to rewrite it tastefully. Honestly, none of those options really appeal to me.

So for anyone asking the question “How could you guys run that?,” please know that we zoomed through the same cycle of emotions that so many of our readers did. We just didn’t see the other side. We weren’t sophisticated enough. In the future, we will be sophisticated enough — at least on this particular topic. We’re never taking the Dr. V piece down from Grantland partly because we want people to learn from our experience. We weren’t educated, we failed to ask the right questions, we made mistakes, and we’re going to learn from them.

"Learning experiences" are often overvalued. It's a sentimental trick we play on ourselves to try to escape the shame of past failures. In situations where a life is lost, the "learning experience" maxim rings even more hollow.

It's also the only response Simmons can have in this situation. You may think it's a deplorable sentiment for Grantland to whitewash a death with this hackneyed idea, but what's the alternative? At a certain point, the phrase "blood from a stone" comes to mind. Grantland fucked up in a profound way. That's the thing about tragedy, it's profoundly pointless and people will do whatever they can to construct a meaning around it. Grantland (and the media at large) using this experience to ensure that something like this never happens again in the world of journalism doesn't in any way mitigate the loss of Vanderbilt's life, but it will hopefully serve as a sobering reminder of how journalistic intentions can have mortal consequences.

If you've somehow made it all the way through my drivel, I'd encourage you to read What Grantland Got Wrong - a piece by ESPN baseball writer and trans woman Christina Kahrl. She's a better writer than me and offers a real perspective on this issue.