The Problem of Being Known

I never wanted to become a public figure, and I have never quite made peace with being one.

For those who are lucky enough to have never been in the public eye, there is sometimes a sort of romantic obsession about being “famous” or being “known.” There is a misconception that somehow your life would be better if you were famous, if people knew who you were, if you were respected (or, at the very least, feared). You would, presumably, have money. You would have friends, and you would have enemies (the good kind of enemies, though, you know?). You would get the things you want, and having the things you want — fame, money, attention, purpose — would greatly outweigh any possible negative consequences.

The desire to be known in this way is, I think, entirely natural and entirely human. We want to be loved. We want to have influence and be important, believing that if our existence means something to others then perhaps it will also be meaningful to ourselves. We want to have money, enough of it that we don’t need to worry about meeting the needs of ourselves and of those who depend on us. Fame, notoriety, being known — they all hold this promise of giving us the things we so deeply crave, the things that are so often missing in our lives.

The problem, of course, is that being known brings none of this. When your name can be easily googled, and when those search results paint a picture of someone that you are, in fact, very much not, it sets expectations that you cannot escape. In my case, those expectations have been damaging — to my life, my friendships, my career, and my family — and I am still, eight years later, wrestling with the consequences of once being famous. The hate mail has slowed to a trickle, the private investigators are no longer parking outside my house and no longer following my toddler daughter to the park and photographing her, various high-ranking people at tech companies are no longer harassing me and my family members and vowing to destroy us, and I haven’t had to call the police on a creepy PI or stalker for several years, but the problem of being known, of being thought of as someone I am not, remains, and I don’t know what the hell to do about it.

In February 2017, I wrote a blog post about my experience at Uber that garnered international attention. It launched me into the public eye in a loud and painful way. There were good things that came out of it, including the new public spotlight on sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. Like many people, I had daydreamed about someday being well-known, but I wanted to be known for my writing, for being an engineer, or for many of my other accomplishments — not for what I ended up being known for. I wanted so little to do with being in the public eye that I refused to do any press, despite the urgings of nearly everyone around me. I refused to go on TV. I refused to be interviewed. I refused, period. I refused to do a single interview until Maureen Dowd, whose writing I had been following for years and whose judgement I trusted, interviewed me for The New York Times at the end of the year. I didn’t even want to go to the photoshoot with TIME that ended up being on the cover. I tried to keep my advocacy work behind the scenes. I didn’t want to be famous. I didn’t want to be a public figure.

The only reason I eventually agreed to write a book about my experience and be involved in a film (that, thankfully, was never made) was this: even though I had done my best to stay out of the public eye, I was under constant media scrutiny, and reporters would contact me and ask me to confirm things that were completely and utterly false. Everyone, it seemed, had some idea of who I was, and the “Susan” that was in their minds was absolutely not who I was. In many accounts I heard, I was a rich Ivy League kid whose blog post only became famous because of connections I had in the media and in the tech world. This saddened and frustrated me because it couldn’t have been further from the truth. I wrote my memoir Whistleblower because I wanted people to know who I was. I wanted them to know that I had been raised in poverty. That I was self-educated. That I had been harassed and discriminated against and retaliated against before, and had failed to get any sort of resolution that resembled justice. I wanted the world to know who I really was.

In the years that followed my blog post, I have had a very difficult time building true friendships. I’d grown up in a sheltered, religious environment, was homeschooled and not allowed to date or have non-religious friends, and struggled to build meaningful friendships with people until I was in college, and it’s no wonder: as a bisexual and agnostic young woman who was obsessed with literature and science and philosophy, I didn’t have much in common with the people my family wanted me to interact with. Making friends was something I had worked hard on, and that meant a great deal to me. Every friendship I made was something I cherished. Every friend I had was a gift. I am still close with many of the friends I made during the early chapters of my life, but have struggled to build lasting friendships in my post-2017 life. The issue comes down to this: when you are a public figure, in the way I am, people approach you with preconceptions about who you are and who you can be to them, and there can be no genuine friendship until all the preconceptions (which are always false!) are torn down.

Anyone with a moderately large internet presence is familiar with this phenomenon. If, for example, someone meets you after interacting with you on social media, the ideas they have of who you are will be entirely shaped by what they’ve seen online. In this case, what they’ve seen online is a presence that you have created, so there is still some truth to the preconceptions that others will bring to the friendship. But, if you are a public figure, the preconceived notions that they will have of you are based not necessarily on what you have said about yourself, but what others have said about you.

One friend I made in mid-2017 insisted later that I pay for her college tuition, and refused to speak with me or hang out with me again after I explained to her that I didn’t actually have that kind of money. Another, after I had signed with literary agents, told me that I owed it to her to give my agents and my book deals to friends like her who were more deserving than I. Again, radio silence after I explained that this is not actually how publishing works. Others asked me to get them acting jobs after the Superpumped TV series aired, and were confused when I explained that I had nothing to do with the show and was not involved in any way. People are constantly asking me for money (that I don’t have), for jobs (that I can’t give), and for favors (that I have no way of giving), often after I have invested heavily in the friendship for months or years. I tell them that if I had the money to do what they are asking, I would do it, and I mean this, but it is never enough to save the friendship. After they realize that I am not the person they have googled and built up in their head, that I in fact don’t have millions of dollars to throw at them, that I cannot give them a financial return on the investment they have made into our friendship, they quickly disappear from my life. They stop answering my texts. They want nothing more to do with me.

Another difficulty I’ve faced is that, in the first few years after 2017, I could not trust people to not publicly share things I had said to them in private. I don’t mean that people would gossip about me — of course they would, and everyone gossips about everyone, no matter how famous or not famous they may be. What I mean is that people who I thought were my close friends would proactively reach out to reporters and share things about me, my family, my home, and my life. These reporters would then reach out to me and ask me to confirm or deny things that these friends had shared with them. And, of course, I always knew who had spoken to the reporters. My circle of friends was small, and I would immediately know which friend had told the reporter x thing about me, because I had only told one of my friends about x thing. More than once, I suspected certain friends of immediately calling reporters every time after I spoke to them, and gave them a piece of false information; within a day or two, a reporter would ask me to comment on the false thing. And so, over the years, my circle has gotten smaller, and smaller.

Being a public figure has also taken a toll on my work. When, for example, I joined The New York Times as a staff editor in 2018, I found that when I interacted with people using my maiden name “Susan Fowler,” which was the name under which I had published the infamous blog post, they would often recognize it. This was, unfortunately, usually not a good thing. Those who were already familiar with my name would often balk at being edited by me, someone who was only known for, as one woman put it, “being sexually harassed.” My editing experience would be immediately discounted, my edits dismissed. I was asked if I was biased because I had been sexually harassed. I was asked if I was able to be a fair editor because I had been involved in legislation protecting the rights of women and men who had been sexually harassed and sexually assaulted. This didn’t just happen when working with writers. During my first week on the job, when my boss introduced me to A.G. Sulzberger, the paper’s publisher, A.G. asked me in front of a room full of my new coworkers if I actually knew how to edit — something I never heard him ask any other newly hired editors.

And of course I knew how to edit! I had been offered a job by the Times to be their technology op-ed editor because I was, at the time, the editor-in-chief of a technology magazine in San Francisco. (I had also passed a very long editing test that many of the other new hires were not required to do.) I knew what to do, I was a damn good editor and a good colleague and I went on to edit hundreds and hundreds of pieces during my years at the Times. The secret to my quick success at the paper turned out to be changing my name professionally to “Susan Rigetti” and never mentioning anything about my past as an infamous whistleblower to anyone. In their eyes, “Susan Rigetti” wasn’t hired for being famous or a woman or a diversity hire or whatever else they liked to say, but was hired because she was a good editor (something that my work demonstrated to them clearly).

Over the past handful of years, I have tried to combat this problem by being almost absurdly private. I do my work quietly and under the radar, and try not to bring attention to it. (Think about it: If someone asked you what I do, what would you answer?) I try not to post much on social media. I try not to write much publicly. I have tried hard to go from being a famous whistleblower to a private writer and editor, and, in some very important ways, I have succeeded. The one thing that I cannot shake, however, is the mess of preconceived notions that people have about me, and it does truly make my life so much more difficult, lonely, and heartbreaking. A very good friend of mine, when I confided in her about these problems, pointed out that this issue will never go away. The only way to combat it, she said, is to stop fearing being known. In the face of misguided ideas of who I am, I need to stop hiding and be loud about who I actually am.

So here we go:

I am an all-too-ordinary person. I deeply value my friendships. I love my work. I love my kids. I love to play the violin, and I love to ride horses. My favorite things in the world are reading amazing books, learning new things, editing essays and articles, and writing stories and writing personal essays for my blog. I am painfully, dully, disappointingly normal. I am not rolling in money. I cannot give you a job. I cannot change your life or pay off your debts. I cannot give you an agent or a book deal or a movie deal. I have zero power and zero influence. I am still trying to pay off my own student loans, eleven years after graduating from college. What I can do, however, is be your helper, your colleague, your friend. I can edit your essays, your articles, your books. I can write you a story. I can babysit your kids. I can be your travel companion and I can ride through the woods with you on horseback. I can help you set up a Girl Scout Troop and I can volunteer for your nonprofit, your cause, your organization, your campaign. I can be there for you when you are hurt and you are lonely and you are in need of a shoulder to cry on. I can show up and clean your house and do your laundry when you are depressed, or sick, or when it is all just too much.

Any takers?