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@ -112,18 +112,6 @@ Now, the irrigation canals are so dry in summer thatthe small bridges spanning
Water comes from the government in red plastic barrels, in rations of about 160 gallons a month per family. Even when used sparingly, it barely lasts a week in the heat, said Mr. Sahlani, the sheikh and science teacher, who lives in the village of Albu Jumaa. Graffiti scrawled in Arabic on a half-destroyed concrete wall expressed the frustration: “Where is the state?” it read.
Water comes from the government in red plastic barrels, in rations of about 160 gallons a month per family. Even when used sparingly, it barely lasts a week in the heat, said Mr. Sahlani, the sheikh and science teacher, who lives in the village of Albu Jumaa. Graffiti scrawled in Arabic on a half-destroyed concrete wall expressed the frustration: “Where is the state?” it read.
Image
Farmers have increasingly abandoned their homes and lands, moving to overcrowded cities in search of better economic prospects.
Image
Sheikh Adnan al Sahlani near his home in southern Iraq, which is suffering from a severe dearth of water.
Image
A gathering to discuss plans to protest to the government about the absence of water in Dhi Qar Province.
As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, Iraq’s water ministry built artificial lakes and dams to hold the immense annual overflow from winter rains and gushing snow melt from the Taurus Mountains, the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates.
As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, Iraq’s water ministry built artificial lakes and dams to hold the immense annual overflow from winter rains and gushing snow melt from the Taurus Mountains, the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates.
Even today, traces of Iraq’s greener past can be seen every spring. In the Anbar desert, a brief winter rain can turn the shallow valleys green and speckle them with flowers. Along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the water still nourishes trees beside the narrow banks, with bands of green fields on either side.
Even today, traces of Iraq’s greener past can be seen every spring. In the Anbar desert, a brief winter rain can turn the shallow valleys green and speckle them with flowers. Along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the water still nourishes trees beside the narrow banks, with bands of green fields on either side.
@ -212,18 +200,6 @@ Last year, Islamic State fighters crossed on foot at night and killed 11 soldier
This year, the fighters have moved farther east, attacking villages on the Diyala River, which is also low because of drought and Iran’s dams. More than 50 civilians were killed in the province in the first five months of 2023, most by fighters aligned with ISIS.
This year, the fighters have moved farther east, attacking villages on the Diyala River, which is also low because of drought and Iran’s dams. More than 50 civilians were killed in the province in the first five months of 2023, most by fighters aligned with ISIS.
Image
According to Sheikh Muhammed Dhaifan, militants who had been pushed back in recent years are taking advantage of the drying landscape to attack with greater ease.
Image
Farmers’ homes that were destroyed by the Islamic State during its occupation of this area of Diyala Province in 2014 and 2015.
Image
Farmers listening to a security discussion. In parts of Iraq, rivers and irrigation canals that once provided strategic barriers have disappeared.
In the past, the snowmelt and rains sometimes swelled the region’s rivers, prompting Turkey and Iran to share more water with Iraq. But thefuture looks unlikely to offer much respite.
In the past, the snowmelt and rains sometimes swelled the region’s rivers, prompting Turkey and Iran to share more water with Iraq. But thefuture looks unlikely to offer much respite.
The current trend of a hotter, drier Iraq — and a hotter Middle East — is expected to last for decades, making the once-fertile crescent less and less livable.
The current trend of a hotter, drier Iraq — and a hotter Middle East — is expected to last for decades, making the once-fertile crescent less and less livable.
@ -240,18 +216,6 @@ The fertilizer in the runoff makes the groundwater saltier. Studies in southern
Iraq’s population makes the forecast even more dire: It is [one of the fastest-growing](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?locations=ZQ) in the region.
Iraq’s population makes the forecast even more dire: It is [one of the fastest-growing](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?locations=ZQ) in the region.
Image
A construction site in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. The country’s population is one of the fastest-growing in the region.
Image
Years of neglect have turned many canals in and around Basra into repositories for garbage and raw sewage.
Image
A fish wholesale market in Baghdad. Fish farmers have threatened government regulators who have tried to close them down for violating water restrictions.
Mr.Sahlani, the science teacher nearNaseriyah, recalled how much of life in rural southern Iraq was lived on the water just 20 years ago. Locals started their days in small boats, pushing off at first light to fish before returning after sunrise to tend the fields. While some still do, the river fish are often too small, their flesh too inundated with pollutants, to make it worthwhile these days.
Mr.Sahlani, the science teacher nearNaseriyah, recalled how much of life in rural southern Iraq was lived on the water just 20 years ago. Locals started their days in small boats, pushing off at first light to fish before returning after sunrise to tend the fields. While some still do, the river fish are often too small, their flesh too inundated with pollutants, to make it worthwhile these days.
The changes are especially evident in [the vast marshes of southern Iraq](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/travel/iraq-mesopotamian-marshes.html). Some 60 years ago, they were the largest wetlands in western Eurasia. People have lived there for thousands of years.
The changes are especially evident in [the vast marshes of southern Iraq](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/travel/iraq-mesopotamian-marshes.html). Some 60 years ago, they were the largest wetlands in western Eurasia. People have lived there for thousands of years.
# A crumbling, long-forgotten statue with an unusual erect phallus might be a Michelangelo. Renaissance scholars want hard evidence.
Some 400 years ago, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi — whose family would produce two popes, more than a dozen cardinals, and a smattering of statesmen — bought what became known as the Villa Ludovisi from Italy's Orsini family. A sprawling estate on the outskirts of Rome, it included an art collection that drew admirers from across Europe and, most notably, Caravaggio's only ceiling mural.
In a place of honor was a life-size marble statue of the Greek god Pan with a wicked expression, a forked beard, and an 8-inch erect penis leaning left. The cardinal, it appears, built a pillared shrine for it between two majestic cypress trees.
Over the centuries, new research has found, the Ludovisi family's attitude toward the marble god changed. A satyr with an ugly grimace and an imposing phallus? What would the neighbors think?
A sculpted fig leaf covering the uncircumcised penis was last seen in 1885. A row of hedges was planted in front of the statue, allowing it to recede out of view.
By the second half of the 20th century, the hedges were gone and a tree was planted in front of the statue. Artists and scholars continued to copy and study the works of the villa, but the statue left the public record for a century, not drawn or photographed between 1885 and 1985. Pan, the Greek god of woodlands and lust, was left to waste away behind a tree.
When Corey Brennan, a classics professor at Rutgers University, visited the property for the first time, in spring 2010, he didn't know what to do with the statue. The villa's steward at the time, Princess Rita Jenrette Boncompagni Ludovisi, had cleared away the tree a couple of years earlier and brought the sculpture back into public view.
She said the statue was created by Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Renaissance master who painted the Sistine Chapel and etched David out of marble before his 1564 death. She learned this from her husband, Nicolò, who heard it from his grandfather Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi, whose "depth of historical information, handed down from generation to generation, always is proven to be historically correct and consistent," Princess Rita told Insider.
The statue's provenance was widely accepted by the 1830s, but a group of German scholars later in the 19th century had cast doubt on the attribution. When, in July 2022, a student of Brennan's, Hatice Köroglu Çam, said she was a Michelangelo fanatic, he turned the question over to her.
"See what you can do with it," he recalled telling her.
Çam took on the assignment with relish. Digging into the estate's archives and other historical documents, she found centuries-old private sketches of the statue and correspondences and journal entries describing it.
Over time, the elements had beaten the statue, whittling away some of its fingernails, softening its facial features, and receding the satyr's hairline. But in older sketches, those aspects are more sharply drawn.
The more Çam looked, the more she was convinced the statue was created by the master himself.
## The statue is stuck outdoors amid a messy family dispute over the property
Çam's identification of the statue as a bona fide Michelangelo, argued over the past year and a half in [a four-part, 28,000-word treatise](https://villaludovisi.org/2023/05/05/a-new-self-portrait-of-michelangelo-the-statue-of-pan-at-the-casino-dellaurora-in-rome-part-iv-physical-condition-conservation-mandates/) on Brennan's website dedicated to the history of the Villa Ludovisi comes amid a bitter dispute over what will happen to the opulent property and all its stories.
In 1988, the villa had been passed on to Prince Nicolò Boncompagni Ludovisi, a Roman noble and the heir to the villa.
Fifteen years later, he met Jenrette, who had previously lived as a US Republican Party operative, a congressman's spouse, an author of a tell-all memoir about being the ex-wife of a congressman who cheated on her, a Harvard Business School alumna, and a real-estate mogul. At the time, the prince wanted to develop a hotel, and [a mutual friend asked her to help out](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/28/the-renovation-rita-jenrette-princess-italy).
They married in 2009, and the newly named Princess Rita spent a decade and millions of dollars cataloging, cleaning, restoring, and studying the property's artwork and architecture. She brought on Brennan to help bring the villa to its former glory.
The prince left the villa to his wife in his will. But after his death in 2018, his three sons from a previous marriage disputed her ownership. A messy inheritance conflict ensued, complicated by the Italian Culture Ministry's legal control over many of its treasures. Çam got to study the Ludovisi Pan, as the sculpture is known, in July 2022, just months before [the princess was evicted from the property](https://nypost.com/2023/05/13/playboy-princess-i-lost-500m-palace-in-bitter-royal-feud/).
To help settle the estate dispute, an Italian court ordered the property to go up for auction in January 2022, first at $546 million. The Ludovisi Pan, if it's really a Michelangelo, could be worth as much as $100 million, according to Brennan, who noted that [one of the artist's drawings sold last year for $21 million](https://news.artnet.com/market/michelangelo-drawing-breaks-record-2117046). The Caravaggio mural alone, experts opined, was worth $360 million. (The princess [once described the property as](https://www.tatler.com/article/caravaggio-ceiling-fresco-italian-villa-aurora-471-million-ludovisi-family) "a Caravaggio with a house thrown in.")
Hosted on a janky Italian government website alongside apartments and tennis courts, in need of an estimated $11 million in repairs, and with the provision that the Italian Justice Ministry could swoop in and force a sale to the Culture Ministry anyway, the villa attracted no bidders. Five more auctions, with prices successively revised downward, were also unsuccessful.
A seventh auction, with the asking price lowered to $122 million, was scheduled to begin in June. But over the summer, Princess Rita and her stepchildren came to an agreement where they'd put more money into sprucing up the villa and auction it privately. The group hopes to partner with an organization such as Sotheby's or Christie's to sell it properly.
The sale will likely still be difficult. Only a handful of prospective buyers could pay a high price for the villa and provide the necessary upkeep. Some cultural treasures within the property — like the Caravaggio — are physically immovable. And even if the Italian government doesn't ultimately purchase the property, it still has some discretion over how most of the artwork, including the Ludovisi Pan, can be moved or restored. The villa has 40,000 square feet of indoor space, but officials have refused to allow the statue to be moved indoors, where Brennan and Çam — who is now pursuing an art-history doctorate at Temple University — say it needs to be to protect it from further damage. The princess told Insider she hoped a buyer would appreciate the villa's treasures, including the Pan, newly uncovered frescoes, and what she said were the remains of Julius Caesar's estate "where he romanced Cleopatra."
"Now that all heirs have signed a rapprochement, I can only hope that someone purchases our home who appreciates all we have discovered therein, from the archive, to which I have devoted two decades of my life," she said.
The mainstream press has already accepted the Pan statue's attribution to the Renaissance master. [The New Yorker described it](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/28/the-renovation-rita-jenrette-princess-italy) as "a statue of Pan by Michelangelo" in 2011 without qualification. CBS News, visiting it in 2017, [said it was a Michelangelo sculpture "in all his glory."](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/principessa-rita-a-fairytale-life/) Earlier this year, [CNN said](https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/20/europe/texas-rita-jenrette-boncompagni-evicted-intl/index.html) it was "recently unearthed" as a Michelangelo. The [New York Post called it](https://nypost.com/2023/05/13/playboy-princess-i-lost-500m-palace-in-bitter-royal-feud/) one of his "masterpieces."
Michelangelo scholars are more skeptical.
William E. Wallace, an author or editor of eight books about the Renaissance artist, viewed the statue on a Jenrette-led tour in 2015 with a group of conservationists**.** He told Insider the sculpture was interesting but "not a great thing." The evidence that Michelangelo created it, he said, simply isn't there.
"They're hopeful that it's a Michelangelo because it'll sell for $50 million. If it's a garden sculpture by nobody, it's $5,000," Wallace said. "So there's a big difference by putting the name like Michelangelo on it. But there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that he has anything to do with this object."
Whether further examination determines it's a Michelangelo or not, there's no question it's an important sculpture that needs further preservation and study, Brennan said.
"Either way, it's an understudied 16th-century sculpture that needs to come out of the elements," he said.
In its current state, the statue has literally lost its luster. The marble has turned dull. Apparent attempted repairs in previous years have left holes and rusting metal pieces in its face and neck. Cracks are forming on the right testicle.
"There are a lot of cracks, a lot of holes, a lot of metal pieces," Çam said. "But it has a lot of secrets. And it is melting. It's melting in front of the world."
## The family was embarrassed by the phallus, Çam says
For some time, Çam found in her research, visitors to the Villa Aurora, the most prominent part of the Villa Ludovisi, assumed the statue was from ancient Rome.
The earliest reference to it in the Ludovisi archives is in a January 1633 inventory. In the early 1700s, it was cataloged alongside other statues on the property that were thousands of years, not decades, old. It left an impression on Francis Mortoft, who visited the property in 1659. "Wee saw a very ridiculous statue of A satyr, which canot but stir up any man to much laughter in looking on such a Rediculous piece, but yet very excellently well made," he wrote in his journal.
By the mid-1700s, something had changed. Visitors had generally understood that the sculpture was attributed to Michelangelo, according to records unearthed by Çam, even if they thought it wasn't his best.
Writing in his private notes in 1756, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, widely considered the founder of the field of art history, [identified it](https://villaludovisi.org/2023/05/05/a-new-self-portrait-of-michelangelo-the-statue-of-pan-at-the-casino-dellaurora-in-rome-part-iv-physical-condition-conservation-mandates/) as part of "the school of Michelangelo." The Swiss painter and writer Henry Fuseli believed it to *predate* Michelangelo, theorizing it influenced Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses.
Throughout the first half of the 19th century, [visitors generally agreed Michelangelo himself created it](https://villaludovisi.org/2022/11/05/a-new-self-portrait-of-michelangelo-the-statue-of-pan-at-the-casino-dellaurora-in-rome-part-iii-reception/). [Çam found in her research](https://villaludovisi.org/2022/11/05/a-new-self-portrait-of-michelangelo-the-statue-of-pan-at-the-casino-dellaurora-in-rome-part-iii-reception/) that the exceptions were three German scholars who visited between 1836 and 1880s and considered it not a genuine Michelangelo, if "Michelangelo-esque."
The Germans didn't give reasons for their conclusion. Victor Coonin, a professor of Italian Renaissance art at Rhodes College, offered one: It doesn't have that Michelangelo je ne sais quoi.
The Ludovisi Pan is "a wonderful, delightful statue" but is "a little bit lifeless," Coonin said. In his works, Michelangelo investigated his subjects, interested in what makes them profound or beautiful, and invited the viewers of his work into that process. The Ludovisi Pan is not the work of an artist engaged in that kind of exploration, Coonin said.
"That's part of what makes Michelangelo, Michelangelo — that it's about something more than what it appears to be," Coonin said. "And this Pan looks to me rather to be what it purports to be."
The statue does not, at first glance, look like a lot of Michelangelo's other sculptures, especially the full-scale ones. They are typically religious figures in the Christian tradition; their faces look like they've been struck by a heavenly light, in poses that inspire reverence. The Ludovisi Pan stares you down with a cruel laugh, provoking you while resting at ease.
Yet, Çam said, the details are unmistakable.
Take a look at the statue's right hand, she said, which is virtually identical to the right hand on Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses, down to the veins shaped in a diamond pattern. The index and middle fingers are spaced in the same way, she wrote, and the Pan's fingers are buried into the pelt over his shoulder in the same way Moses' is buried into his tangled beard.
The Pan statue, Çam said, also resembles Michelangelo's titanic portrait of David. Each stands in almost the same pose, slightly shifting its weight on the right leg, which is supported by a marble-carved tree stump.
Most compellingly, the Ludovisi Pan appears to be not just any ordinary sculpture by Michelangelo but a self-portrait, Çam said.
She came to that conclusion while looking at other works considered to be Michelangelo's self-portraits, including a mask in his 1533 drawing "The Dream of Human Life."
"I thought maybe this is Michelangelo's self-portrait because it's almost identical," she told Insider.
Like the artist, the Pan statue has a forked beard, a full lower lip, and "a flattened and broken nose," Çam said. And in [a series of illustrations of grotesque figures](https://villaludovisi.org/2022/09/12/a-new-self-portrait-of-michelangelo-the-statue-of-pan-at-the-casino-dellaurora-in-rome-part-ii-testimonia-sketches-earlier-inventories/) held in Frankfurt's Städel Museum, Michelangelo drew a faun, a half-human, half-goat beast, with a face that looks very similar to the Ludovisi Pan's.
"The depiction of the eyes, the shape of the eyebrows, and the treatment of the lower forehead between the eyebrows are the same," Çam wrote. "Significantly, the long, broken, and wide-shaped nose and wide-shaped nostrils are almost identical."
The ravages of time have made those similarities less clear. But they are striking, Çam told Insider, in early illustrations and photographs of the Pan that she discovered in the Ludovisi family's archives, made when the statue's features were in better condition.
And in a 1723 drawing by the artist Hamlet Winstanley, the figure is presented in a "near-flawless state," she wrote. The statue's potbelly once looked like abs, its smile laughing with you and not at you. That illustration, Çam said, demonstrates similarities to Michelangelo's other works and helps explain why other visitors to the Villa Aurora were so enamored with the work.
We see "the finer details of the Ludovisi Pan that have now largely disappeared," she wrote: the curls of its beard, the hairy animal pelt slung over its right shoulder, and the fur on its goatlike legs, which have become smooth over time.
If the statue is so great, and a possible Michelangelo, then why is it wasting away? Çam theorized that the phallus had something to do with it.
While it was originally covered by a fig leaf — which could be removed if an artist wanted to draw the faun fully nude — it disappeared at some point. Giuseppe Felici, a family archivist, described the statue as "repugnant and obscene" in a 1952 chronicle of the property. The Ludovisi family, Çam surmised, was embarrassed by a large, erect phallus greeting their visitors. They shuffled the statue to less-prominent places on the property and planted some shrubs in front of it.
"It was the Pan's erect phallus that negatively affected its placement and presentation — from at least the early 18th century exhibited with a fig leaf, and eventually positioned behind a tree — at different locations on the property of the Villa Ludovisi," Çam wrote.
Given how prominently the statue was once presented on the Ludovisi estate, it was odd for it to be given the short shrift centuries later, Brennan said. While other sculptures show male genitalia, the Pan is the only statue with a fully erect penis, their research found.
"There was plenty that they boasted about," Brennan told Insider. "The family was really proud of their artwork but not this piece."
That same uneasiness removed the statue from discourse among connoisseurs over whether it was created by Michelangelo, Çam said.
"The phallus is what prevented this sculpture from getting proper recognition, which in turn directly affected its attribution to Michelangelo," she wrote. "Squeamishness about subject matter overshadowed all the stylistic similarities between Michelangelo's works and Pan, derailed its scholarly acceptance, and caused the sculpture to be abandoned to its present fate."
## It's hard to carve a marble statue in secret
The trouble for Çam's theories is that Michelangelo was not some obscure artist whose life and work were shrouded in mystery before his death. He was a rock star. He carved David out of marble when he was 26. He is the best-documented artist of the Renaissance.
Historians have more than 1,000 letters written by or to Michelangelo, in addition to bank records, contracts, and biographies written during his lifetime. In none of them is any reference to a self-portrait Pan obtained by the Orsini family, according to Coonin, the Rhodes College professor.
"That everybody would've ignored it or didn't know about it, that Michelangelo wouldn't have mentioned it to anyone, that nobody mentioned it as being a Michelangelo within Michelangelo's lifetime — I think that that's rather unlikely for such a large and idiosyncratic sculpture to escape complete mention in the literature," he said.
It is Michelangelo's very celebrity that explains why so many features may appear Michelangelo-esque, Wallace, a professor of art history and architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, said.
By the time of his death, many considered him the greatest artist who ever lived. He inspired legions of imitators and students of his work, perhaps including whoever made the sculpture, he said.
"That artist who probably carved that garden sculpture had seen the Moses," Wallace said. "And so when he came to carve hands and the beard, he thought to invoke the greatest master of carving of all time, and he would be praised by his contemporaries for being able to imitate Michelangelo very nicely."
As for the faces looking like Michelangelo's? Çam and Brennan conceded the Pan could be the work of an imitator — perhaps a student in an oedipal struggle with the master — though still of immense historical value. Anyone who spent months carving a big, expensive block of marble to make Michelangelo look like a beast would have shaken up the Italian art scene.
"It's either Michelangelo doing a self-portrait, or it's one of Michelangelo's contemporaries depicting Michelangelo as half goat, half man. And either option is really interesting," Brennan said. "If it's Michelangelo who is portraying himself as such, that's unbelievable. But if someone else, I can't imagine one of his followers saying, 'Oh, here, Michelangelo, I'm your assistant here, and I've created this sculpture of you as the god Pan.'"
Çam and Brennan said they believed the Pan could be one of Michelangelo's early works, from before he became famous. The statue, Çam said, reflects his interest in antiquity and mythology, even if those themes are not as developed as in his later works.
But to Wallace, the simplest explanation is the most likely.
"Everybody in Florence in the 16th century was seeing these drawings by Michelangelo, and they provided artists all kinds of ideas about how to go about carving things," Wallace said.
Besides, a life-sized marble statue is not exactly the kind of thing you can make discreetly.
"Marble is extremely heavy, expensive, it's hard to move. You need to carve it somewhere and keep it there — marble isn't carved quickly," Coonin said. "And so you'd have to have a piece of marble standing in a studio somewhere that he's working on continuously and never be seen or mentioned by anyone."
As for the family being mortified by the statue's penis? Çam simply hasn't brought enough evidence to support her theory that the Ludovisis demoted it because of its genitals, Wallace and Coonin said**.** Garden statues are rearranged all the time.
"Maybe they got embarrassed by the penis and so they put it out in their garden. I don't know," Wallace said. "All of this sounds very fuzzy."
## 'Found' Michelangelos come and go
In 1996, a sculpture of a young archer displayed in a French Embassy in Manhattan, New York, caught the eye of a young graduate student who thought it looked like the work of one of Michelangelo's contemporaries. Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, an art-history professor at New York University, took a look and [thought it was made by Michelangelo himself](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/arts/design/06archer.html), perhaps one of his early works. Other scholars were skeptical.
Wallace, as he does here, described it in [a magazine piece](https://www.academia.edu/23738352/They_Come_and_Go_Art_News_96) at the time as "wholly unlikely." He said then, as he does now, that these "new" Michelangelos "come and go."
"On average, a new Michelangelo has appeared every two or three years for the past 75 years," he wrote in the April 1996 issue of ArtNews.
Wallace told Insider he was being "polite" those decades ago. Michelangelo creating the cupid, he said, "is still unlikely and less than likely."
He keeps a list of 200 works that have been attributed to Michelangelo since 1900. Only one — a wooden crucifix in a church in Florence, Italy — has achieved consensus as the real thing, he said.
That graduate student who spotted the archer statue, James David Draper, later got a job as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, down the block from the embassy where he first saw the statue. In 2009, [France loaned it to the museum](https://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2010/marble-sculpture-attributed-to-michelangelo-on-loan-to-metropolitan-museum-from-french-republic), where it remains. In its [description of the sculpture](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/236774), the Met elides all debate: It was "only recently it was recognized as Michelangelo's lost Cupid," the museum says. Draper [estimated Michelangelo made the sculpture when he was 15 years old](https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/little-archer-big-mystery-258/), an early age when the historical record is relatively murky. On a recent rainy Sunday, throngs of visitors walked around the statue. They paid more attention to the colorful porcelain works nearby, fired by anonymous artists and also once owned by storied Italian families.
How can we be sure a Michelangelo is a Michelangelo? Michael Daley, an art historian and the editor of ArtWatch UK — who [has extensively argued that the $430 million "Salvator Mundi" painting](http://artwatch.org.uk/problems-with-the-new-york-leonardo-salvator-mundi-part-i-provenance-and-presentation/) is [not a genuine work of Leonardo da Vinci](https://www.insider.com/is-leonardo-da-vinci-salvator-mundi-fake-crystal-orb-2017-10) — told Insider that these things were determined by connoisseurship. If enough Michelangelo experts say a Michelangelo is a Michelangelo, then it's a Michelangelo.
Çam didn't disagree. The visitors of the 18th century, she said, *were* connoisseurs. When the statue was in better shape, they believed it possessed the same divine spark that burned in Michelangelo's other works. But contemporary connoisseurs have different standards. Can the marble be traced to the quarries of Carrara, which Michelangelo prized for its quality material? Are there other documents that can help determine its ownership? Can it be traced to a time when Michelangelo was young, or to when other artists may have been imitating his style?
"The visual/stylistic case is not established for the work being an autograph Michelangelo," Daley wrote in an email. "Essentially, the weakness is that the author's photo-comparisons of details attest at best to work's Michelangelo-like features and in some instances are actually counter-productive."
Wallace said, "It's a matter of weight of opinion over time."
He added: "The weight of opinion over time usually is pretty negative. These things come out as Michelangelo and then they descend. They become followers of Michelangelo, pupils of Michelangelo, anonymous followers of Michelangelo."
The Ludovisi Pan — perhaps because it has been ravaged by the eras, perhaps because it has always looked this way — stares us down.
Its stature has shifted, but it has outlived kings and empires. Across the chasm of time, its smile has widened, turning crueler, mocking our questions.
#### How a Sexual Assault Case in St. John’s Exposed a Police Force’s Predatory Culture
### Winning a sexual assault conviction against a cop is hard. That didn’t stop Jane Doe
## BY [LINDSAY JONES](https://thewalrus.ca/author/lindsay-jones/)
## PHOTOGRAPHY BY [JOHNNY C.Y. LAM](https://thewalrus.ca/author/johnny-c-y-lam/)
Published 6:30, Oct. 16, 2023
A portrait of Jane Doe on a Newfoundland beach near where she now lives
*This story contains details about sexual assault that some readers may find disturbing.*
It was late January 2015, after midnight, when one of the few female officers at the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary received a call on her police radio. “Unknown trouble,” said the dispatcher. A woman was upset. She had been drinking, was confused by her whereabouts, and feared for her safety.
“I’ll go,” constable Kelsey Muise radioed back.
Muise (then using her maiden name Aboud) pulled over when she saw a young woman with dark hair and glasses standing on the side of Newfoundland Drive in St. John’s. The woman, known today only as Jane Doe, asked to be taken to a friend’s house. In the back seat of the patrol car, she said, “I need to tell you something.” Jane Doe gulped back air and began crying hysterically. Muise pulled into a convenience store parking lot and flicked on the dome light. She turned to her passenger to better take in what she was saying.
As Jane Doe would later explain in court, she’d left a bar shortly after 3 a.m. four days before Christmas. She descended an alleyway of stairs and stepped into a downtown street. She was drunk and wanted to go home. Scanning for a taxi, she noticed a patrol car close by. She discussed a ride home with the policeman, and he unlocked the back door. A cop was safer than a cabbie, she figured, and got in.
After a few minutes, they pulled up outside her basement apartment. Jane Doe couldn’t find her keys. The officer discovered an unlocked kitchen window and slid it open for her to climb through. He came to the back door to make sure she was okay, and Jane Doe let him in. The two stood talking in her living room. They kissed, and then, feeling too drunk to stand, Jane Doe sat on her brown loveseat. She passed out and came to at the sound of the police officer’s voice. She was naked, and he was standing over her, penetrating her anally. He said he’d missed two call-outs and had to go. Jane Doe recalled seeing him in her bathroom, adjusting his uniform. The whole encounter, a jury would later learn, from the time the police officer parked outside the apartment to when he left, lasted about nineteen minutes.
The next morning, Jane Doe awoke in bed, confused. Her flowered crop top and purple high-waisted pants were strewn on the living room floor. There were muddy footprints on the white kitchen countertop. It hurt to go to the washroom. And there were friction burns on the inside of her thighs. She also noticed bruises on her legs.
In the back of Muise’s cruiser, Jane Doe’s story came tumbling out. She didn’t even know the name of the police officer who had driven her home. All she knew was he had short hair, was taller than her, and looked like he was in his thirties. Over the course of the month since the assault, Jane Doe had wavered between blaming herself and wondering if she could have stopped or changed what happened. She felt too scared to go to the police. “Who’s going to believe me?” she confided to a friend at the time.
After more than an hour, Muise drove Jane Doe home and hugged her goodbye. Someone would be in touch, she said. Then Muise took a deep breath. She had witnessed inappropriate and illegal sexual behaviour at the RNC before. It had always been brushed aside. But she vowed it would be different this time. She wasn’t about to let this one go.
Kelsey Muise outside her Newfoundland home
The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, one of the oldest police forces in North America, was officially founded in 1871. For more than a century prior to that, British soldiers had helped police St. John’s, but when Britain decided to withdraw its garrison from the port city in 1870, Newfoundland was left to set up its own force to maintain law and order. The next year, a notice appeared in the Royal Gazette. “Wanted, a few strong active young men between 19 and 27 years of age,” read the ad. “They must be well recommended for honesty, sobriety, and fidelity.” The Newfoundland Constabulary moved into Fort Townshend, the former headquarters of the British garrison, where it remains today in a modern brick and glass building. About 400 officers serve the major towns and cities in the province.
The RNC swore in its first female members in 1980—six years later than the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which also patrols rural areas in the province. Women had already been part of the constabulary for more than two decades by the time Muise arrived, at age twenty, shortly after graduating from the Atlantic Police Academy in Prince Edward Island. She was blonde with green eyes and a shy smile. She’d grown up around the police officers who visited her father’s tow truck business at their home in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Those officers were kind and friendly, and as she got older, Muise realized she wanted to help people like they did. As a kid, she tried to rescue every stray cat and dog she encountered. Once, at a movie theatre with her mother, she got up and sat with an elderly man who was sitting alone.
Arriving in a new city where she had her own apartment and car felt freeing and exciting. But it wasn’t long before she started to see, as a patrol officer, the harshness of the real world, one where men threw women through walls and beat their faces bloody.
She often took flak, for being so young and also a woman, from people she was arresting.
“What are you gonna do?”
“Are you even old enough to be here?”
And so she’d hit the gym, to lift weights, so that even if those around her didn’t think she could handle herself, she knew she could. She was stationed in the west district where, at the time, there were a handful of female officers. The first time she remembers a colleague saying something unsettling to her was in the parking lot of the police station. “How many fucking batteries does your baton take?” a much older constable asked. Muise, taken aback, laughed stiffly. She felt she had to try to fit in.
It became obvious that some of her fellow male officers didn’t see her as one of them. She recalled walking into a meeting room and glancing around for a seat. One officer tipped his head back and waggled his tongue in the air. “You can sit right here,” he said as the room full of men chortled in unison. She’d grown up with an older brother and was familiar with juvenile male behaviour, but this was far worse than she had expected.
That same year, an officer brandished a furry highway patrol hat in front of his crotch. “Does your curtain match your drapes?” he asked as the room erupted in laughter. Embarrassed, Muise walked away. These were the people who were supposed to be protecting women?
After meeting Jane Doe, Muise took a moment to collect herself. She knew how rare it was for survivors to come forward in the first place. She had heard about male colleagues declaring reports of sexual violence “unfounded,” or baseless. That meant no arrest, no trial, no conviction and no punishment. So, instead of filing a report in the computer system as she normally would, Muise turned in a handwritten report to the active sergeant that night—someone she trusted. The complaint moved swiftly up her chain of command and ended up with the RNC unit that deals with sexual assault cases.
Later that morning, sergeant Tim Hogan was at home when his work cellphone rang. A seasoned cop in charge of the child abuse and sexual assault unit, he was ordered to take over the investigation. Hogan arranged for Jane to be interviewed that weekend and listened as she tearfully recounted the assault. He felt certain there was enough to continue the investigation, but he had to move quickly. Careful to loop in only senior staff to stop news of the investigation from spreading, Hogan brought on the supervisor of the police communications centre. At the time, the centre used GPS to monitor the location of police vehicles. The supervisor searched those records, looking for the cars signed out on the night of the assault. They showed car number 221 had been parked outside Jane Doe’s address. Communication logs revealed that dispatch had called for the officer twice around 3 a.m.
Next, Hogan and a forensic identification sergeant visited Jane Doe’s apartment. She showed them where the assault had occurred, then she waited outside with her family. The sergeant shone a UV light on the middle of her brown loveseat and saw an effervescent blue glow, signalling the presence of human bodily fluid. He unzipped the cushion cover and sent it to a lab.
Hogan knew it would be difficult to keep the investigation quiet within the constabulary. There was no way they could use their own surveillance teams. His supervisor reached out to the RCMP, and Hogan asked them to help surveil the suspected officer and obtain a DNA sample.
On a drizzly day in February, the Mounties staked out an off-duty cop at a local Starbucks in St. John’s. When he got up to leave, they snagged the white ceramic mug he had been drinking from and slipped it into an evidence bag. The DNA from the loveseat was a near-perfect match of the DNA from the mug. It belonged to Carl Douglas Snelgrove, a thirty-seven-year-old married street patrol cop. He had been on the force for a decade.
That summer, an officer arrested Snelgrove and read him his rights, the same words Snelgrove had said to others over the years. This time, he was one of the bad guys.
The Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador, where former constable Carl Douglas Snelgrove’s first trial took place.
The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary located at 1 Fort Townshend in St John’s
A year and a half later, in 2017, Jane Doe trudged up the stone steps of the fortress-like Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador. She wore her first ever suit—a black polyester jacket and slacks carefully purchased at the mall after she googled “what to wear in court.”
In the courtroom, Jane sat on a wooden bench alongside her parents, sister-in-law, an aunt, and some cousins. Her two brothers, who had always looked out for her, were absent; they couldn’t face being in the same room with the cop who had violated their baby sister.
The odds were against her. Winning a sexual assault conviction against a cop is hard. A [September 2022 study](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08974454.2022.2126744) by Kate Puddister and Danielle McNabb, published in *Women & Criminal Justice*, looked at this problem in Ontario, [analyzing](https://theconversation.com/convictions-remain-rare-when-police-are-accused-of-sexual-assault-194965) the outcomes of 689 reports of police-involved sexual assault made to the Special Investigations Unit, a police oversight agency, between 2005 and 2020. According to the findings, only 7.4 percent of those reports resulted in criminal charges, and only 1.59 percent ended in a conviction and sentence. It’s not difficult to see why the rate is so low. Cases often hang on the credibility of the complainant versus that of the accused. And here police have advantages. They enjoy built-in authority in the justice system—a system they know their way around.
This was the institutional machinery and lopsided dynamic that Jane Doe faced as she took the stand, reliving the night of the assault and describing it in detail. The job of undermining Jane Doe’s story went to Randy Piercey, Snelgrove’s defence lawyer at the time. Piercey maintained that all sexual activity was consensual. Throughout the trial, he tried to chip away at the claim that Jane Doe had felt coerced. He focused on her choices after leaving the bar the night of the assault.
“Why did you go alone?”
“Why not go to your friends?”
“You felt confident enough to go get a cab at that hour of the morning by yourself?”
At one point, Piercey showed the jury a photo of the basement window Jane Doe had climbed through, to argue that she wasn’t as intoxicated as she said she was.
“Did you have any difficulty getting through that window?”
“No,” she said.
“Even at your size, I imagine it was difficult to get in through that window?”
“No,” she said. “Not for me.”
The lawyer asked her to describe the counter height and whether she had any trouble getting down: “Would you agree that, even sober, that would not be an easy thing to do—climb into the window onto the countertop and down onto the floor?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“OK, but you can imagine, sober—is that something you would want to be doing every day?”
“No,” said Jane Doe.
“So, I would suggest to you that you would appear to be sober when you did that,” said Piercey.
“OK,” she whispered.
“Would you agree or disagree?”
“Well, I wasn’t,” she said.
“But if someone was looking at you, and saw what you were doing, would that not give them a message about your degree of intoxication?”
“I guess,” she said.
Piercey seized on the fact that Jane Doe had told police she couldn’t remember whether she consented or not. He argued that not only created reasonable doubt about her level of drunkenness but left open the possibility she was aware enough to make decisions—including agreeing to sexual activity. Later, when Snelgrove took the stand, he delivered his script: she didn’t seem drunk, she invited him in, she took her clothes off, she wanted it. To Jane Doe, he sounded confident, cocky even. Dudley Do-Right tricked into unzipping his pants.
The case against Snelgrove rested on the definition of consent. Sexual activity in Canada is legal only when both parties agree to it, and, as the courts have interpreted it, consent must be communicated voluntarily and affirmatively, either through words or conduct. It can’t be inferred from silence or passivity.
Crucially, the criminal code has a provision for situations where the accused has abused their position of trust, power, or authority to commit a sexual crime. Crown prosecutor Lloyd Strickland argued that the presiding judge, justice Valerie Marshall, needed to instruct the jury on that provision. The Crown was confident that the jury would come to see that Jane Doe could not have consented because she was either unconscious or too drunk. But even if she had said yes, the Crown maintained, this still didn’t meet the legal threshold for consent: Snelgrove could have induced her into sexual activity by exploiting her feelings of trust in him.
Consent must be communicated either through words or conduct. It can’t be inferred from silence or passivity.
Justice Marshall wouldn’t accept that. Because Jane Doe could not recall what had happened, the judge pointed out, there wasn’t enough evidence that Snelgrove had attempted to leverage his position to gain consent. It was thus unfair, she argued, to instruct the jury on this aspect of the law. And so, uninstructed, the jury never considered it.
It took two days for jurors to declare Snelgrove not guilty. Immediately after the foreperson uttered the words, Jane Doe was whisked, sobbing, out the back of the courtroom by supporters.
Outside, a protest erupted. A crowd lingered on the steps of the courthouse until nightfall, chanting, “No excuse for violent men.” The next day, the courthouse door had been pelted with eggs. The downtown was defaced with graffiti: “Believe victims,” someone had sprayed in white letters. “St. Johns cops believe in rape” and “Fuck u RNC.”
Jane Doe, encouraged by the protest, decided to keep fighting. The Crown appealed on her behalf and won. Her lawyers argued that the jury should have been allowed to consider the power differential. In the fall of 2018, two of three appeal court judges agreed, a decision later upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2019. “It would have been open to the jury to conclude,” wrote Supreme Court justice Michael Moldaver, that “the accused took advantage of the complainant who was highly intoxicated and vulnerable, by using the personal feelings and confidence engendered by their relationship to secure her apparent consent to sexual activity.”
The Supreme Court of Canada decision paved the way for a new trial. By then, it had been five Christmases since Jane Doe had stepped into Snelgrove’s patrol car. After months of being jolted awake at night, sweaty and scared, she had started on new antidepressants and completed two programs at community college. Still, she felt stagnant, like she couldn’t heal. St. John’s no longer felt safe. She worried she’d run into him. So she moved to a remote cove hours away.
The retrial was set for March 2020 but took place in September due to pandemic delays. Proceedings were held in a former school in St. John’s to allow for physical distancing. The case captured the attention of the island again, but things unexpectedly unravelled. About eight days in, before the verdict was delivered, the presiding judge declared a mistrial after improperly dismissing two jurors.
Jane Doe, increasingly exasperated, agreed to try again. A third trial, under a different judge, took place in the same building in May 2021. The city blossomed with support. There were signs, some hand drawn, in the windows of homes, cars, and businesses all over St. John’s. “Three trials is too many,” said one. “We believe survivors,” said another. A woman painted rocks with messages of support and tucked them beside the hyacinth and heathers of her garden. Students hung banners in solidarity. Many updated their social media profiles with a post that said `#SupportForJaneDoe`.
Jane Doe by her kitchen window
Jane Doe was advised to keep her composure in court. If you start to feel angry, ask for a break, she recalled being told by the Crown and victim services. On the stand, Snelgrove’s lawyer pressed her about her decision to seek advice from a litigation lawyer in the early days of the police investigation. Piercey seemed to suggest what Jane Doe was really after was a cash settlement. “You wanted to find out if this jury is going to find him guilty, then you will pursue him civilly,” Piercey said to her during cross-examination.
“No,” Jane Doe cried. “I just want this over.”
Piercey swung again. He accused Jane Doe of waiting for the outcome of the trial before going forward with a suit. He kept needling, trying to get her to say she was going to sue. “If they convict, you’ll consider it?” he asked.
“It’s a consideration,” yelled Jane Doe. “I just don’t know.”
The jury deliberated for two days. Jane Doe and her family members gathered in one of the school’s empty classrooms, waiting to hear the verdict on a television broadcasting from the room. At the word “guilty,” her jaw dropped. She sat in disbelief. Her mother, who had taken time off from her job as a grocery store cashier to be with her daughter, felt a rush of pride. Everyone had underestimated her daughter, she thought—“that tiny scrap of a thing.”
In the parking lot, Muise, the police officer who had picked Jane up that cold January night more than six years earlier, sat in her Jeep. Tears streamed down her face when she saw the verdict on Twitter (now X). She had hoped to catch Jane Doe’s eye when she left the building, but instead, she spotted Snelgrove being escorted in handcuffs.
Outside, supporters cheered and hugged. Cars and trucks blew past, honking in support. Across St. John’s, a dozen billboards flashed the words “Support for Jane Doe.” In the small fishing town where Jane grew up, members of a women’s dart tournament held a moment of silence.
In November 2021, Snelgrove was sentenced to four years in prison. He shook his head as the judge declared him a federal sex offender and stood as a sheriff clinked handcuffs on his wrists behind his back. He faced a row of mostly female supporters, who included his wife. She wore a pink sweater, her hair in a bun, and put her fingers to her mask, as if to blow him a kiss.
Lynn Moore, a litigation lawyer who had given Jane Doe advice in the early days of the police investigation, wrestled with what to do. After Snelgrove’s conviction, a credible source provided details suggesting that the culture of sexual misconduct within the RNC ran deeper than anyone suspected. On July 19, 2021, Moore turned to Twitter and asked for information about other assaults by on-duty police officers. Her phone blew up. She fielded dozens of calls from women with stories disturbingly similar to Jane Doe’s. Moore, who is married to a retired police officer, was apoplectic. “When you’re on duty as a police officer, you’re supposed to be upholding the law, not violating it, not violating people,” she told me. “It’s just such an abuse of power.”
The Supreme Court of Canada decision about Jane Doe’s case—namely, that Snelgrove at the wheel of a marked police car and wearing a uniform was enough of a potential inducement—led to a clearer, more nuanced understanding of consent law, providing better protection for victims of sex crimes. Almost a year after her tweet, Moore represented eight women who filed two separate civil suits in Newfoundland and Labrador’s Supreme Court. They allege that the province, the employer of the RNC, knew or ought to have known that police officers were preying on women and took no steps to stop them.
One of Moore’s clients is an RNC officer. Her lawsuit alleges she was out drinking downtown in June 2014 when an on-duty sergeant gave her a ride home in his police car. He invited himself in for a beer and raped her. The second lawsuit details allegations, from seven other women, of sexual assaults by police officers, spanning more than a decade and a half. They say they were picked up in police cars and forced into unwanted sexual acts. One incident from around 2014 was similar to the Snelgrove case. A drunk woman left a downtown bar and was driven home by an RNC officer. According to court documents, he helped her get into her home as she had lost her keys. Once inside, he raped her. (When asked for comment on the pending lawsuits, an RNC spokesperson said that the department “does not comment on matters before the court or those anticipated to be before the court.”)
The RNC quietly changed its rules about transporting the public in patrol vehicles, according to a Canadian Press story from September 2021. Officers are now allowed to drive civilians only as part of a call for service. The next summer, a civilian-led police oversight agency found a “disturbing pattern” of police officers using their position “to solicit sexual favour from women in the St. John’s area.” The agency determined that several incidents deserved a more thorough investigation, including one reported in 2017 in which a police officer drove a woman home from downtown, put his tongue in her mouth, and tried to put his hand up her skirt. The RNC allowed the officer to resign with no further action.
The impact of Jane Doe’s case on the RNC went further. An independent workplace review, published in 2022, found a significant number of police officers—as many as 45 percent—did not believe their workplace was free of offensive, degrading, and humiliating behaviour. One of the review’s recommendations was to create an office for police personnel to bring allegations of misconduct.
For Jane Doe, the realization that her case encouraged other sexual assault victims to come forward was staggering. “If I hadn’t spoken up, none of these people likely would’ve either,” she told me at her kitchen table in rural Newfoundland. “I still can’t believe it.”
What she really wants is to start her life again. To go on vacation without worrying about being called back to court. To start a family with her partner. To move into a new house. And to tell her scared younger self that she’s going to be okay, that it’s finally all over. (As of this writing, Snelgrove has petitioned the Supreme Court of Canada to overturn his guilty verdict.)
Five months after picking up Jane Doe and reporting her case, Muise was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. During the years the case wound through court, she struggled. She felt targeted as officers showed up in court to support Snelgrove. She felt they looked down on her for “selling out” one of their own. Eventually, it became too much, and she took stress leave. She recalled one occasion when Snelgrove approached her outside the courtroom. He wasn’t mad at her, he said, and leaned forward to give her a hug. Disgusted, Muise walked away.
Muise thought of Jane Doe often but held back from contacting her throughout the trials. Ahead of the sentencing, Jane Doe texted Muise a copy of her victim impact statement. In the four-page document, Jane Doe described how she took medication for anxiety and depression. How she felt suicidal. How she had become scared of people in positions of power. How she felt like she had lost control of her life and her body. How she still woke up from nightmares and experienced flashbacks of Snelgrove standing over her. And how she credited Muise with saving her life. “Thanks to grace, higher powers and reasons unknown to me,” Jane Doe wrote, “Constable \[Muise\] was driving that night. She changed my life by believing in me.”
Looking back, after years of therapy, Muise sees that Jane’s case is part of her own story. “It changed so much in my life,” said Muise, who spoke to me last October on an overcast afternoon in St. John’s. Recently retired after nineteen years in service, she finally felt free to speak.
In a baseball cap and facing the front door of the cafe so she could see who walked in, Muise, then thirty-nine, described how, when she was twenty-one—the same age Jane Doe was at the time of her assault—she was out drinking downtown and was offered a ride home by a cop in his patrol car. She was drunk when the officer made unwanted sexual advances and inappropriately touched her while parked outside her home. She described another time when she was twenty-nine. Again, she was out drinking with friends downtown, and a sergeant offered her a ride home. When they got to her place, he invited himself in to use the bathroom and groped her.
Muise said she didn’t report the assaults because, at the time, it seemed normal—just another instance of crude behaviour she was expected to tolerate on the job as a female police officer. Plus, she said, echoing Jane, “Who’s going to believe a drunk person over a sober police officer?”
@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ For the segment, Onwuachi and a reporter named Lauren Scala were going to sample
“Do I remember when I was thirty-three?” Scala wondered aloud.
“Do I remember when I was thirty-three?” Scala wondered aloud.
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a25466)
“My goodness, Keith! You look like you’ve seen a goat.”
“My goodness, Keith! You look like you’ve seen a goat.”
@ -58,7 +58,7 @@ His look is fitting for a restaurant that feels more like a night club than like
Last March, Pete Wells, the *Times* restaurant critic, awarded Tatiana three stars, extraordinary for a rookie restaurant. Then came an even bigger shock: in April, when Wells published a list of the hundred best restaurants in New York, Tatiana held the No. 1 spot, ahead of Atomix, Le Bernardin, Via Carota, and other redoubtables. “We needed Tatiana. We needed a kitchen that puts Caribbean and African and Black American cooking, too often kept in the city’s margins, right at center stage,” he wrote. “And after quarantines and masks and distancing and sundry social traumas, we needed a party.”
Last March, Pete Wells, the *Times* restaurant critic, awarded Tatiana three stars, extraordinary for a rookie restaurant. Then came an even bigger shock: in April, when Wells published a list of the hundred best restaurants in New York, Tatiana held the No. 1 spot, ahead of Atomix, Le Bernardin, Via Carota, and other redoubtables. “We needed Tatiana. We needed a kitchen that puts Caribbean and African and Black American cooking, too often kept in the city’s margins, right at center stage,” he wrote. “And after quarantines and masks and distancing and sundry social traumas, we needed a party.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26375)
“I think we should break up.”
“I think we should break up.”
@ -78,8 +78,6 @@ Onwuachi was born on Long Island and raised in the Bronx. His parents, Jewel Rob
Onwuachi lived with Robinson in a cramped apartment, and saw his father mostly on weekends. Patrick, who worked as a construction project manager, took his son to the batting cages and on vacations, but he could be abusive. (“My job as his dad was to prepare him for the world,” Patrick said.) Around the age of ten, Onwuachi began to act out. “I was a *bad* kid,” he told me. Robinson sent him to Nigeria to stay with his grandfather P. Chike Onwuachi, an Igbo chief and a luminary of the Pan-African movement who taught for many years at Howard University, so that he might “learn respect.”
Onwuachi lived with Robinson in a cramped apartment, and saw his father mostly on weekends. Patrick, who worked as a construction project manager, took his son to the batting cages and on vacations, but he could be abusive. (“My job as his dad was to prepare him for the world,” Patrick said.) Around the age of ten, Onwuachi began to act out. “I was a *bad* kid,” he told me. Robinson sent him to Nigeria to stay with his grandfather P. Chike Onwuachi, an Igbo chief and a luminary of the Pan-African movement who taught for many years at Howard University, so that he might “learn respect.”
Onwuachi finishes a dish of curried snow crab with a drizzle of Calabrian chili oil.
What Robinson had billed as a single summer stretched to two years, during which Onwuachi lived without municipal electricity or water, and learned to raise livestock and grow vegetables. It’s an experience that he references frequently, not only because it acquainted him so thoroughly with his heritage but also because it taught him at an early age how to adapt. “I was speaking pidgin within a couple months,” he recalled. But when he returned to the Bronx his rebellious streak flared up again. He was kicked out of Catholic school for antagonizing teachers and classmates, and he joined a gang at the Webster Houses, where his best friend lived. He worked at McDonald’s, for $7.25 an hour, until he realized that he could make more money selling weed, an enterprise he continued in college, at the University of Bridgeport.
What Robinson had billed as a single summer stretched to two years, during which Onwuachi lived without municipal electricity or water, and learned to raise livestock and grow vegetables. It’s an experience that he references frequently, not only because it acquainted him so thoroughly with his heritage but also because it taught him at an early age how to adapt. “I was speaking pidgin within a couple months,” he recalled. But when he returned to the Bronx his rebellious streak flared up again. He was kicked out of Catholic school for antagonizing teachers and classmates, and he joined a gang at the Webster Houses, where his best friend lived. He worked at McDonald’s, for $7.25 an hour, until he realized that he could make more money selling weed, an enterprise he continued in college, at the University of Bridgeport.
There, Onwuachi’s hustle caught up with him: before his first year was through, he was expelled for failing a drug test. He went to live with his mother, who had moved to Louisiana, and embarked on a “sad-ass parade” of menial jobs: as a prep cook for Robinson, who was an executive chef at a catering company; as a dishwasher; and as a server at a barbecue restaurant. Things began to look up when he got a gig cooking on a cleanup ship for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Onwuachi seemed to have little in common with the ship’s mostly white “back-country Louisiana boys”—until he started to make the food that they had all grown up eating. Before long, he was put in charge of the kitchen.
There, Onwuachi’s hustle caught up with him: before his first year was through, he was expelled for failing a drug test. He went to live with his mother, who had moved to Louisiana, and embarked on a “sad-ass parade” of menial jobs: as a prep cook for Robinson, who was an executive chef at a catering company; as a dishwasher; and as a server at a barbecue restaurant. Things began to look up when he got a gig cooking on a cleanup ship for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Onwuachi seemed to have little in common with the ship’s mostly white “back-country Louisiana boys”—until he started to make the food that they had all grown up eating. Before long, he was put in charge of the kitchen.
@ -94,8 +92,6 @@ Onwuachi’s work has been lauded for its specificity, for its fidelity to the p
Still, he bristles at being stereotyped. Before “Top Chef,” Onwuachi worked briefly for Dinner Lab, a startup that operated a members-only supper club in cities across the U.S. When the founder, who was white, asked him to cook Senegalese food for a fund-raiser, Onwuachi politely declined. (He had no particular connection to Senegal.) In their initial pitch, the investors behind the Shaw Bijou suggested that he offer “upscale riffs” on Southern cooking. Again, he declined, for fear of “becoming an actor in the long and ugly play of degrading black culture for the benefit of white people,” he wrote.
Still, he bristles at being stereotyped. Before “Top Chef,” Onwuachi worked briefly for Dinner Lab, a startup that operated a members-only supper club in cities across the U.S. When the founder, who was white, asked him to cook Senegalese food for a fund-raiser, Onwuachi politely declined. (He had no particular connection to Senegal.) In their initial pitch, the investors behind the Shaw Bijou suggested that he offer “upscale riffs” on Southern cooking. Again, he declined, for fear of “becoming an actor in the long and ugly play of degrading black culture for the benefit of white people,” he wrote.
On a typical night at the restaurant, Onwuachi makes rounds in the dining room, greeting guests.
His project, instead, is to develop a varied, idiosyncratic Black culinary idiom—and to bring it into the mainstream. Onwuachi seems to revel in the contradictions of his position—blaring “music with the curse words” at the home of the New York Philharmonic—but he’s savvy about operating within the system. When I asked if he ever wanted to take a more radical approach, he was unequivocal. “I’m a businessman,” he said. “I’m an artist, sure, but I employ fifty people. I’m playing my fucking music that I wanna play, we’re putting oxtails on the menu, I’m putting a Black woman’s name on the side of Lincoln Center. I feel like I’m being as radical as I want to be.”
His project, instead, is to develop a varied, idiosyncratic Black culinary idiom—and to bring it into the mainstream. Onwuachi seems to revel in the contradictions of his position—blaring “music with the curse words” at the home of the New York Philharmonic—but he’s savvy about operating within the system. When I asked if he ever wanted to take a more radical approach, he was unequivocal. “I’m a businessman,” he said. “I’m an artist, sure, but I employ fifty people. I’m playing my fucking music that I wanna play, we’re putting oxtails on the menu, I’m putting a Black woman’s name on the side of Lincoln Center. I feel like I’m being as radical as I want to be.”
In late August, Onwuachi flew to D.C., and then drove to a small town called Middleburg, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia’s hunt country, an area that has long drawn élite weekenders from Washington. He was there for the third annual Family Reunion, a food festival that he started with Sheila Johnson, a co-founder of Black Entertainment Television and the first Black American woman to become a billionaire. In the late nineties, Johnson bought a horse farm in Middleburg. (Her young daughter was an aspiring equestrian.) One day, she noticed that a gun shop in the village center had a Confederate flag hanging in the window, so she bought the building that housed it. Later, she bought hundreds of acres of land nearby and placed most of it under conservation. In 2013, she opened a luxury resort, called the Salamander, on a small remaining parcel.
In late August, Onwuachi flew to D.C., and then drove to a small town called Middleburg, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia’s hunt country, an area that has long drawn élite weekenders from Washington. He was there for the third annual Family Reunion, a food festival that he started with Sheila Johnson, a co-founder of Black Entertainment Television and the first Black American woman to become a billionaire. In the late nineties, Johnson bought a horse farm in Middleburg. (Her young daughter was an aspiring equestrian.) One day, she noticed that a gun shop in the village center had a Confederate flag hanging in the window, so she bought the building that housed it. Later, she bought hundreds of acres of land nearby and placed most of it under conservation. In 2013, she opened a luxury resort, called the Salamander, on a small remaining parcel.
@ -108,8 +104,6 @@ This year’s Family Reunion was a *Who’s Who* of the Black American culinary
“It does, right?” he said. “I think I’m addicted to it.”
“It does, right?” he said. “I think I’m addicted to it.”
The menu at Tatiana draws inspiration from Nigerian, Caribbean, and Creole cuisine, as well as from New York’s street carts and corner stores.
Onwuachi spent the weekend in a state of perpetual motion. He roamed the Salamander’s grounds, sometimes in a golf cart, with a demeanor that was part summer-camp director, part pastor, part door-to-door salesman. He greeted guests with a cheerful, if slightly canned, “Welcome home!” and doled out hugs and collegial shoulder squeezes. In many ways, the event was an advertisement for him: its full title—“Kwame Onwuachi Presents the Family Reunion”—was even printed on the tags of the T-shirts and hoodies for sale at the merch table, which was staffed by his mother, his sister, a former babysitter, and two childhood friends.
Onwuachi spent the weekend in a state of perpetual motion. He roamed the Salamander’s grounds, sometimes in a golf cart, with a demeanor that was part summer-camp director, part pastor, part door-to-door salesman. He greeted guests with a cheerful, if slightly canned, “Welcome home!” and doled out hugs and collegial shoulder squeezes. In many ways, the event was an advertisement for him: its full title—“Kwame Onwuachi Presents the Family Reunion”—was even printed on the tags of the T-shirts and hoodies for sale at the merch table, which was staffed by his mother, his sister, a former babysitter, and two childhood friends.
Much of the time, he was trailed by a documentary film crew from Bronxville, a production company that he co-founded with the filmmaker Randy McKinnon, who adapted “Notes from a Young Black Chef” into a screenplay. (It was acquired by A24.) Hovering close behind, carrying a tote bag full of bottled water, was a strikingly tall young man with his hair in twists, whose name was Destined One Leverette. The Family Reunion arranges room and board for volunteers, and Leverette insisted that he had applied for a position—yet the organizers had no record of it. He’d come, on his own dime, from Birmingham, Alabama, where he worked in the kitchen of a chain restaurant called Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen. He was nineteen. Onwuachi said that he’d taken pity on Leverette: “He’s, like, ‘I’m ready to work.’ I’m, like, ‘Where’s your chef coat?’ He’s, like, ‘I don’t have it.’ I was, like, ‘Well, then, you’re going to just do whatever is needed.’ ”
Much of the time, he was trailed by a documentary film crew from Bronxville, a production company that he co-founded with the filmmaker Randy McKinnon, who adapted “Notes from a Young Black Chef” into a screenplay. (It was acquired by A24.) Hovering close behind, carrying a tote bag full of bottled water, was a strikingly tall young man with his hair in twists, whose name was Destined One Leverette. The Family Reunion arranges room and board for volunteers, and Leverette insisted that he had applied for a position—yet the organizers had no record of it. He’d come, on his own dime, from Birmingham, Alabama, where he worked in the kitchen of a chain restaurant called Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen. He was nineteen. Onwuachi said that he’d taken pity on Leverette: “He’s, like, ‘I’m ready to work.’ I’m, like, ‘Where’s your chef coat?’ He’s, like, ‘I don’t have it.’ I was, like, ‘Well, then, you’re going to just do whatever is needed.’ ”
# Martin Scorsese on Making “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Martin Scorsese has the best curveball in the business. His 2013 film, “[The Wolf of Wall Street](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-lasting-power-of-the-wolf-of-wall-street),” based on the true story of a large-scale financial fraudster, is also his wildest and wackiest comedy, closer in inspiration to Jerry Lewis than to Oliver Stone. His modern-gothic horror-thriller “[Shutter Island](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/out-of-the-past),” from 2010, is primarily a refracted personal essay about his childhood spent watching paranoid film-noir classics in the shadow of nuclear war. And now his forthcoming film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” his first attempt—as an octogenarian—at a Western, is essentially a marital drama akin to Stanley Kubrick’s final film, “Eyes Wide Shut.” It borrows more from such intimate psychological dramas as “Phantom Thread,” “Suspicion,” and, yes, “Gaslight” than from any of the Western classics of John Ford. In other words, the first of the mysteries that Scorsese’s new film poses isn’t in the plot—it’s the mystery of its own genesis.
When I met [Scorsese](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/03/27/martin-scorsese-profile-man-who-forgets-nothing) several weeks ago, I told him, before we got started, that I do very few interviews, because, well, I have a director’s films, and, if watching them doesn’t give me enough to think about and to write about, then I’m in the wrong profession. That said, there was much that I wanted to know about Scorsese, not least because of the paradox of his artistic position: he directs extraordinary movies on hundred-million-dollar budgets yet makes them deeply personal and packs them with artistic flourishes—spectacular camera moves, intimate observations, dramatic shocks, and moments of performance—that are as daring as they are distinctive. I wanted to ask about his methods because I’ve long felt that a huge part of the art of directing is *producing*—that the originality of a finished film usually has its roots in the distinctiveness of its director’s approach to the systems and methods that get it made.
I’d seen something of Scorsese’s behind-the-scenes originality in [Jonas Mekas’s documentary](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/review-jonas-mekass-illuminating-documentary-of-martin-scorsese-on-the-set-of-the-departed) about the making of Scorsese’s 2006 gangland drama, “The Departed”—the movie for which Scorsese finally won the Oscar for Best Director, after five previous nominations ended in disappointment, and which heralded his great outburst of work in the past decade and a half. I’d also seen it in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” in the way that Scorsese took the increasingly commonplace technology of C.G.I. and proceeded to use it like a painter. But the part of his process on “Killers of the Flower Moon” that I was most curious about involved the subject matter. Set in Oklahoma in the nineteen-twenties, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is based on the [nonfiction book](https://www.amazon.com/Killers-Flower-Moon-Osage-Murders-ebook/dp/B01CWZFBZ4) of the same name by [David Grann](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/david-grann), a colleague of mine at *The New Yorker*. In the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a white man who marries an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone), under the direction of his gangster-like uncle (Robert De Niro), as part of a wide-ranging and murderous scheme to pry away the wealth of the Osage Nation, on whose territory oil has been discovered.
One of the common frustrations of watching movies adapted from books is the inevitable abridgment of the source material. Reading a book several hundred pages long takes many more hours than watching even a longish feature, and, often, one can sense an adaptation’s compression and gaps without having read the book. Scorsese’s new film is colossal—three hours and twenty-six minutes—but even that duration could never encompass the plethora of incident that [Grann delivers](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/david-grann-the-osage-murders-and-the-birth-of-the-fbi) in his fascinating, horrifying book. Scorsese escapes this dilemma with a move of almost Houdini-like ingenuity, zeroing in on something that even Grann’s voluminous research couldn’t shed much light on: What was that couple’s relationship like? Thanks to this change in emphasis, the task of writing the script became not one of condensation but one of expansion—of filling a historical gap by means of imagination. And the way in which the couple’s relationship is reimagined, as Scorsese made clear to me, embodies his own grappling with the underlying morality of Grann’s tale—a responsibility to place the Osage people at the center of the story that turned out to shift the very aesthetic of the movie.
Almost all directors are also actors; they just happen to reserve their performances for their cast and crew. Some also perform in movies, their own or those of other directors; Scorsese has done both, albeit in incidental roles. In “Killers of the Flower Moon” he appears in a small but crucial dramatic role, a performance that is far more powerful than a Hitchcockian wink or a cameo to please connoisseurs. Scorsese won his Oscar at a time when the studios had already become inhospitable to his kind of large-scale yet artistically ambitious filmmaking, and the ensuing rise of superhero movies and other primarily youth-centered I.P. franchises made matters worse. Scorsese has leveraged his eminence to take a leading role in advocating for studios to both invest in the preservation and distribution of classic movies and release new and substantial movies by ambitious directors. In effect, he has become the face and the voice of the cause of cinematic art—past, present, and future. No spoilers, but, when he acts in “Killers,” he nonetheless speaks for himself and speaks, too, for the cinema at large.
In person, Scorsese has a lot to say, and the fascination of what he says is heightened by his way of saying it. Just as a scene in a movie may be made of dozens of shots of diverse durations, assembled in various ways, and often ranging far in time and space and tone, so Scorsese speaks in a free-associative, quick-cut, montage-like manner that is entirely his own, building drama as the details accrete and connect with verbal counterparts to cuts, dissolves, superimpositions, and other kinds of cinematic punctuation. His conversation is the image of a mind in motion, ranging freely between memory and perception, between practical specifics and ideas, between firsthand experience and notions gleaned from watching movies—all infused, like his films, with purpose and passion. Just as “Killers of the Flower Moon” was the fastest three and a half hours of my moviegoing life, my conversation with Scorsese about it was the fastest hour of conversation I’d ever experienced. Our discussion has been edited for length and clarity.
**There’s something special about “Killers of the Flower Moon.” You always tell good, moving, passionate stories, but here I felt like you were doing something more than telling a story. I felt like you were bearing witness. Did you have that feeling when you were making the film? Was that part of what went into the project?**
Definitely. And I think it goes back to a time in ’74, when I had this opportunity to spend some time, only a day or two, maybe two days, with the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) tribe, in South Dakota, and I was involved with a project that didn’t work out. It was a traumatic experience, and I was so young I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand the damage and the poverty. I grew up with poverty in another way, which was working-class men and women on Elizabeth Street and Mott Street and Mulberry, but we also had the Bowery. So I grew up with *that* poverty. But I never saw anything like *this*, and I can’t describe why—it was hopeless. I met some Native Americans again in L.A. at the time, and we talked about another project, and I saw, too, that this incredible fantasy that we had growing up as children was something that—even despite the wonderful attempts at righting the wrongs of the Hollywood films with “Broken Arrow,” “Drum Beat,” “Apache,” “Devil’s Doorway”—all the films that were pro-Native American, there were still American white actors playing the Native Americans. But the stories were balanced toward not only who had right on their side but also a respect for the culture, particularly in “Broken Arrow,” I thought.
But, in any event, no, I was always aware of poverty, and I always felt I was witness to it there only for a couple of days. But culminating in the end of the Western with Sam Peckinpah, there was a new territory then: How are we to think, what are we to make of all this in terms of the Native American experience? Are they really gone? In a way, as children, we thought, Well, they’re with us, but they’re like us now. We were children and, I think, meant to think that way of the forced assimilation, to a certain extent, of the Native populations. But I didn’t know. When I got out there and I saw what it was, it was different.
**But from 1974 to now—it’s forty-nine years. Had you been thinking of a project involving Native Americans for the entire time?**
I stayed away from it. I stayed away from it because the shock was so strong. Somehow it had to be the right story, and that’s taken a long time.
**How did you find David Grann’s book? How did it come to you?**
Oh, Rick Yorn gave it to me. Rick is my manager, and also Leo DiCaprio’s manager. And, yeah, the idea of the flower moon—the flower moon is feminine and we had just worked on “Silence,” and the moon images and the sense of Jesus as the feminine side of Jesus rather than the masculine side is really important. And so, for me, the flower moon, the feminine, but the “killers of the flower moon,” the clash of that, and this landscape, which I only had in my imagination—I’d never been out to the prairie. When I got out there, we were driving for so long on one road, and I wondered why we were going so slowly, and I looked at the—it was, like, forty-five minutes—I looked at this speedometer, we’re doing seventy-five, and I realized this place never ends. And on either side there were no trees. You really couldn’t tell how fast you were going.
**What you did with the book, I mean, not that I would ever want to teach, but if I were teaching a class on adaptation, I would show people your film and I’d have them read David’s book, because your transformation of the book is, to me, one of your many great achievements, because you have everything that’s in the book, almost everything that’s in the book, almost all the salient details of the horrors, in the film. But you reverse the perspective.**
Yeah. Leo and I wanted to make a film together about this whole idea of the West and all that sort of thing. And he was going to play Tom White, the F.B.I. agent. And so I said, I’m thinking, how are we going to do this? Because I’m just, not to be glib, but Tom White, in reality, was a very strong-willed man. Very, very, very disciplined, moral, straightforward. And laconic. Hardly said anything. Didn’t need to say much. Now, Leo likes—I told him many times, I said, Your face is a cinema face. I said, You can do silent films. You don’t need to say that or this, just your eyes do it, move, whatever you do, he just has it—but I do know he likes to speak in films.
Then I’m realizing, too, who are these people? I said, These guys come in from Washington, and the moment they get off that train, the moment they enter that town, you look around and you see Bob De Niro, you see so-and-so—“I know who did it.” The audience is way ahead of us. I said, It’s, like, we’re going to watch two and a half hours of these guys trying to find things. That’s a police procedural. In the book, it works; in the book, it works. But a police procedural, for me, I’ll watch it, but I can’t do it. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to do the plot. I don’t know where to put the pen. And so I said, What the hell are we going to do here? So we tried and tried and tried. Our script was over two hundred pages, and one night we had a big reading: myself and Leo and \[the co-writer\] Eric \[Roth\] and my daughter, a number of people. The first two hours, we were moving along. The second two hours, boy, is this getting a little long in the tooth, as they say. It was just getting to be—we really ran out of energy in the story, and I wanted to tell more and more of the story, and I wanted to do more digressions, to go off in tangents, so to speak, what seem like tangents, but are not.
But at the same time, luckily I had gone out to Oklahoma a few times and the first thing I did was, I was very concerned about meeting the Osage Nation to see how we could coöperate together. I found that yes, they were concerned about trust. I got them to understand that I wanted to do the best I could with them and the story, and that they could trust me, I hoped. And they began to, but I also understood why they don’t. I totally get it. And that’s the story. Now here, what really is the story is that you have trust in a marriage, right? O.K., there are different levels of it and there are aspects and mistakes and things, but there’s trust. Well, what I was learning from the Osage was that all the families are still there. The Burkharts and the Roans, Henry Roan. What we were told by their descendants was, Don’t forget this, that Ernest and Mollie were in love. Why the hell did she stay? Not *why* did she stay with him? *How* did she stay with him? Why one person stays with another, we don’t know. “How” is another issue, another way into the story. The “how” is deception, self-deception; the “how” is love stronger than what she dares think he is doing. So this was a coverup, and yet she trusted. And so this love story, this love story. And we had met with Lily \[Gladstone\] through a Zoom because \[the casting director\] Ellen Lewis showed me Kelly Reichardt’s “[Certain Women](https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/certain-women).” Lily was extraordinary in it. And then Leo and her met on the Zoom because he was very concerned about who are we going to get to play this part? Obviously, she has to be Native American, and we wanted the Osage approval. They approved her, and, before they approved her, Leo had this conversation with her on Zoom, and as soon as the Zoom call was over he said, “She’s amazing.” I said, ”Yeah, for many different reasons.” I think a lot of it you can see in the film; she has integrity, a sense of humor.
There’s a profundity to her and there’s a sweetness, at times, of face. We felt confident that she knew more than us. She just knew it, meaning she knows the people, she understands the situation, she understands the delicacy of the confusions and, I think, the trespasses, so to speak. But in any event, after doing the reading, a week later, Leo came to me and—we still had this in our head, that they’re in love. And the reality was that she didn’t leave until after the trial. We had scenes in there, the F.B.I. guys—or the Bureau guys—were saying, “How is she still with him?”
They actually said that. We have the court transcript. She’s still there in the court. She’s in the court. Doesn’t she get it? But there was something about him and her together, and then she left him after that. And we said, Well, what was that about? And I said, What if that’s the story? And Leo came to me and said—so we tried to build it in within the context of somebody else playing Ernest, and Tom White dealing with, again, the police procedural, but it overwhelmed it. The procedural overwhelmed the personal story. And Leo came to me again, he came to my house one night, a week later, and he said, “Where’s the heart of the film?” I said, “Well, the heart is with her and Ernest.” He said, “Because no matter what, if I’m playing Tom White, we deal with the iconic nature of the Texas Ranger.” We have seen that; it’s good. Does he need to do it? How would I do it any differently? I tried. I couldn’t find a way. So he looked at me and sat down and said, “Now, don’t get upset.” He said, “But what if I play Ernest?”
**So it was his idea to do it. Wow.**
I said, “If you play Ernest and we deal with the love story, then we’re at the very heart of it. We’re in the the day-to-day.” I said, “You realize, of course, that means we go in the center of script, rip it open and change everything and tell the studio you want to play the other guy, and we’re going to go this way, and Lily’s great, and we’ll rewrite the whole thing,” which is what we did.
But “rewrite” is the wrong word. We constructed it all. Eric \[Roth\], me, a couple of friends helped. That’s what we had done with “Casino,” too, Nick Pileggi and I, we worked from transcripts. And so I would say, “That’s great over here.” And then another guy would say, “Hey, why don’t we put *this* in?” And so, cobbling and pushing and shoving, I mean, until we went into rehearsal, and then, even in rehearsal, we just kept working on it and working on it, and we had a lot with the Osage themselves, they would say things, and one guy, Wilson Pipestem, who was a lawyer, a really terrific guy, Osage, he was very concerned at first. He looked at me and said, “You don’t understand, we have a certain way of life.” And he’s a very strong lawyer, an activist, and he pointed out and said, “We grew up this way, we grew up that way”—he was giving me examples of things in the midst of, not a lesson, not an argument against me, but an argument for himself and for his people, saying, “This is what we are, you don’t understand this. For example, when I was young, my grandmother would be in the house and all of a sudden this storm would come up and I’d be running around and she’d say, ‘Nope, sit down, sit down, let the storm flow over us, the power of the storm. It’s a gift from God. It’s a gift from Wah’Kon-Tah. Let the storm—don’t move, just absorb the storm.’ ” And he said, “That’s the way we live.” So I wrote it down. Grab from here, grab from there. And there was the end of the scene, the dinner scene with Mollie and Leo, which we had written where she said, “Would you like some whiskey?” and they drink and she drinks more than him, but she doesn’t get drunk and he does. And I said, “We could do a great scene.” I said, “But there’s something—what if the rain hits? What if the storm happens, without making it too ominous, the storm, but it’s the power of the storm, the beauty of Wah’Kon-Tah, the gift of the storm. And, in order to do that, you have to be quiet. You can’t be your little coyote self.” And she controlled him that way, and he just waits.
So that’s the way it was constructed. We had fun with that because we were always finding new things, because somebody would go by and say something, or \[the producer\] Marianne Bower would find out a great deal. She was our connection with all the people. She’d work with the different departments, different Osage technical advisers for different departments, and, well, “So-and-so said this and so-and-so said that.” “That’s interesting. What is that?” “Well, you know what they normally do: the youngest member of the family walks over the coffin of the eldest who died.” Well, that’s got to be, it’s got to be. We have to do it.
So then the funeral scenes got bigger. So, in a way, what I mean by “got bigger” was that I—we even had more, but we had to narrow it down, narrow it down. Then I had the—coming from Sicilians, one of the key things, I grew up with a lot of the old people dying off. So I grew up in a lot of funeral parlors, and the old Italian ladies, the old Sicilians in black, it’s like “Salvatore Giuliano,” remember? “Turiddu!” and she screams on her son—that’s who we grew up with. And the son’s holding the mother back and she’s throwing herself in the coffin. I said, “They were talking about the wailers and the mourners.” I said, “They have mourners.” They have people who cry. So we got to do that. And when we did it, I found that—they said, “We do it in front of the house.” I said, “Great.” And I said, “Well, let’s get a wide shot of it from way above.” And there was the house, there was nothing behind it, and there were these three figures, and they’re wailing, and the way it sounded, well, that’s great. “Don’t you want a tighter shot?” I said no. He said, “I got a tighter shot, it’s maybe from—” I said, “No, the shot is up here. I think it’s up here because they’re wailing out to Wah’Kon-Tah. We see it all. And there’s this little house, pathetic human beings. We’re all as we are, and we’re just wailing and you barely hear it.” So this is the way it was.
**Your description of your discovery of the overhead shot reminds me of one of the things that’s miraculous in masterworks of large-scale filmmaking, which is that it’s like you’re painting a painting with a paintbrush at the end of a crane, but you’re not driving.**
No, I’m not driving it. I would like to, I’d like to drive the crane, but then I’d get into all kinds of trouble. But no, I don’t want the technology to limit me, meaning to get too hung up on the technology. I’ve always been fighting that for years. That’s why I had good relationships with a number of different directors of photography, Mike Chapman and certainly Michael Ballhaus, others I’ve worked with that were terrific, but we only did one or two films together. But often I would find that many D.P.s love the equipment and the equipment gets in the way.
**I had a shock of a lifetime when I saw something that was put up online soon after the release of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which is a [video made by Brainstorm Digital,](https://vimeo.com/83523133) a company that did some post-production work on the film. And what they showed was the footage as it appears in the film, and then the raw footage from the camera and how, by means of digital technology, by C.G.I., things were—a wedding scene was lifted physically off of one site and placed on another completely different background.**
Oh, yeah, we did something. Yes, yes, yes.
**Did you find yourself needing to use a lot of C.G.I. in the making of “Killers of the Flower Moon”?**
No, not really. Except for straightening out some landscape. For example, certain trees that weren’t quite right, supposedly. We were told those trees don’t necessarily belong in this part of the ground, whatever. No, we found that what \[the production designer\] Jack Fisk did with Pawhuska, where we shot, to make it look like Fairfax—Fairfax was about forty-five minutes away—it was like a studio. It was like we were literally going to these places. We had the storefronts reconstructed. It was like going back in time, really. We were spending a lot of time in 1921 and ’22.
**One of the things about this film, and, for me, your recent run of films, including “The Irishman,” is that they are ferociously political. I really get a sense of “The Irishman” as, Let me show you what’s lying underneath this respectable society, and, with “Killers of the Flower Moon,” it’s like lifting up the lid and saying, This is your American history. This is what you didn’t learn in school. This is what our society now is built on and doesn’t dare look in the face.**
Exactly. Exactly. Maybe because where I came from, I saw it on street level, I think. A lot of it has to do with believing that you’re right, believing you deserve it. And that’s what I’ve been becoming aware of in the past twenty-five, thirty years of the country based on people who formulated the country, white Protestant—English, French, Dutch, and German. And so that country was formed that way with that kind of thinking. It’s European, but not Catholic, not Jewish, but the work ethic of the Protestant, which is good. It’s just that that was the formation. And then the political and power structure came out of that and stays with that. It just stays with it. I also saw and experienced people close to me who were basically pretty decent, but did some bad things and were taken advantage of by law officers. So I grew up thinking there’s no lawman you could trust. There was some good police, there were some good cops on the beat, nice guys. Some were not. But, from my father’s world, from his generation, it was a very different experience. But this issue of—I really admire the idea of people who really get into politics for public service and are really public servants. That’s really interesting. If they really serve the public.
**Could you make a film about one?**
I don’t know. One who could try, one who could try to be a good public servant. It reminds me of the line in “Black Narcissus.” The Mother Superior tells Deborah Kerr before she goes to India: Remember, the leader of them all is the servant of them all.
**I have the feeling that something changed in your work after “The Departed,” after you won the Oscar. Not that awards really matter, but that, at that point, it was like you had nothing else, whether consciously or unconsciously, nothing more to prove. And you then made a film that I consider one of your best and one of your, in the most positive sense, craziest films, “Shutter Island.”**
Yeah, the people are split on that one. But I like it, in the sense that every line of dialogue could mean an infinite number of things. It was really quite interesting for me, I really wanted to do it. Winning the award was—don’t forget, it was thirty-seven years before an Oscar for Best Director, let alone Best Picture, which was a total surprise to me. But it’s a different Academy from when I was starting. But, for me, that award was, it was inadvertent. I had made “The Departed” as a sign-off. I was leaving and just going to make some small films, I don’t know. And it just happened that “The Departed” clicked. And it was a very difficult one to make, for many different reasons. That’s a whole other story. But we fought our way out of it—through it, I should say. Through it, out of it. And, when I finally threw it up on the screen, people liked it. I don’t mean I didn’t think that it was good or bad. I just felt we had accomplished something. I didn’t know it was going to be that way. I had no idea. And my next film was going to be “Silence.” That was the idea. But what came in between was “Shutter Island.” There were issues there. I did feel something—let’s make, O.K., now I can—let’s try and make another *movie*. And I got the script and I just fell in love with the script. Then I didn’t realize, until we started working with the actors, the different levels, and I knew the levels were there, but how to perceive—how to shoot it, how to perceive the images, and also how to direct the actors.
But the thing about it was that in a way, after “Departed,” it was like I knew I could not make films for the studios anymore, because at that time—there’s no ill will between us and the people who were at the studio at the time—but, even to this day, they wanted a franchise film, and I killed off the two guys. They wanted one to live. I didn’t want to make films that way. And I realized there was no way I could continue making films. And so everything since then has been independent to a certain extent since “Shutter.” The guy who took care of me was \[the Paramount Pictures C.E.O.\] Brad Grey. He came in, Brad gave me “Departed,” and he agreed on “Shutter.” And so then he passed away. And, since then, it’s really been independent. There’s no room for me to make films through the studios that way anymore.
**Well, that’s been my hypothesis: that an entire generation of younger filmmakers found their second wind with independent producers, whether it’s Wes Anderson or Sofia Coppola or Spike Lee.**
Yeah.
**But, from your generation, you are the person who—the studio was holding you back in a certain sense. Not that you made bad films, you made wonderful films. But I kind of always felt there’s more. There’s a—not compromise—but there’s a wall that a filmmaker hits, any filmmaker hits when they’re working for the big studios.**
There’s no doubt. And my thing was to explore that. And in some cases—in the case of “Last Temptation of Christ,” I had a deal at Universal. I owed them some movies; that became “Cape Fear” and “Casino,” and that was it. But by the time we did “Kundun” and “Bringing Out the Dead,” it was over. It was over. We were declared gone, “Bringing Out the Dead” only played for a few weeks. And it was a Paramount film. And that was the end. And again, \[my agent, Michael\] Ovitz came and kind of helped me and put together “Gangs of New York” with Leo, with \[Harvey\] Weinstein, and all of them. That became a whole other period of my life. I was glad when it was over, but I was obsessed with “Gangs.” I never really even finished it in my head. And I just said, O.K., this obsession is over with. I still haven’t, at that point, hadn’t cracked the script for “Silence.” So I was ready to do a *movie*. I wanted to work and make a film, and they had this thing called “The Aviator.” They didn’t tell me what it was about. And so I started reading it, don’t tell me it’s Howard Hughes, because Spielberg, Warren Beatty want to do—but then I kept reading it. It’s the different Howard Hughes, it’s the early Howard Hughes. He flies and he’s—but right here, in the meantime, he can’t touch a doorknob.
That’s interesting. So we did that. And, even that, that was fine. That was a terrific shoot. The editing was good, but the elements involved in the distribution caused some serious problems toward the end. I had some very, very ugly—and I decided at that point, you can’t make films anymore. If this is the way I’m going to have to make them, it’s over. And so I said, I wanted to make this. I found the script of “The Departed” and I liked the idea and I said, “Let’s just make this in the streets and let’s do something.”
But that became—it turns out it was Warner Bros., which was one of the distributors of “Aviator,” that we had some arguments with. And they said, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” But, in the meantime, it was difficult. And so, after that I said, “No more.” And so we went into “Shutter Island,” but I was able to make “Departed” pretty much the way I wanted to. But it was a knockdown, drag-out fight all the way from Day One to the end. So by that point I realized, If that’s the way you’re going to make a film, there’s no sense anymore. So it was going to be independent films and it was going to be going into “Silence” and that sort of thing.
**So did you think you were going to scale back and work on very low budgets with seven people in the street?**
Yes. Yes.
**Are you still tempted?**
I think, let me put it this way, it’s into my head. Seven people could be seventy, but it’s got to *feel* like seven, because, quite honestly, I’m short. I’m old now. Try to get in the room with the lighting and all the cable. I have to have an assistant in front of me, taking me. I would love to be able to have the freedom of the smaller crews again, a sense of freedom. But in the case of “The Irishman,” for example, out of the question, because of the trucks, because of the C.G.I., and Bob \[De Niro\] and me, I was seventy-five. Bob was seventy-five, Al \[Pacino\] was seventy-seven, Joe \[Pesci\], I don’t know what age he is. I mean, at a certain point, by the time we all get on set, they’re good for a certain amount of hours.
And if you want to say, “Hey, we’re going to go down the block and shoot another scene, we’re going to move all the trucks,” they need sleep. So we were kind of locked in there. But with “Killers of the Flower Moon,” by having Pawhuska to ourselves, that was quite something. Adam Sumner’s a brilliant assistant director. He works with Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott. His staging is wonderful, and the background stuff—I would say, “O.K., they’re going to be coming down the block here, we’re going to track this way,” and, of course, it’s 1921. So the background, costumes, horses, you need people doing things. It’s not like shooting in New York, but we had the control. It was like a studio. We had the control. And that, in a funny way, made it feel like we were making a smaller picture.
And we had such devotion from the Osage, from all the people working behind the camera to get the costumes right. I chose them. You could see it with \[the costume designer\] Jackie West. I sent black-and-white pictures everywhere, and drawings. I would circle a tie or a collar or a shoe. They would bring me stuff from the Osage and I’d circle certain things. They’d tell me what’s right and what’s wrong for certain. But, primarily, I mean, buttons. I would go on—every place in the film, all the men’s and women’s costumes had gone through me, through to Jackie, from historical photographs and from films like “The Winning of Barbara Worth,” which I saw one night. My wife was in the hospital, it was on TV on TCM. And I think Gary Cooper’s wearing the goggles in the car. It’s a silent film. And so we had the goggles. Or “Blood on the Moon,” which I looked at again last night because I want to do something on TCM with it. “Blood on the Moon,” the costuming there and the brooding nature of the way they move. And Robert Mitchum, Charles McGraw, Robert Preston. Very, very important influence for this picture. So it felt free, and maybe in a way, too, because we weren’t in L.A., we weren’t in New York. There wasn’t anywhere to go. You’re in a big house that I had rented and you go and make the movie, you’re not going to Tulsa; you have night life in Tulsa. I was in Bartlesville, where Terry Malick grew up.
**So you’re all focussed together and there’s essentially nothing to think about but the movie.**
# Orcas are learning terrifying new behaviors. Are they getting smarter?
Orcas (*Orcinus orca*) are apex predators that can take on prey much larger than themselves. (Image credit: The Asahi Shimbun Premium via Getty Images)
In March 2019, researchers off the coast of southwestern Australia witnessed a gruesome scene: a dozen orcas ganging up on one of the biggest creatures on Earth to kill it. The orcas devoured huge chunks of flesh from the flanks of an adult blue whale, which died an hour later. This was the first-ever documented case of orca-on-blue-whale predation, but it wouldn't be the last.
In recent months, orcas (*Orcinus orca*) have also been spotted [abducting baby pilot whales](https://www.livescience.com/orca-appears-to-adopt-or-abduct-a-baby-pilot-whale) and tearing open sharks to feast on their livers. And off the coast of Spain and Portugal, a small population of [orcas has begun ramming and sinking boats](https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/orcas-have-sunk-3-boats-in-europe-and-appear-to-be-teaching-others-to-do-the-same-but-why).
All of these incidents show just how clever these apex predators are.
"These are animals with an incredibly complex and highly evolved brain," [Deborah Giles](https://www.wildorca.org/story/meet-giles-wild-orcas-resident-killer-whale-scientist/), an orca researcher at the University of Washington and the nonprofit Wild Orca, told Live Science. "They've got parts of their brain that are associated with memory and emotion that are significantly more developed than even in the human brain."
But the scale and novelty of recent attacks have raised a question: Are orcas getting smarter? And if so, what's driving this shift?
> They've got parts of their brain that are associated with memory and emotion that are significantly more developed than even in the human brain.
It's not likely that orcas' brains are changing on an anatomical level, said [Josh McInnes](https://oceans.ubc.ca/2023/06/01/josh-mcinnes/), a marine ecologist who studies orcas at the University of British Columbia. "Behavioral change *can* influence anatomical change in an animal or a population" — but only over thousands of years of evolution, McInnes told Live Science.
**Related:** [**Scientists investigate mysterious case of orca that swallowed 7 sea otters whole**](https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/scientists-investigate-mysterious-case-of-orca-that-swallowed-7-sea-otters-whole)
But orcas are fast learners, which means they can and do teach each other some terrifying tricks, and thus become "smarter" as a group. Still, some of these seemingly new tricks may in fact be age-old behaviors that humans are only documenting now. And just like in humans, some of these learned behaviors become trends, ebbing and flowing in social waves.
Frequent interactions with humans through boat traffic and fishing activities may also drive orcas to learn new behaviors. And the more their environment shifts, the faster orcas must respond and rely on social learning to persist.
## Teaching hunting strategies
Orcas (*Orcinus orca*) attacked an adult blue whale off the coast of Australia and inserted their heads inside the whale's mouth to feed on its tongue. (Image credit: John Totterdell)
There's no question that orcas learn from each other. Many of the skills these animals teach and share relate to their role as highly evolved apex predators.
Scientists described [orcas killing and eating blue whales](https://www.livescience.com/orcas-hunt-and-kill-blue-whales) (*Balaenoptera musculus*) for the first time in a [study published last year](https://doi.org/10.1111/mms.12906). In the months and years that followed the first attack in March 2019, orcas preyed on a blue whale calf and juvenile in two additional incidents, pushing the young blue whales below the surface to suffocate them.
This newly documented hunting behavior is an example of social learning, with strategies being shared and passed on from adult orcas to their young, [Robert Pitman](https://mmi.oregonstate.edu/people/robert-pitman), a marine ecologist at Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute, told Live Science in an email. "Anything the adults learn will be passed along" from the dominant female in a pod to her offspring, he said.
Taking down a blue whale "requires cooperation and coordination," Pitman said. Orcas may have learned and refined the skills needed to tackle such enormous prey [in response to the recovery of whale populations](https://doi.org/10.1111/mms.12182) from whaling. This know-how was then passed on, until the orcas became highly skilled at hunting even the largest animal on Earth, Pitman said.
## Old tricks, new observations
The remains of a shark that was attacked by orcas off the coast of South Africa. (Image credit: Marine Dynamics)
Some of the gory behaviors researchers have observed recently may actually be long-standing habits.
For instance, during the blue whale attacks, observers noted that the orcas inserted their heads inside live whales' mouths to feed on their tongues. But this is probably not a new behavior — just a case of humans finally seeing it up close.
"Killer whales are like humans in that they have their 'preferred cuts of meat,'" Pitman said. "When preying on large whales, they almost always take the tongue first, and sometimes that is all they will feed on."
Tongue is not the only delicacy orcas seek out. Off the coast of South Africa, two males — nicknamed Port and Starboard — have, for several years, been [killing sharks to extract their livers](https://www.livescience.com/killer-whale-great-white-shark-killing-spree).
> Killer whales are like humans in that they have their 'preferred cuts of meat.'
Although the behavior [surprised researchers at first](https://www.livescience.com/59056-orcas-may-be-killing-great-white-sharks.html), it's unlikely that orcas picked up liver-eating recently due to social learning, [Michael Weiss](https://www.whaleresearch.com/ourpeople), a behavioral ecologist and research director at the Center for Whale Research in Washington state, told Live Science.
**Related:** [**Orcas attacked a great white shark to gorge on its liver in Australia, shredded carcass suggests**](https://www.livescience.com/animals/sharks/orcas-attacked-a-great-white-shark-to-gorge-on-its-liver-in-australia-shredded-carcass-suggests)
That's because, this year, scientists also captured [footage of orcas slurping down the liver of a whale shark](https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/watch-orca-tear-open-whale-shark-and-feast-on-its-liver-in-extremely-rare-footage) off the coast of Baja California, Mexico. The likelihood that Port and Starboard transferred their know-how across thousands of miles of ocean is vanishingly small, meaning liver-eating is probably a widespread and established behavior.
"Because there are more cameras and more boats, we're starting to see these behaviors that we hadn't seen before," Weiss said.
## Sharing scavenging techniques
Orcas make an easy meal by following fishing boats and feasting on their catch. (Image credit: wildestanimal via Getty Images)
Orcas master and share more than hunting secrets. Several populations worldwide have learned to poach fish caught for human consumption from the longlines used in commercial fisheries and have passed on this information.
In the southern Indian Ocean, around the Crozet Islands, two orca populations have [increasingly scavenged off longlines since fishing in the region expanded in the 1990s](https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0328). By 2018, the entire population of orcas in these waters had taught one another to feast on longline buffets, with whole groups that previously foraged on seals and penguins developing a taste for human-caught toothfish.
Sometimes, orcas' ability to quickly learn new behaviors can have fatal consequences. In Alaska, orcas recently started dining on groundfish caught by bottom trawlers, but many end up entangled and dead in fishing gear.
"This behavior may be being shared between individuals, and that's maybe why we're seeing an [increase in some of these mortality events](https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/opportunistic-orcas-have-developed-a-new-feeding-behavior-that-appears-to-be-killing-them)," McInnes said.
## Playing macabre games
Orcas off the North Pacific coast have been playing with porpoises to death in a game that has lasted 60 years. (Image credit: Wild Orca)
Orcas' impressive cognitive abilities also extend to playtime.
Giles and her colleagues study an [endangered population of salmon-eating orcas](https://www.livescience.com/inbreeding-may-be-causing-orca-population-in-the-pacific-northwest-to-crash) off the North Pacific coast. Called the Southern Resident population, these killer whales don't eat mammals. But over the past 60 years, they [have developed a unique game](https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/orcas-are-harassing-and-playing-with-baby-porpoises-in-deadly-game-that-has-lasted-60-years) in which they seek out young porpoises, with the umbilical cords sometimes still attached, and play with them to death.
**Related:** [**'An enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth': How orcas gained their 'killer' reputation**](https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/an-enormous-mass-of-flesh-armed-with-teeth-how-orcas-gained-their-killer-reputation)
There are 78 recorded incidents of these orcas tossing porpoises to one another like a ball but not a single documented case of them eating the small mammals, Giles said. "In some cases, you'll see teeth marks where the \[killer\] whale was clearly gently holding the animal, but the animal was trying to swim away, so it's scraping the skin."
The researchers think these games could be a lesson for young orcas on how to hunt salmon, which are roughly the same size as baby porpoises. "Sometimes they'll let the porpoise swim off, pause, and then go after it," Giles said.
## Are humans driving orcas to become "smarter"?
Orcas are adapting their hunting strategies to changing conditions in Antarctica. (Image credit: Delta Images via Getty Images)
Humans may indirectly be driving orcas to become smarter, by changing ocean conditions, McInnes said. Orca raids on longline and trawl fisheries show, for example, that they innovate and learn new tricks in response to human presence in the sea.
Human-caused climate change may also force orcas to rely more heavily on one another for learning.
In Antarctica, for instance, a population of orcas typically preys on Weddell seals (*Leptonychotes weddellii*) by washing them off ice floes. But as the ice melts, they are adapting their hunting techniques to catch leopard seals (*Hydrurga leptonyx*) and crabeater seals (*Lobodon carcinophaga*) — two species that don't rely on ice floes as much and are "a little bit more feisty," requiring orcas to develop new skills, McInnes said.
While human behaviors can catalyze new learning in orcas, in some cases we have also damaged the bonds that underpin social learning. Overfishing of salmon off the coast of Washington, for example, has dissolved the social glue that keeps orca populations together.
"Their social bonds get weaker because you can't be in a big partying killer-whale group if you're all hungry and trying to search for food," Weiss said. As orca groups splinter and shrink, so does the chance to learn from one another and adapt to their rapidly changing ecosystem, Weiss said.
And while orcas probably don't know that humans are to blame for changes in their ocean habitat, they are "acutely aware that humans are there," McInnes said.
Luckily for us, he added, orcas [don't seem interested in training their deadly skills on us](https://www.livescience.com/animals/how-often-do-orcas-attack-humans).
@ -87,18 +87,10 @@ As a French Arab who grew up in his hometown’s only housing project, he believ
Hazebrouck is a middle-class city of 21,000 people in a region known for its rich farmland, work ethic and love of beer. Locals describe it as insular and quiet. Only 2 percent of residents were immigrants [in 2019](https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/6455262?sommaire=6455286&geo=COM-59295).
Hazebrouck is a middle-class city of 21,000 people in a region known for its rich farmland, work ethic and love of beer. Locals describe it as insular and quiet. Only 2 percent of residents were immigrants [in 2019](https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/6455262?sommaire=6455286&geo=COM-59295).
Image
In central Hazebrouck.Credit...Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times
Before his parents rented a nearby house, Mr. El Haïry grew up in “the blocks” — a group of subsidized high-rises where many of the town’s few immigrant families lived.
Before his parents rented a nearby house, Mr. El Haïry grew up in “the blocks” — a group of subsidized high-rises where many of the town’s few immigrant families lived.
His father worked at a steel plant in Dunkirk, 28 miles away. His mother, who grew up in Hazebrouck, was a cook in a hospice. Farid was the youngest of their three sons — a wiry boy buzzing with energy who roared around the neighborhood on a bike.
His father worked at a steel plant in Dunkirk, 28 miles away. His mother, who grew up in Hazebrouck, was a cook in a hospice. Farid was the youngest of their three sons — a wiry boy buzzing with energy who roared around the neighborhood on a bike.
Image
Brahim El Haïry and Jocelyne Dewynter, Farid’s parents, in the early 1970s.Credit...via Farid El Haïry
“He liked to laugh, tease and roughhouse,” Ms. Vanhaecke said. But, she added, “he wasn’t violent at all.”
“He liked to laugh, tease and roughhouse,” Ms. Vanhaecke said. But, she added, “he wasn’t violent at all.”
As a teenager, Mr. El Haïry was stopped regularly for identity checks by the local police. Sometimes, he recalled, the same officers would stop him more than once a day.
As a teenager, Mr. El Haïry was stopped regularly for identity checks by the local police. Sometimes, he recalled, the same officers would stop him more than once a day.
@ -119,10 +111,6 @@ The police were never able to identify the man from the second incident. The acc
Under questioning from a magistrate months later, however, the stories shifted. The two friends said they had been pressured into their statements by officers, and denied ever seeing Mr. El Haïry and the victim together. The accuser said while the friends had talked to her, only Mr. El Haïry had molested her.
Under questioning from a magistrate months later, however, the stories shifted. The two friends said they had been pressured into their statements by officers, and denied ever seeing Mr. El Haïry and the victim together. The accuser said while the friends had talked to her, only Mr. El Haïry had molested her.
Image
An alley in Hazebrouck where Mr. El Haïry’s accuser said she was raped.Credit...Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times
The case went forward anyway.
The case went forward anyway.
“The police should have immediately, immediately, immediately said to themselves, ‘It’s not just one thing that is inconsistent, it’s a lot of things,’” Mr. El Haïry said.
“The police should have immediately, immediately, immediately said to themselves, ‘It’s not just one thing that is inconsistent, it’s a lot of things,’” Mr. El Haïry said.
@ -167,10 +155,6 @@ Then, last year, Mr. El Haïry’s life was upended again by a call from the pol
After the call, Mr. El Haïry rushed to tell his parents. His mother, then 69, was in palliative care with kidney failure.
After the call, Mr. El Haïry rushed to tell his parents. His mother, then 69, was in palliative care with kidney failure.
Image
Mr. El Haïry with his mother on the day that he told her his accuser had sent prosecutors a letter admitting she had lied.Credit...via Farid El Haïry
“She said to me, ‘Don’t worry Farid, I won’t die,’” said Mr. El Haïry, recounting the scene. “‘I will be in the courtroom when you are exonerated.’” Soon after, she moved back home.
“She said to me, ‘Don’t worry Farid, I won’t die,’” said Mr. El Haïry, recounting the scene. “‘I will be in the courtroom when you are exonerated.’” Soon after, she moved back home.
But she was too sick to travel to Paris last December when judges on France’s top appeals court exonerated her son.
But she was too sick to travel to Paris last December when judges on France’s top appeals court exonerated her son.
@ -195,19 +179,15 @@ She talked for more than two hours, breaking into tears a few times. The story i
Julie was born and raised in Hazebrouck, where her family used to own a textile business.
Julie was born and raised in Hazebrouck, where her family used to own a textile business.
Image
Hazebrouck, where Julie was born and raised.Credit...Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times
When she sent the letters in 2017, she had been carrying the lie for almost two decades. Several things pushed her to confess.
When she sent the letters in 2017, she had been carrying the lie for almost two decades. Several things pushed her to confess.
She had recently given birth to her first child, a son, and was terrified the pattern of incest would repeat itself.
She had recently given birth to her first child, a son, and was terrified the pattern of incest would repeat itself.
That summer, a victim’s aid counselor urged her to come clean.
That summer, a victim’s aid counselor urged her to come clean.
In the fall, the #MeToo movement erupted. It inspired her, she said, even though her experience contradicted what many other activists at the time were saying — that the police regularly dismiss rape victims as liars.
In the fall, the `#MeToo` movement erupted. It inspired her, she said, even though her experience contradicted what many other activists at the time were saying — that the police regularly dismiss rape victims as liars.
“#MeToo is about the liberation of speech,” she said. “So I spoke out, this time to tell the truth.”
“`#MeToo` is about the liberation of speech,” she said. “So I spoke out, this time to tell the truth.”
When she was 14, Julie’s first consensual sex with her boyfriend resurfaced traumatic memories of her brother’s incest, she said, triggering a gnawing anxiety.
When she was 14, Julie’s first consensual sex with her boyfriend resurfaced traumatic memories of her brother’s incest, she said, triggering a gnawing anxiety.
@ -263,10 +243,6 @@ But in the blocks where Mr. El Haïry’s family is still known, the exposed inj
Mr. El Haïry’s North African heritage and his connection to the impoverished neighborhood made him an “easy target,” Mr. Zidane said.
Mr. El Haïry’s North African heritage and his connection to the impoverished neighborhood made him an “easy target,” Mr. Zidane said.
Image
Mr. El Haïry playing with his father, Brahim, during a trip to Morocco.Credit...via Farid El Haïry
“If you aren’t the same color as others, it’s not OK,” concurred Évelyne Lazoore, 63, outside the local primary school, where she had just dropped off her niece. “He was put in prison for nothing.”
“If you aren’t the same color as others, it’s not OK,” concurred Évelyne Lazoore, 63, outside the local primary school, where she had just dropped off her niece. “He was put in prison for nothing.”
Mr. El Haïry has filed a complaint against Julie, accusing her of wrongfully accusing him. An investigation is continuing.
Mr. El Haïry has filed a complaint against Julie, accusing her of wrongfully accusing him. An investigation is continuing.
@ -289,11 +265,6 @@ Since he learned of Julie’s confession, Mr. El Haïry’s nights are sleepless
[Aurelien Breeden](https://www.nytimes.com/by/aurelien-breeden) has covered France from the Paris bureau since 2014. He has reported on some of the worst terrorist attacks to hit the country, the dismantling of the migrant camp in Calais and France's tumultuous 2017 presidential election. [More about Aurelien Breeden](https://www.nytimes.com/by/aurelien-breeden)
[Aurelien Breeden](https://www.nytimes.com/by/aurelien-breeden) has covered France from the Paris bureau since 2014. He has reported on some of the worst terrorist attacks to hit the country, the dismantling of the migrant camp in Calais and France's tumultuous 2017 presidential election. [More about Aurelien Breeden](https://www.nytimes.com/by/aurelien-breeden)
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rape, Race and Years-Old Lie That Still Wounds. [Order Reprints](https://www.parsintl.com/publication/the-new-york-times/) | [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) | [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY)
@ -62,13 +62,13 @@ DER SPIEGEL has spoken with a half-dozen people who attended the 2008 Bucharest
Photos from Bucharest show an apparently high-spirited chancellor in the Romanian capital's Palace of Parliament, one of the largest buildings in Europe, with conference halls the size of half a football field. But there are also images of Merkel looking surly, the strain clearly visible. The summit lasted from April 2-4, a Wednesday to Friday. On the first evening, Merkel dined with the other heads of state and government, and the next day, the national leaders met together with ministers, advisers and military leaders in a large conference setting. On the last day, member state leaders welcomed Russian President Putin. Many witnesses also remember how Merkel wore a green jacket on that Thursday, making her stand out among the gray suits worn by all the men.
Photos from Bucharest show an apparently high-spirited chancellor in the Romanian capital's Palace of Parliament, one of the largest buildings in Europe, with conference halls the size of half a football field. But there are also images of Merkel looking surly, the strain clearly visible. The summit lasted from April 2-4, a Wednesday to Friday. On the first evening, Merkel dined with the other heads of state and government, and the next day, the national leaders met together with ministers, advisers and military leaders in a large conference setting. On the last day, member state leaders welcomed Russian President Putin. Many witnesses also remember how Merkel wore a green jacket on that Thursday, making her stand out among the gray suits worn by all the men.
![The 2008 NATO Summit: "High Noon" in Bucharest](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/650f0cb1-4ad5-4f5b-bf05-43d1b20168b7_w520_r1.5066208925944091_fpx29.86_fpy44.98.jpg "The 2008 NATO Summit: "High Noon" in Bucharest")
The 2008 NATO Summit: "High Noon" in Bucharest
The 2008 NATO Summit: "High Noon" in Bucharest
Foto: Belga / IMAGO
Foto: Belga / IMAGO
![Merkel and Bush (second from left) in Bucharest: "George, I've thought things through carefully."](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/1c66f8cb-31fb-4a59-8517-99882059534c_w520_r1.3289036544850499_fpx33.84_fpy44.97.jpg "Merkel and Bush (second from left) in Bucharest: "George, I've thought things through carefully."")
Merkel and Bush (second from left) in Bucharest: "George, I've thought things through carefully."
Merkel and Bush (second from left) in Bucharest: "George, I've thought things through carefully."
Americans know little about how their seafood is sourced.
Much of it comes from a vast fleet of Chinese ships.
On board, human-rights abuses are rampant.
China has invested heavily in an armada of far-flung fishing vessels, in part to extend its global influence. This maritime expansion has come at grave human cost.
October 9, 2023 
*Daniel Aritonang graduated* from high school in May, 2018, hoping to find a job. Short and lithe, he lived in the coastal village of Batu Lungun, Indonesia, where his father owned an auto shop. Aritonang spent his free time rebuilding engines in the shop, occasionally sneaking away to drag-race his blue Yamaha motorcycle on the village’s back roads. He had worked hard in school but was a bit of a class clown, always pranking the girls. “He was full of laughter and smiles,” his high-school math teacher, Leni Apriyunita, said. His mother brought homemade bread to his teachers’ houses, trying to help him get good grades and secure work; his father’s shop was failing, and the family needed money. But, when Aritonang finished high school, youth unemployment was above sixteen per cent. He considered joining the police academy, and applied for positions at nearby plastics and textile factories, but never got an offer, disappointing his parents. He wrote on Instagram, “I know I failed, but I keep trying to make them happy.” His childhood friend Hengki Anhar was also scrambling to find work. “They asked for my skills,” he said recently, of potential employers. “But, to be honest, I don’t have any.”
Aritonang at an airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on his way to the Zhen Fa 7.Photograph by Ferdi Arnando
At the time, many villagers who had taken jobs as deckhands on foreign fishing ships were returning with enough money to buy motorcycles and houses. Anhar suggested that he and Aritonang go to sea, too, and Aritonang agreed, saying, “As long as we’re together.” He intended to use the money to fix up his parents’ house or maybe to start a business. Firmandes Nugraha, another friend, worried that Aritonang was not cut out for hard labor. “We took a running test, and he was too easily exhausted,” he said. But Aritonang wouldn’t be dissuaded. A year later, in July, he and Anhar travelled to the port city of Tegal, and applied for work through a manning agency called PT Bahtera Agung Samudra. (The agency seems not to have a license to operate, according to government records, and did not respond to requests for comment.) They handed over their passports, copies of their birth certificates, and bank documents. At eighteen, Aritonang was still young enough that the agency required him to provide a letter of parental consent. He posted a picture of himself and other recruits, writing, “Just a bunch of common folk who hope for a successful and bright future.”
For the next two months, Aritonang and Anhar waited in Tegal for a ship assignment. Aritonang asked Nugraha to borrow money for them, saying that the pair were struggling to buy food. Nugraha urged him to come home: “You don’t even know how to swim.” Aritonang refused. “There’s no other choice,” he wrote, in a text. Finally, on September 2, 2019, Aritonang and Anhar were flown to Busan, South Korea, to board what they thought would be a Korean ship. But when they got to the port they were told to climb aboard a Chinese vessel—a rusty, white-and-red-keeled squid ship called the Zhen Fa 7.
Satellite data from Global Fishing Watch show about a thousand ships from China’s distant-water fishing fleet on September 2, 2019.
In the past few decades, partly in an effort to project its influence abroad, China has dramatically expanded its distant-water fishing fleet. Chinese firms now own or operate terminals in ninety-five foreign ports. China estimates that it has twenty-seven hundred distant-water fishing ships, though this figure does not include vessels in contested waters; public records and satellite imaging suggest that the fleet may be closer to sixty-five hundred ships. (The U.S. and the E.U., by contrast, have fewer than three hundred distant-water fishing vessels each.) Some ships that appear to be fishing vessels press territorial claims in contested waters, including in the South China Sea and around Taiwan. “This may look like a fishing fleet, but, in certain places, it’s also serving military purposes,” Ian Ralby, who runs I.R. Consilium, a maritime-security firm, told me. China’s preëminence at sea has come at a cost. The country is largely unresponsive to international laws, and its fleet is the worst perpetrator of illegal fishing in the world, helping drive species to the brink of extinction. Its ships are also rife with labor trafficking, debt bondage, violence, criminal neglect, and death. “The human-rights abuses on these ships are happening on an industrial and global scale,” Steve Trent, the C.E.O. of the Environmental Justice Foundation, said.
It took a little more than three months for the Zhen Fa 7 to cross the ocean and anchor near the Galápagos Islands. A squid ship is a bustling, bright, messy place. The scene on deck looks like a mechanic’s garage where an oil change has gone terribly wrong. Scores of fishing lines extend into the water, each bearing specialized hooks operated by automated reels. When they pull a squid on board, it squirts warm, viscous ink, which coats the walls and floors. Deep-sea squid have high levels of ammonia, which they use for buoyancy, and a smell hangs in the air. The hardest labor generally happens at night, from 5 *P.M.* until 7 *A.M.* Hundreds of bowling-ball-size light bulbs hang on racks on both sides of the vessel, enticing the squid up from the depths. The blinding glow of the bulbs, visible more than a hundred miles away, makes the surrounding blackness feel otherworldly. “Our minds got tested,” Anhar said.
The lights on boats entice squid up from the depths.Ed Ou, for the Outlaw Ocean Project
The captain’s quarters were on the uppermost deck; the Chinese officers slept on the level below him, and the Chinese deckhands under that. The Indonesian workers occupied the bowels of the ship. Aritonang and Anhar lived in cramped cabins with bunk beds. Clotheslines of drying socks and towels lined the walls, and beer bottles littered the floor. The Indonesians were paid about three thousand dollars a year, plus a twenty-dollar bonus for every ton of squid caught. Once a week, a list of each man’s catch was posted in the mess hall to encourage the crew to work harder. Sometimes the officers patted the Indonesian deckhands on their heads, as though they were children. When angry, they insulted or struck them. The foreman slapped and punched workers for mistakes. “It’s like we don’t have any dignity,” Anhar said.
The ship was rarely near enough to land to get cell reception, and, in any case, most deckhands didn’t have phones that would work abroad. Chinese crew members were occasionally allowed to use a satellite phone on the ship’s bridge. But when Aritonang and other Indonesians asked to call home the captain refused. After a couple of weeks on board, a deckhand named Rahman Finando got up the nerve to ask whether he could go home. The captain said no. A few days later, another deckhand, Mangihut Mejawati, found a group of Chinese officers and deckhands beating Finando, to punish him for asking to leave. “They beat his whole body and stepped on him,” Mejawati said. The other deckhands yelled for them to stop, and several jumped into the fray. Eventually, the violence ended, but the deckhands remained trapped on the ship. Mejawati told me, “It’s like we’re in a cage.”
*Almost a hundred years* before Columbus, China dominated the seas. In the fifteenth century, China’s emperor dispatched a fleet of “treasure ships” that included warships, transports for cavalry horses, and merchant vessels carrying silk and porcelain to voyage around the Indian Ocean. They were some of the largest wooden ships ever built, with innovations like balanced rudders and bulwarked compartments that predated European technology by centuries. The armada’s size was not surpassed until the navies of the First World War. But during the Ming dynasty political instability led China to turn inward. By the mid-sixteenth century, sailing on a multi-masted ship had become a crime. In docking its fleet, China lost its global preëminence. As Louise Levathes, the author of “[When China Ruled the Seas](https://www.amazon.com/When-China-Ruled-Seas-1405-1433/dp/0195112075),” told me, “The period of China’s greatest outward expansion was followed by the period of its greatest isolation.”
For most of the twentieth century, distant-water fishing—much of which takes place on the high seas—was dominated by the Soviet Union, Japan, and Spain. But the collapse of the U.S.S.R., coupled with expanding environmental and labor regulations, caused these fleets to shrink. Since the sixties, though, there have been advances in refrigeration, satellite technology, engine efficiency, and radar. Vessels can now stay at sea for more than two years without returning to land. As a result, global seafood consumption has risen fivefold.
Squid fishing, or jigging, in particular, has grown with American appetites. Until the early seventies, Americans consumed squid in tiny amounts, mostly at niche restaurants on the coasts. But as overfishing depleted fish stocks the federal government encouraged fishermen to shift their focus to squid, whose stocks were still robust. In 1974, a business-school student named Paul Kalikstein published a master’s thesis asserting that Americans would prefer squid if it were breaded and fried. Promoters suggested calling it “calamari,” the Italian word, which made it sound more like a gourmet dish. (“Squid” is thought to be a sailors’ variant of “squirt,” a reference to squid ink.) By the nineties, chain restaurants across the Midwest were serving squid. Today, Americans eat a hundred thousand tons a year.
China launched its first distant-water fishing fleet in 1985, when a state-owned company called the China National Fisheries Corporation dispatched thirteen trawlers to the coast of Guinea-Bissau. China had been fishing its own coastal waters aggressively. Since the sixties, its seafood biomass has dropped by ninety per cent. Zhang Yanxi, the general manager of the company, argued that joining “the ranks of the world’s offshore fisheries powers” would make the country money, create jobs, feed its population, and safeguard its maritime rights. The government held a grand farewell ceremony for the launch of the first ships, with more than a thousand attendees, including Communist Party élites. A promotional video described the crew as “two hundred and twenty-three brave pioneers cutting through the waves.”
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Since then, China has invested heavily in its fleet. The country now catches more than five billion pounds of seafood a year through distant-water fishing, the biggest portion of it squid. China’s seafood industry, which is estimated to be worth more than thirty-five billion dollars, accounts for a fifth of the international trade, and has helped create fifteen million jobs. The Chinese state owns much of the industry—including some twenty per cent of its squid ships—and oversees the rest through the Overseas Fisheries Association. Today, the nation consumes more than a third of the world’s fish.
China’s fleet has also expanded the government’s international influence. The country has built scores of ports as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure program that has, at times, made it the largest financier of development in South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. These ports allow it to shirk taxes and avoid meddling inspectors. The investments also buy its government influence. In 2007, China loaned Sri Lanka more than three hundred million dollars to pay for the construction of a port. (A Chinese state-owned company built it.) In 2017, Sri Lanka, on the verge of defaulting on the loan, was forced to strike a deal granting China control over the port and its environs for ninety-nine years.
Military analysts believe that China uses its fleet for surveillance. In 2017, the country passed a law requiring private citizens and businesses to support Chinese intelligence efforts. Ports employ a digital logistics platform called *Logink*, which tracks the movement of ships and goods in the surrounding area—including, possibly, American military cargo. Michael Wessel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, told me, “This is really dangerous information for the U.S. to be handing over.” (The Chinese Communist Party has dismissed these concerns, saying, “It is no secret that the U.S. has become increasingly paranoid about anything related to China.”)
China also pushes its fleet into contested waters. “China likely believes that, in time, the presence of its distant-water fleet will convert into some degree of sovereign control over those waters,” Ralby, the maritime-security specialist, told me. Some of its ships are disguised as fishing vessels but actually form what experts call a “maritime militia.” According to research collected by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Chinese government pays the owners of some of these ships forty-five hundred dollars a day to remain in contested areas for most of the year. Satellite data show that, last year, several dozen ships illegally fished in Taiwanese waters and that there were two hundred ships in disputed portions of the South China Sea. The ships help execute what a recent Congressional Research Service study called “ ‘gray zone’ operations that use coercion short of war.” They escort Chinese oil-and-gas survey vessels, deliver supplies, and obstruct foreign ships.
Sometimes these vessels are called into action. In December, 2018, the Filipino government began to repair a runway and build a beaching ramp on Thitu Island, a piece of land claimed by both the Philippines and China. More than ninety Chinese ships amassed along its coast, delaying the construction. In 2019, a Chinese vessel rammed and sank a Filipino boat anchored at Reed Bank, a disputed region in the South China Sea that is rich in oil reserves. Zhou Bo, a retired Chinese senior colonel, recently warned that these sorts of clashes could spark a war between the U.S. and China. (The Chinese government declined to comment on these matters. But Mao Ning, a spokesperson for its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has previously defended her country’s right to uphold “China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime order.”) Greg Poling, a senior fellow at C.S.I.S., noted that taking ownership of contested waters is part of the same project as assuming control of Taiwan. “The goal with these fishing ships is to reclaim ‘lost territory’ and restore China’s former glory,” he said.
*China’s distant-water fleet* is opaque. The country divulges little information about its vessels, and some stay at sea for more than a year at a time, making them difficult to inspect. I spent the past four years, backed by a team of investigators working for a journalism nonprofit I run called the Outlaw Ocean Project, visiting the fleet’s ships in their largest fishing grounds: near the Galápagos Islands; near the Falkland Islands; off the coast of the Gambia; and in the Sea of Japan, near the Korean Peninsula. When permitted, I boarded vessels to talk to the crew or pulled alongside them to interview officers by radio. In many instances, the Chinese ships got spooked, pulled up their gear, and fled. When this happened, I trailed them in a skiff to get close enough to throw aboard plastic bottles weighed down with rice, containing a pen, cigarettes, hard candy, and interview questions. On several occasions, deckhands wrote replies, providing phone numbers for family back home, and then threw the bottles back into the water. The reporting included interviews with their family members, and with two dozen additional crew members.
James Glancy, for the Outlaw Ocean Project
China bolsters its fleet with more than seven billion dollars a year in subsidies, as well as with logistical, security, and intelligence support. For instance, it sends vessels updates on the size and location of the world’s major squid colonies, allowing the ships to coördinate their fishing. In 2022, I watched about two hundred and sixty ships jigging a patch of sea west of the Galápagos. The armada suddenly raised anchor and, in near simultaneity, moved a hundred miles to the southeast. Ted Schmitt, the director of Skylight, a maritime-monitoring program, told me that this is unusual: “Fishing vessels from most other countries wouldn’t work together on this scale.” In July of that year, I pulled alongside the Zhe Pu Yuan 98, a squid ship that doubles as a floating hospital to treat deckhands without bringing them to shore. “When workers are sick, they will come to our ship,” the captain told me, by radio. The boat typically carried a doctor and maintained an operating room, a machine for running blood tests, and videoconferencing capabilities for consulting with doctors back in China. Its predecessor had treated more than three hundred people in the previous five years.
In February, 2022, I went with the conservation group Sea Shepherd and a documentary filmmaker named Ed Ou, who also translated on the trip, to the high seas near the Falkland Islands, and boarded a Chinese squid jigger there. The captain gave permission for me and a couple of my team members to roam freely as long as I didn’t name his vessel. He remained on the bridge but had an officer shadow me wherever I went. The mood on the ship felt like that of a watery purgatory. The crew was made up of thirty-one men; their teeth were yellowed from chain-smoking, their skin sallow, their hands torn and spongy from sharp gear and perpetual wetness. The scene recalled an observation of the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis, who divided people into three categories: the living, the dead, and those at sea.
When squid latched on to a line, an automated reel flipped them onto a metal rack. Deckhands then tossed them into plastic baskets for sorting. The baskets often overflowed, and the floor filled shin-deep with squid. The squid became translucent in their final moments, sometimes hissing or coughing. (Their stink and stain are virtually impossible to wash from clothes. Sometimes crew members tie their dirty garments into a rope, up to twenty feet long, and drag it for hours in the water behind the ship.) Below deck, crew members weighed, sorted, and packed the squid for freezing. They prepared bait by carving squid up, separating the tongues from inside the beaks. In the galley, the cook noted that his ship had no fresh fruits or vegetables and asked whether we might be able to donate some from our ship.
We spoke to two Chinese deckhands who were wearing bright-orange life vests. Neither wanted his name used, for fear of retaliation. One man was twenty-eight, the other eighteen. It was their first time at sea, and they had signed two-year contracts. They earned about ten thousand dollars a year, but, for every day taken off work because of sickness or injury, they were docked two days’ pay. The older deckhand recounted watching a fishing weight injure another crew member’s arm. At one point, the officer following us was called away. The older deckhand then said that many of the crew were being held there against their will. “It’s like being isolated from the world and far from modern life,” he said. “Many of us had our documents taken. They won’t give them back. Can we ask you to help us?” He added, “It’s impossible to be happy, because we work many hours every day. We don’t want to be here, but we are forced to stay.” He estimated that eighty per cent of the other men would leave if they were allowed.
Ed Ou, for the Outlaw Ocean Project
Looking nervous, the younger deckhand waved us into a dark hallway. He began typing on his cell phone. “I can’t disclose too much right now given I still need to work on the vessel, if I give too much information it might potentially create issues on board,” he wrote. He gave me a phone number for his family and asked me to contact them. “Can you get us to the embassy in Argentina?” he asked. Just then, my minder rounded the corner, and the deckhand walked away. Minutes later, my team members and I were ushered off the ship.
When I returned to shore, I contacted his family. “My heart really aches,” his older sister, a math teacher in Fujian, said, after hearing of her brother’s situation. Her family had disagreed with his decision to go to sea, but he was persistent. She hadn’t known that he was being held captive, and felt helpless to free him. “He’s really too young,” she said. “And now there is nothing we can do, because he’s so far away.”
*In June, 2020*, the Zhen Fa 7 travelled to a pocket of ocean between the Galápagos and mainland Ecuador. The ship was owned by Rongcheng Wangdao Deep-Sea Aquatic Products, a midsize company based in Shandong. On board, Aritonang had slowly got used to his new life. The captain found out that he had mechanical experience and moved him to the engine room, where the work was slightly less taxing. For meals, the cook prepared pots of rice mixed with bits of fish. The Indonesians were each issued two boxes of instant noodles a week. If they wanted any other food—or coffee, alcohol, or cigarettes—the cost could be deducted from their salaries. Crew photos show deckhands posing with their catch and gathering for beers to celebrate.
Aritonang and a fellow deckhand.Photographs by Ferdi Arnando
One of Aritonang’s friends on board was named Heri Kusmanto. “When we boarded the ship in the first weeks, Heri was a lively person,” Mejawati said. “He chatted, sang, and joked with all of us.” Kusmanto’s job was to carry hundred-pound baskets of squid down to the refrigerated hold. He sometimes made mistakes, and that earned him beatings. “He did not dare fight back,” a deckhand named Fikran told me. “He would just stay quiet and stand still.” The ship’s cook often struck Kusmanto, so he avoided him by eating plain white rice in the kitchen when the cook wasn’t around. Kusmanto soon got sick. He lost his appetite and stopped speaking, communicating mostly through gestures. “He was like a toddler,” Mejawati said. Then Kusmanto’s legs and feet swelled and started to ache.
Kusmanto seemed to be suffering from beriberi, a disease caused by a deficiency of Vitamin B1, or thiamine. Its name derives from a Sinhalese word, *beri*, meaning “weak” or “I cannot.” It is often caused by a diet consisting mainly of white rice, instant noodles, or wheat flour. Symptoms include tingling, burning, numbness, difficulty breathing, lethargy, chest pain, dizziness, confusion, and severe swelling. Like scurvy, beriberi was common among nineteenth-century sailors. It also has a history in prisons, asylums, and migrant camps. If untreated, it can be fatal.
Beriberi is becoming prevalent on Chinese vessels in part because ships stay so long at sea, a trend facilitated by transshipment, which allows vessels to offload their catch to refrigerated carriers without returning to shore. Chinese ships typically stock rice and instant noodles for extended trips, because they are cheap and slow to spoil. But the body requires more B1 when carbohydrates are consumed in large amounts and during periods of intense exertion. Ship cooks also mix rice or noodles with raw or fermented fish, and supplement meals with coffee and tea, all of which are high in thiaminase, which destroys B1, exacerbating the issue.
Beriberi is often an indication of conditions of captivity, because it is avoidable and easily reversed. Some countries (though not China) mandate that rice and flour be supplemented with B1. The illness can also be treated with vitamins, and when B1 is administered intravenously patients typically recover within twenty-four hours. But few Chinese ships seem to carry B1 supplements. In many cases, captains refuse to bring sick crew members to shore, likely because the process would entail losing time and incurring labor costs. Swells can make it dangerous for large ships to get close to each other in order to transfer crew members. One video I reviewed shows a man being put inside a fishing net and sent hundreds of feet along a zip line, several stories above the open ocean, to get on another ship. My team and I found two dozen cases of workers on Chinese vessels between 2013 and 2021 who suffered from symptoms associated with beriberi; at least fifteen died. Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist in Washington, D.C., told me that allowing workers to die from beriberi would, in the U.S., constitute criminal neglect. “Slow-motion murder is still murder,” he said.
Source: Jiebriel83 / YouTube
The contract typically used by Kusmanto’s manning agency stipulated heavy financial penalties for workers and their families if they quit prematurely. It also allowed the company to take workers’ identity papers, including their passports, during the recruitment process, and to keep the documents if they failed to pay a fine for leaving early—provisions that violate laws in the U.S. and Indonesia. Still, as Kusmanto’s condition worsened, his Indonesian crewmates asked whether he could go home. The captain refused. (Rongcheng Wangdao denied wrongdoing. The captains of Chinese ships in this piece could not be identified for comment. A spokesman for the manning agency blamed Kusmanto for his illness, writing, “When on the ship, he didn’t want to take a shower, he didn’t want to eat, and he only ate instant noodles.”)
The ship may have been fishing illegally at the time, possibly complicating Kusmanto’s situation.
“Short of catching them in the act, this is as close as you can get to firm evidence,” Michael J. Fitzpatrick, the U.S. Ambassador to Ecuador, told me. (Rongcheng Wangdao’s vessels have been known to fish in unauthorized areas; one of the Zhen Fa 7’s sister ships was fined for unlawfully entering Peruvian waters in 2017, and another was found illicitly fishing off the coast of North Korea. The company declined to comment on this matter.) Transferring Kusmanto to another vessel would have required disclosing the Zhen Fa 7’s location, which might have been incriminating.
By early August, Kusmanto had become disoriented. Other deckhands demanded that he be given medical attention. Eventually, the captain relented, and transferred him to another ship, which carried him to port in Lima. He was taken to a hospital, where he recovered; afterward, he was flown home. (Kusmanto could not be reached for comment.) Meanwhile, the rest of the crew, which had by then been at sea for a year, felt a growing sense of isolation. “They had initially told us that we would be sailing for eight months, and then they would land the ship,” Anhar said. “The fact was we never landed anywhere.”
*China does more* illegal fishing than any other country, according to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. Operating on the high seas is expensive, and there is virtually no law-enforcement presence—which encourages fishing in forbidden regions and using prohibited techniques to gain a competitive advantage. Aggressive fishing comes at an environmental cost. A third of the world’s stocks are overfished. Squid stocks, once robust, have declined dramatically. More than thirty countries, including China, have banned shark finning, but the practice persists. Chinese ships often catch hammerhead, oceanic whitetip, and blue sharks so that their fins can be used in shark-fin soup. In 2017, Ecuadorian authorities discovered at least six thousand illegally caught sharks on board a single reefer. Other marine species are being decimated, too. Vessels fishing for totoaba, a large fish whose swim bladder is highly prized in Chinese medicine, use nets that inadvertently entangle and drown vaquita porpoises, which live only in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. Researchers estimate that, as a result, there are now only some ten vaquitas left in existence. China has the world’s largest fleet of bottom trawlers, which drag nets across the seafloor, levelling coral reefs. Marine sediment stores large amounts of carbon, and, according to a recent study in *Nature*, bottom trawlers release almost a billion and a half tons of carbon dioxide each year—as much as that released by the entire aviation industry. China’s illicit fishing practices also rob poorer countries of their own resources. Off the coast of West Africa, where China maintains a fleet of hundreds of ships, illegal fishing has been estimated to cost the region more than nine billion dollars a year.
The world’s largest concentration of illegal fishing ships may be a fleet of Chinese squidders in North Korean waters. In 2017, in response to North Korea’s nuclear- and ballistic-missile tests, the United Nations Security Council, with apparent backing from China, imposed sanctions intended to deprive Kim Jong Un’s government of foreign currency, in part by blocking it from selling fishing rights, a major source of income. But, according to the U.N., Pyongyang has continued to earn foreign currency—a hundred and twenty million dollars in 2018 alone—by granting illicit rights, predominantly to Chinese fishermen. An advertisement on the Chinese Web site Zhihu offers permits issued by the North Korean military for “no risk high yield” fishing with no catch limits: “Looking forward to a win-win cooperation.” China seems unable or unwilling to enforce sanctions on its ally.
Chinese boats have contributed to a decline in the region’s squid stock; catches are down by roughly seventy per cent since 2003. Local fishermen have been unable to compete. “We will be ruined,” Haesoo Kim, the leader of an association of South Korean fishermen on Ulleung Island, which I visited in May, 2019, said. North Korean fishing captains have been forced to head farther from shore, where their ships get caught in storms or succumb to engine failure, and crew members face starvation, freezing temperatures, and drowning. Roughly a hundred small North Korean fishing boats wash up on Japanese shores annually, some of them carrying the corpses of fishermen. Chinese boats in these waters are also known for ramming patrol vessels. In 2016, Chinese fishermen rammed and sank a South Korean cutter in the Yellow Sea. In another incident, the South Korean Coast Guard opened fire on more than two dozen Chinese ships that rushed at its vessels.
In 2019, I went with a South Korean squid ship to the sea border between North Korea and South Korea. It didn’t take us long to find a convoy of Chinese squidders headed into North Korean waters. We fell in alongside them and launched a drone to capture their identification numbers. One of the Chinese captains blared his horn and flashed his lights—warning signs in maritime protocol. Since we were in South Korean waters and at a legal distance, our captain stayed his course. The Chinese captain then abruptly cut toward us, on a collision trajectory. Our captain veered away when the Chinese vessel was only thirty feet off.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs told me that “China has consistently and conscientiously enforced the resolutions of the Security Council relating to North Korea,” and added that the country has “consistently punished” illegal fishing. But the Ministry neither admitted nor denied that China sends boats into North Korean waters. In 2020, the nonprofit Global Fishing Watch used satellite data to reveal that hundreds of Chinese squid ships were routinely fishing in North Korean waters. By 2022, China had cut down this illegal armada by seventy-five per cent from its peak. Still, in unregulated waters, the hours worked by the fleet have increased, and the size of its catch has only grown.
*Shortly after* New Year’s Day, 2021, the Zhen Fa 7 rounded the tip of South America and stopped briefly in Chilean waters, close enough to shore to get cell-phone reception. Aritonang went to the bridge and, through pantomime and broken English, asked one of the officers whether he could borrow his phone. The officer indicated that it would cost him, rubbing his forefinger and thumb together. Aritonang ran below deck, sold some of his cigarettes and snacks to other deckhands, borrowed whatever money he could, and came back with the equivalent of about thirteen dollars, which bought him five minutes. He dialled his parents’ house, and his mother answered, excited to hear his voice. He told her that he would be home by May and asked to speak to his father. “He’s resting,” she told him. In fact, he had died of a heart attack several days earlier, but Aritonang’s mother didn’t want to upset her son while he was at sea. She later told their pastor that she was looking forward to Aritonang’s return. “He wants to build a house for us,” she said.
Soon afterward, the ship dropped anchor in the Blue Hole, an area near the Falkland Islands, where ongoing territorial disputes between the U.K. and Argentina provide a gap in maritime enforcement that ships can exploit. Aritonang grew homesick, staying in his room and eating mostly instant noodles. “He seemed to become sad and tired,” Fikran said. That January, Aritonang fell ill with beriberi. The whites of his eyes turned yellow, and his legs became swollen. “Daniel was in pretty bad shape,” Anhar told me. The captain refused to get him medical attention. “There was still a lot of squid,” Anhar said. “We were in the middle of an operation.” In February, the crew unloaded their catch onto a reefer that carried it to Mauritius. But, for reasons that remain unclear, the captain refused to send Aritonang to shore as well.
Eventually, Aritonang could no longer walk. The Indonesian crew went to the bridge again and confronted the captain, threatening to strike if he didn’t get Aritonang medical help. “We were all against the captain,” Anhar said. Finally, the captain acquiesced, and, on March 2nd, transferred Aritonang to a fuel tanker, the Marlin, which agreed to carry him to Montevideo, Uruguay. The Marlin’s crew brought him to a service area off the coast, where a skiff picked him up and took him to the port. A maritime agency representing Rongcheng Wangdao in Uruguay called a local hospital, and ambulance workers took him there.
Jesica Reyes, who is thirty-six, is one of the few interpreters of Indonesian in Montevideo. She taught herself the language while working at an Internet café that was popular among Indonesian crews; they called her Mbak, meaning “Miss” or “big sister.” From 2013 to 2021, fishing ships, most of them Chinese, disembarked a dead body in Montevideo roughly every month and a half. Over a recent dinner, Reyes told me about hundreds of deckhands in need whom she had assisted. She described one deckhand who died from a tooth infection because his captain wouldn’t bring him to shore. She told me of another ailing deckhand whose agency neglected to take him to a hospital, keeping him in a hotel room while his condition deteriorated; he eventually died.
On March, 7, 2021, Reyes was asked by the maritime agency to go to the emergency room to help doctors communicate with Aritonang; she was told that he had a stomach ache. When he arrived at the hospital, however, his whole body was swollen, and she could see bruises around his eyes and neck. He whispered to her that he had been tied by the neck. (Other deckhands later told me that they hadn’t seen this happen, and were unsure when he sustained the injuries.) Reyes called the maritime agency and said, “If this is a stomach ache . . . You’re not looking at this young man. He is all messed up!” She took photographs of his condition, before doctors asked her to stop, because she was alarmed.
In the emergency room, physicians administered intravenous fluids. Aritonang, crying and shaking, asked Reyes, “Where are my friends?” He whispered, “I’m scared.” Aritonang was pronounced dead the following morning. “I was angry,” Reyes told me. The deckhands I reached were furious. Mejawati said, “We really hope that, if it’s possible, the captain and all the supervisors can be captured, charged, or jailed.” Anhar, Aritonang’s best friend, found out about his death only after disembarking from the Zhen Fa 7 in Singapore, that May. “We were devastated,” he said, of the crew members. When we reached him, he was still carrying a suitcase full of Aritonang’s clothes that he’d promised to take home for him.
*Fishing is one* of the world’s deadliest jobs—a recent study estimates that more than a hundred thousand workers die every year—and Chinese ships are among the most brutal. Recruiters often target desperate men in inland China and in poor countries. “If you are in debt, your family has shunned you, you don’t want to be looked down on, turn off your phone and stay far away from land,” an online advertisement in China reads. Some recruits are lured with promises of lucrative contracts, according to court documents and investigations by Chinese news outlets, only to discover that they incur a series of fees—sometimes amounting to more than a month’s wages—to cover expenses such as travel, job training, crew certifications, and protective workwear. Often, workers pay these fees by taking out loans from the manning agencies, creating a form of debt bondage. Companies confiscate passports and extract fines for leaving jobs, further trapping workers. And even those who are willing to risk penalties are sometimes in essence held captive on ships.
Source: Dalian Hongxu Food Co. / TikTok
For a 2022 report, the Environmental Justice Foundation interviewed more than a hundred Indonesian crew members and found that roughly ninety-seven per cent had their documents confiscated or experienced debt bondage. Occasionally, workers in these conditions manage to alert authorities. In 2014, twenty-eight African workers disembarked from a Chinese squidder called the Jia De 1, which was anchored in Montevideo, and several complained of beatings on board and showed shackle marks on their ankles. Fifteen crew members were hospitalized. (The company that owned the ship did not respond to requests for comment.) In 2020, several Indonesian deckhands reportedly complained about severe beatings at sea and the presence of a man’s body in one of the ship’s freezers. An autopsy revealed that the man had sustained bruises, scarring, and a spinal injury. Indonesian authorities sentenced several manning-agency executives to more than a year in prison for labor trafficking. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.)
In China, these labor abuses are an open secret. A diary kept by one Chinese deckhand offers an unusually detailed glimpse into this world. In May, 2013, the deckhand paid a two-hundred-dollar recruitment fee to a manning agency, which dispatched him to a ship called the Jin Han Yu 4879. The crew were told that their first ten days or so on board would be a trial period, after which they could leave, but the ship stayed at sea for a hundred and two days. “You are slaves to work anytime and anywhere,” the deckhand wrote in his diary. Officers were served meat at mealtimes, he said, but deckhands got only bones. “The bell rings, you must be up, whether it is day, night, early morning, no matter how strong the wind, how heavy the rain, there are no Sundays and holidays.” (The company that owns the ship did not respond to requests for comment.)
The broader public in China was forced to reckon with the conditions on ships when the crew of a squid jigger called the Lu Rong Yu 2682 mutinied, in 2011. The captain, Li Chengquan, was a “big, tall, and bad-tempered man” who, according to a deckhand, gave a black eye to a worker who angered him. Rumors began circulating that the seven-thousand-dollar annual salary that they had been promised was not guaranteed. Instead, they would earn about four cents per pound of squid caught—which would amount to far less. Nine crew members took the captain hostage. In the next five weeks, the ship’s crew devolved into warring factions. Men disappeared at night, a crew member was tied up and tossed overboard, and someone sabotaged a valve on the ship, which started letting water in. The crew eventually managed to restore the ship’s communications system and transmit a distress signal, drawing two Chinese fishing vessels to their aid. Only eleven of the original thirty-three men made it back to shore. The lead mutineer and the ship’s captain were sentenced to death by the Chinese government. (The company that owns the ship did not respond to requests for comment.)
Labor trafficking has also been documented on American, South Korean, and Thai boats. But China’s fleet is arguably the worst offender, and it has done little to curb violations. Between 2018 and 2022, my team found, China gave more than seventeen million dollars in subsidies to companies where at least fifty ships seem to have engaged in fishing crimes or had deaths or injuries on board—some of which were likely the result of unsafe labor conditions. (The government declined to comment on this matter, but Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, recently said that the fleet operates “in accordance with laws and regulations,” and accused the U.S. of politicizing “issues that are about fisheries in the name of environmental protection and human rights.”)
In the past few years, China has made a number of reforms, but they seem aimed more at quelling dissent than at holding companies accountable. In 2017, after a Filipino worker died in a knife fight with some of his Chinese crewmates, the Chinese government created a Communist Party branch in Chimbote, Peru—the first for fishing workers—intended to bolster their “spiritual sustenance.” Local police in some Chinese cities have begun using satellite video links to connect to the bridges of some Chinese vessels. In 2020, when Chinese crew members on a ship near Peru went on strike, the company contacted the local police, who explained to the workers that they could come ashore in Peru and fly back to China, but they would have to pay for the plane tickets. “Wouldn’t it feel like losing out if you resigned now?” a police officer asked. The men returned to work.
*As I reported* on these ships, stories of violence and captivity surfaced even when I wasn’t looking for them. This year, I received a video from 2020 in which two Filipino crew members said that they were ill but were being prevented from leaving their ship. “Please rescue us,” one pleaded. “We are already sick here. The captain won’t send us to the hospital.” Three deckhands died that summer; at least one of their bodies was thrown overboard. (The manning agency that placed these workers on the ship, PT Puncak Jaya Samudra, did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did the company that owns the ship.) On a trip to Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2020, I met a half-dozen young men who told me that, in 2019, a young deckhand named Fadhil died on their ship because the officers had refused to bring him to shore. “He was begging to return home, but he was not allowed,” Ramadhan Sugandhi, a deckhand, said. (The ship-owning company did not respond to requests for comment, nor did his manning agency, PT Shafar Abadi Indonesia.) This past June, a bottle washed ashore near Maldonado, Uruguay, containing what appeared to be a message from a distressed Chinese deckhand. “Hello, I am a crew member of the ship Lu Qing Yuan Yu 765, and I was locked up by the company,” it read. “When you see this paper, please help me call the police! S.O.S. S.O.S.” (The owner of the ship, Qingdao Songhai Fishery, said that the claims were fabricated by crew members.)
Source: Choi Yen D Chen / Facebook
Reyes, the Indonesian translator, put me in touch with Rafly Maulana Sadad, an Indonesian who, while working on the Lu Rong Yuan Yu 978 two years ago, fell down a flight of stairs and broke his back. He immediately went back to work pulling nets, then fainted, and woke up in bed. The captain refused to take him to shore, and he spent the next five months on the ship, his condition worsening. Sadad’s friends helped him eat and bathe, but he was disoriented and often lay in a pool of his own urine. “I was having difficulty speaking,” Sadad told me last year. “I felt like I’d had a stroke or something. I couldn’t really understand anything.” In August, 2021, the captain dropped Sadad off in Montevideo, and he spent nine days in the hospital, before being flown home. (Requests for comment from Rongcheng Rongyuan, which owns the ship Sadad worked on, and PT Abadi Mandiri International, his manning agency, went unanswered.) Sadad spoke to me from Indonesia, where he could walk only with crutches. “It was a very bitter life experience,” he said.
Like the boats that supply them, Chinese processing plants rely on forced labor. For the past thirty years, the North Korean government has required citizens to work in factories in Russia and China, and to put ninety per cent of their earnings—amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars—into accounts controlled by the state. Laborers are often subjected to heavy monitoring and strictly limited in their movements. U.N. sanctions ban such uses of North Korean workers, but, according to Chinese government estimates, last year as many as eighty thousand North Korean workers were living in one city in northeastern China alone. According to a report by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, at least four hundred and fifty of them were working in seafood plants. The Chinese government has largely scrubbed references to these workers from the Internet. But, using the search term “North Korean beauties,” my team and I found several videos on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, that appear to show female seafood-plant workers, most posted by gawking male employees. One Chinese commenter observed that the women “have a strong sense of national identity and are self-disciplined!” Another argued, however, that the workers have no choice but to obey orders, or “their family members will suffer.”
In the past decade, China has also overseen a crackdown on Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, a region in northwestern China, setting up mass detention centers and forcing detainees to work in cotton fields, on tomato farms, and in polysilicon factories. More recently, in an effort to disrupt Uyghur communities and find cheap labor for major industries, the government has relocated millions of Uyghurs to work for companies across the country. Workers are often supervised by security guards, in dorms surrounded by barbed wire. By searching company newsletters, annual reports, and state-media stories, my team and I found that, in the past five years, thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have been sent to work in seafood-processing plants. Some are subjected to “patriotic education”; in a 2021 article, local Party officials said that members of minority groups working at one seafood plant were a “typical big family” and were learning to deepen their “education of ethnic unity.” Laura Murphy, a professor at Sheffield Hallam University, in the U.K., told me, “This is all part of the project to erase Uyghur culture, identities, religion, and, most certainly, their politics. The goal is the complete transformation of the entire community.” (Chinese officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Uyghur and North Korean forced labor in the nation’s seafood-processing industry.)
The U.S. has strict laws forbidding the importation of goods produced with North Korean or Uyghur labor. The use of such workers in other industries—for example, in solar-panel manufacturing—has been documented in recent years, and the U.S. has confiscated a billion dollars’ worth of imported products as a result. We found, however, that companies employing Uyghurs and North Koreans have recently exported at least forty-seven thousand tons of seafood, including some seventeen per cent of all squid sent to the U.S. Shipments went to dozens of American importers, including ones that supply military bases and public-school cafeterias. “These revelations pose a very serious problem for the entire seafood industry,” Martina Vandenberg, the founder and president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, told me.
China does not welcome reporting on this industry. In 2022, I spent two weeks on board the Modoc, a former U.S. Navy boat that the nonprofit Earthrace Conservation uses as a patrol vessel, visiting Chinese squid ships off the coast of South America. As we were sailing back to a Galápagos port, an Ecuadorian Navy ship approached us, and an officer said that our permit to reënter Ecuadorian waters had been revoked. “If you do not turn around now, we will board and arrest you,” he said. He told us to sail to another country. We didn’t have enough food and water for the journey. After two days of negotiations, we were briefly allowed into the port, where armed Ecuadorian officers boarded; they claimed that the ship’s permits had been filed improperly and that our ship had deviated slightly in its approved course while exiting national waters. Such violations typically result in nothing more than a written citation. But, according to Ambassador Fitzpatrick, the explanation was a bit more complicated. He said that the Chinese government had contacted several Ecuadorian lawmakers to raise concerns about the presence of what they depicted as a quasi-military vessel engaging in covert operations. When I spoke with Juan Carlos Holguín, the Ecuadorian Foreign Minister at the time, he denied that China was involved. But Fitzpatrick told me that Quito treads carefully when it comes to China, in part because Ecuador is deeply in debt to the country. “China did not like the Modoc,” he said. “But mostly it did not want more media coverage on its squid fleet.”
*The day of Aritonang’s death*, Reyes filed a report with the Uruguayan Coast Guard, and showed officers her photographs. “They seemed pretty uninterested,” she said. The following day, a local coroner conducted an autopsy. “A situation of physical abuse emerged,” the report reads. I sent it to Weedn, the forensic pathologist, who told me that the body showed signs of violence and that untreated beriberi seems to have been the cause of death. Nicolas Potrie, who runs the Indonesian consulate in Montevideo, remembered getting a call from Mirta Morales, the prosecutor who investigated Aritonang’s case. “We need to continue trying to figure out what happened. These marks—everybody saw them,” Potrie recalled her saying. (A representative for Rongcheng Wangdao said that the company had found no evidence of misconduct on the ship: “There was nothing regarding your alleged appalling incidents about abuse, violation, insults to one’s character, physical violence or withheld salaries.” The company said that it had handed the matter over to the China Overseas Fisheries Association. Questions submitted to the association went unanswered.)
Potrie pressed for further inquiry, but none seemed forthcoming. Morales declined to share any information about the case with me. In March of 2022, I visited Aldo Braida, the president of the Chamber of Foreign Fishing Agents, which represents companies working with foreign vessels in Uruguay, at his office in Montevideo. He dismissed the accounts of mistreatment on Chinese ships that dock in the port as “fake news,” claiming, “There are a lot of lies around this.” He told me that, if crew members whose bodies were disembarked in Montevideo had suffered physical abuse, Uruguayan authorities would discover it, and that, when you put men in close quarters, fights were likely to break out. “We live in a violent society,” he said.
Uruguay has little incentive to scrutinize China further, because the country brings lucrative business to the region. In 2018, for example, a Chinese company that had bought a nearly seventy-acre plot of land west of Montevideo presented a plan to build a more than two-hundred-million-dollar “megaport.” Local media reported that the port would be a free-trade zone and include half-mile-long docks, a shipyard, a fuelling station, and seafood storage and processing facilities. The Uruguayan government had been pursuing such Chinese investment for years. The President at the time, Tabaré Vázquez, attempted to sidestep the constitution, which requires a two-thirds vote by both chambers of the General Assembly, and authorize construction of the port by executive order. “There’s so much money on the table that politicians start bending the law to grab at it,” Milko Schvartzman, a marine researcher based in Argentina, told me. But, following resistance from the public and from opposition parties, the plan was called off.
The seafood industry is difficult to police. A large portion of fish consumed in the U.S. is caught or processed by Chinese companies. Several laws exist to prevent the U.S. from importing products tainted by forced labor, including that which is involved in the production of conflict diamonds and sweatshop goods. But China is not forthcoming with details about its ships and processing plants. At one point, on a Chinese ship, a deckhand showed me stacks of frozen catch in white bags. He explained that they leave the ship names off the bags so that they can be easily transferred between vessels. This practice allows seafood companies to hide their ties to ships with criminal histories. On the bridge of another ship, a Chinese captain opened his logbook, which is supposed to document his catch. The first two pages had notations; the rest were blank. “No one keeps those,” he said. Company officials could reverse engineer the information later. Kenneth Kennedy, a former manager of the anti-forced-labor program at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that the U.S. government should block seafood imports from China until American companies can demonstrate that their supply chains are free of abuse. “The U.S. is awash with criminally tainted seafood,” he said.
These companies included retail chains such as Costco, Kroger, H Mart, and Safeway.
They also included food-service distributors like Sysco and Performance Food Group, each servicing hundreds of thousands of restaurants and cafeterias at colleges, hotels, hospitals, and government buildings. (These companies did not respond to requests for comment.)
It’s likely that some of the squid Aritonang died catching ended up on an American plate.
To document the gaps in the system, we followed the supply chain to show where squid tainted by worker abuse might end up.
First, we tracked the Zhen Fa 7 by satellite, from 2018 to 2022.
During that time, it transferred its catch to seven refrigerated reefers.
We then tracked the journey of one reefer, the Lu Rong Yuan Yu Yun 177, to China’s Shidao port.
It is especially difficult to document where the catch goes once it gets to port. Arduous in-person tracking is sometimes the only way to follow its movements.
We hired private investigators in China to track a shipment of squid from the Lu Rong Yuan Yu Yun 177. They hid in their car at the port, filming at a distance as workers unloaded the squid and then packed it into trucks.
They followed the trucks out of the port.
The trucks eventually arrived at a seafood facility owned by a company called Rongcheng Xinhui Aquatic Products.
We also reviewed the ownership details of the other reefers that transshipped with the Zhen Fa 7 and found that its squid likely ended up at five additional processing plants in China.
Two of these plants, owned by Chishan Group, have employed at least a hundred and seventy workers transferred from Xinjiang, according to local news reports and corporate newsletters on the company’s Web site. (A representative from Rongcheng Haibo, one of the plants, said that the company “has never employed any Xinjiang workers.” A representative from Shandong Haidu, the other plant, said, “There is no use of illegal workers from Xinjiang or other countries, and we recently passed human-rights audits.” Chishan Group did not respond to requests for comment.)
The plants connected to the Zhen Fa 7 then sent large quantities of their seafood to at least sixty-two American importers.
On April 22nd, Aritonang’s body was flown from Montevideo to Jakarta, then driven, in a wooden casket with a Jesus figurine on top, to his family home in Batu Lungun. Villagers lined the road to pay their respects; Aritonang’s mother wailed and fainted upon seeing the casket.
Source: Desta Motor 143 / YouTube
A funeral was soon held, and Aritonang was buried a few feet from his father, in a cemetery plot not far from his church. His grave marker consisted of two slats of wood joined to make a cross. That night, an official from Aritonang’s manning agency visited the family at their home to discuss what locals call a “peace agreement.” Anhar said that the family ended up accepting a settlement of some two hundred million rupiah, or roughly thirteen thousand dollars. Family members were reluctant to talk about the events on the ship. Aritonang’s brother Beben said that he didn’t want his family to get in trouble and that talking about the case might cause problems for his mother. “We, Daniel’s family, have made peace with the ship people and have let him go,” he said.
Last year, thirteen months after Aritonang’s death, I spoke again to his family by video chat. His mother, Regina Sihombing, sat on a leopard-print rug in her living room with her son Leonardo. The room had no furniture and no place to sit other than the floor. The house had undergone repairs with money from the settlement, according to the village chief; in the end, it seems, Aritonang had managed to fix up his parents’ home after all. When the conversation turned to him, his mother began to weep. “You can see how I am now,” she said. Leonardo told her, “Don’t be sad. It was his time.” ♦
*This piece was produced with contributions from Joe Galvin, Maya Martin, Susan Ryan, Austin Brush, and Daniel Murphy.*
### More on China's Seafood Industry
Watch “[Squid Fleet](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/squid-fleet-takes-you-into-the-opaque-world-of-chinese-fishing),” a film that offers a close look at the gruelling work of squid fishing.
Illustrations: Cleon Peterson. Map Icons: Francesco Muzzi. Photos: the Outlaw Ocean Project.
@ -38,12 +38,8 @@ March 5, 2012. The staff of the San Diego nonprofit Invisible Children had been
That night, Jason Russell, the video’s protagonist and Invisible Children’s then-33-year-old co-founder, was in Los Angeles alongside his wife, Danica, and 5-year-old son (and *Kony 2012* co-star*)*, Gavin, leveraging the modest Hollywood connections he’d made to drum up excitement around the video. He premiered *Kony 2012* at the talent firm Creative Artists Agency, with an event hosted by Jason Bateman and family friend Kristen Bell. Around 200 people were in attendance. After the screening finished, Jason checked his phone. Things were going well so far. With help from a nationwide network of high school students the Invisible Children team had spent months cultivating, the video had climbed to 200,000 views. By midnight, it had reached 500,000, which was their goal for the entire year.
That night, Jason Russell, the video’s protagonist and Invisible Children’s then-33-year-old co-founder, was in Los Angeles alongside his wife, Danica, and 5-year-old son (and *Kony 2012* co-star*)*, Gavin, leveraging the modest Hollywood connections he’d made to drum up excitement around the video. He premiered *Kony 2012* at the talent firm Creative Artists Agency, with an event hosted by Jason Bateman and family friend Kristen Bell. Around 200 people were in attendance. After the screening finished, Jason checked his phone. Things were going well so far. With help from a nationwide network of high school students the Invisible Children team had spent months cultivating, the video had climbed to 200,000 views. By midnight, it had reached 500,000, which was their goal for the entire year.
Jason Russell’s son Gavin in a scene from Kony 2012, in which Jason explains to Gavin who Joseph Kony is and what he has done to children in Uganda. (Image from Kony 2012)
Jason Russell’s son Gavin in a scene from Kony 2012, in which Jason explains to Gavin who Joseph Kony is and what he has done to children in Uganda. (Image from Kony 2012)
Then, Jason awoke in the middle of the night to a flurry of texts, all saying some variety of the same thing:
Then, Jason awoke in the middle of the night to a flurry of texts, all saying some variety of the same thing:
@ -78,12 +74,8 @@ Finally, the staff obeyed their leader — for a few moments. For 15 minutes, th
That video — *Kony 2012* — is an artifact of unprecedented viral success, reaching 100 million views in only six short days. At the time, it was the most viral video in YouTube history. And it is difficult to overstate how unlikely it was for this particular video to take that crown. YouTube had already proven the ability to reach Super Bowl-size audiences via web video, but the other most viral videos of that year were all either catchy pop hits like Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” cultural sensations like Psy’s “Gangnam Style” or political sendups such as “Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney. Epic Rap Battles of History.”
That video — *Kony 2012* — is an artifact of unprecedented viral success, reaching 100 million views in only six short days. At the time, it was the most viral video in YouTube history. And it is difficult to overstate how unlikely it was for this particular video to take that crown. YouTube had already proven the ability to reach Super Bowl-size audiences via web video, but the other most viral videos of that year were all either catchy pop hits like Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” cultural sensations like Psy’s “Gangnam Style” or political sendups such as “Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney. Epic Rap Battles of History.”
In the Kony 2012 video, a graphic shows the hierarchy of the Ugandan guerilla group the Lord’s Resistance Army, with Joseph Kony at the top. (Image from Kony 2012)
In the Kony 2012 video, a graphic shows the hierarchy of the Ugandan guerilla group the Lord’s Resistance Army, with Joseph Kony at the top. (Image from Kony 2012)
*Kony 2012*, effectively a social advocacy video, was a viral anomaly. The campaign centered around Joseph Kony, leader of Ugandan guerilla group the Lord’s Resistance Army and, according to the video, the most evil man you’d never heard of. The viewer was directly challenged: Keep watching for the next 29 minutes, make Kony famous, change the world. It proposed an irresistibly simple and slick call to action, gamifying a pre-organized strategy: Share the video with friends; tweet it to celebrities and government officials; take to the streets. If all goes to plan, a groundswell of grassroots activism will compel the U.S. government to intervene, sending out troops to capture Kony.
*Kony 2012*, effectively a social advocacy video, was a viral anomaly. The campaign centered around Joseph Kony, leader of Ugandan guerilla group the Lord’s Resistance Army and, according to the video, the most evil man you’d never heard of. The viewer was directly challenged: Keep watching for the next 29 minutes, make Kony famous, change the world. It proposed an irresistibly simple and slick call to action, gamifying a pre-organized strategy: Share the video with friends; tweet it to celebrities and government officials; take to the streets. If all goes to plan, a groundswell of grassroots activism will compel the U.S. government to intervene, sending out troops to capture Kony.
@ -96,12 +88,8 @@ Then, just as quickly, it all fell apart.
The internet was unable to follow through on its promise to materialize the utopia we thought it capable of. Millions of people threw those same posters into landfills, laughing off their brief fervor like an adult looking back on a bad haircut. In less than one week, Jason Russell went from complete anonymity to worldwide celebrity to canceled villain to laughingstock, his very public “naked meltdown” mercilessly mocked across the web. *Kony 2012* did not forever alter the course of human history. Instead, it has become a digital relic of deep hubris. Those who recall this frenzy remember it mostly as a tragic joke. *Kony 2012* has become the stuff of shitposts and ironic halloween costumes at millennial-themed house parties.
The internet was unable to follow through on its promise to materialize the utopia we thought it capable of. Millions of people threw those same posters into landfills, laughing off their brief fervor like an adult looking back on a bad haircut. In less than one week, Jason Russell went from complete anonymity to worldwide celebrity to canceled villain to laughingstock, his very public “naked meltdown” mercilessly mocked across the web. *Kony 2012* did not forever alter the course of human history. Instead, it has become a digital relic of deep hubris. Those who recall this frenzy remember it mostly as a tragic joke. *Kony 2012* has become the stuff of shitposts and ironic halloween costumes at millennial-themed house parties.
The Invisible Children team’s Kony 2012 branding design ideas. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
The Invisible Children team’s Kony 2012 branding design ideas. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
*Kony 2012* may not have delivered the revolution — nor, notably, its promise to capture Kony. But it did, perhaps, presage the way in which democratic discourse takes shape online today, nudging a cultural shift away from tech optimism toward skepticism, and creating a more discerning, media literate class of online users. It also, very much unwittingly, kick-started conversations around two issues that now dominate our discourse: cancel culture, and the rise of disinformation. It served as an early look at the psychological consequences of flash viral fame, and it inspired the mainstreaming of the term “white savior,” which was used by Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole to describe Jason Russell and the phenomenon of *Kony 2012*. “The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality,” Cole wrote in one of his series of viral tweets criticizing the video.
*Kony 2012* may not have delivered the revolution — nor, notably, its promise to capture Kony. But it did, perhaps, presage the way in which democratic discourse takes shape online today, nudging a cultural shift away from tech optimism toward skepticism, and creating a more discerning, media literate class of online users. It also, very much unwittingly, kick-started conversations around two issues that now dominate our discourse: cancel culture, and the rise of disinformation. It served as an early look at the psychological consequences of flash viral fame, and it inspired the mainstreaming of the term “white savior,” which was used by Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole to describe Jason Russell and the phenomenon of *Kony 2012*. “The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality,” Cole wrote in one of his series of viral tweets criticizing the video.
@ -112,12 +100,8 @@ Jason meets with me across multiple locations in Los Angeles, showing up at vari
“Had I not become a ‘white savior,’ that would have been shocking,” he says. “I was trained to make a difference, make an impact, go for your dreams, help people. How far can you blame a person when the environment, the culture, the community, the nation, the religion, groomed them to be a very specific way?”
“Had I not become a ‘white savior,’ that would have been shocking,” he says. “I was trained to make a difference, make an impact, go for your dreams, help people. How far can you blame a person when the environment, the culture, the community, the nation, the religion, groomed them to be a very specific way?”
Jason Russell was born in San Diego in the fall of 1978. He attended a Christian kindergarten before studying at Anza Elementary, where he was under the tutelage of Mr. Dorfi, a sentimentalist who cared deeply about his students and the injustices in the world. He left a deep impact on young Jason. “He was everything you wanted a teacher to be. He was very emotional, he cared so much about us. And he was \[full of conviction\] when he told us about the Civil Rights Movement and about slavery,” Jason says.
Jason Russell was born in San Diego in the fall of 1978. He attended a Christian kindergarten before studying at Anza Elementary, where he was under the tutelage of Mr. Dorfi, a sentimentalist who cared deeply about his students and the injustices in the world. He left a deep impact on young Jason. “He was everything you wanted a teacher to be. He was very emotional, he cared so much about us. And he was \[full of conviction\] when he told us about the Civil Rights Movement and about slavery,” Jason says.
His parents are Paul and Sheryl Russell, the founders of the Christian Youth Theater, the largest national youth program of its kind in the United States. By the age of 12, Jason says he “wouldn’t be surprised if I had 10,000 hours” of musical theater experience. He had been the Tin Man and Mr. Toad, but at 13, he landed his dream role: Peter Pan. In Peter, he saw his desires, and he saw himself. He, like Peter, was a storyteller who longed for eternal youth and the ability to take flight. On stage, he got his wish. Underneath his green tights and shirt, he wore a flying contraption, allowing him to perform backflips midair. He flew through a window. He flew past the fireplace. He flew into the audience.
His parents are Paul and Sheryl Russell, the founders of the Christian Youth Theater, the largest national youth program of its kind in the United States. By the age of 12, Jason says he “wouldn’t be surprised if I had 10,000 hours” of musical theater experience. He had been the Tin Man and Mr. Toad, but at 13, he landed his dream role: Peter Pan. In Peter, he saw his desires, and he saw himself. He, like Peter, was a storyteller who longed for eternal youth and the ability to take flight. On stage, he got his wish. Underneath his green tights and shirt, he wore a flying contraption, allowing him to perform backflips midair. He flew through a window. He flew past the fireplace. He flew into the audience.
@ -136,12 +120,8 @@ Jason was one of many victims of alleged grooming and sexual assault at Christia
In his first year of college, Jason made a short film about Peter Pan in Neverland, before spending the summer with evangelical Christian youth organization Teen Mania (which has since shut down). Each year, the organization held enormous conferences in cities across the U.S., packing out stadiums with thousands of teenagers there to sign up for missionary trips. Jason, who wore blond dreadlocks at the time (“I was breaking all the rules”), attended one such conference, before spending a summer week training in Texas.
In his first year of college, Jason made a short film about Peter Pan in Neverland, before spending the summer with evangelical Christian youth organization Teen Mania (which has since shut down). Each year, the organization held enormous conferences in cities across the U.S., packing out stadiums with thousands of teenagers there to sign up for missionary trips. Jason, who wore blond dreadlocks at the time (“I was breaking all the rules”), attended one such conference, before spending a summer week training in Texas.
Laren Poole, left, next to Bobby Bailey, and Jason Russell, right, with a local man who helped them build a crane for production during their trip to Uganda. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
Laren Poole, left, next to Bobby Bailey, and Jason Russell, right, with a local man who helped them build a crane for production during their trip to Uganda. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
Jason traveled to Kenya with Teen Mania in the summer of 2000, performing 30-minute productions alongside 150 others, dancing around in costumes and offering up the word of the gospel. At the end of each production, they’d tell the villagers to raise their hands if they wanted to be saved — before heading back to their hotel in an air-conditioned minivan. In the U.S., criticism around the organization’s militaristic symbolism and training regimes grew. Teen Mania’s website battlecry.com, for instance, was decorated with a blood-red logo, battle flags and text that encouraged teenagers to “join the frontline.”
Jason traveled to Kenya with Teen Mania in the summer of 2000, performing 30-minute productions alongside 150 others, dancing around in costumes and offering up the word of the gospel. At the end of each production, they’d tell the villagers to raise their hands if they wanted to be saved — before heading back to their hotel in an air-conditioned minivan. In the U.S., criticism around the organization’s militaristic symbolism and training regimes grew. Teen Mania’s website battlecry.com, for instance, was decorated with a blood-red logo, battle flags and text that encouraged teenagers to “join the frontline.”
@ -157,24 +137,16 @@ By Christmastime, Jason had decided on his location, a rather unorthodox choice:
Together, they tried to recruit Laren Poole, a then-lifeguard they were becoming close friends with, who had his own ambitions of directing blockbuster action movies. Laren, who was also on the side of Calvinism, said he would need “a sign.” Jason and Bobby took this literally. The following day, they broke into his unlocked car, played classic rock group Switchfoot at full blast — effectively snake-charming music for a Christian millennial — and held up a sign that read “GO OUT” in pink spray paint, outside of his house. It was an evangelical John Cusack move that drew tears from Laren’s eyes. “I’m going, I’m going, I’m going,” he said, on the phone to Jason and Bobby. “I don’t care if I die,” he wrote later that night in his journal.
Together, they tried to recruit Laren Poole, a then-lifeguard they were becoming close friends with, who had his own ambitions of directing blockbuster action movies. Laren, who was also on the side of Calvinism, said he would need “a sign.” Jason and Bobby took this literally. The following day, they broke into his unlocked car, played classic rock group Switchfoot at full blast — effectively snake-charming music for a Christian millennial — and held up a sign that read “GO OUT” in pink spray paint, outside of his house. It was an evangelical John Cusack move that drew tears from Laren’s eyes. “I’m going, I’m going, I’m going,” he said, on the phone to Jason and Bobby. “I don’t care if I die,” he wrote later that night in his journal.
The Invisible Children core team with Oprah Winfrey. Left to right, Tom Shadyac, Bobby Bailey, Oprah Winfrey, Laren Poole and Jason Russell. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
The Invisible Children core team with Oprah Winfrey. Left to right, Tom Shadyac, Bobby Bailey, Oprah Winfrey, Laren Poole and Jason Russell. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
Soon after, Jason wrote to none other than Oprah Winfrey, telling her about his trip to Africa. He signed off, thanking her. In Oprah, he saw himself. “As soon as I first saw her on TV I remember just being drawn to her light and her essence and power. So, I would make personal videos from me to her, and I knew how to message it to her. I knew how to speak her language.”
Soon after, Jason wrote to none other than Oprah Winfrey, telling her about his trip to Africa. He signed off, thanking her. In Oprah, he saw himself. “As soon as I first saw her on TV I remember just being drawn to her light and her essence and power. So, I would make personal videos from me to her, and I knew how to message it to her. I knew how to speak her language.”
When Jason appeared on *The Oprah Winfrey Show* years later, she thanked him for the videos.
When Jason appeared on *The Oprah Winfrey Show* years later, she thanked him for the videos.
When the three unaccompanied recent college graduates arrived in Sudan that following spring — just as the genocide in the western region had reached its height — Jason says they were the only white people there, “except for a guy named Jeff. It was so dangerous.” Their cameras, he says, gave them “a sense of empowerment — but not even just empowerment — of responsibility.”
When the three unaccompanied recent college graduates arrived in Sudan that following spring — just as the genocide in the western region had reached its height — Jason says they were the only white people there, “except for a guy named Jeff. It was so dangerous.” Their cameras, he says, gave them “a sense of empowerment — but not even just empowerment — of responsibility.”
While they originally intended to document the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, when they arrived, there was scarcely any activity to shoot. A local woman they met on the road redirected them to Gulu, in the northern region of Uganda, telling them that was where they’d find their story. When they arrived they found children sleeping on the streets, children who told the white men with cameras about Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army.
While they originally intended to document the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, when they arrived, there was scarcely any activity to shoot. A local woman they met on the road redirected them to Gulu, in the northern region of Uganda, telling them that was where they’d find their story. When they arrived they found children sleeping on the streets, children who told the white men with cameras about Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army.
@ -205,12 +177,8 @@ Prior to *Kony 2012*, Invisible Children made nine films which they presented ac
In those years, Jason was rapidly spreading himself thin while traveling to screenings across the country. He needed to expand his team so he could stay in the office and strategize while others screened his films on the road. The way to do that, he figured, was to recruit ambassadors for the Invisible Children brand: young students willing to work for free and compete for the chance to spread the word of Invisible Children throughout the States. “Once you made it in, it was like a bootcamp for activism,” Jason says. He referred to the Invisible Children ambassadors as “roadies.”
In those years, Jason was rapidly spreading himself thin while traveling to screenings across the country. He needed to expand his team so he could stay in the office and strategize while others screened his films on the road. The way to do that, he figured, was to recruit ambassadors for the Invisible Children brand: young students willing to work for free and compete for the chance to spread the word of Invisible Children throughout the States. “Once you made it in, it was like a bootcamp for activism,” Jason says. He referred to the Invisible Children ambassadors as “roadies.”
Jason and active LRA soldiers in the LRA camp in Gulu, Uganda. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
Jason and active LRA soldiers in the LRA camp in Gulu, Uganda. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
Invisible Children rented out a house in a residential area of San Diego for roadie recruitment and training. There, around 40 to 60 roadies at a time would learn in greater depth about the history of the L.R.A., as well as bookkeeping, managing spreadsheets and navigating Salesforce. Then, they’d split up into state-based teams of around five to six, accompanied by a student from Uganda, and travel around the country, showcasing the films and spreading the word about Kony.
Invisible Children rented out a house in a residential area of San Diego for roadie recruitment and training. There, around 40 to 60 roadies at a time would learn in greater depth about the history of the L.R.A., as well as bookkeeping, managing spreadsheets and navigating Salesforce. Then, they’d split up into state-based teams of around five to six, accompanied by a student from Uganda, and travel around the country, showcasing the films and spreading the word about Kony.
@ -223,12 +191,8 @@ Meanwhile, as more staff came on board, the sense of urgency to capture Kony inc
“Here’s the thing about people that worked at Invisible Children. Nobody liked to talk shit behind people’s backs. Nobody liked to gossip,” Kevin Trout, a California native and one of *Kony 2012*’s lead editors, recalls. The majority of people gladly worked there for free, or for a salary that hardly paid the rent. Many of them were recovering evangelicals, almost all white millennials in their 20s. They had been taught to serve others as children, but after graduating college and becoming disillusioned with their childhood faith, found that there was no one to serve or save. Jason, like Captain Hook in *Peter Pan*, felt the ticking of the crocodile clock each second Kony was still at large. And he made everyone else feel that urgency, too.
“Here’s the thing about people that worked at Invisible Children. Nobody liked to talk shit behind people’s backs. Nobody liked to gossip,” Kevin Trout, a California native and one of *Kony 2012*’s lead editors, recalls. The majority of people gladly worked there for free, or for a salary that hardly paid the rent. Many of them were recovering evangelicals, almost all white millennials in their 20s. They had been taught to serve others as children, but after graduating college and becoming disillusioned with their childhood faith, found that there was no one to serve or save. Jason, like Captain Hook in *Peter Pan*, felt the ticking of the crocodile clock each second Kony was still at large. And he made everyone else feel that urgency, too.
Jason and Jacob during a trip to Gulu, Uganda. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
Jason and Jacob during a trip to Gulu, Uganda. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
Jason was a magnetizing figure. Still to this day, he carries himself with the conviction of a child who believes he has magical powers. He narrates his own life to me like an oracular storyteller. While there’s now a sense of pathos to his dogged earnestness and wide-eyed passion, when he was the captain of Invisible Children’s ship, he inspired deep reverence from just about everyone under his command. “It’s his charisma, his deep need to do good for the world,” says Andrew Collins, the brother of Alex Collins, the former artist relations manager. “When I went to visit the office, he was so excited to introduce me. I wanted to do anything I could to live there 24/7.”
Jason was a magnetizing figure. Still to this day, he carries himself with the conviction of a child who believes he has magical powers. He narrates his own life to me like an oracular storyteller. While there’s now a sense of pathos to his dogged earnestness and wide-eyed passion, when he was the captain of Invisible Children’s ship, he inspired deep reverence from just about everyone under his command. “It’s his charisma, his deep need to do good for the world,” says Andrew Collins, the brother of Alex Collins, the former artist relations manager. “When I went to visit the office, he was so excited to introduce me. I wanted to do anything I could to live there 24/7.”
@ -239,24 +203,16 @@ While working in D.C., trying to keep the heat on senators and members of Congre
“I remember it hitting me like a lightning bolt,” Jason recalls. “Make. Kony. Famous.” He began skipping and running down the office hallway before taking a book on Andy Warhol from the shelf and making his creative team study the concept of fame: what it is and how celebrities leverage it in order to influence others.
“I remember it hitting me like a lightning bolt,” Jason recalls. “Make. Kony. Famous.” He began skipping and running down the office hallway before taking a book on Andy Warhol from the shelf and making his creative team study the concept of fame: what it is and how celebrities leverage it in order to influence others.
The $30 Kony 2012 package containing a t-shirt, bracelet, badges, flyers and stickers. (Image from Kony 2012)
The $30 Kony 2012 package containing a t-shirt, bracelet, badges, flyers and stickers. (Image from Kony 2012)
In their early designs, the Invisible Children team photoshopped Angelina Jolie in a meeting with Joseph Kony; women with mutilated faces on the covers of *Vogue*. Then, they developed an action kit: a $30 package containing a T-shirt, bracelet, badges and flyers to spread across the recipient’s neighborhood. “We treated the work that we were doing as though we were working at Nike or Apple, a brand. We knew we were competing for eyes, hearts and minds,” Jason says. “We were using that same kind of integrity and intensity to beat the drum about this story. We weren’t afraid to spend resources to do that in order to gain more people. It was incredibly radical for a nonprofit to do the kinds of things that we were doing.” While it may not have been quite as groundbreaking as he makes out — he was taking a leaf out of Bono’s book when it came to combining humanitarianism with corporate brand culture — Jason was uniquely talented when it came to branding a humanitarian crisis.
In their early designs, the Invisible Children team photoshopped Angelina Jolie in a meeting with Joseph Kony; women with mutilated faces on the covers of *Vogue*. Then, they developed an action kit: a $30 package containing a T-shirt, bracelet, badges and flyers to spread across the recipient’s neighborhood. “We treated the work that we were doing as though we were working at Nike or Apple, a brand. We knew we were competing for eyes, hearts and minds,” Jason says. “We were using that same kind of integrity and intensity to beat the drum about this story. We weren’t afraid to spend resources to do that in order to gain more people. It was incredibly radical for a nonprofit to do the kinds of things that we were doing.” While it may not have been quite as groundbreaking as he makes out — he was taking a leaf out of Bono’s book when it came to combining humanitarianism with corporate brand culture — Jason was uniquely talented when it came to branding a humanitarian crisis.
As for the video itself, Jason wanted to “do something that had never been done before”: directly address the internet viewer, making them feel both culpable and empowered, before daring them to keep watching.
As for the video itself, Jason wanted to “do something that had never been done before”: directly address the internet viewer, making them feel both culpable and empowered, before daring them to keep watching.
Invisible Children staff members Kimmy Vandivort, Jedidiah Jenkins and Ben Keesey working at the office in downtown San Diego right before the Kony 2012 campaign was launched. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
Invisible Children staff members Kimmy Vandivort, Jedidiah Jenkins and Ben Keesey working at the office in downtown San Diego right before the Kony 2012 campaign was launched. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
Kevin Trout had been brought in to digitize the footage from Gulu. “Man, there was some dark stuff, dude,” Kevin tells me on a Zoom call. Every day, he’d have to pore over clips of children crying out in emotional agony, recounting stories of their family members’ violent kidnappings by the L.R.A. He spent months with the recordings, coming to know the footage more intimately than anyone else, going home each night numbed.
Kevin Trout had been brought in to digitize the footage from Gulu. “Man, there was some dark stuff, dude,” Kevin tells me on a Zoom call. Every day, he’d have to pore over clips of children crying out in emotional agony, recounting stories of their family members’ violent kidnappings by the L.R.A. He spent months with the recordings, coming to know the footage more intimately than anyone else, going home each night numbed.
@ -271,12 +227,8 @@ Sangita Shresthova, a director of research at the University of Southern Califor
To this day, it’s a criticism that Jason still rejects. “To the people who say I oversimplified the situation, I say ‘thank you’ because simplicity is the highest form of sophistication. It’s actually very sophisticated. That movie is layered and sophisticated and thought through of how to get you to keep watching.”
To this day, it’s a criticism that Jason still rejects. “To the people who say I oversimplified the situation, I say ‘thank you’ because simplicity is the highest form of sophistication. It’s actually very sophisticated. That movie is layered and sophisticated and thought through of how to get you to keep watching.”
When *Kony 2012* went viral, Jason was swept up in a simple kind of joy. He felt the world on his side — for a brief moment. Many of the world’s biggest celebrities — Angelina Jolie, Lady Gaga, George Clooney — were urgently telling the public not to sleep on the video. The public donated hundreds of thousands of dollars within the first 24 hours of it going live. *Kony 2012* was suddenly the world’s number one topic of discussion.
When *Kony 2012* went viral, Jason was swept up in a simple kind of joy. He felt the world on his side — for a brief moment. Many of the world’s biggest celebrities — Angelina Jolie, Lady Gaga, George Clooney — were urgently telling the public not to sleep on the video. The public donated hundreds of thousands of dollars within the first 24 hours of it going live. *Kony 2012* was suddenly the world’s number one topic of discussion.
“As everything does on the internet, after three days, things swing the other way,” Jason says. “That’s typically when you start to see the backlash.”
“As everything does on the internet, after three days, things swing the other way,” Jason says. “That’s typically when you start to see the backlash.”
@ -289,12 +241,8 @@ Other commentators took issue with the video’s call-to-action for military int
By this point, the roadies had been traveling across the States for three weeks, and were now receiving an increasing sense of animosity with each stop. The attacks became more personal: High schoolers ripped their posters apart right in front of them. The roadies said some of them were sleeping 20 minutes a night while driving upward of 14 hours a day. They still had seven weeks left on the road.
By this point, the roadies had been traveling across the States for three weeks, and were now receiving an increasing sense of animosity with each stop. The attacks became more personal: High schoolers ripped their posters apart right in front of them. The roadies said some of them were sleeping 20 minutes a night while driving upward of 14 hours a day. They still had seven weeks left on the road.
High school students and supporters at “MOVE: DC,” an Invisible Children event that over 10,000 attended in November 2012. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
High school students and supporters at “MOVE: DC,” an Invisible Children event that over 10,000 attended in November 2012. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
In the office, the staff had only one P.R. person to rely on, an intern. “We had to have responses, not only to Joe Shmoe asking on the internet, but also reputable sources,” Krista says. “We weren’t prepared. It was a really tiring time. And it just got harder and harder. The criticisms got worse and more.”
In the office, the staff had only one P.R. person to rely on, an intern. “We had to have responses, not only to Joe Shmoe asking on the internet, but also reputable sources,” Krista says. “We weren’t prepared. It was a really tiring time. And it just got harder and harder. The criticisms got worse and more.”
@ -309,12 +257,8 @@ It wasn’t until later that day that Jason’s typically high spirits began to
Jason returned to the Invisible Children office a week later. He hadn’t slept for several days. He brought a pile of paper plates with him to the conference room and began writing out screeds on good and evil, passing the plates around to the staff. He was at the center of the universe, the diviner of morality and mortality. With the questions from his interviews still reeling in his head, he felt he had to have the answers for what was to come next; that he was responsible for the fate of humanity, every living creature. The paper plates were his best shot at saving the world.
Jason returned to the Invisible Children office a week later. He hadn’t slept for several days. He brought a pile of paper plates with him to the conference room and began writing out screeds on good and evil, passing the plates around to the staff. He was at the center of the universe, the diviner of morality and mortality. With the questions from his interviews still reeling in his head, he felt he had to have the answers for what was to come next; that he was responsible for the fate of humanity, every living creature. The paper plates were his best shot at saving the world.
Jacob tells his story during a high school rally organized by Invisible Children. (Image from Kony 2012)
Jacob tells his story during a high school rally organized by Invisible Children. (Image from Kony 2012)
“He was our captain, and it’s hard to watch the captain of your ship completely disintegrate,” Krista, who had known Jason almost for his entire life, says. His younger sister, Janie, has been her best friend since she was 4 years old. She had never known Jason to be unwell. “He was always very off-the-wall, ‘dream big’, ‘dream impossible things,’ but never ill. It was shocking to see how fast that happened.”
“He was our captain, and it’s hard to watch the captain of your ship completely disintegrate,” Krista, who had known Jason almost for his entire life, says. His younger sister, Janie, has been her best friend since she was 4 years old. She had never known Jason to be unwell. “He was always very off-the-wall, ‘dream big’, ‘dream impossible things,’ but never ill. It was shocking to see how fast that happened.”
@ -337,12 +281,8 @@ At this moment, Jason felt like he was holding an umbilical cord to the divine.
“Oh, and by the way, I met God, and she’s Black,” Jason adds.
“Oh, and by the way, I met God, and she’s Black,” Jason adds.
Jason and locals during one of his trips to Gulu, Uganda. (Image from Kony 2012)
Jason and locals during one of his trips to Gulu, Uganda. (Image from Kony 2012)
Jason, to be sure, does not consider himself God. In his view, he’s closer to a prophet, a divine mystic; someone who spends their life trying to communicate what exactly God is, channeling her love like a river.
Jason, to be sure, does not consider himself God. In his view, he’s closer to a prophet, a divine mystic; someone who spends their life trying to communicate what exactly God is, channeling her love like a river.
@ -361,12 +301,8 @@ He puts his phone away, blood rushes to his cheeks, he appears flushed with some
“I wish I could tap into the consciousness all the time every day, but it’s just not possible,” he adds. “It doesn’t last forever, but it can return. And I think if it does return, it’s my job to make sure it’s under a very tight leash.”
“I wish I could tap into the consciousness all the time every day, but it’s just not possible,” he adds. “It doesn’t last forever, but it can return. And I think if it does return, it’s my job to make sure it’s under a very tight leash.”
Ten days after the video’s release, Jason tells me he had a divine encounter with the Holy Spirit. While a pastor read Psalm 46 (“The God of Jacob is our refuge”), he fell to his knees and began to cry on the church floor. He felt a spirit move through him. “God, how are you doing this?” he asked.
Ten days after the video’s release, Jason tells me he had a divine encounter with the Holy Spirit. While a pastor read Psalm 46 (“The God of Jacob is our refuge”), he fell to his knees and began to cry on the church floor. He felt a spirit move through him. “God, how are you doing this?” he asked.
Jason experienced auditory hallucinations for the first and only time in his life three days later. This is the first time he’s told this part of the story.
Jason experienced auditory hallucinations for the first and only time in his life three days later. This is the first time he’s told this part of the story.
@ -377,12 +313,8 @@ Jason experienced auditory hallucinations for the first and only time in his lif
Back in the Invisible Children offices, the communications department had been restlessly checking articles and online criticisms of *Kony 2012* for the past week and a half. On the morning of March 16, they saw a headline indicating that Jason had been masturbating in the street (a TMZ exaggeration — Jason is naked in the video, but is not masturbating). “Look at this,” Krista told a fellow staff writer, believing it was cheap gossip, clickbait. Together, they read the TMZ article, scrolling down to find the footage of Jason on the streets at the bottom of the page. “This I’ll never forget,” Krista says. “My fellow writer fell to her knees, fell to the ground. Legs collapsed. It was absolutely unreal.”
Back in the Invisible Children offices, the communications department had been restlessly checking articles and online criticisms of *Kony 2012* for the past week and a half. On the morning of March 16, they saw a headline indicating that Jason had been masturbating in the street (a TMZ exaggeration — Jason is naked in the video, but is not masturbating). “Look at this,” Krista told a fellow staff writer, believing it was cheap gossip, clickbait. Together, they read the TMZ article, scrolling down to find the footage of Jason on the streets at the bottom of the page. “This I’ll never forget,” Krista says. “My fellow writer fell to her knees, fell to the ground. Legs collapsed. It was absolutely unreal.”
Jason on a television set for an interview during his press tour for Kony 2012. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
Jason on a television set for an interview during his press tour for Kony 2012. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
Krista then gathered all 10 of the interns together, flocking them into her office. “We didn’t want them to see it, as if we could keep it from them forever.” From her office, she texted Jason’s sister. “Tell me this is not happening,” she said. “Not in the way they’re saying it is,” Janie responded.
Krista then gathered all 10 of the interns together, flocking them into her office. “We didn’t want them to see it, as if we could keep it from them forever.” From her office, she texted Jason’s sister. “Tell me this is not happening,” she said. “Not in the way they’re saying it is,” Janie responded.
@ -401,12 +333,8 @@ Jess — the person responsible for overseeing the Midwest team — called short
On April 20th, “Cover The Night” — an initiative that was supposed to mobilize the crowds swayed by *Kony 2012* away from their screens and onto the streets, where they’d paste posters of Kony all over buildings, lampposts and shop windows — inspired a paltry turnout. The few posters that were spread were quickly swept up by street cleaners come morning.
On April 20th, “Cover The Night” — an initiative that was supposed to mobilize the crowds swayed by *Kony 2012* away from their screens and onto the streets, where they’d paste posters of Kony all over buildings, lampposts and shop windows — inspired a paltry turnout. The few posters that were spread were quickly swept up by street cleaners come morning.
During the recording for Kony 2012, an Invisible Children team member puts up a wall poster to visualize the “Cover The Night” action planned to take place on April 20th. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
During the recording for Kony 2012, an Invisible Children team member puts up a wall poster to visualize the “Cover The Night” action planned to take place on April 20th. (Photo courtesy of Jason Russell)
Jason was ultimately hospitalized for several weeks. A statement by his family at the time said the diagnosis was a “brief reactive psychosis, an acute state brought on by extreme exhaustion, stress and dehydration.”
Jason was ultimately hospitalized for several weeks. A statement by his family at the time said the diagnosis was a “brief reactive psychosis, an acute state brought on by extreme exhaustion, stress and dehydration.”
@ -425,12 +353,8 @@ Creative storytelling continues to play an integral role in Invisible Children
Jason stayed on with Invisible Children until December 2014. A month after departing, he founded a new creative agency, Broomstick Engine, which, in its eight years of operation, has strategized and launched campaigns for the likes of Toms Shoes and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Jason no longer has any involvement with Invisible Children. “My job now is to basically make white savior movies for organizations,” he tells me.
Jason stayed on with Invisible Children until December 2014. A month after departing, he founded a new creative agency, Broomstick Engine, which, in its eight years of operation, has strategized and launched campaigns for the likes of Toms Shoes and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Jason no longer has any involvement with Invisible Children. “My job now is to basically make white savior movies for organizations,” he tells me.
Peacebuilding training led by Invisible Children with a local volunteer Peace Committee in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo. (Photo courtesy Invisible Children)
Peacebuilding training led by Invisible Children with a local volunteer Peace Committee in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo. (Photo courtesy Invisible Children)
In 2017, Jason released his Kickstarter-funded book *A Little Radical: The ABC’s Of Activism*, co-authored with wife Danica. It’s a children’s book breaking down the fundamentals of humanitarian advocacy, featuring photos of their own children. Today, he works on a freelance basis, collaborating with numerous clients on script production, post-production and animation. He still appears to be friends with many people in Hollywood; this year, he watched the Oscars (his favorite event of the year) with singer-songwriter Lorde. He does yoga. While he used to work all through the night, today he sticks to a stricter routine, going to bed no later than 10:30 p.m.
In 2017, Jason released his Kickstarter-funded book *A Little Radical: The ABC’s Of Activism*, co-authored with wife Danica. It’s a children’s book breaking down the fundamentals of humanitarian advocacy, featuring photos of their own children. Today, he works on a freelance basis, collaborating with numerous clients on script production, post-production and animation. He still appears to be friends with many people in Hollywood; this year, he watched the Oscars (his favorite event of the year) with singer-songwriter Lorde. He does yoga. While he used to work all through the night, today he sticks to a stricter routine, going to bed no later than 10:30 p.m.
# The wild business of desert island tourism - The Hustle
A few weeks ago, **Ben Saul-Garner** paid ~$3.7k to be abandoned on a remote island in Indonesia.
The 33-year-old entrepreneur flew from his home city of London to Jakarta, then boarded another flight to a regional airport. A car service drove him to a pier, where he climbed onto a janky speedboat and hummed across the ocean for 90 minutes until he reached an uninhabited mass of land covered in palm trees and dense brush.
The boat turned around and left, and Saul-Garner remained marooned there for 10 days, alone and nearly resourceless.
He slept in a hammock, subsisted on coconuts and crab, and spent his days foraging for firewood.
“You actually realize just how much time you have in a day when you remove all distractions,” Saul-Garner told *The Hustle*. “There’s something about just being in nature and going back to basics that I love.”
#### **The restless soul**
Saul-Garner booked this experience with Docastaway, a company that caters to travelers looking for extreme isolation.
It was founded in 2010 by **Alvaro Cerezo**, a restless soul from Málaga, Spain.
Cerezo spent his summer days exploring the Alboran Sea’s rocky beaches and secret coves. By the age of eight, he was venturing offshore in an inflatable raft.
“I always dreamed about going beyond the horizon,” he told *The Hustle*. “And I knew that as soon as I had freedom, I’d see what was out there.”
The son of an engineer and a government administrator, Cerezo was encouraged to get an economics degree in college. But between his studies, he’d fly to Asia and pay a few bucks to hop on a fishing vessel bound for a remote island.
Islands became his obsession.
He began to develop an extensive knowledge of archipelagos in Indonesia, the Philippines, Polynesia, and Micronesia. After he graduated, he began to wonder if he could make a living out of his hobby.
“I wanted to do this every day of my life,” he said. “I had no idea if there were others out there who wanted to travel to these remote islands, but I decided to see.”
In 2010, Cerezo launched [Docastaway](https://www.docastaway.com/) (a combination of “do” and “castaway”) and billed his service as an escape from the clutter and digital chaos of the modern world. Travelers would pay Cerezo to dump them alone on an island, where they could spend time in complete and utter isolation.
The timing for this service was fortuitous.
Interest in extreme wilderness tourism had taken off, thanks to TV shows like [*Man vs. Wild*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_vs._Wild) and [*Survivorman*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorman), and a growing number of YouTube channels dedicated to “bushcraft” — wilderness survival skills like foraging, building natural shelters, and starting fires.
People wanted to test themselves — and there was no better test than being marooned on an island without food, water, or shelter.
*The Hustle*
Cerezo’s first clients were his friends, whom he convinced to join him on a few “test” expeditions to his favorite remote desert islands. But eventually, adventurous travelers from around the globe began to organically discover Docastaway.
“There was no other company like this, so when people searched for ‘desert island company’ online, they’d find me,” he says. “The demand started to grow, and that’s when I really had to improve the experience.”
That meant finding the perfect islands.
#### **The art of ‘finding’ an island**
Cerezo realized early on that clients didn’t want to go *too* far to experience true isolation on a remote island. The typical customer only had around eight to 10 days budgeted for travel, and they didn’t want to spend more than two of them traveling.
“An island has to be remote and isolated — but not *too* remote and isolated,” Cerezo said.
Today, Cerezo has come to realize that bringing foreign tourists into remote island territories requires a fair bit of politicking, including payments and bribes. When he finds the perfect island, he flies out and meets with the island’s owner and local officials to work out arrangements.
“Bribes are important,” Cerezo says. “Everyone wants their piece.”
The typical process works like so:
- The island owner (either the government or a private owner) is paid $100-$150 for rental of the island for a few days
- Police are paid to prevent any issues like pirating or looting
- Local officials are paid to prevent fishing vessels and other boats from docking on the island when a client is there
Altogether, these bribes, tips, and payments typically amount to around $300 per trip.
“These aren’t Richard Branson types who own these islands,” Cerezo says. “Most of these islands have never seen a tourist. So, the owners are happy to accept any kind of payment they can get to authorize use for a few days.”
Providing clients with the illusion of complete solitude is harder than it sounds. Even on the most remote islands on earth, isolation has to be manufactured:
- Cerezo goes to great lengths to make sure local fishing boats don’t come into view of any island where a client is staying. This involves setting up a support team on a nearby island to “intercept” and pay off any boats that float too close.
- Before a client is taken ashore, the island also has to be cleaned of debris to give it an untouched appearance. (Islands in the middle of the ocean are often magnets for trash.)
Only one out of every 20 islands Cerezo surveys meets his criteria for safety and isolation.
#### **The castaway experience**
Today, Cerezo offers island experiences in Polynesia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Central America. Prices range from €90 to €380 per night (~$95 to $400), and the typical trip is around a week.
Clients are responsible for their own flights to and from the destination, but once they touch ground, they’re shuttled to a nearby port and motored across the ocean on a speedboat — sometimes 90 minutes or longer — to live out their island fantasies.
Cerezo’s profit? “Very little,” he says. “I’m never going to get rich with this. I do it because it’s my passion. And it’s an excuse for me to continue exploring different islands.”
Over his 13 years in business, Cerezo has had over **1k clients**. They range from entrepreneurs like Ben Saul-Garner, to students, to multimillionaires who are looking for a self-reliance test after years of indulging in luxury comforts.
When a client signs up, he or she has two options:
- **“Survival” mode**: They get dropped off on the island with barely anything (in some cases, just a machete or spear gun) and have to figure out everything on their own.
- **“Comfort” mode**: They have a crew on standby with food, water, shelter, and other necessities.
Survival mode has become an increasingly popular option in recent years.
Clients might elect to be left with a few items — a machete, a lighter, a speargun — but once Cerezo’s staff leaves the island, they’re on their own to forage for food, build shelter, and source water. Cerezo makes sure that the islands he selects have options.
Usually, this means catching fish and crabs and scaling trees for coconuts. Some clients [even resort](https://paradise.docastaway.com/our-clients-15/) to eating things that get washed up on shore, like packaged goods and produce that fall off of local ships.
“Everything is very difficult on an island. You need to fight for everything you get,” said Cerezo. “I could be more romantic and tell you, ‘Oh yeah, this is the life.’ But it’s much better being in civilization. This is a true test for people.”
Every client has to sign a disclaimer form accepting liability in the case of injury or death — though Cerezo says that hasn’t happened yet.
“They know it’s dangerous,” he says. “They’re alone with no hospitals. If you have to go to a hospital, it’s going to be at least four hours to get there. And even then, the hospitals we’re talking about are not very well equipped.”
Sometimes clients abandon ship early — usually due to extreme sunburn, sickness, fear, or even boredom.
“People go there thinking it’s going to be an Indiana Jones kind of adventure,” said Cerezo. “It’s not like that. A desert island is lonely. And some people can’t handle being completely alone.”
#### **The isolation business**
Docastaway isn’t the only desert island tourism outfit in town. UK-based [Desert Island Survival](https://www.desertislandsurvival.com/) offers a similar service geared toward groups.
“I was working in finance, and totally depressed,” the company’s founder, **Tom Williams**, told *The Hustle*. “I’d always felt like a square peg in a round hole. I wanted to see the untouched parts of earth, and go over the edge of the map.”
During an evening of despair, Williams came across Cerezo’s company and realized there was room in the market for another business.
Williams’ service is less about transformative experiences and the poetry of isolation, and more about learning the skills necessary to survive in the wild.
“It’s about escaping the rat race, disconnecting, and learning how to survive in the real world,” he said.
Desert Island Survival is an eight-day experience — five days of hands-on training with one of the company’s survival skill experts, and three days of putting those skills to use in “survival mode” on the island. Clients learn how to:
- Build a shelter and make rope out of natural fibers
- Source water and food that doesn’t kill them
- Start fires using friction techniques like the “[bow drill](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETzcTwxLx3M)”
- Weave palms into baskets, hats, and beds
The expeditions are made up of groups of individuals — mostly solo travelers — who don’t know each other. But Williams will also occasionally cater to bachelor parties, father-son trips, and corporate retreats.
All in, the experience costs around **£3k** (~$3.7k) per person, and Williams says he’s done around 50 trips in total — 20 this year alone — with 60% margins.
Williams says his only bottleneck to growing the business is finding more islands.
“There are lots of beautiful islands in the Philippines, but there are [pirates](https://maritimefairtrade.org/the-risks-of-maritime-piracy-on-filipino-seafarers-trade/),” he said. “In Indonesia, there are pit vipers, and in New Guinea there are green mambas that can literally kill you.”
A “risks and dangers” [tab](https://www.desertislandsurvival.com/risks-dangers/) on his website elaborates on the various traumas that can be inflicted by monitor lizards, wild pigs, sharks, jellyfish, pufferfish, stingrays, and other island-dwelling creatures.
He also has to contend with a formidable rival: reality TV shows.
When shows like *Survivor* and *Naked and Afraid* need a shooting location, they typically go for the same limited inventory of islands. And Williams says producers offer to pay handsome rental sums in excess of **$100k**. Recently, Williams says a very famous YouTuber paid **$70k** to rent an island in Panama for a video.
“He turned up there with friends, and there were way too many insects for them. So they left,” said Williams.
Williams often has to sign more relaxed contracts with islands that allow the owner to give him the boot if a more lucrative opportunity arises. He has backup islands nearby for any last-minute change of plans.
#### **The last frontier**
Both Cerezo and Williams are aware that the services they offer are up against the broader threat of wide-scale industrialization.
- Oceans are now [acidifying](https://www.nrdc.org/stories/ocean-pollution-dirty-facts#:~:text=This%20problem%20is%20rapidly%20worsening,industrial%20revolution%20200%20years%20ago.) faster than they have in 300m years.
- The waters are infested with trillions of [plastic particles](https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/08/world/ocean-plastic-pollution-climate-intl/index.html) and large swaths of debris.
- Previously obscure islands are being [privatized](https://elitetraveler.com/property/private-islands-sales-market-trends) and developed at a rapid rate, often commanding [millions of dollars](https://www.privateislandsonline.com/).
*An island sunset (via Alvaro Cerezo)*
It’s getting harder to find *any* place — even a remote desert island — that isn’t unmarred by the hand of the modern world.
“We’ve had to drop a few islands from our service because they’re getting too polluted, or there are hotels being built there,” said Cerezo. “We will eventually need to go more and more remote.”
But Cerezo, now 43, is no stranger to a hard journey. He says he plans to be in the desert island business for the rest of his life.
“As long as I’m alive it will be there,” he said. “I want to make as many people as possible feel like the last person alive on earth.”
# Winging It with the New Backcountry Barnstormers
Heading out the door? Read this article on the Outside app available now on iOS devices for members! [Download the app](https://outsideapp.onelink.me/wOhi/6wh1kbvw).
## Part One: The Convincer in Chief
### Northern Nevada and the Lost Sierra, Summer 2022
In early August of 2022, 69 days before the 12th annual High Sierra Fly-In—an event known as American aviation’s Burning Man—Trent Palmer hoisted himself into the cockpit of his red, white, and blue bush plane, the *Freedom Fox,* and fired up the engine for another cruise into the valleys north of Lake Tahoe. Palmer, wearing flip-flops, shorts, and a Trent Palmer limited-edition trucker hat (“Fly Low, Don’t Die,” $40), is not your typical bush pilot, hauling mountaineers and machinery. Thanks to a prodigious YouTube following, he’s one of the most prominent of a new breed of lower 48 adventurers who are landing their fat-tire planes on and in mountaintops, ridgetops, river canyons, mountain meadows, dry lake beds, and grass and dirt airstrips, mainly in the American West, and mostly on land managed by the federal government.
Here was Palmer, 34, his handsome face smooth of whiskers but strong of jaw, moving through his preflight checklist, which included ditching his flip-flops in favor of bare feet, both of which were hovering over the rudder pedals. He jiggled the center control stick, rising up from the floor between his legs, which he used to tame the *Freedom Fox’*s direction and pitch. He said “Clear” and pushed the starter button, and the propeller coughed and revved, eventually producing a throaty thrum. The plane’s wings and fuselage were the color of Old Glory; several dozen stars spanned the cockpit’s exterior. An observer would be forgiven for mistaking Palmer’s craft for an Air National Guard stunt plane.
Palmer tweaked the throttle and steered toward the runway. He spoke into his headset: “Stead traffic, *Freedom Fox,* taking runway two-six at alpha two. It’ll be a westbound departure.”
I sat to Palmer’s right, a motion-sickness bracelet on my left wrist, anti-nausea gum in my mouth, and a gallon-size ziplock at my feet. The copilot’s control stick started bobbing around between my legs in sync with Palmer’s. The *Freedom Fox,* an immaculately maintained, high-wing, single-engine tail-wheel plane with burly 29-inch bush tires, monster shocks, extended wings, and a 140-horsepower fuel-injected turbocharged engine, climbed from Reno-Stead Regional Airport at 1,500 feet a minute. The stamped alkaline flats of the Great Basin gave way to the dense pine forests of California’s Lost Sierra, a huge swath of mountainous backcountry about an hour north of Reno. On the horizon, the jagged crest of the Sierra Buttes came into view. Palmer, who was piping a Shakey Graves tune through the headsets, exuded competence, bonhomie, and (in the confines, I couldn’t help but notice) a pleasant, soapy smell.
He had agreed to take me along as he executed a series of “short takeoffs and landings”—STOL, for short—which epitomize bush flying, whether the assignment is depositing researchers onto a remote airstrip in Alaska’s Brooks Range, competing in STOL competitions, or landing “off-airport”—on ungroomed terrain, nowhere near a runway—as we were about to do next to California’s Stampede Reservoir.
Palmer seemed happy to be flying without cameras and a YouTube agenda. “How are you feeling?” he asked, this polite ambassador and evangelist of his winged pastime, this member of a band of nine bush-pilot buckaroos called the [Flying Cowboys](https://www.theflyingcowboys.com/), social media influencers all, using their platforms to spread the bush-flying gospel to the uninitiated.
In one 2018 video, Palmer and two other young pilots fly to a northern Nevada mountaintop and set up base camp. One pilot paraglides off the summit. In a voiceover keyed to uplifting synths and soaring drone shots, Palmer says, “More often than not, we work away all the golden years of our lives, years we’ll never get back, all in an attempt to enjoy the remaining few.”
“I say it doesn’t have to be that way,” he continues. “What I’m saying is to stop waiting, stop dreaming, and start living. Life is too short to eat dessert last.”
“You know the drill,” he concludes. “Like this video if you do, subscribe if you haven’t, \[and\] come be my wingman.” Then he whispers “Peace,” flashes the V, and slaps his hand over the lens.
The result? Followers. Half a million of them. Palmer grosses about $150,000 a year from various income streams, including YouTube.
He gestured at the twitching control stick. “You might get punched in the nuts when I’m landing,” he said, “but don’t worry about it.”
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- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2023-10-07 ✅ 2023-10-06
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2023-09-30 ✅ 2023-09-29
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2023-09-30 ✅ 2023-09-29
iOS
1 year ago