How Being Canceled Saved My Marriage

It wasn’t until I got to the police station to report the threats against my life that I realized I had forgotten my phone. The officer who was taking the incident report wanted to see a few of the more than 200 attacks, taunts and slurs I’d received on my social media accounts—and via IMs, texts and emails—from people with user names like Fuck You NAZI and Adam in Jersey. But I had left the apartment jangly-nerved and preoccupied, so arrived with my husband at the 6th precinct empty-handed.

What brought me there had started a few weeks earlier, with screenshots of my posts protesting the war in Gaza blowing up on social media, followed by doxxing and then dozens of posts on my employer’s social media accounts calling for my head on a stick, followed by my being fired from my job. It was over in a matter of hours. But not the blowback, which would last for months and which included a man who worked for a New York City real estate developer posing in a text as a reporter for the New York Post. It also included trolls here and in Israel IM’ing dozens of my Facebook friends, or replying to their old public posts, to ask why they were friends with an anti-Semite. Even my lawyer was harassed as part of the campaign, organized by a Zionist unmasking group that had made its name sharing videos of people tearing down posters of hostages and engaging in hate speech.

Why they came after me, considering I had merely expressed my strongly held, though not always politely expressed, political opinions was bewildering, but that didn’t matter right now. Now I was sitting with my husband in a banged-up molded plastic chair at a banged-up wooden table in a 60s-era police precinct in the West Village while a janitor mopped the floor using a plastic jack-o’-lantern for a bucket, unable to show Officer Li who wanted me dead after all. “Don’t worry,” my husband said, as he stood to go back to our apartment. “I got it.”

The Dark Days

This phrase would become my husband’s mantra over the next few months as I struggled to cope with the surreality of being canceled. A quart of homemade lentil soup. A tissue. My phone. My back. He’s got it. I, meanwhile, had nothing. No job, no way to stop crying, no will to get up and shower, no incentive to leave the apartment given what I feared was waiting for me outside.

The human psyche isn’t designed to bear what mine did those first few months after I was doxxed. The distance between ordinary hate and the genetically engineered version that I experienced through the mechanism of social media is a bottomless chasm. “Weaponized” is what they call the latter, but in this case the weapon wasn’t a pistol but an AK-47. It didn’t leave a neat hole that could be cleaned and sutured, rather it shredded and shattered me. Yet through every excruciating day of that brutal trauma, my husband took care of me as he would an invalid. He made me believe I wasn’t the horrible person the world now thought I was and kept me from giving in to the darkness.

I didn’t expect this from him. Our marriage, now 22 years old, hadn’t been great for a long time. There were fights, slammed doors and accusations. We had let frustrations and resentments crowd out the kindnesses we once shared. During the pandemic, my husband had rented a workspace since the apartment where we were confined with our son was so small. Now he spent most of his time there while our son was off at college. When he was around, I would find trivial reasons to criticize him. Could you please put your dirty dishes in the dishwasher for once? Do you have to play the music so loud? I thought I told you to buy scallions; these are shallots. He responded by snapping at me. Long ago, I had been the editor-in-chief of Martha Stewart Weddings. Apparently, I knew how to celebrate a marriage just not how to maintain one.

Finding a New Way to Be Together

Now, with the world turned against me, things were different between us. We would sit together on the couch at night, our feet propped side-by-side on the coffee table, eating store-bought shepherd’s pie, with a square of black January night reflecting the lamplight, and binge-watch every episode of all the Inspector Morse spinoffs. We discussed each plot twist and I managed to laugh with him when Dr. Debryn, the coroner in Endeavor, would stand after examining another dead body lying on the ground of Oxford and say once more to the detectives waiting to learn when they’d meet at the morgue: “Shall we say two [nine, four, ten] o’clock?”

During the day, my husband called employment lawyers, defamation lawyers, private investigators, therapists and reputation management companies. He sent me articles sup-porting my views and documenting people just like me who had suffered in the same way. He quietly texted all my friends and asked them to please check in on me as often as they could. He tried to arrange for me to take a trip with my bffs (I refused the offer—too terrifying). If he wasn’t with me, he was telling me he’d be back soon. “Shall we say five o’clock?” he’d say as he headed out to work. When he came home, I’d often be in the same spot as when he’d left, still crying and asking him again to tell me when it would all end, but he never lost patience with me.

Everything was gone in one concussive blast in those awful first months of being canceled, but something else had unexpectedly been returned to me. When it seems the entire world wants you dead, a dirty dish in the sink is almost obscenely inconsequential. What matters is knowing that one person loves you more than all the anonymous haters hate you. And with him to help me lift my head, I could see more love shimmering out there beyond my bedroom walls. My son would call me breathless on his way to class to tell me how proud he was of me and that I could never let him down. My childhood friends reminded me of the person they always knew me to be. People I’d lost touch with over the years coaxed me out for coffee and lunch and texted to say how outraged they were on my behalf.

Writing My Way Through

While talking with various experts on how to claw back my reputation, I learned that I could suppress the negative search results that appeared when you Googled my name by paying a company to create new, positive content that would “push down” the bad stuff. It cost at least $50,000 and there was no guarantee it would work after a minimum of six months of trying. I’m an unemployed content producer, I thought. I can do this for free. So I started a blog site and posted articles on a few other platforms as well.

Suddenly, I had something to do besides sob. I wrote as if my life depended on it because it did. And while I was careful about who could access my content and to turn off comments for the most part, those who did read my writing told me how much they liked it. I discovered that there were strangers out there who not only didn’t hate me but who supported and encour-aged me, too.

Some Final Advice

Slowly, I started to heal and eventually, I was ready to peel back the bandages and examine my wounded self. My husband, as he had been for months, was there to help with that. One day, sitting on the couch where we had logged all those episodes of Endeavor and Lewis, the dishes strewn around un-resented, either scallions or shallots in the crisper, I didn’t know or care which, he turned to me and said something I had needed to hear but wasn’t ready to until now. “You were sometimes too quick to anger,” he said. Not just with him but with the people I engaged with online. My righteousness was admirable, he said, but I needed to be more patient with the world and to maybe think first before I spoke my mind. Luckily, I’d had him as my Buddha those past few months and proof of how powerful such patience could be.

I’m still learning from his example, and while I no longer hold a grudge against those who found it more convenient to drop me rather than defend me, it’s harder to let go of my anger for those who viciously sought to destroy me. They took so much from me—some things I will never get back and some I may recover only over time. But my husband—along with my son, my friends, my sisters and those beautiful strangers—handed me the gift of a second chance at life when I was ready to give up on it. Maybe at last I can find my way to giving my many tormentors a second chance, too, by forgiving them for what they’ve done to me. Shall we say 3 o’clock?