Two People Can Keep a Secret-Provided One of Them is Dead
Anonymity used to be a somewhat easy thing. But the internet made that much harder for people to do. You can trace things like IP addresses, payments, things like that. So it is surprising that the literary world had not only an anonymous writer but blogger as well by the name of Belle de Jour. What was even more surprising was that Belle de Jour was a call girl who wrote about her experiences. The icing on the cake was that Belle stayed anonymous for six years, during which time the blog became a series of best-selling books as well as an internationally successful TV series. Even her agent didn’t know her real name until this past week.
And then, the world was let known via the Sunday Times that Belle was actually Dr Brooke Magnanti a specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology who ran out of money during the final stages of her PhD thesis and decided to become an escort to make ends meet. From there the blog was born. Dr Magnanti was all ready an established scientific blogger. In fact, the style and substance of the writing was one of the things that fueled the question “Who is Belle de Jour?” and kept people guessing.
Did the good Doctor got tired of being anonymous and decided to give it all up? Paul Carr of TechCrunch says, maybe not:
Let’s give Belle and the Sunday Times the benefit of the doubt and assume that Magnanti really did approach them, and not the other way around. There’s no reason to doubt Magnanti’s version of events, but it’s worth remembering that the Sunday Times has a particularly grubby history when it comes to anonymous bloggers…
…Zoe Margolis opened the door of her London home at an ungodly hour of the morning to accept a flower delivery from an anonymous admirer. What she didn’t know was that the delivery man had actually been sent by the Sunday Times who had positioned a photographer across the road ready to snap her when she came to the door. Two days later she learned the horrible truth: an email arrived from the paper’s ‘acting news editor’; a scumbag called Nicholas Hellen. In the email, Hellen announced that the paper was preparing to out Zoe as the author of the anonymous sex blog ‘Girl With A One Track Mind‘, which – like Belle de Jour’s blog – had just been turned into a book.
Hellen proposed a deal: either Zoe could agree to give her story to the Times, illustrated with a photoshoot in “glamourous evening wear” taken by their resident fashion photographer – or the paper would run its own hit-job expose, written by fellow-scum-bag Anna Mikhailova and complete with the (in Hellen’s words) “not particularly flattering” paparazzi shot.
Zoe told the Times to go fuck themselves, and the rest is a painful outing, a hideously uncomfortable conversation with her parents and a week of press-camped-out-on-her-doorstep hell (stories she tells in a follow-up book to be published in March 2010)
How might a newspaper like the Times have found out something that had been kept under wraps for six years? There is talk in the interview about an ex-boyfriend with a big mouth. Did he contact the Times? There is that. Supposedly other friends new about the double life that Dr Magnanti lived. There is also the rest of Carr’s column that goes on by saying that basically Belle was an ego-maniac who outed herself in order to take credit for everything that she had done. But I think the answer is far more complex than that. You see, secrets are a pain in the ass. You have to create a separate reality around the secret in order to explain all the inconsistencies of life. After a while, the act of keeping two separate realities in check becomes a rather tedious job. Throw in an ex with a big mouth, the fact that it was becoming apparent that the adventures of Belle was beginning to finally play out, and the idea of saying “sod it, that was fun, but its time to move on” looks pretty good.
So here’s to anonymity. It can be done, but the fact is you’re the only one who can know about it.
Now Playing: Robert Palmer – Secrets – Under Suspicion
Loading...