Brooke Gladstone: This is Brooke with the On the Media midweek podcast. When stories, moments, and ideas even memes go viral on the internet, a good question is to ask why? Some tug at our heartstrings like Charlie bit my finger, others are just silly like Bernie Sanders in big mittens, but a few rise in the digital ranks because they make us argue. We pick sides and then we pick fights for and against people we don't know. That was the case this week regarding two women who met in Boston over a decade ago. Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson were a subject of an article by Robert Kolker in the New York Times entitled The Bad Art Friend.

Dorland and Larson were both regulars at GrubStreet, a non-profit writing center known for literary workshops and events. As far as facts go, that is at least one that everyone in this story will agree on. The tale is one of two writers in extremis over purloined letters, iffy intentions and charged feelings, but for the internet, particularly the world of Twitter, it was about so much more. We called up a friend of ours to talk about his review of the story and the debate. Journalist Michael Hobbes is host of the podcast Maintenance Phase. Thanks for joining us, Mike.

Michael Hobbes: Thanks for having me back.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay, so let's start with their initial meeting. The story in the New York Times jumps to 2015 I think when Dawn who had moved away from Boston to LA made a big decision to donate a kidney to a stranger, just to put it in the bank. Then she made a decision to create a Facebook group about it.

Michael Hobbes: Yes. She created a private Facebook group. It's not totally clear how many members of it there were, but Dawn says it's roughly 20 to 30. Sonya says it's 250 to 300. From all of Dawn's correspondence, it seems quite clear that she was using this as a private group for close friends. The pinned post on the group says, hello, this is a group for my close friends. She says it's basically something that when you go through one of these major medical procedures or something, or if you have twins or something, you're going to be answering the same questions from a lot of your friends.

Dawn's idea, or at least the way that she describes it is that she wanted to create this private Facebook group to tell everybody at once. Like, this is what I've decided to do. I'm donating a kidney, this is why. Share whatever private reflections she had that she wanted to tell her close friends and not necessarily everybody on Facebook.

Brooke Gladstone: Sonya is on it, right?

Michael Hobbes: Yes. Sonya is one of the people who's on it. It seems clear that Dawn considered her a close friend. It doesn't seem like Sonya considered Dawn a close friend. They had been in the same circles, writing literary circles in Boston for almost 10 years at this point. Sonya says that they have never actually been in a room by themselves together.

It appears that Sonya does not consider this to be a particularly close friendship, but Dawn's argument is that like, well we go to the same literary events. We know the same people. We go to the same dinner parties. You can still form closeness with somebody through larger group events without necessarily having a one-on-one friendship. It doesn't mean we weren't close. By the way, it feels so weird to be litigating this in public by the way. Were two random women friends? It feels really wrong to be doing this.

Brooke Gladstone: We're going to discuss why we're doing this in a moment but first, just to clear up the story, to speed it up. Tell me what goes on during the Facebook group that we may not have seen chronologically in the story done by the Times, it does come up later.

Michael Hobbes: This is actually an irrelevant detail to the story, but it's one that the New York Times puts very early in that story, and I think ends up poisoning most of the readers against Dawn fairly early in the story. Even though it's not all that interesting or important of a detail, ultimately. After a couple of weeks of this Facebook group being around Dawn notices that Sonya is viewing all of her posts, because when you look at your post on your own private Facebook page, you can see like John viewed your post and Bob viewed your post. You have a little bar that shows you who's viewing them.

Because it's a small enough number of people who are in this private Facebook group, Dawn notices like, Hmm. Sonya is looking at all of the posts and she hasn't liked any of the posts, she hasn't commented on the posts, she hasn't reached out to say, "Hey, good for you for donating a kidney, a lot of people need kidneys." There's been no engagement, but she's looking at all of them. I think to me, this is why the closeness of the friendship is important because obviously, it's extremely weird behavior to reach out to somebody that you barely know and be like, why aren't you liking my Facebook posts?

That's the way that it's presented in the Times story a little bit. This would just be really aggressive and weird behavior, but it makes more sense if you think of this as a very small group and Dawn who thought of Sonya as her close friend. If you imagine, I've just had a baby and I had this group where I'm posting a bunch of baby pictures and one of my close friends is looking at all my baby pictures, but they haven't said, "Hey, congratulations." Or even a perfunctory mention of this huge life event that I've had. It seems to me that that was the way that Dawn was perceiving this. That I've just done this big thing, I've brought this major activity into my life and I've had a relatively risky surgery.

Sonya is looking at all my posts about this, but she's not saying anything to me. All my other writer friends, this writing world in Boston, all of these people who I thought I was close with, I'm bumping into them at things and they're not mentioning this to me. It just feels weird.

Brooke Gladstone: What was going on that Dawn didn't know about in this period?

Michael Hobbes: We now know from all of these excruciating group texts that have now been leaked as part of discovery. Again, I feel so wrong knowing this, but Sonya and the other writers in this writer's group were mocking Dawn quite a bit. She was an object of ridicule to them. They came up with an acronym, in all of their emails they called her DFD for Dawn effing Dorland. That it was enough of a topic of conversation, this cringy woman that they all knew that they came up with an acronym so they didn't have to type out her name every time.

A lot of these emails and group texts and Facebook chats are now part of the legal record. We can see that effectively everything she was posting on Facebook, they would text and be like, "Oh my God, can you believe what she posted now?" Like, "Oh, it's so cringe." A lot of these posts were related to her kidney donation because it seems that Dawn was honestly pretty annoying about the fact that she had donated a kidney, but also the US doesn't have a lot of kidney donors, and it's literally a life-saving donation. The US needs many more people to be doing this.

It's also cringy to be reading these group texts about like, can you believe this woman who donated a kidney and she's talking about it on Facebook when like, that's what you're supposed to do when you donate a kidney. Also, she did a good thing and I don't know, maybe she just gets to be a little bit annoying about it.

Brooke Gladstone: You mentioned the suit. Let's talk about that. Sonya starts working on a story during the time that this Facebook group was active?

Michael Hobbes: Yes. Just after Dawn reaches out to her to say, "Hey, I noticed you're not really doing anything with these posts. Are we still cool? Is anything going on?" Sonya starts working on this short story, this officially fictional short story. We now know that she took a letter that Dawn wrote to the ultimate recipient of her kidney. She wrote this letter that was a little bit self-congratulatory, not super self-aware. I've done this thing and I've been thinking about you and the gift that you're going to have because of me. You can see how people would look at it and it would be a little bit like, "Oh, maybe tone it down." I get that emotional reaction.

What we now know is that Sonya appears to have essentially word for word copy-pasted this letter into her short story. Her short story is about a woman who receives a kidney from a donor and then receives a letter and has somewhat of a relationship with this extremely cringy, extremely entitled obnoxious woman. This woman is very clearly based on Dawn. In early drafts of the story, this character's name was Dawn. Other people in their writing group who read the story at that stage have emailed Sonya and said like, "Yes, it's really clearly a takedown of this woman who we know. You've written a story mocking this woman that we know and using her actual words to mock her.

There's also a weird professional element of this too, that also doesn't really end up in the New York Times story that Dawn was a student in workshops that a lot of these writers were teaching. She was also a lower level employee or lower-level fellow at this same organization that Sonya was much higher up in. These are also people who are part of this professional writers collective mocking one of their students and one of their colleagues to each other as well.

Brooke Gladstone: Then in the summer of 2016, Dawn finds out that Sonya has written this short story and even read a draft loud at a bookstore in Boston. She learns it through a friend's comment in her Facebook group.

Michael Hobbes: This poor guy, he's now part of the New York Times. All he did was he went to a reading and he's like, "Hey, you wrote a story about a kidney donation and then he tags Dawn, and he's like, "Dawn had a kidney donation. I wonder if that has anything to do with it." Just like a friendly like, "Hey, these two things are about the same thing. He's swatting this hornet's nest having no idea that that's what he's doing. Then of course Dawn reaches out to Sonya and is breezy, it's like, "Hey, I heard you got this new fellowship. How are things? How is John?" Normal catching up email. There's one paragraph that says, "Hey, I heard you're working on a story about a kidney donation. Do you mind if I read it?"

Thus ensues this long email conversation back and forth where Sonya essentially says, "The story is not finished yet, I'm not comfortable showing it. I'm sure it sounds like it's based on you because you went through this last summer, but it's actually totally different. It was a seed of a story, but just creatively it went in a completely different direction." We now know from all this discovery that that was a lie, the story was not only finished, it was published. She was behind the scenes emailing the publisher to say, "There's some word for word stuff I took from a Facebook post from somebody I know and I don't feel great about it. Do you mind if we edit those sections?"

There's also texts indicating that she's like, "Oh man, Dawn is asking questions. I know I took this wording from her Facebook post, I should probably change it." Sonya is completely aware of what she's done and behind the scenes is working to change the wording so that it's a better disguised by the time Dawn finds out about it.

Brooke Gladstone: It takes a while for Dawn to actually read the story.

Michael Hobbes: Yes, it comes out in 2017, but she doesn't end up reading it until 2018, partly because it's behind a paywall, I don't know how much it cost, but she didn't want to read it. Also, I think on some level she probably believed Sonya that, "Well, she says it's not about my kidney donation so I don't need to rush to read this." She's also in other places said, "I think it would be too hard to read this. A close friend writing about my experience who didn't really talk to me about my experience while she was writing this."

She was hurt that, well, you don't know that many people who went through a kidney donation and it's something that vanishingly few people do and yet you didn't really reach out to me to tell me you were writing a story or ask me about my experience at all. She just avoided reading it. She only reads it in 2018 once it ends up on the website without a paywall of something called American Short Fiction, which is a short story publisher.

Brooke Gladstone: This reads like a takedown of Dawn, but Sonya says that this story is about white savior complex.

Michael Hobbes: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: That the person who donated the kidney was doing it principally to center themselves in someone else's story.

Michael Hobbes: Yes. In the story, the character that is based on Dawn is not the main character. The protagonist of the story is a Chinese-American woman who receives the kidney from this white savior lady and receives the letter and then the white savior lady comes over to her house for this awkward brunch situation and it ends with the white savior lady taking a selfie of both of them. It's very clear that this story, the author end of the character in the story both have a lot of contempt for this character that is very clearly based on Dawn. The letter that is in the story, it's been changed, the wording has changed, but it's in the same structure as Dawn's letter and there's a couple of similarities. Dawn can see the echo of the letter.

Brooke Gladstone: That are really strong, the emphasis of the word you, which is underlined or italicized in both, that kind of thing.

Michael Hobbes: There's a couple little artifacts where you can tell that it's based on Dawn's letter, but it's not as bad as the earlier version that had been almost word for word. Then where some of my sympathies start to shift, is that then Dawn goes into battle mode and starts contacting the publisher of this short story. She contacts a book festival that's publishing an anthology that features the story. She files a copyright so that her own Facebook post is copywritten. She emails what appears to be every one that she and Sonya know about, "What are your policies on plagiarism? Did you know that one of your authors might have plagiarized?"

She goes on this wide campaign of telling people that Sonya has effectively plagiarized this story. I think importantly, it's not actually Dawn who sues, it's actually Sonya who gets a lawyer and sues Dawn first. She sues Dawn for tortious interference, which is when somebody else is basically interfering with a contract that you have saying, "Don't hire Brooke Gladstone because she's a triple murderer or something." You can't do that. That's what Sonya sues for.

Then Dawn countersues for the copyright stuff and then it just gets real boring. This has been in the courts since 2018 and they're suing each other over the discovery stuff. Sonya is suing her own lawyer or Dawn's lawyer or something like that. There's all these weird meta lawsuits now and it must be tens of thousands of dollars at this point. It's just become this extremely ugly legal battle and this is how we got all of these text messages coming out, all of these old emails. They're litigating, there's literally hearings about how good of friends are they like please demonstrate evidence of how many times you met Sonya before this. It's just become this deranged exercise in just legal weaponry against each other.

Brooke Gladstone: In your review of the story, everything is in chronological order. This was in the cases we've noted in the original article. When you've told stories in the past, complicated historical stories, you really try and stick to the chronology. You don't reserve some facts for later to create a bigger impact or something like that although that's very common, especially in podcasts. Why the chronological approach?

Michael Hobbes: This started out as I have a project due and I was procrastinating and I was looking through all these legal files. I was like, "Well, for me to understand what I think about this, I need to know the timeline." Because so much of our adjudication of morality comes down to like, who knew what and when. When did Sonya decide to do this? What did she tell Dawn? When did she contact her publisher to say, "Please, change the text?" Those things for me to judge whether those are immoral or unethical acts, I need to know when they happened and what she knew at the time and what else was going on.

Once you put everything back in order, to me anyway, it seems like a clear case of somebody lifting text from their friend's Facebook post and then writing an entire story mocking them, while lying to their face about it. If you read The New York Times story, you would not get that impression at all because The New York Times story is all told from Dawn's perspective. It's the story of Dawn and when Dawn learns information, that's when the reader learns information. Dawn did not know anything about these group texts until very late until this legal case had already been going on.

Your 7,000 words into a 10,000 word story, by the time you find out that everything she was saying about Sonya was true. It's easy to see her as paranoid and annoying for a lot of the early parts of the story because you don't know that she's going to bat to get this story taken out of these festivals because what she says happened happened. It's weird to say that for a twist.

Brooke Gladstone: This story, as you mentioned, has become a bit of a raw shock test and people pick different sides passionately. I think of the dress of 2015, some thought it was gold, some thought it was blue. To answer the fundamental question, who is the bad art friend? You say why not both?

Michael Hobbes: [laughs] Yes, both sides. You love both sides journalism on the show so I thought I'd come here and practice that. Can I ask, Brooke, what did you think of the story when you first read it? What was your take on it? What's your baggage that you bring to this? [laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: I thought Dawn was really well intended. I have the baggage of a friend who really needed a kidney and couldn't get one, and fortunately, he didn't die, but he did say, "You can contribute to this bank," and I didn't because I was terrified of donating a kidney. I understand what a big deal this is and how hard it is to recover from because I looked into it. I was impressed with what she did, but I also thought that she was centering herself and I've had lots of people in my life who do that. I find it really frustrating on many levels. Then I found her obnoxious.

Sonya, I could not figure out. I think that one thing it's interesting that you haven't addressed is the fact that people do steal from other people's lives all the time. I have a friend Donald Margulies who wrote a play called Collected Stories, which is just about stealing other people's work. It is something that writers do. You have to expect them to do it. This evidently was a good story. A lot of people thought this was quality writing. Does that matter at all?

Michael Hobbes: My advice in the article that I wrote about it, was Sonya should have made it a bone marrow donor or somebody who adopted a kid from Ethiopia and was really insufferable about it. It shouldn't have been a letter, it should have been a phone call. All she had to do was disguise this character based on Dawn. Just the bare minimum of disguise and Dawn never would have found out and it never would have hurt Dawn's feelings. Both of these people can live the rest of their lives, Sonya can just have that secret in her mind. I think this happens all the time. We've all written stories based on the terrible boss that we had, or whatever person we want to subtweet through fiction. I think that's totally fine.

In general, if it's a case like this where you've pretended to be somebody's friend this entire time and you've explicitly denied to them that this has anything to do with them, and you've been mocking them behind their back. I do think you probably should disguise it enough so that it doesn't hurt their feelings. I think that there is some moral duty there, especially also considering they had some professional relationship. There's some duty of morality to disguise this so that it's a better subtweet so that she doesn't know it's about her. I don't actually think that would've been that hard and still had a good story.

Brooke Gladstone: That's your advice to Sonya, excellent advice. What would have been your advice to Dawn?

Michael Hobbes: I think your friend did something really mean to you. I think flame her in a Medium post, write really mean emails about her to your friends. I think what she did is a really horrible personal transgression. I would cry for days if this happened to me. It would be so hurtful to find out that a 10-year friendship was actually somebody laughing at you behind your back for years. That's awful to think about.

Dawn's the one that elevated into this copyright claim, plagiarism, she's committed a professional ethics violation thing. On some level, it's defensible because these people are colleagues and Sonya effectively destroyed Dawn's career to this writing group that she knows. She effectively humiliated her in front of all of their friends. My scorn, in this case, is more on Sonya's side than Dawn's side, but I also think that this isn't really a plagiarism case. This is more a just terrible friend behavior case. Dawn is using this more technical complaint to make a interpersonal conflict into a professional conflict.

Brooke Gladstone: There's a lot of news to sort through every week, Michael, countless feature stories. This might be a question for the universe, but I'm directing it at you. Why did you decide to spend time on this?

Michael Hobbes: Oh my God. What's wrong with me? How much time do we have, first?

[laughter]

What are your rates? I think one of the things that's so interesting is Twitter has become the de facto water cooler for the American journalism industry. Reporters are on there. Editors are on there. If you want to pitch a piece like oftentimes you can do a Twitter thread and some editors going to get in touch with you and be like, "Can you write this up for us?" This is where the journalism hive mind changes its mind and develops what it thinks about something. As a result of so many journalists using it in that way, journalism anything involving this slice of society ends up getting outsized attention there. That's part of it.

I also think humans love debating etiquette questions. This is basically a subreddit, am I the asshole post in 10,000 words? This whole thing is a morality play, and people are trying to turn it into something about the legal system or identity politics or whatever and that's fine. It's really just a question of etiquette of like, who is the asshole in this situation? People love debating this stuff. It's great. It's why people debate sports. A lot of politics is basically this type of debate but disguised to something else. Humans love debating like the little narrow things of like who's the jerk.

The third thing I want to say is you mention the dress, and I also think for me, anyway, this was very dress-like. My reaction to this when I saw the story going around and then I saw other people saying, "This Dawn lady is a monster, I can't believe how terrible she is. She gave away her kidney just so that she could get praise and stuff." I wasn't even mad I was more just confused. I was like, "Wait, really? I see this as gold and you see this as blue, really?" This is what's so incredible to me. It's just people were instantly talking past each other because I just could not see a scenario where in order in this story. This woman who's annoying at worst is somehow this sociopathic criminal who only gave away a kidney so she could brag about it.

I'm like, "Well, she did give away a kidney and we need kidneys as a country." I don't know. I also, had this very strange like I think people really dug in their heels because other people don't understand why I would be defending Dawn in the same way that I don't understand why they would be criticizing Dawn? It's just like what is this guy talking about? It also had that feature that people were just instantly talking past each other.

Brooke Gladstone: Actually it really fits the era too, because we're at a time where we wonder whether our minds have changed about artists that we once really admired, whether it's Woody Allen or Bill Cosby or you name it.

Michael Hobbes: The social media aspect can't be underplayed too. 20 years ago we didn't have the technology to screenshot our cringy friends cringy post and share it with our other friends. We didn't have the technology to see like, "Hey, John has seen all my posts, but he hasn't commented." The amount of information that's available to us and the different ways that we can share our interpersonal relationships with each other. Just like we didn't have as many ways of doing that back then.

I think we're all still in this adjustment period where we're figuring out what life with social media is going to be like. I think this is just one of the bumps along that road. We're still figuring out what are the norms. Is it okay to have a group chat that mostly makes fun of somebody that you're pretending to be nice to, or a professional colleague? Is it okay like I have group chats where I make fun of journalists I don't like? I like to think that I'm transparent about the fact that I don't like them so then it's kind of better, but is that better? I don't know.

We're all figuring this out because all of this is new. There's also another reason that makes it so tempting to fight about is that there's this new technology that we don't have any of the social norms to go along with.

Brooke Gladstone: Michael, thank you so much.

Michael Hobbes: Thanks for having me. I will see you in my group chat.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Michael Hobbes is a journalist and the co-host of the podcast Maintenance Phase. Thanks for listening to the midweek podcast. Check out The Big Show. It usually posts on Friday around dinnertime, and while you're at it sign-up for our fabulous newsletter, bye.

[00:26:43] [END OF AUDIO]

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