What Meg Tilly's Book Has to Do With Journalistic Integrity

When I was 12, I came home from school one day to discover that my parents had brought home a girl from church. “She’ll be living with us for the next week, and so make sure you show her all of your dolls and things,” my mother whispered as I put down my stack of school books.

My parents were Salvation Army officers – which is another way of saying that they were pastors. I was accustomed to life revolving around the ins and outs of their mission. We would get phone calls in the middle of a Thanksgiving dinner, for example, and my father would rush out to deliver a food basket to someone who had a last-minute need. And my brother and I spent hours on end at the local Salvation Army, especially during December, when my mother ran a “toy shop” for people who couldn’t afford to buy gifts for their children.

But this was the very first time that they’d actually brought home a child to stay with us.

I remember taking the girl’s hand and leading her upstairs to my pink and white room. “Would you like to play Barbies?” I asked. She shrugged, eyeing my tall Barbie townhouse. “I got this for Christmas,” I explained. “See? It even has an elevator.” I pulled on a string to make the plastic box go up and down. She sat down and silently held my dolls, stroking their hair and not uttering a word.

The week was difficult. The girl never wanted to play in my room. She preferred to stay in the basement, where my parents had created a guest room. I didn’t feel like she liked me very much, despite my attempts to engage her. When she left, I was relieved to have life back as it was.

Years later, as I studied in college for my chosen profession of journalism, I had a class in which my professor asked the ethical question: “Is it right for journalists to cover all crime stories? Should journalists stay away from stories about child abuse and child sexual molestation?”

It got me thinking, and suddenly, the girl’s visit to our house of long ago made sense. I remember asking my mother, and she confirmed my suspicions – the child had been abused by her father, and my parents had agreed to take her in as soon as an emergency until foster care could be lined up. I never saw the girl again, and her name and face still haunt me to this day. What happened to her?

As a reporter, the memory of this child ate at me whenever I was asked to do a police write-up on a child abuse case. And because I come from a conservative religious background, many of my friends were highly critical of my chosen profession and the types of stories I was assigned to write.

“Don’t you think that’s exploitation?” they would ask whenever I would bring up a story about a victim of child abuse.

It bothered me. Was it? Was I taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune so that I could advance my career? I had to dig deep and look at my motives, and I realized: The stories had to be told. How else would these victims have a voice? How else would justice prevail? How else would the public be made aware of criminal activity against society’s innocent members? How else could it be stopped? It had to be printed. It had to be told. And I felt a deep connection to the girl of long ago, realizing that her story was a story being repeated over and over again – and people needed to be made aware.

Fast forward to this month, when, out of curiosity, I picked up a book written by the actress Meg Tilly.

The title: “Gemma.”

The premise: A 12-year-old girl is abducted by a sexual predator and has to survive a harrowing journey from his car trunk, to hotel rooms, to finally being rescued, to confronting him in a courtroom.

I have to be honest with you.

The initial chapters made me so physically ill that I had to put the book away. I didn’t think I would pick it up again. I asked myself: “What’s the point of reading this? What’s the point of filling my mind with this?”

But then I realized that I was being quite hypocritical. If I really believed what I told myself those years ago – that these stories had to be told – then I could at least see if this book/author had the same purpose.

It did, and she does.

I am now mom to a 10-year-old boy. The much publicized stories of the Jerry Sandusky case at Penn State University have hit me hard as a single mom, because Sandusky’s victims were children of single moms. I have closely followed that case because I want to be made aware of how someone like Sandusky managed to get away with his atrocities undetected for as long as he did. What could those moms have done differently to protect their boys?

As I read through “Gemma,” I was struck by Tilly’s gift to put me squarely in the mind of a monster like Sandusky. And I was equally struck by her gift to illustrate the mind-set of a child who is thus victimized. Seeing the world through Gemma’s eyes, one realizes the deficiencies of our educational system, our court system, our system as a society to keep watch over our young and innocent children, and our steadfast denial as parents of lurking dangers that could snatch our children from our chests.

The result is a heart-pounding, non-stop ride through Gemma’s soul – an opaque window that allows us to glimpse the sufferings of tiny human beings who don’t have a chance … unless we are willing to help.

If you shy from reading a book like “Gemma,” it’s understandable. None of us really wants to look at the underbelly of the worst of humanity. But I’d strongly encourage you to give it a chance, especially if you are a teacher, pastor, social worker, court official, lawyer, police officer – and especially, a journalist. Tilly gives us insights into a plight of a reality that most of us can only guess.

I still think about the girl in my house in 1977. I still see her sitting on my bedroom floor and holding the Barbies as if they were alien creatures. I still see the look on her face as she made it clear to me that I was in a completely different league – I was still a child. She was not. Adulthood had been foisted on her, and she had missed out on the beauty and innocence of a simple activity like playing with Barbie dolls.

I see “Gemma” when I think of her now.

And I am extremely grateful to Meg Tilly for having the courage and insight to write a book on a subject that society continues to largely ignore. 

"Gemma" is easily available on Amazon. Here's a photo of the book cover and link to where you can get it:

http://tinyurl.com/kfcvfrw

Interview Pitfalls: Lessons Learned from Meg Tilly and The Globe & Mail

It's one of those things you hear from your mother and push aside, because she's your mother:

"You don't realize how powerful you are."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah,"  I quip, rolling my eyes and waving my hand at her as if she's an insect that has just flown too near my coffee cup. I've never been comfortable with that statement, but my mother repeats it a lot. A LOT.

Yet it wasn't until very recently that I had to seriously scrutinize these words. A few Twitter friends were batting around discussion about a blog entry by the actress Meg Tilly, which you can read here:


Meg Tilly: "Still Reeling"


Apparently, Tilly is one of those actresses who is excessively media-shy, and with good reason, as she's been burned in the past. But recently, she let down her guard with The Globe and Mail of Canada. She soulfully opened up to an interviewer and was none too happy with the resulting article, which you can read here:

"Meg Tilly as she is, not as you’d imagine"

Both deserve to be read in order for you as a journalist to get both points of view (after all, that's what we're about, isn't it? Getting both sides of the story?).

I walked away from this with a few thoughts: In my opinion, this was a classic case of miscommunication. And both sides are in the right, and both sides are in the wrong. The Globe & Mail's story is well-written and well-reported. But I did some digging and discovered another story in The Daily Mail of the U.K., written in 2011, and it had the same tenor and tone and style:

"The family Colin Firth left behind: How he will always be in debt to the reclusive beauty who bore his first son"

My guess is this was an advancement of that story, even though the two papers are not related. You know how this works if you've worked in daily newspapers: An editor decides they want to match what another paper has done, and the reporter is sent out with a pre-established list of questions or angle to quench that editor's thirst. I'm not sure if this is what exactly happened in this instance, but I found the similarities between the two stories interesting.

Now we get to the interview itself. Tilly describes the interviewer this way:

"I think the thing that hurts the most, is that I really liked this woman. ...We were both middle-aged women in our 50’s with grown kids, laughing over wrinkly necks, changing bodies, desires. She was wearing this unique jacket that was like this funky piece of art.  She was a writer, I was a writer. ...And it was fun. Sipping on peppermint tea with a little bit of honey. Tucked in a warm booth at a retro diner in a hipster hotel."

Tilly does a nice job setting up the scene, and I see exactly what she's describing. I've been that interviewer in the past. Interviewing people for a story is very psychological. To get them to discuss the most important aspects of their lives, you do need to find common ground and the like-ability factor. And as someone who tests consistently as an ENFJ on a Myers Briggs personality test, this is one area in which I am particularly adept.

But this is where I part ways with the interviewer.

See, whether you want to admit it, we as journalists do have power -- the power to build someone up or demoralize them, just because our words are circulated in print for thousands of people to read. And with that power comes great responsibility.

My heart sank when I read these words from Tilly:

"She felt like a friend. Her sharing her life, me sharing mine.  And when I left, I thought, maybe we’ll be friends, wouldn’t that be nice? ...I started to read, and shock set in.  This was an intelligent woman with warm eyes, this woman had a comfortable laugh, a comfortable body.  We were both middle aged women who had gone through a lot.  How could she have written this? An article that barely mentioned the book, which was the whole reason we met. Nothing about the writing process, the reasons why. The title. That’s it.  There was a brief reference,  a sentence, I think, about Bomb Girls."

You might say to me, "Well, Heidi, Meg Tilly knew exactly what she was doing when she sat down with a journalist. She's a grownup. She has responsibility and shouldn't be whining. If she didn't want that stuff in print, why didn't she say it was off the record?"

Yes, she could have and probably should have. But this is how I know that the interviewer went astray and abused the power that had been entrusted to her.

"An article that barely mentioned the book, which was the whole reason we met."

And no more needs to be said. It's obvious that the interviewer landed the sit-down discussion with this reclusive individual because she had written a book. She was there to discuss the book. She thought the interviewer was going to write about the book. She was led to believe the entire purpose ... was about the book.

If you have a personality that immediately sets people at ease and tells them that they can lower their guard, you have a responsibility as a journalist and as a human being to be as up front with them as possible. If the interviewer's editor said, "Listen, you get this interview, and she wants to talk about the book, but see what else she's willing to discuss ...." (And we KNOW that discussion had to have taken place, because I've heard those words more times than I can count) ... it was the reporter's responsibility to tell Tilly.

I always lay my cards out on the table for each interviewee, if it's a puff piece. We're not talking about investigative journalism. Yes, when I've interviewed slippery politicians, I have just let them talk and hang themselves with their words. But this is an instance where you have a fragile and trusting woman who obviously has a gift for writing as well as for screen acting. She was there to discuss her book. To do a complete 180 on her without giving her any warning may not land you in a court of law for a lawsuit ... but it ignores the simple human call to compassion and kindness.

What did the reader gain from this article? Maybe for the interviewer, it was all about satisfying curiosity and gossiping tongues. But was the reader's life edified? Would it have been so if the interviewer had gone with the premise for the article -- a story about an actress-turned-author?

There are losers on all sides of this story: Meg Tilly lost trust in what could have been a very positive experience, both for her and for the interviewer. The interviewer lost respect and a sense of her own humanity in running roughshod over that trust. The readers lost an amazing opportunity to read an enriching piece about an artist and how she spun her creativity into a new web of wonderful writing.

And as journalists, we also are losers if we can't learn a few lessons from Meg Tilly and The Globe & Mail about human compassion, decency, trust and integrity.