No, You Don't Get to Reveal Private Emails, Even if They Were from J.D. Vance

The New York Times today: JD Vance, an Unlikely Friendship and Why It Ended.

The paper of record announces it is now in possession of “a series of emails between two friends, part of a close-knit group of 16 students who remained together throughout their first law school semester in the fall of 2010. As now-Senator Vance seeks the vice presidency, (Sofia) Nelson has shared about 90 of their emails and text messages, primarily from 2014 through 2017, with The New York Times.”

Sofia Nelson is transgender, and in 2022, had a falling-out with long-time friend J.D. Vance over the Senator’s support for state bans on gender-affirming medical procedures. With Vance now Trump’s choice as veep, Nelson thinks their decade-long friendship (and the reasons for its end) are newsworthy.

Nelson is wrong, and the Times is, um, wronger.

I have nothing to say about trans issues. I have a lot to say about the ethics of revealing private correspondence, as that is a key concern of anyone in the memoir business. We all understand that there are times when private emails or texts or handwritten notes should be made public, or at least, shared with the authorities; for example, when one receives a subpoena from a court, or when the exchanges contain exculpatory evidence in a criminal case.

When one’s correspondent is dead, and the message cast them in a favorable light, it is good to share them. So, if your favorite professor wrote you an encouraging note years ago that you’ve always kept, when they go to the Great Lecture Hall in the Sky, you might go to their memorial service and share that note with the grieving family, offering a reminder of what a kind and generous mentor the deceased was. That also strikes me as an acceptable, even generous, reason to break the seal of friendship.

Sofia Nelson has not released these emails and texts to vouch for the character of J.D. Vance. Sofia’s motives are unclear, but we can safely say that they are uncharitable. The point Nelson makes to the Times is that Vance has changed, and that evolution led to the end of a friendship. (One notes that it is Nelson, not Vance, who cut off contact.) Perhaps the goal is to suggest that Vance’s evolution to the right is just a cynical grift. Perhaps the goal is to get Sofia Nelson’s name in print.

Please understand that what I am about to say is neither a boast or a threat: In my old life, I became close with a great many people who are now semi-public figures. Most of them are members of the feminist left. Some are quite well-known, others less so. A few of these relationships were flirtatious, one or two led to affairs. Most were simply good friendships. I read a lot of rough drafts of essays that ended up in places like, well, the New York Times. I was an advance reader for screenplays and books. And we exchanged a lot of personal secrets as well as encouragement. We were all trying to make a living in the Great Online Feminist World of the mid-to-late-aughts, and we were allies, rivals, frenemies, and once or twice, lovers.

I have done some really stupid and unkind things in my day. I have hurt people I loved. I have told lies. My sins are real. But they are also sins rooted in a compulsive need for attention and affirmation. I have caused tremendous heartache because I was desperate to be told I was handsome, charming, a good lover and a decent writer. But I will say, with some small pride, that I have never been guilty of the sin of malice. I have never tried to derail someone’s career. I have never tried to expose someone’s private failings. I have never attempted to cause humiliation and pain under the guise of “setting the record straight.” And I have never shared any of the many, many intimacies once shared with me. The sexts, the drunken texts, the first drafts of screenplays? I have deleted the ones I can remember, while others no doubt lurk somewhere in the Cloud or in my hundreds of Gmail folders, and I can assure you - with all the intensity that comes with a run-on sentence and mixed metaphors: come hell or high water, none of these private exchanges will see the light of day.

Clearly, I am worked up on this subject! I could go on about why it is that Dante puts the betrayers of their friends in the lowest circle of hell. I could tell you that a defining feature of every bloody revolution from Savonarola’s Florence to Robespierre’s Paris to Mao’s China is that publicly informing on one’s former friends is, to put it mildly, highly incentivized. And you might say — perhaps you are already saying! — that this is hyperbolic on my part. No one is trying to send J.D. Vance to the stake or the guillotine or the gulag. Surely I can understand that for a trans person like Sofia Nelson, J.D. Vance’s political evolution might also feel like something of a betrayal?

Perhaps. It’s still not an excuse.

In The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s great play about mass hysteria in 1690s Salem, the Reverend Hale pushes hard for more witch-hunting:

Though our hearts break, we cannot flinch, these are new times, sir. There is a misty plot afoot so subtle we should be criminal to cling to old respects and ancient friendships. I have seen too many frightful proofs in court — the Devil is alive in Salem, and we dare not quail to follow wherever the accusing finger points!

The New York Times certainly doesn’t intend to honor old respects and ancient friendships, and it will happily follow wherever the accusing finger points, as long as it points to the fellas on the political right. But the Times is wrong, and they were wrong to publish Nelson’s email exchanges with Vance, and we are wrong to believe Nelson justified in sharing them in the first place.

Even the best-intentioned among us will have fallings-out over politics, over romance, over professional rivalries. The end of a close friendship can be nearly as devastating as the end of a marriage. (I have been divorced five times and I have lost many friends in my day, so I have some experience with which to speak.) To share the private correspondence of your ex-lovers and ex-colleagues is every bit as damnable as sharing a nude photo, and the fame or office or ideology of your ex does not change that calculation in the slightest.

What do we owe our former friends and bedmates? What did Sofia Nelson owe J.D. Vance? Dante knew, Arthur Miller knew, and William Shakespeare knew. The final lines of Sonnet 36:

I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,
Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name:
But do not so, I love thee in such sort,
As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.

Mine is thy good report: I will always speak well of you, even if I do not evermore acknowledge thee. There are no circumstances so exigent, no election so existential, no falling-out so bitter, that we can slough off that obligation to provide a “good report” — or, if we cannot manage that, to provide a decent silence.

Sofia Nelson’s bitterness is understandable. The Times’ decision to capitalize on that bitterness is shameful.