Writing Real-Life Villains
A conversation with journalist Joe Sexton: "Trust me, if you dig into the ugliest, seemingly most irredeemable set of events, you will find good."
Thank you subscribers to my Substack experiment. If you are new here, I’m a journalist who focuses on longform narratives. I’m also a professor in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, a small and special major, in which students spend their time dissecting and debating narrative nonfiction, as well as working on their own reported projects.
I created this Substack recently to guide my classes, and to organize the many topics, stories, and lessons that I have explored with students or in my own work over the years. So many talented and generous writers have visited my classes to offer advice. I wish I had archived all these lessons in the past. This is an attempt to try to do so now.
I realize these conversations are also helpful to working journalists, nonfiction writers, and educators, so I invite you to follow along as we delve into different subjects, from finding story ideas, to trauma-informed reporting, to craft choices, freelancing, pitching, and writing about taboo topics.
This week, my class is discussing writing about real-life villains, and whether nonfiction writers should humanize them at all. If so, why? Students have also been reading Rachel Louise Snyder’s No Visible Bruises, which dives deep into the world of domestic violence, introducing us to the lives and pasts not just of victims and their families, but the abusers themselves.
We are also bringing Joe Sexton’s most recent reported narrative, “The Hardest Case for Mercy,” from The Marshall Project, into our discussions. The investigation follows the defense team for the Parkland school shooter as they fought to spare their client from the death penalty. Recently in The Sunday Long Read, I described Sexton’s piece as “haunting, brave, uncomfortable, and impossible to put down.”
Sexton is a journalist and nonfiction author who spent 25 years as a reporter and editor at The New York Times, and later worked as an editor at Propublica. He was kind enough to speak with me about his reporting. His advice, which I have outlined below, is invaluable.
In recent years, there have been effective movements on behalf of victims’ families calling on media not to publicize the names of mass shooters, to focus instead on the victims. Yet we’ve also seen some writers take their own approach to this issue, and justify why. I think of Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s GQ cover story, “The Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof.” Though her reporting began as an attempt to focus on survivors, she decided instead to write the piece as a powerful reported essay to expose Roof: “He is hatred,” she writes.
In No Visible Bruises, Snyder also does not shy away from writing about evil, reporting a harrowing story that begins with an abuser and murderer named Rocky. She characterizes him through other people’s descriptions, and as my students pointed out, we see him through the eyes of others who knew or loved him.
Sexton and Snyder’s reporting raise important questions for journalists: How and why would you ever write about people who have committed atrocious acts? What makes their story worth telling in the first place? How does the reporter navigate the ethical mine field of writing about someone who has done something so unforgivable?
Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 people, and wounded another 17 at his former high school in Parkland, Florida in 2018. One might argue, as a parent in Sexton’s story does, the state should just kill him: “If you are a mass murderer, you do not deserve any legal defense.”
Sexton’s story does not hinge on whether Cruz is sentenced to die—but the moral and systemic matters inherent in how his defense team navigated the legal process to spare his life.
In my interview with Sexton, we talked about why he felt this story needed to be told.
In 2023, Sexton found himself at a capital defense conference, listening to a presentation by a lead defense counsel in the Parkland case. The attorney described the experience of reconstructing Cruz's life. It was clear she had also been traumatized by the experience. Sexton realized that many like him did not know the full story of Cruz’s birth mother, his adoption, or that he had been poisoned in utero by alcohol.
Sexton decided to write the piece following the journeys and perspectives of people through which readers may be better able to understand or empathize with, such as the defense attorneys, who see their roles as important in preventing future school shootings, and who want to spare their client from the death penalty. His reporting interrogates systems of adoption, schools, policing, fetal alcohol syndrome research, and the death penalty.
After the defense attorney’s talk, Sexton walked up to her and said: “Somebody should tell your story.”
Sexton told me: “I just decided that I would be the person to do that.”
Here is our (condensed) interview.
Why did you decide to pursue this story?
In the end, I decided to do it in a sort of act of defiance. It seems to have become a journalistic convention, as of late, to not write about mass killers. It's an idea that comes from good intentions. We don't want to give some celebrity status to these people. But at a certain point you’ve got to say: “Well, wait, when did journalism start deciding what was too awful to report on?”
I'm nothing if not a contrarian. Part of me wanted to say: “Well this should be written, and if people get upset by it, or if I’m accused of somehow furthering future incidents by paying attention to this guy and humanizing him in some way, I'm old enough to be canceled.”
So, it was partially done to address this idea of are we really not going to write about these folks anymore? Like the Uvalde school shooter, I would challenge anyone to tell me one single fact about the killer. I know next to nothing about him. I think that's intentional, and I think that's a mistake.
When I started to meet the defense team, one of my first questions was: “Is there ever a case in which it's just too fucking awful for you to want to work on?” And I think the question can be asked of reporters too. And maybe there are. But when you start creating a hierarchy of what can be written about and what cannot, what's just too ugly, that feels like a perilous thing.
You start with his birth mother and take us through his life. In a sense, you do humanize this experience, and you humanize him, but in doing that, you're also taking on multiple systems that seem to have serious flaws in this story.
Yes, not the least of which is the whole crazy world of black-market adoptions. Cruz’s birth mother finds an ad for an adoption agency in the Penny Pincher magazine. She is paid $20,000 for her unborn child. And the adopting couple knows full well, over the course of the pregnancy, about the life the birth mother is leading. Diving into that felt like it was fresh ground.
They get a kid, and they check the box: “We don't want a disabled kid. We don't want a Black kid.” The idea that ultimately, when she's raising him, she preferred that he'd be identified as autistic, rather than suffering from something that happened during his pregnancy. That was just a dark, weird, mostly unexplored world. There should be some obligation, if you're going to revisit a trauma as profound as this one, that one of your reasons for doing so is shedding new light.
I had a basic understanding, for example, of the phenomenon of fetal alcohol disorders, but not a great appreciation for it. I was struck by how little has been written about it, in the context of the criminal justice system. But when you look into case histories, it has become an increasingly common argument that defense teams have made.
True crime is endlessly popular. There is a difference between sensationalized crime reporting and stories like yours that, as you say, shed new light or reveal systematic failures, like within adoption, policing, education. Do you have any other advice for journalists thinking about revisiting a crime?
My main advice is to mistrust the idea that everyone knows what you think they know. Particularly for journalists and people whose daily life involves consuming what they write, what their friends write, what their competitors write, what their favorite reporters write. It’s a real bubble, and you can pretty much trust the outside world doesn't know any of it.
Almost every story I undertake these days begins with that basic animating curiosity. When I sat there in the capital defense conference and listened, I didn't know any of that, and I am a pretty voracious reader.
I remember being Nikole Hannah-Jones’ editor at ProPublica, and when we first met, we started to kick around story ideas. She was telling me about this phenomenon that was going on about the resegregation of schools. She said: “But everybody knows that. I'm not going write about that.”
I said: “Nikole, trust me, I don't, they don't. You should write this.” And she did. So just mistrust what you think people know.
You had multiple layers in your piece that were surprising, newsworthy, and underreported. Most readers didn’t know much about the deeper issues that you were able to work into this narrative, which intersect directly with the story and people you focus on. How did these insights drive the story forward?
It was not until fairly late in my reporting that I came to understand how Florida had changed its death penalty statute as a result of the Parkland case. I was like, “holy shit.” This is really consequential.
Another reason for me to do this story is to report on what's become known as capital case mitigation material. Going back as far as 1978, it has been basically enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, as an essential part of any capital case, that any jury or judge who is going to consider death be required to know the life circumstances of the accused.
That information might move a jury or a judge to grant either leniency or mercy. There have been a series of Supreme Court cases, from 1978 onward, ramifying the idea that this is essential. There are cases that establish that lawyers are obligated to do this work, and to present it to a jury. There are cases that show that mitigating evidence cannot only be about childhood trauma, but also can include lives the accused have lived since their crimes.
So, if they've gone behind bars, and gotten their education, and done meaningful and virtuous work, that must be considered by a judge. It's a rich and interesting line of Supreme Court cases, and there are some who today believe that it's at risk. We've obviously got a Supreme Court that is happy to revisit a long-established precedent and overturn it. There have been conservative judges on the Supreme Court over the decades who have been incredibly hostile to the idea that mitigating evidence should be presented in capital cases.
There are some in the defense community who believe that the Supreme Court might be willing to toss out the idea that people's life stories are essential to any death penalty case.
We talk in my classes about how, in order for these longform stories to work, you need the “characters” or subjects going through it all, and you need the social dimension, so it’s not just a primetime TV episode—the big issues. You focus on people who want something and struggle along the way, the defense team. Their struggle seems to exemplify aspects of what I think of as the human condition dimension. Why do we care about these people?
I have always found that even when you dig into the most wrenching kinds of stories, you almost invariably find both people of grace and moments of forgiveness, or at least moments of shared recognition.
People say: “Why do you always write these sad fucking stories?”
My honest answer is that tucked into all that sadness is something redemptive, something human.
Jim Dwyer was a close friend at the Times, and a legendary columnist. But he had a great line that has resonance for journalists who might be asking themselves: “Should I be doing this?” His line is that there are three great inextinguishable human desires: The need for food, the need for sex, and the need for stories. Human beings, it’s just wired into us that we want to hear stories of surprise, and stories of outrage, and stories of miracles. That's a human thing that will never go away or subside.
When it comes to having an appetite for the difficult or the traumatic, trust me, if you dig into the ugliest, seemingly most irredeemable set of events, you will find good. You will. And it will take a variety of forms, and they might not be immediately obvious, or their quality of goodness may be nuanced. But you will find it, and it will make it worthwhile. Not just for yourself, but for the readers that you're serving.
After I wrote my book, The Lost Sons of Omaha, one of my friends, whose judgment I value, told me: “You're a pathological empath.” I think that's a good thing to be.
I was probably 60 years old before I even understood what empathy really was. It’s not some sad sack version of sympathy. It's an act of humanity and daring that is essential, particularly in a world in which the divides are so profound, the mistrust so extraordinary, and the urge to demonize the other, so second nature. “Radical empathy.” Let’s put that on a T-shirt.