The Volokh Conspiracy
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Suicides and Public Humiliation: Recalling Some Past Incidents
The tragic apparent suicide of Cambridge Prof. Jason Arday, following what appeared to be at least credible public allegations that he had engaged in false biographical claims, plagiarism, and (potentially) data falsification, has led people to argue that some in the media misbehaved in the matter. To quote Michelle Goldberg in the N.Y. Times yesterday ("After a Scholar's Awful Death, Mistaken Calls for Censorship"),
In the wake of Arday's death, many on the left are blaming the media. "The media lynched Jason Arday," declared Ibram X. Kendi. The head of a Cambridge college called for an official inquiry into the "media onslaught."
Important British progressives, including Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, and several Labour M.P.s, signed an open letter demanding some sort of official oversight of journalistic decision making. "Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed," it said. The writer Will Self called, in an open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham, for the police to begin "impounding computers," presumably belonging to people involved in covering the scandal.
I think it's often helpful in such situations to broaden the frame a bit, beyond the particular cause célèbre before us. It's human nature to be influenced in such situations by one's feelings towards the particular person involved, whether sympathy or antipathy. Looking at a wider range of examples can help us get beyond this bias.
I therefore thought I'd pass along some other examples of people committing suicide following episodes in which they were accused of misconduct, often publicly, and faced actual or possible loss of jobs or other business opportunities:
- In 2020, Dartmouth professor and department chair David Bucci was accused of "looking the other way" as to sexual harassment in the department, and "intimidate[ed] those who had spoken out." "Some colleagues shunned him. A woman at his food co-op called him a 'disgusting human being,' said his wife, Katie Bucci." Less than a year later, he committed suicide.
- In 2008, two University of Iowa professors (Mark O. Weiger and Arthur H. Miller) accused of sexually harassing their students, killed themselves.
- In 2011, University of Idaho professor Ernesto A. Bustamante was accused of threatening his ex-girlfriend (a graduate student), and "was either fired or forced to resign as a result." After that, he murdered the ex-girlfriend and killed himself.
- In 2019, German historian Marie Sophie Hingst committed suicide after having been found to have falsified much of her life story, including claims that many of her relatives had been murdered in the Holocaust. According to Wikipedia, "She was castigated in the German media, leading to the destruction of her reputation."
- In 2014, Japanese researcher Yoshiki Sasai committed suicide after his papers were retracted by the journal Nature based on "duplicated and mixed-up images, mislabeling, faulty descriptions, and 'inexplicable discrepancies ….'"
- In 2017, Japanese researcher Yoshihiro Sato apparently committed suicide after another researcher had uncovered what was described as "fabricat[ing] data."
- In 2021, Portsmouth (England) student Alistair Hall committed suicide after having been found to have plagiarized his final dissertation.
- In 2020, University of North Carolina Wilmington professor Mike Adams committed suicide after a wave of condemnation for various tweets that were said to be racist, sexist, and the like. His "rhetoric had been labeled 'vile' and 'hateful' by his own university," and the controversy had gotten a great deal of public attention and news coverage. In the wake of the controversy, he had apparently agreed to retire.
- In 2017, porn actress August Ames killed herself "after sparking an online backlash over allegedly homophobic comments." "Ames' death occurred after she was criticized on Twitter for refusing to work with a male performers who had previously appeared in gay adult films."
Now naturally each of these incidents is different. Some followed considerable news coverage of the accusations. Some followed a great deal of social media attention. Some were apparently more connected to humiliation in front of colleagues, even if not the public at large. Some involved worse behavior than others (the Bustamante incident being the worst, of course).
In some, the person involved apparently had other psychological difficulties. In some, the true causes of the suicide might be complex, with the criticism or firing being just one element (though it was apparently a triggering event in each incident, from the press accounts I've seen).
And of course the overwhelming majority of all accusations, even of much more serious offenses (such as serious crimes), don't lead to suicide. But these incidents also remind us that a wide range of accusations—whether they involve alleged plagiarism, fabrication, sexual harassment, sexism, racism, and so on—that can cause humiliation, firing, or the potential end of a career can also lead some people to commit suicide.
Of course, that still leaves the question of what to do about all this. Should there be social norms against criticism—or coverage of criticism—that might lead someone to suicide? Should there be legal constraints? I'm skeptical about both. (Lies that lead to suicide should of course be condemned, and could already lead to liability: They would be lies, which is bad enough, and of course their effects would show that they would be especially harmful lies. But that, I think, is not the issue as to Jason Arday: The accusations against him were either true or at least sincere and even plausible conjecture.)
Should there be institutional mechanisms that diminish the scope of such scandals, by protecting the ability to criticize others (especially prominent people, such as academics)? For instance, if a university is widely known to honestly and seriously deal with accusations against its faculty, accusers might turn to the university rather than going public. In my experience, in many situations the accusers don't want to take the time, energy, and risk to fully investigate the allegations themselves, if they think some more established institution can handle the matter.
Then, if the university concludes the accused was culpable, the accused could be offered a relatively quiet and graceful exit: The firing or discipline of the accused would presumably be still be announced (recall the "honestly and seriously deal with accusations" assumption), but the announcement would likely yield just one round of stories, with little likely follow-up. (Query whether that's on balance good, since it may in some measure protect individual faculty but at the expense of less attention to what might be serious systemic problems in the university.)
But this appears not to have happened here. The press accounts that I've seen suggest that Cambridge and other universities associated with Arday didn't seriously investigate the allegations, and even Times Higher Education decided not to run its story about the matter in 2025 because of litigation threats.
This is, of course, human nature: It's natural (not to say good, but natural) for institutions to protect themselves and their leadership. Accusations against faculty reflect badly on the institutional leadership as well, especially when the leadership has celebrated the faculty members' work and identity, so there's ample incentive to ignore or minimize such accusations.
But the consequence of this natural reaction was that the accusers felt they had to go public (that too is human nature), and the story started coming out a little at a time. That meant newspaper article after article dealing with each new development in the story: each accusation of plagiarism, of fabrication, of litigation threats. I expect that led to much more massive media coverage.
In any event, though, when we're thinking about such matters, we should appreciate that any such norms or legal rules would apply to a wide range of public criticism, from the left, right, or elsewhere, of a wide range of people.
