American Girls (27 page)

On August 5, 2013, Californians started getting AMBER alerts on their phones regarding a missing sixteen-year-old girl, Hannah Anderson, and her eight-year-old brother, Ethan. A multi-agency manhunt was under way, stretching from British Columbia to Baja California, Mexico, for the suspect in their kidnapping—forty-year-old James Lee DiMaggio, a family friend the kids called “Uncle Jim.”

On August 10, an FBI agent shot DiMaggio dead in the wilderness near Cascade, Idaho, where DiMaggio had taken Hannah. Ethan and the children's mother, Christina Anderson, had already died, on August 4, in DiMaggio's home in Boulevard, California, their bodies burned in an arson fire. Their deaths, and the fire, were blamed on DiMaggio. Christina had died from blunt-force trauma, apparently inflicted with a crowbar. Ethan's body was so badly burned that medical examiners couldn't determine the cause of death.

This horrifying case was one of the first times social media became such a prominent factor in a crime story involving a teenage girl. For in the days after she was returned safely home, Hannah—a blond white girl from Lakeside, California—went rogue, going on social media and answering hundreds of questions about her experience posed by users on Ask.fm.

“Do you know why he did it?,” meaning DiMaggio, one Ask.fm user asked. “Because he's a physco [
sic
],” Hannah replied. “Are you glad he's dead?” asked someone else. “Absolutely,” Hannah said.

“Your hot,” another user wrote.

Hannah said, “Thanks.”

In the same thread, Hannah posted a picture of her freshly painted nails. “When did you get your nails done?” someone asked. “Yesterday,” she said.

The apparent nonchalance with which this sixteen-year-old girl was willing to discuss the details of her traumatic ordeal on an anonymous site was perplexing to many in the news media and on social media as well. It quickly gave rise to speculation as to whether Hannah's detachment could perhaps be an indication of some complicity in her own kidnapping and the crimes against her mother and brother. People started trolling, asking whether Hannah might have actually been having a sexual relationship with DiMaggio. Inadvertently fueling such gossip, Hannah said, on
Today,
“He had a crush on me,” confirming what she had already told the world on social media.

San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore had said in an interview with the
Los Angeles Times
that “everybody, the FBI, our investigators, everybody are convinced that there is no way [Hannah] was anything but the worst kind of victim in this.” Still, Facebook pages and Twitter and Reddit threads started to appear in which commenters evaluated the particulars of the case, pointing out inconsistencies in Hannah's story—her claim, for example, that DiMaggio had drugged her with what she thought was Ambien before abducting her, knocking her out, while some saw in a blurry video released from a security checkpoint when they were driving to Idaho Hannah possibly awake in the passenger seat beside him. However, the main thing which seemed to be making followers of the story uneasy was Hannah's avid social media use so soon after the tragedy. Why would a teenage girl want to chat about such personal and dreadful events online? And why was she posting selfies on Instagram?

In the days and weeks after she came home, Hannah was posting selfies—there she was at cheerleading practice, at dance rehearsals, and driving in her car, smiling merrily into her cell phone camera. She seemed ebullient, always smiling and smizing with heavily made-up eyes. “You are like the definition of perfect,” commented fans. “You are honestly flawless.” “Your eyebrows are perfect! Do you tweeze or wax them?” “You are STUNNING!” “I love love love your style!”

“Aw. Thanks,” replied Hannah, with a smiley face.

Social media experts were quick to point out that this was just what kids do these days—they talk about everything online; they seek solace for their pain; and they post a lot of selfies. Eric Rice, a professor of social work at the University of Southern California, told Mashable: “In some ways this is a normal response in the contemporary era for teens. This is just a way of storytelling, through social media, which is fairly normal and a response to trauma.”

“It just helps me grieve,” Hannah explained on
Today
when asked why she was discussing the tragedy on social media. “Like, [to] post pictures to show how I'm feeling. I'm a teenager. I'm gonna go on it.”

In fact, what she was doing wasn't all that different from the online behavior of many adults. The in memoriam post about a deceased parent, friend, or beloved pet has become a social media convention. And such posts always get a lot of likes, however heartfelt they may actually be. The poster is showered with condolences and achieves a kind of social media boost.

But somehow it also brings to mind that scene in 1995's
To Die For
when Nicole Kidman's character, Suzanne Stone, makes a display of grieving for the news media at her husband's funeral, busting out a tape player and blaring Eric Carmen's maudlin 1975 hit, “All By Myself,” as she poses, looking stoic and tragic. In the film, it's a satirical moment, meant to reveal how the character has no shame in using the murder of her husband (which she in fact orchestrated) to try, however clumsily, to craft a sympathetic public self, and to increase her fame. “Suzanne used to say that you're not really anybody in America unless you're on TV,” says another character in the film.

In the days and weeks after her rescue, Hannah gained thousands of followers on Instagram as she posted pictures of her deceased little brother and mother, alongside lengthy messages expressing her grief: “I already miss you guys so much,” she wrote. “But god needed two perfect angels with him up there to get me home and that's exactly what you guys did.”

She was getting hundreds of likes on all her photos as well as scores of supportive comments from new followers around the world: “God bless you!” “Stay strong!” “Millions of people love you, girl.” Her followers called her “a fighter,” “a role model,” and “an inspiration.” Girls, in particular, swarmed to support Hannah. “I wish I could be as strong as you,” one girl said. There was now a hashtag used for Hannah—#hannahstrong—which Hannah tagged on her own social media pictures.

When an Ask.fm user told her she was “worldwide trending on Twitter,” Hannah replied, “lol.”

She was famous now, and she was performing the role of the star, giving her fans what they wanted—which in the new stardom of social media meant more, more, more of her. But Hannah was also continuing to get hate. Commenters persisted in suggesting that she was somehow culpable in her family members' brutal deaths, alleging that her relationship with DiMaggio had been inappropriate. Others criticized her for how she had behaved at her mother and brother's memorial service, posing for pictures, including a selfie in which she and a friend were seen pointing their fingers like guns. Some even sounded off on the way Hannah carried around a Starbucks Frappuccino at the event. Hannah was being cyberbullied.

It wasn't her first experience with online bullying. In the months before her kidnapping, she'd been called a steady stream of abusive names on Ask.fm: “ugly,” “whore,” “cunt,” “bitch,” “a fucking ugly whore.”

“Everybody is so mean to you,” one commenter observed. “Tell me about it,” Hannah said.

But on Ask.fm, she also showed a resilience to such attacks. She seemed to take it all in stride, giving back as good as she got. “Keep talkin shit your pretty funny and pathetic,” she told one cyberbully.

On Ask.fm, Hannah presented an image of herself as a sort of in-the-know party girl. She posted about having rented a “party bus” for her sixteenth birthday—just like it sounds, it's a rented, chauffeur-driven bus on which high school kids party, typically with alcohol and drugs. By her own account, she had given lap dances to many of the passengers. “Damn on that last party bus you really showed you can dance little mama,” an Ask.fm user commented.

She'd been open about her sexual activity, as well, on Ask.fm. “Have you ever fucked a black guy?” someone asked. “Yupp,” she said. She'd posted sexy selfies which had received appreciative, sexualized comments from boys. She'd received graphic sexual advances, most of which she laughed off. She'd expressed sadness over how she had been “played” by guys. “Why does every guy play you?” someone asked. “Good question,” she replied.

El Capitan High School, where Hannah was then in eleventh grade, is housed in a sprawling redbrick building just off the road which runs through the center of town. Lakeside is a middle-class town of some 20,000 people about twenty-one miles east of San Diego. It's hot and flat, with a few shopping plazas and small suburban houses on streets dotted with trucks and parched palms. All around you can see the foothills of the Cuyamaca Mountains, which look so bare and rocky, you feel like you've landed on the moon.

When I went to Lakeside a couple of months after Hannah's rescue, some senior girls in the parking lot of El Capitan remarked on how Hannah had “put herself out there” on social media, referring to how she had talked about her sex life. “She didn't have the best reputation,” said one of the girls.

But these same girls also spoke of a “double standard” in their school which got a girl who was open about her sexuality called a “slut,” while “if a guy gets a lot of action, it's, Go you.”

“The boys here are pigs,” said one of the girls. “They're immature. They see a girl twerk at a party, they think, I'm gonna take advantage of her.”

“A few boys are okay,” the second girl said.

“Like two,” said the first.

Regarding Hannah, the first girl said, “Everyone's just looking at her now, like no one wants to say anything,” because of what she had been through. “The school told us not to say anything about it to her, but people think it's weird that she seems, like, really happy—”

“Like,
prancy,
” said the second girl.

“Like if my mom died I wouldn't be all happy like that,” the first girl said.

How were kids reacting to Hannah becoming Instafamous? I asked.

“She's working it,” said the second girl with a shrug. “But, you know? Anybody would.”

Hannah's life in Lakeside before she became a social media star seems like it was hard. “Why are you always bitchy and sad all the time?” an Ask.fm user asked around a month before her kidnapping. “Your not hot shit,” this user went on, “and your annoying when you just try to get attention all the time.”

“Get a life. And fuck off,” said Hannah.

Hannah's mother and father, Brett Anderson, had recently separated, and Brett had moved to Tennessee for work. Kids from her school said that Hannah had been upset about the breakup of her parents and missed her father. (After the death of her mother and brother, Brett moved back to the area to be with her.)

The apartment complex where she had lived with her mother and brother looked bleak and run-down. Some residents had blankets in their windows instead of curtains. The neighborhood was not especially safe.

According to Andrew Spanswick, a friend of Jim DiMaggio's (DiMaggio was an old friend of Hannah's dad), “Uncle Jim” had sometimes helped Christina Anderson financially. A friend of Hannah's had reportedly said on Ask.fm that DiMaggio had helped with “rides [and] school supplies and stuff.” “Jim told me about how he cared about those kids,” Spanswick said when I spoke to him on the phone. “Jim was a stabilizing force in their lives,” he maintained.

Spanswick, the CEO of a group of rehab centers, had been defending DiMaggio in the media—an unpopular position, given the seriousness of what DiMaggio had been accused of doing.

In 2011, DiMaggio set up a life insurance policy of $112,000 with Hannah and Ethan's grandmother as the beneficiary; Spanswick believes the money was intended for Hannah. “Hannah's father was gone and Hannah was fighting with her mother,” Spanswick said. Hannah had confirmed at least part of this, in her appearance on
Today,
when she said, “Me and my mom didn't really get along a year ago.” She talked about writing letters to DiMaggio about her troubles, and said he had written her back.

DiMaggio was “like my second dad, we were almost best friends,” Hannah said on
Today.
The two had gone on trips alone together; but on Ask.fm, when a user asked Hannah why she had wanted to travel alone with an older man, she replied, “My mom pushed me to go,” according to one report. She had posted pictures from some of the excursions on Instagram. One in particular was now feeding continued speculation about the nature of their relationship. On a picture of herself posing in short shorts, Hannah had commented, slightly misquoting a line from the Miley Cyrus song “We Can't Stop”: “Red cups and sweaty bodies everywhere, hands in the air cause we don't care. #L.A. #Letsgooo.” “The Lakeside Lolita had Uncle Jim twisted around her little finger,” said a commenter on Fox5SanDiego.com, in a typically sexist comment.

When it comes to women and public shaming, even famous women have something in common with high school girls. Over the years, whenever I've interviewed some famous woman who's had problems with the media, she has invariably expressed her awareness of a double standard in which her youthful indiscretions were harshly judged, while the “bad” behavior of her male counterparts was forgiven or even celebrated. It was only in their coupling with some famous men that two of these women managed to wipe their media slates clean. Angelina Jolie was doing the kind of humanitarian work she's devoted her life to years before she started dating Brad Pitt and was accused of being a “homewrecker”; it was only after she bore their kids that she gained a near saintly reputation in the media, condemnations of her wilder past finally shushed. Nicole Richie's image did a similar 180 almost as soon as she married and had children with rocker Joel Madden (who, despite having a lot of tattoos, has a rather clean-cut image).