I thought it was a honey trap. When a sexy woman with a large chest and pretty eyes sends you a picture of herself in a bathing suit, the American Stasi is near. You’re being set up.
It had been tried before. In 2018 when I was the target of a political hit by the left. They sent a gorgeous young woman to try and have sex with me, which would be used for blackmail—all to prevent a high school friend of mine from getting on the Supreme Court. That roadside encounter with a blonde Megan Fox lookalike is recounted in my book The Devil’s Triangle. The girl said she was stranded and needed a ride home, along with the young guy who was with her. As the FBI would tell me, I was in the kill zone: I take them from Maryland back to DC—crossing state lines with minors, a felony—then she yells rape and her buddy snaps a picture.
It failed because my Spidey Sense warned me to keep driving.
So now, years later, I was getting contacted by a woman. I’ll call her Jyn Erso because she’s a Star Wars nerd. She sent me an email saying she knows who I am and is a fan. She didn’t want anything. The pictures she sent are nice. She’s curvy and they’re tasteful. She also lives in another state. I’m safe. I think.
In her email Jyn Erso compared me to Luke Skywalker. I’d been minding my own business when the Empire, the American left, zoomed in and blew up my neighborhood. I survived. My book was the torpedo that would blow up the Death Star. Jyn also went into analysis of some minor Star Wars characters: Asajj Ventress, Max Rebo, Zeen Mrala. It was kind of charming. I had seen the first Star Wars movie in 1977 with my father and brother. It was a wonderful memory. Both my brother and father are now gone.
After the email, I wanted to hear Jyn Erso’s voice. I knew it might be foolish. In the political hit on me, people who supposedly had integrity had fled or worked to opposition research me. It was hard to trust anyone. Girls I’d dated going back to high school acted viciously, saying things about me that weren’t true and making it clear that politics was more important than mercy—or the truth. They were banshees, femme fatales, demons. Journalists, politicians, public intellectuals, all had shown cowardice when I became a public enemy. In 2020, the Catholic writer Joseph Bottum sent out a tweet. “The treatment of @markgjudge was awful, and the failure of those who published him to defend him was among the most despicable—so he ends up washing dishes.” Bottum was responding to the news that I had taken a job washing dishes.
When my PTSD symptoms flare up, I’m often told that the struggles I have aren’t legitimate, that I’m not really suffering at all, or at least have no right to. What’s helped me are the things that were a life preserver when I was a teenager—art, books, skateboarding, pop music. In 2019 Keane put out an album, Cause and Effect, that became a source of beauty and hope for me. One of my favorite songs, “The Way I Feel,” captured the sorrow I felt of feeling I couldn’t go on then told by people it was my own fault:
And it's the voices in your head now
Saying there's something wrong about the way I feel
A broken link, a missing part, a punctured wheel
It doesn't matter what you say now
It's like some vision in the stars that seems so real
The way I feel, the way I feel, the way I feel
The way I feel, the way I feel, the way I feel
Finally I talked to Jyn Erso on the phone. She’d emailed me saying she wanted me to photograph her. I’d done some photography prior to my crucifixion. She wanted to talk about what to wear—all tasteful and non-nude. The media tried to torch me for the photography and films I’ve done, and part of the PTSD struggle was the “shame storm” I felt, even if I’d done nothing wrong. Photographing a bosomy Star Wars chick on a beach somewhere is good medicine.
Jyn and I were talking about the details of the shoot when it happened. She started crying. It was after dark, around 11 p.m. My bedroom was nocturnal and there was no noise outside. Her voice was clear. Her emotion came in a sudden, heavy gush, and she struggled to speak. “What they did to you…” she trailed off. “Yet you stood up for your friends. You threw it back in their faces.” She stopped. She couldn’t go on. There were several seconds of silence. Then she said, “I sleep with your book on my night table.”
Suddenly, I realized how badly I had simply needed to hear someone cry for me. My friends from high school had stood by me, but we’d gone to an all-boys Jesuit high school and the guys were not big weepers. I closed my eyes and absorbed her tears. Then I said it.
“Technology will not save us.”
It was a line my brother had said to me in 1977, and I heard myself say it to Jyn Erso. Star Wars has amazing special effects and it’s easy to get enraptured in the idea that our future will be a painless one of hyperdrives and antiseptic planets. Yet my brother had been right. At the penultimate moment in A New Hope, Luke Skywalker refuses the computerized aid of his starfighter. After two hours of whiz-bang gadgetry, in the end he had to trust the Force.
Technology will not save us. I realized that what may have seemed like a honey trap, or a weirdo fan, or even some naughty phone sex, had become something else: the archetype of the ally. I had an ally. Carl Jung knew how crucial allies are to “individuation,” or spiritual and psychological maturity. “Without the conscious acknowledgment of our fellowship with those around us,” Jung wrote, “there can be no synthesis of personality. Individuation does not shut out the world but gathers it unto itself. You cannot individuate on Everest.”
We said we’d talk again soon. I fell asleep peacefully listening to Keane.
Love me just a little and I will give you my life
Throw your arms around me, shelter me like a child
Be my direction, throw myself at your feet
Give me something in return for what you've done to me