‘I WAS A BROKEN PERSON’
Talk of protections for whistleblowers belies the devastating personal and professional toll many say they’ve paid for choosing to tell the truth. Don Butler reports.
When a would-be whistleblower comes to Tom Devine seeking advice, his first response is to try to talk them out of it.
Devine, legal director of the world’s leading whistleblower organization, the Government Accountability Project (GAP) in Washington, D.C., has worked with 7,000 whistleblowers during his lengthy career. He knows better than almost anyone the terrible price most people pay when they make the fateful decision to speak out.
“The choice of whether to blow the whistle is a life’s crossroads,” Devine says. “If you do, you’ll never be the same — for better or, usually, for worse. I warn people, ‘You’re going to spend years more in pain and use up all the financial resources you have to hammer the final nail into your own professional coffin. Do you really want to do that?’”
Devine says it’s not that he wants to dissuade whistleblowers. He just wants to ensure they make their decision with eyes open: “They’re the ones who are going to have to live with the consequences. Most people are flying blind when they do this.”
Those consequences can be dire and long-lasting: loss of job and profession is virtually a given. So is retaliation, particularly for those who expose systemic wrongdoing.
“It’s almost axiomatic: You blow the whistle, you’re going to be retaliated against,” says Ottawa whistleblower and former public servant Joanna Gualtieri, whose 12-year legal battle with the federal government ended in a 2010 settlement that includes a stifling gag order.
The retaliation, says Devine, is designed to humiliate whistleblowers and destroy their credibility and reputation. The smear tactics and harassment often only intensify if the whistleblower tries to fight back.
Devine calls it “the institutional equivalent of animal instinct. When an animal is threatened, it tries to destroy the threat. That’s what institutions do to whistleblowers.”
Firing them isn’t sufficient. The objective is to blacklist whistleblowers, so they ’ll never find work in their industry again. “It’s financial ruin — that’s the objective of retaliation,” says Devine.
“That will scare everybody else exponentially more than if somebody just lost their job and got a better one.”
The trauma generated by retaliation takes a heavy toll on whistleblowers’ physical and mental health.
It puts strains on relationships with family and friends that can lead to divorce and isolation.
The most comprehensive survey of whistleblowers, done by U.S. academics Joyce Rothschild and Terance D. Miethe in 1999, found that most suffered intensely. More than eight in 10 reported severe depression and anxiety as well as feelings of isolation or powerlessness. Their physical health and finances declined in about two-thirds of cases. And more than half reported problems with family relationships.
Faced with all that, most whistleblowers quickly capitulate. The relatively few who fight on pay the heaviest price, says Gualtieri, a lawyer who served as chair of GAP’s board until 2014. “When you take them on, there’s no escaping the trauma. It is an exhausting, life-changing, life-threatening undertaking.”
Increasingly, in popular culture, whistleblowers are lionized for exposing corrupt or abusive acts by governments and corporations.
Snowden, director Oliver Stone’s film about Edward Snowden, who disclosed extensive warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency, is a typically heroic portrayal.
But the Hollywood stories don’t reflect the way typical whistleblowers act, Gualtieri says. Most aren’t looking for conflict, but rather corrective action. “They are true believers, most of them,” she says. They’re also often an organization’s most loyal and committed employees.
A whistleblower is put on the spot, Devine says. “They stumbled onto knowledge that they’d probably prefer they didn’t even know about. But they do know, and they’ve got to figure out what to do about it.”
I warn people, ‘You’re going to spend years more in pain and use up all the financial resources you have to hammer the final nail into your own professional coffin. Do you really want to do that?’
For many, sorting out their conflicting loyalties is the most agonizing choice, he says.
“Our deepest loyalty is to support our family. But by risking everything for the public, you’re also abandoning your duty to your family and your co-workers, who may lose their jobs.”
Though the perils are formidable, whistleblowing doesn’t always leave a life in ashes, Devine says. Some prominent whistleblowers make a good living on the lecture circuit. Others have become expert witnesses in trials, or earned law degrees to defend other whistleblowers.
“It’s a decision that requires one of the best courses you’ve ever taken in your life,” Devine says. But few people have that knowledge. “That’s why the sad consequences are the rule rather than the exception.”
When Devine started working at GAP in 1979, most whistleblowers were seen as nuts or traitors, he says. “Now they’re on a pedestal with the media and with the politicians.”
Whistleblowers, he says, “are being recognized as persons who are changing the course of history.” Snowden’s revelations, for example, led to the passage in 2015 of the USA Freedom Act, which outlawed government possession of surveillance without a warrant.
“No politician in the United States dares to oppose whistleblower protection anymore,” Devine says. When it comes to whistleblowing, “We’ve pretty much won the cultural revolution.”
However, that’s not yet the case in Canada, which is “still in the dark ages,” Gualtieri says. “We have a very nascent whistleblower movement. We haven’t had the type of public dialogue that is necessary.”
Whistleblower advocates in Canada had hoped that government and private industry would recognize the value of having robust internal reporting systems that give employees a safe channel to report wrongdoing, she says.