The Undoing of Joss Whedon
The Buffy creator wrestles with losing his legacy.
IN THE FALL OF 2002, 160 scholars convened at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. They were an eclectic group—theologians, philosophers, linguists, film professors—and they had descended on the medieval city for a conference dedicated to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a cult television show about a teenage girl who fights monsters while attending high school in Southern California. It was not a typical academic gathering. There were life-size cutouts of the eponymous heroine as well as Buffy-themed chocolates, action figures, and, in the welcome bags, exfoliating moisturizers (“Buffy the Backside Slayer”). Professors stalked around in long black leather coats like the vampire Spike, Buffy’s enemy and, later, her lover.
If the line between scholarship and fandom was vanishingly thin, so was the line between fandom and worship. On the first morning of the conference, David Lavery, a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, stood at the podium and declared the show’s creator, Joss Whedon, the “avatar” of a new religion, the “founder of a new faith.” Lavery and two other professors would go on to establish the Whedon Studies Association, an organization devoted to expanding the field of Buffy scholarship. As Lavery would write in the introduction to a book he co-authored on the series, Whedon had not simply composed a narrative about a struggle against the “forces of darkness—vampires, demons, monsters of all varieties”; he had taken a stand against a panoply of oppressive “social forces,” most obviously the “forces of gender
He felt he “had” to sleep with them, that he was “power less” to resist. I laughed. “I’m not actually joking,” he said.
According to the prevailing rules of Hollywood horror at the time, Whedon’s protagonist, a hot blonde with a dumb name, should have died within the opening scenes, but Whedon had flipped the genre on its head, endowing her with superhuman powers and a hero’s journey.
It wasn’t just scholars who worshipped him in those days. He was a celebrity showrunner before anyone cared who ran shows. In 2005, the comic-book artist Scott R. Kurtz designed a T-shirt that gestured at Whedon’s stature in popular culture at the time: JOSS WHEDON IS MY MASTER NOW. Marvel later put him in charge of its biggest franchise, hiring him to write and direct 2012’s The Avengers and its sequel Age of Ultron, two of the highest-grossing films of all time. His fans thought of him as a feminist ally, an impression bolstered by his fund-raising efforts for progressive causes. But in recent years, the good-guy image has been tarnished by a series of accusations, each more damaging than the last. In 2017, his exwife, Kai Cole, published a sensational open letter about him on the movie blog The Wrap. She condemned him as a “hypocrite preaching feminist ideals” and accused him of cheating on her throughout their marriage, including with actresses on the set of Buffy. Then, beginning in the summer of 2020, the actors Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot, who had starred in a superhero film directed by Whedon, claimed he’d mistreated them, with Fisher describing his behavior as “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable.”
They were soon joined by Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia on Buffy and its spinoff series, Angel. In a long Twitter post, she wrote that Whedon had a “history of being casually cruel.” After she became pregnant, heading into Angel’s fourth season, he called her “fat” to colleagues and summoned her into his office to ask, as she recalled, if she was “going to keep it.” She claimed he had mocked her religious beliefs, accused her of sabotaging the show, and fired her a season later, once she had given birth. All the joy of new motherhood had been “sucked right out,” she wrote. “And Joss was the vampire.”
Carpenter’s comments threw the fandom into a crisis. Fan organizations debated changing their names; people on discussion sites wrote anguished posts as Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played the titular Slayer, and other Buffy stars offered words of support for Carpenter online. The community’s sense of shock and betrayal could be seen in part as an indictment of the culture of fandom itself. “As fans, we have a bad habit of deifying those whose work we respect,” Kurtz, the comic-book artist, told me. “When you build these people up so big they have nowhere to go but down, I don’t know why we’re surprised when they turn out to be fallible humans who fall.”
This past spring, Whedon invited me to spend a couple of afternoons with him at his home in Los Angeles. By then, I had spoken with dozens of people who knew him; after months of agonizing over whether to grant my request for an interview, he had decided to talk, too. Whedon lives in Santa Monica, 13 blocks from the ocean, on a street lined with magnolia trees and $5 million homes. His house is open, airy, modern. He sat hunched over on a black leather couch, his fingers clicking together, the thumbs tapping each of the other digits in quick succession whenever the conversation shifted toward his recent troubles. Pale and angular with bags under his eyes, he no longer much resembled the plump-cheeked Puck who once impishly urged a profile writer to describe him as “doughy” and “jowly.” It was a perfect day in Santa Monica, as almost every day in Santa Monica is. But Whedon wanted to stay inside. Gazing through a wall of glass at his lush backyard, he announced in his quiet rumble of a voice that he was thinking of getting curtains. “The sun is my enemy,” he said.
Scattered around the room were paintings by his wife, the artist Heather Horton. They got married in February 2021, just after the wave of allegations had crested. At the sound of the garage door opening, his shoulders relaxed. “Heather’s coming back,” he said. She breezed through the room in a sundress and complimented me on my glasses. Then she was gone. Picking up a cup of tea, Whedon said he could no longer remain silent as people tried to pry his legacy from his hands. But there was a problem. Those people had set out to destroy him and would surely seize on his every utterance in an attempt to finish the job. “I’m terrified,” he said, “of every word that comes out of my mouth.”
BACK WHEN HE WAS still a god, the kind that is contractually obligated to promote network-television shows at press junkets, Whedon was asked over and over to explain why he wrote stories about strong women. For years, he would answer by talking about his mother. Lee Stearns, who died in 1991, was an activist and unpublished novelist who taught history at an elite private school in the Bronx. One of her students, Jessica Neuwirth, went on to become a co-founder of Equality Now, an organization that promotes women’s rights. Neuwirth, who has cited Stearns as an inspiration, described her to me as “a visionary feminist.” In 2006, Equality Now presented Whedon with an award at an evening dedicated to honoring “men on the front lines” of feminism. In his speech, Whedon referred to his mother as “extraordinary, inspirational, tough, cool,” and “sexy.”
Sitting in his living room, he told me he sees a different side of her now. “She was a remarkable woman and an inspiring person,” he said, “but sometimes those are hard people to be raised by.”
Whedon had been thinking a lot about his childhood. He had been in therapy for the past few years, ever since he checked himself into an addiction-treatment center in Florida for a monthlong stay. As a younger man, he had channeled his pain into his work, but he was never particularly interested in picking apart the stories he always told himself about his past. Now, he didn’t have much else to do. The allegations against him had led friends to stop calling. He was out of work and wasn’t writing. What story could he even tell? There were things about his life he was only beginning to understand. “Not the things being said in the press, necessarily, but things I’m not comfortable with,” he told me. “I’m like, I have nothing going on. I can do some work on me.”
Born Joseph, Whedon grew up in a palazzo-style apartment building on the Upper West Side. The family spent holidays reading Shakespeare out loud and evenings listening to Sondheim with friends. “There wasn’t a grown-up who didn’t have a drink in their hand by midafternoon,” he said. His father, Tom, was a secondgeneration television writer whose credits included The Golden Girls and The Dick Cavett Show. He had lived through many writers’-room battles, and he and Lee ran the home as though they were in the thick of one. “If you weren’t funny or entertaining or agreeing with them, they would cut you down or turn to stone,” he recalled.
Whedon was the youngest of three boys. Soft and slight and anxious, he had long red hair that caused people to mistake him for a girl, which he says he didn’t mind. He identified with “the feminine”—a testament, maybe, to his connection with his mother. She was “capricious and withholding,” but she frightened him less than his father and, especially, his brothers—“admirable monsters” who “bullied the shit” out of him. On weekends and in summers, he would pass his mornings pacing the long driveway of the family’s second home, a farmhouse near Schenectady, “making up sciencestereotyping.”
fiction universes or plotting elaborate revenges on my brothers.”
Whedon now has a term for the damage his childhood caused. He says he suffers from complex post-traumatic-stress disorder, a condition that can lead to relationship problems, self-destructive behavior, and addictions of various kinds. I asked if he would be willing to share his most traumatic memory with me. “I’m going to run to the loo,” he said. Later, he would let slip that someone had advised him to pretend he needed to pee if he felt uncomfortable with a question.
Returning to the couch, he affected a sort of Vincent Price voice. “And now,” Whedon said, “tales of horror and woe.”
When he was 5, a 4-year-old boy, the son of family friends, disappeared on his parents’ property upstate. Eventually, his body was found; he had drowned in the pond. Years later, as a teenager, Whedon remembered he had called the boy over to the pond to play with him. After getting bored, he had walked away, leaving the boy alone by the water. “I didn’t think it was my fault,” Whedon said. “I knew I was 5. But it doesn’t just disappear as a thought.” It took him another 30 years, he said, before another thought dawned on him: Even after the incident, his parents never taught him to swim. “There was no structure,” he said. “There was no safety.”
His parents split up when he was 9. At 15, he went to an allboys boarding school in England where he read more Shakespeare, joined the fencing team, and struggled to make friends. “I was very dark and miserable, this hideous little homunculus who managed to annoy everyone,” he told the author of Joss Whedon: The Biography. Then, in 1983, his fortunes changed. He had arrived at Wesleyan University, where he discovered his artsy, angsty personality could actually be attractive to women. He got a girlfriend, traded his basic name for a more interesting one, and found a mentor, the eminent film scholar Jeanine Basinger.
Basinger, a sort of campus Svengali, surrounded herself with acolytes—Michael Bay, Mike White, D. B. Weiss. In one of her books, A Woman’s View, she espoused the artistic merits of the woman’s picture, a genre that predominated in the middle of the 20th century. The heroines of these films led fabulous lives as successful single girls in the workplace until just before the closing credits, when they gave it all up for marriage. Seen from one angle, these movies promoted sexist conventions; from another, they celebrated women’s liberation. Basinger argued they did both, and she perceived this ambiguity made them interesting because it reflected the messiness of the human mind. This insight stayed with Whedon, who had no trouble understanding how messy the mind could be. He admired strong women like his mother, yet he’d discovered he was capable of hurting them, “usually by sleeping with them and ghosting or whatever.” He would later tell his biographer this duality gave him “an advantage” over the girls in his college class on feminism when it came to discussing relations between the sexes. “I have seen the enemy,” he said, “and he’s in my brain!”
After Wesleyan, Whedon moved to L.A., where he met Cole and wrote the screenplay for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the 1992 film directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui. He wanted to tell a story about someone who turns out to be important despite the fact that no one takes that person seriously. “It took me a long time to realize I was writing about me,” he told me, “and that my feeling of powerlessness and constant anxiety was at the heart of everything.” His avatar was not a fearful young man, however, but a gorgeous girl with extraordinary courage. He wanted to be her, and he wanted to fuck her.
In 1995, executives at the fledgling WB network invited him to turn the idea into a series. Building on his original premise, he reimagined the monsters as metaphors for the horrors of adolescence. In one climactic scene, Buffy loses her virginity to a vampire who has been cursed with a soul; the next morning, his soul is gone and he’s lusting for blood. Any young woman who had gone to bed with a seemingly nice guy only to wake up with an asshole could relate.
Like those women’s pictures Basinger had written about, the show invited a multiplicity of interpretations. You could view it as a story of female empowerment or as the opposite—the titillating tale of a woman in leather pants who is brutalized by monsters. When it came out, critics mostly read it as the former. It was the late ’90s, after all. In 1998, shortly after Buffy’s second season aired, Time published an infamous cover asking, “Is Feminism Dead?” As the story’s author, Ginia Bellafante, noted, the protests of the ’60s and ’70s were long over, Gloria Steinem was defending Bill Clinton in the New York Times, and the struggles for equal pay and child care had been subsumed by the corporate pageantry of “girl power,” the glib spectacle of powerful women on TV. Buffy was actually far more complex than most of the other examples of this phenomenon. As in so much of Whedon’s work, the lines between good and evil were blurred. The good guys sometimes did monstrous things, and the monsters could occasionally do good. But the media likes a story with a clear-cut hero, and Whedon wasn’t above playing the part. “I just got tired of seeing women be the victims,” he told the L.A. Times in 2000. “I needed to see women taking control.”
IN THOSE EARLY DAYS of the internet, before nerd culture swallowed the world, fans flocked to a message board set up by the WB to analyze Buffy with the obsessive zeal of Talmudic scholars. Whedon knew how to talk to these people—he was one of them. He would visit the board at all hours to complain about his grueling schedule or to argue with fans about their interpretations of his work. Back then, as he pointed out to me, the internet was “a friendly place,” and he, the quick-witted prince of nerds, “had the advantage of it.” At one point, fans became convinced Buffy and another Slayer, Faith, were romantically entwined. After Whedon shot down the theory, accusing its proponents of seeing a “lesbian subtext behind every corner,” one of the posters (Buffynerd) sent him a link to her website, where she had published a meticulous exegesis of the relationship. He returned to the message board to applaud her, sort of. “By God, I think she’s right!” he declared. Dropping the facetious tone, he conceded she had made some good points. “I say B.Y.O. Subtext,” he proclaimed, coining a phrase that fans would recite like scripture.
Occasionally, some of the Buffy stars and writers would gather at Whedon’s house to watch episodes. They’d huddle around his computer, log on to the board, and chat. Once, Alyson Hannigan, who played Buffy’s friend Willow, posted her number to the site—she was moving to a new apartment the next day but planned to keep her old landline connected to an answering machine so posters could leave her messages. One fan called so quickly he caught her before she had a chance to set up the machine.
Every year, the regular posters would hold an IRL party where Whedon would make an appearance. Bryan Bonner, one of the organizers, recalled running into him outside one of these events. Bonner suggested he use the VIP entrance, but Whedon shook his head. “He said, ‘No, I’m good. It’s fine,’” Bonner recalled. “He was always this approachable, down-to-earth guy.” Another organizer, Allyson Beatrice, who wrote a book about Buffy fandom, described the annual gathering as a sort of family reunion. Many found their closest friends through the fan community. One of
the most appealing ideas in the show was that a group of social outcasts could come together to form a chosen family. When we meet Buffy, her father is absent, her mother is distracted by work, and she is isolated by the lies she has to tell to cover up her life as a Slayer. At school, she falls in with a gang of nerdy friends who know who she really is. Together, they take on evil teachers, bad boyfriends, and goat-horned demons, saving the world, and one another, again and again.
Fans believed Whedon had found his chosen family, too, behind the scenes of the show they all loved so much. But chosen families are not necessarily spared the strife that can plague any family. “I felt very conflicted with the fans,” one Buffy actress told me. “I didn’t have the same feeling about the show, but I also know sometimes people don’t want your truth.” She believed people hadn’t been ready to hear about what Whedon was really like on the set. “There was a cult of silence around that sort of behavior,” she said.
WHEDON was 31 when he began running Buffy. He had never run a show before and had never been a boss of any kind. At first, when crew members would hold the door open for him on set, he would do an awkward dance and insist he hold the door for them. “It just felt so fucking wrong,” he told me. Then, one day in the third season, a crew member neglected to hold the door and Whedon walked straight into it facefirst. “Oh, I see,” Whedon recalled thinking. “You did get used to it.”
By the next year, he would be running two shows at once—Buffy and Angel. Soon, he added Firefly to the mix. He spent his days racing among the sets and the writers’ rooms, exerting control over countless aspects of the productions, from the story arcs down to the details of makeup and wardrobe. One actor described him as a “huge pulsating brain.” “There were a thousand things he was tuning in to every moment,” he said. “He could make the slightest adjustment and the scene would go from a three to a ten.”
A sort of cult of personality formed around Whedon. Once a month, he would invite his favorite cast and crew members to his house. They would hold Shakespeare readings in the amphitheater that Cole, an architect, had built in their backyard. “It was like being part of this little family,” said an actress who was in the inner circle for a time. One Buffy writer recalled Whedon signing posters for every member of the writing staff. They stood around as he bestowed each of them with personalized words of wisdom like “a guru on the hill.” Scenes like this were not uncommon. “The standard reaction to Joss was worship,” the writer said.
Even people who didn’t worship him told me working with him could be a wonderful experience. Miracle Laurie, an actress on Whedon’s 2009 series Dollhouse, was a size 12 when she got the job. Whedon told her not to go on a diet. “He was trying to show that a size 12 woman is normal, sexy, beautiful, strong,” she said. “I still get people coming up to me saying how much it meant to them. I felt celebrated by him.” Like many I interviewed, she was surprised to hear her colleagues felt differently, but looking back, she remembered glimpsing another side of Whedon. “I saw his kindness and his good intentions,” she said, “and I also saw the snarkiness, the fickleness, where I would not want to be on the other side.”
Buffy costume designer Cynthia Bergstrom recalled an incident that happened during the filming of season five. In one episode, Spike asks a sadistic science nerd to create a sex-robot version of the Slayer. Whedon and Gellar did not agree on what the Buffybot should wear. “Sarah was adamant about it being a certain way,” Bergstrom said. “The costume she wanted was a bit grandma-ish—a pleated skirt and high neck. He definitely wanted it to be sexier.” On the day Gellar tried the different options, Whedon grew frustrated. “I was like, ‘Joss, let’s just get her dressed,’” Bergstrom recalled. “He grabbed my arm and dug in his fingers until his fingernails imprinted the skin and I said, ‘You’re hurting me.’”
A Firefly writer remembered him belittling a colleague for writing a script that wasn’t up to par. Instead of giving her notes privately, he called a meeting with the entire writing staff. “It was basically 90 minutes of vicious mockery,” the writer said. “Joss pretended to have a slide projector, and he read her dialogue out loud and pretended he was giving a lecture on terrible writing as he went through the ‘slides’ and made funny voices—funny for him. The guys were looking down at their pages, and this woman was fighting tears the entire time. I’ve had my share of shitty showrunners, but the intent to hurt—that’s the thing that stands out for me now.”
A high-level member of the Buffy production team recalled Whedon’s habit of “writing really nasty notes,” but that wasn’t what disturbed her most about working with him. Whedon was rumored to be having affairs with two young actresses on the show. One day, he and one of the actresses came into her office while she was working. She heard a noise behind her. They were rolling around on the floor, making out. “They would bang into my chair,” she said. “How can you concentrate? It was gross.” This happened more than once, she said. “These actions proved he had no respect for me and my work.” She quit the show even though she had no other job lined up.
Then there were the alleged incidents two Buffy actresses wrote about on social media last year. Michelle Trachtenberg, who’d played Buffy’s younger sister, claimed there had been a rule forbidding Whedon from being alone in a room with her on set. Whedon told me he had no idea what she was talking about, and Trachtenberg didn’t want to elaborate. One person who worked closely with her on Buffy told me an informal rule did exist, though it was possible Whedon was not aware of it. During the seventh season, when Trachtenberg was 16, Whedon called her into his office for a closed-door meeting. The person does not know what happened, but recalled Trachtenberg was “shaken” afterward. An adult in Trachtenberg’s circle created the rule in response.
The story of Whedon’s conflict with Carpenter is less obscure. The actress has been talking about it with fans and reporters for more than a decade. The tensions with Whedon developed well before her pregnancy. By her own account, she suffered from extreme anxiety and struggled to hit her marks and memorize her lines; Whedon, obsessed with word-perfect dialogue, was not always patient. After she moved over to Angel, she got a tattoo of a rosary on her wrist even though her character was working for a vampire, a creature repelled by crosses. Another time, she chopped off her long hair in the middle of filming an episode. In her Twitter post, Carpenter seemed to blame Whedon for her performance problems. She wrote that his cruelty intensified her anxiety. She got the tattoo, she explained, to help her feel “spiritually grounded” in a volatile work environment.
Whedon acknowledged he was not as “civilized” back then. “I was young,” he said. “I yelled, and sometimes you had to yell. This was a very young cast, and it was easy for everything to turn into a cocktail party.” He said he would never intentionally humiliate anyone. “If I am upsetting somebody, it will be a problem for me.” The costume designer who said he’d grabbed her arm? “I don’t believe that,” he said, shaking his head. “I know I would get angry, but I was never physical with people.” Had he made out with an actress on the floor of someone’s office? “That seems false. I don’t understand that story even a little bit.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his face. “I should run to the loo.” When he came back, he said the story didn’t make sense to him because he “lived in terror” of his affairs being discovered.
He had some regrets about how he spoke with Carpenter after learning she was pregnant. “I was not
mannerly,” he said. Still, he was bewildered by her account of their relationship. “Most of my experiences with Charisma were delightful and charming. She struggled sometimes with her lines, but nobody could hit a punch line harder than her.” I asked if he had called her fat when she was pregnant. “I did not call her fat,” he quickly replied. “Of course I didn’t.”
But he did call other pregnant women fat. Rebecca X, as she asked to be called, was known as Rebecca Rand Kirshner when she wrote for the last three seasons of Buffy; since then, she has dropped her “patriarchal last name.” She saw Whedon at a photo shoot a few years after the show ended, when she was weeks away from giving birth. “I was happy to see Joss, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘Oh, you’re fat,’” she told me. She knew he was joking, but she didn’t find it very funny. “Did it hurt me? Yes. Did I say, ‘Hey, I got a baby in here, what’s your excuse?’ In so many unsaid words, yes. But I think he was actually slim at that point. My point is, it was a dick move. But I wouldn’t call it abuse.”
One day, I took a walk with Rebecca X around the Huntington Botanical Gardens near Pasadena. She wore dark glasses and an Hermès scarf tied around her dark-gold hair and spoke with an inflection that called to mind the mid-Atlantic accent of an oldfashioned Hollywood star. I had reached out to her after hearing Whedon had made her cry in the writers’ room. In the months leading up to our meeting, she had sent me a series of probing emails, excavations of long-buried memories. Once she was in the middle of pitching an idea when Whedon placed his hands on the back of her chair. “Keep going,” he told her, as he tilted the chair backward and lowered her to the ground. “Is that a toxic environment?” she asked me. “I don’t know. What is normal behavior and what isn’t?”
As she led me down a winding garden path past the Terrace of Shared Delights and the Pavilion for Washing Away Thoughts, she alternated between criticizing Whedon, questioning her reasons for criticizing him, and questioning her reasons for questioning those reasons. Yes, she said, she had once burst into uncontrollable tears after
Whedon gave her notes on a script outline, but she couldn’t say for certain whether this was his fault. The writers’ room was as rowdy as a pirate ship. She and the other writers would spend all day sitting around on chintz couches making one another laugh while plumbing their most painful memories for story ideas. They would fuck with each other, and Whedon would fuck with them too—though if you ever fucked with Whedon, he might get mad. “Did he approach giving notes in a way that was healthy and consistent with the ideals of the endeavor?” she wondered. “No. He’s a blunt instrument, but I’m a very delicate receiver.”
She’d always thought the people who worshipped him had it wrong. “I thought he was a false god,” she said. “I talked about Joss as if he were a human, and people gave me shit for it.” Still, she wondered if those who’d been hurt by him had misunderstood him. Whedon was not the first boss in the history of moving pictures to make a writer cry. On his sets, the budget was tight and the hours were long. Everyone was exhausted. And by many accounts, Whedon didn’t always clearly convey what he wanted. A Buffy writer once spent a week researching Irish folklore because it was unclear that Whedon had been kidding when he said he wanted to do an episode about leprechauns. Joss “is a layered and complex communicator,” one longtime collaborator told me. “His tone is deflecting, it’s funny, it’s got wordplay, rhyme, quote marks, some mumbles, self-deprecation, a comic-book allusion, a Sondheim allusion, and some words they only use in England. This means you, the recipient, have to do some decoding. You have to decide if there was a message in there that was meant to correct you, sting you, rib you affectionately, or shyly praise you.”
“Can a person have many bad parts and yet another person they encounter only experiences the good parts?” Rebecca mused in one of her emails. “Can we miss the bad parts of people? I know we can. Did I?” She went on: “Joss was a dweeb and Joss was sharp as hell and Joss was a dick, but to me he wasn’t a toxic dick, he was the kind of dick a person is on the path to becoming someone better. I did believe that.” A few days later, she sent me a text. “Joss is a beautiful person,” she wrote. “But you know what,” she added dryly, “I’m actually particularly vulnerable to abusive people.”
On our second day of interviews, I asked Whedon about his affairs on the set of Buffy. He looked worse than he had the day before. His eyes were faintly bloodshot. He hadn’t slept well. “I feel fucking terrible about them,” he said. When I pressed him on why, he noted
“it messes up the power dynamic,” but he didn’t expand on that thought. Instead, he quickly added that he had felt he “had” to sleep with them, that he was “powerless” to resist. I laughed. “I’m not actually joking,” he said. He had been surrounded by beautiful young women—the sort of women who had ignored him when he was younger— and he feared if he didn’t have sex with them, he would “always regret it.” Looking back, he feels shame and “horror,” he said. I thought of something he had told me earlier. A vampire, he’d said, is the “exalted outsider,” a creature that feels like “less than everybody else and also kind of more than everybody else. There’s this insecurity and arrogance. They do a little dance.”
Buffy ended in 2003, but his affairs did not. He slept with employees, fans, and colleagues. Eventually, his wife found out. In 2012, they split up. In Cole’s open letter to fans, she accused him of using feminism as a cover for his infidelities. “He always had a lot of female friends, but he told me it was because his mother raised him as a feminist, so he just liked women better,” she wrote. After learning he had been deceiving her for 15 years, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD, the same condition as him. “I want the people who worship him to know he is human,” she concluded.
I spoke with three women who dated Whedon after his marriage ended. In their stories, he was not the hero they had read about in the press, the one who wanted to see women in control; he was more like the cold-blooded men he depicted in his work. Sarah, a pseudonym, met Whedon when he was promoting Age of Ultron.
She was a 22-year-old freelance writer who interviewed him for a pop-culture website; after the piece published, they began a sexual relationship. “He led me to believe he was single,” she said. One night she went out for drinks alone with a friend Whedon wanted her to meet. After the friend mentioned she had a long-term boyfriend, Sarah asked what his name was. “I’m dating Joss Whedon,” the woman replied. Sarah went into the bathroom and threw up. “What the fuck is he playing at?”
she remembers thinking.
Erin Shade, a television writer who moonlights as a psychic medium, got involved with Whedon in 2013 while working as a showrunner’s assistant on
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., a series he created with one of his younger half-brothers and the brother’s wife. He was 49; she was 23 and a virgin. One day, Whedon texted her with an unusual request: Would she come over to his house for the weekend to watch him write? He would pay $2,500—more than Shade made in a month as an assistant. There was one caveat: She had to hide
it from her bosses. They dated on and off in secret for nearly a year before she slept with him. Not long after, he sent her a brief email telling her he couldn’t have a girlfriend. Seven years later, she made a ten-hour YouTube series called Erin the Snake Whisperer that chronicled the painful consequences of the relationship. Surrounded by candles and crystals, she described their relationship as an abuse of power. “People like Joss offset their trauma on other people in exchange for their energy, and take their energy to keep going—to keep themselves alive, almost,” she told me. “That’s why he’s so good at the vampire narrative.” (Whedon says he “should have handled the situation better.”)
When Arden Leigh met Whedon in 2012, she was a sex educator in her 20s and author of The New Rules of Attraction, a book about being a female pickup artist. She picked him up at a club. After their second date, Whedon sent her DVDs of Dollhouse. The heroine, played by Buffy alum Eliza Dushku, has no friends, no family, and no personality. A secret corporation has used advanced technology to erase her memory and turn her into a “doll”—a living robot customized to cater to the darkest desires of the company’s wealthy clients. Some critics argued the premise was sexist, but Leigh, who’d worked as a professional dominatrix, related to the dolls and was moved by Whedon’s depiction of them. She and Whedon began a relationship as “owner and doll.” For the most part, she found it gratifying, and she believed he did too.
Whedon told Leigh he identified with a character in Dollhouse: Topher, the nerdy scientist who imprints the dolls with their personalities. It’s not a flattering comparison. As one of Topher’s colleagues points out, he was picked to work at the dollhouse because he had no morals: “You had always thought of people as playthings. This is not a judgment. You always take good care of your toys.” That last line is disingenuous. Topher doesn’t take good care of his dolls, and in the end, according to Leigh, neither did Whedon. On Dollhouse, she reminded me, bad dolls are banished to “the attic,” a
room where they are forced to relive their worst nightmares over and over. In her epilogue to The New Rules of Attraction, Leigh wrote that one of her worst memories was of a boyfriend breaking up with her on her birthday. Whedon read the book, and they talked about the epilogue. In 2015, hours before her birthday, he came over to her house and told her their relationship was over. “If he was like, What could I do to Arden that would be her worst nightmare?, that would have been it,” she said. “Joss destroyed a beautiful thing just to show he had the power to. That’s literally everything you need to know about him.”
Whedon didn’t want to talk about his relationships with women in any detail, but it was possible to infer from various remarks he made throughout our conversations that he’d been aware, at least to some extent, of the pain he had caused. The year his marriage ended, he saw the Globe’s production of Richard III with Mark Rylance playing the conniving, sadistic, charismatic aristocrat who slaughters everyone in his path to the throne and winks at the audience while he does it. Richard is an ugly hunchback. Women have always rejected him. His own mother loathes him. As he seeks the crown, he tricks women into bed and has them murdered when he no longer has use for them. He appears devoid of empathy, but
in one of the play’s final scenes, he awakens, tormented by fear, and for the first time displays a pang of remorse:
Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself. I am a villain. Yet I lie. I am not.
As Whedon quoted from that scene, he let out a choked groan and mimicked the act of plunging a knife into his stomach. “It just reached into my fucking guts,” he said. He confessed that he identified more closely
with Richard than with any other character in Shakespeare’s canon—with the possible exception of Falstaff, the “holy fool.”
Whedon’s experience of seeing Richard III coincided with his own coronation of a kind. He had just directed Marvel’s Avengers, a commercial juggernaut featuring an all-star cast led by Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and Scarlett Johansson. In a profile pegged to its release, GQ hailed Whedon as “the most inventive pop storyteller of his generation.” By then, he had influenced an entire generation of TV creators. His delight in quirky language, his playful subversion of genre conventions, his affinity for powerful female protagonists—you could observe these hallmarks reflected in any number of shows that arrived in Buffy’s wake, from Veronica Mars to Battlestar Galactica and Lost.
But as the culture around him continued to change, certain fans began to see Whedon’s work through a more critical lens, discerning an attitude toward women that seemed unenlightened by the standards of the female-centered shows and movies his success had in some cases helped spawn. In 2017, the same year Cole published her letter, an old Wonder Woman screenplay he had written surfaced online. Compared with the Wonder Woman movie Patty Jenkins had recently directed, his version struck some readers as creepy and sexist, with passages that seemed to linger gratuitously on the Amazon’s sex appeal. “You cannot tell me Joss Whedon didn’t write the original Wonder Woman script while furiously cranking his hog,” one woman tweeted.
That year, Whedon took a job doing rewrites for the Warner Bros. film Justice League, a DC property directed by Zack Snyder. For two white men in their 50s making comic-book flicks, he and Snyder could hardly have been less creatively or philosophically aligned. While Whedon’s superhero epics were leavened by irony and wordplay, Snyder’s were brooding and self-important, with a visual style that combined the artificiality of a video game with
the fascist aesthetic of a Leni Riefenstahl production. Snyder’s fans were every bit as ardent as Whedon’s had been, but his previous effort, Batman v Superman, had faltered at the box office and offended critics, with A.O. Scott going so far as to assert that Snyder and his corporate backers had “no evident motive” to produce such a joyless spectacle of power “beyond their own aggrandizement.” Now, those backers were concerned about how their new venture was shaping up. An early screening did not reassure them. “They asked me to fix it, and
I thought I could help,” Whedon told me. He now regards this decision as one of the biggest regrets of his life.
At first, the studio executives told Whedon his role would be restricted to writing and advising, but soon it became clear to Whedon they had lost faith in Snyder’s vision and wanted him to take full control. (A representative from Warner Bros. denied this. Snyder has publicly stated he left the project to spend time with his family; his daughter had died by suicide two months earlier.) Whedon, now installed in the director’s chair, oversaw nearly 40 days of reshoots, a complicated and laborious undertaking. From the start, things were tense between him and the stars. It wasn’t just that he wanted to impose a whole new vision on their work; he introduced an entirely different style of management. Snyder had given the actors exceptional license with the script, encouraging them to ad-lib dialogue. Whedon expected them to say their lines exactly as he’d written them. “That didn’t go down well at all,” one crew member told me. Some actors criticized his writing. By Whedon’s account, Gal Gadot, who played Wonder Woman, suggested that he, the director of the highest-grossing superhero movie at the time, didn’t understand how superhero movies worked. At one point, Whedon paused the shoot and,
according to the crew member, announced that he had never worked with “a ruder group of people.” The actors fell silent.
The actors, at least some of them, felt Whedon had been rude, too. Ray Fisher, a young Black actor, played Cyborg; it was his first major role. Snyder had centered the film on his character—the first Black superhero in a DC movie—and he’d treated Fisher as a writing partner, soliciting his opinions on the film’s representations of Black people. Whedon downsized Cyborg’s role, cutting scenes that, in Fisher’s view, challenged stereotypes. When Fisher raised his concerns about the revisions in a phone call, Whedon cut him off. “It feels like I’m taking notes right now,” Whedon told him, according to The Hollywood Reporter, “and I don’t like taking notes from anybody—not even Robert Downey Jr.”
Gadot didn’t care for Whedon’s style either. Last year, she told reporters Whedon “threatened” her and said he would make her “career miserable.” Whedon told me he did no such thing: “I don’t threaten people. Who does that?” He concluded she had misunderstood him. “English is not her first language, and I tend to be annoyingly flowery in my speech.” He recalled arguing over a scene she wanted to cut. He told her jokingly that if she wanted to get rid of it, she would have to tie him to a railroad track and do it over his dead body. “Then I was told that I had said something about her dead body and tying her to the railroad track,” he said. (Gadot did not agree with Whedon’s version of events. “I understood perfectly,” she told New York in an email.)
As for Whedon’s claim that he doesn’t threaten people, an actress on Angel told me that hadn’t been true back when she knew him. After her agent pushed for her to get a raise, she claims Whedon called her at home and said she was “never going to work for him, or 20th Century Fox, again.” Reading Gadot’s quote, she thought, “Wow, he’s still using that line.” (Whedon denied this too.)
Justice League premiered in the fall of 2017. It was a critical and commercial debacle. Snyder’s fans blamed Whedon for its failures, accusing him, as one tweet put it, of turning Snyder’s godlike heroes into clowns. The power of fandom, a force Whedon had done so much to cultivate at the start of his career, was now wielded against him. The fans launched an elaborate campaign pressuring Warner Bros. to release the version Snyder had originally planned, chartering a plane to fly a banner over Warner Studios. Just as Whedon had once used message boards to bond with Buffy obsessives, Snyder used the social-media platform Vero to rally his followers, sharing pictures of his morning workouts alongside images that appeared to be derived from his cut of the film. Several months into the pandemic, the studio, desperate for content, announced that his cut would air on HBO Max. At an online fan event celebrating the upcoming release, Snyder declared he would set the movie on fire before using a single frame he had not filmed himself. “Our lord and savior Zack Snyder!!!” someone wrote in the comments below the livestream.
Around the same time, amid worldwide protests against racism, Fisher posted a series of tweets accusing Whedon of abusing his power and charging studio executives with “enabling” the director. In a Forbes interview, Fisher said he’d been told Whedon had used color correction to change an actor of color’s complexion because he didn’t like the actor’s skin tone. “Man, with everything 2020’s been, that was the tipping point for me,” Fisher said. (Fisher did not respond to multiple interview requests.)
Whedon was stunned. He had given the whole movie a lighter look, brightening everything in postproduction, including all the faces. He said the claim that he had disliked a character’s skin tone, which Forbes ultimately retracted, was false and unjust. Whedon says he cut down Cyborg’s role for two reasons. The story line “logically made no sense,” and he felt the acting was bad. According to a source familiar with the project, Whedon wasn’t alone in feeling that way; at test screenings, viewers deemed Cyborg “the worst of all the characters in the film.” Despite that, Whedon insists he spent hours discussing the changes with Fisher and that their conversations were friendly and respectful. None of the claims Fisher made in the media were “either true or merited discussing,” Whedon told me. He could think of only one way to explain Fisher’s motives. “We’re talking about a malevolent force,” he said. “We’re talking about a bad actor in both senses.”
Some of Whedon’s defenders proposed a theory: What if Fisher had been doing Snyder’s bidding? Without furnishing proof, they speculated that Snyder had tricked Fisher into thinking Whedon was racist. Or maybe Fisher knew perfectly well his allegations were bullshit. Either way, the actor and director had “manufactured a controversy” that made Snyder seem like a progressive ally while diverting attention from the fact that their early cut had been a disaster. Whedon’s advocates believed this campaign had poisoned Carpenter against Whedon, causing her to see the complicated story of their relationship as a simplistic narrative of abuse. “Once someone lights a fuse and people see there’s a flame, they run to it and throw stuff into it,” one person in Whedon’s circle said.
In our conversations, Whedon was somewhat more circumspect. “I don’t know who started it,” he told me. “I just know in whose name it was done.” Snyder superfans were attacking him online as a bad feminist and a bad husband. “They don’t give a fuck about feminism,” he said. “I was made a target by my ex-wife, and people exploited that cynically.” As he explained this theory, his voice sank into a hoarse whisper. “She put out a letter saying some bad things I’d done and saying some untrue things about me, but I had done the bad things and so people knew I was gettable.”
When Snyder’s four-hour cut was finally unveiled, it was critically acclaimed. His fans pored through both films to analyze the differences. Some seized on a belief, first put forth by Fisher, that Whedon had intentionally erased people of color from the film. A remarkable reversal had taken place. Fifteen years earlier, Snyder’s work was widely seen as the epitome of problematic cinema. His breakout effort, 300, a sword-and-sandal epic about the Persian Wars, was “so overtly racist” in the view of the U.N. delegation from Iran that it threatened to incite “a clash of civilizations.” Now, the internet had recast Snyder as a progressive hero while branding Whedon, its progressive hero of yesterday, as a villain and bigot. “The beginning of the internet raised me up, and the modern internet pulled me down,” Whedon said. “The perfect symmetry is not lost on me.”
At whedon’s house, his wife, Horton, would occasionally come into the living room bearing tea and dark chocolates. When I asked where they’d met, she said, “Right here.” A mutual friend introduced them in the winter of 2019, after learning Whedon had bought several of Horton’s paintings, including a self-portrait. She was greeted by an image of herself when she walked into his home.
By then, Whedon had begun seeking treatment for sex and love addiction, along with other addictive tendencies. James Franco, Kevin Spacey, and Harvey Weinstein have all taken similar paths. Was he using a page out of some crisis-management playbook? Whedon says he’s genuinely committed to the work. “I decided to take control of my life—or try,” he told me. “The first thing I did with Heather was tell her my patterns, which was not my M.O. I couldn’t shut up because I finally found somebody I found more important than me.”
Life was good and also bad. Having overcome the isolation and ridicule of his childhood, he found himself in the role of social outcast once more. He still had an agent, but it seemed like no one wanted to work with him. At Fisher’s urging, Warner had
conducted a series of investigations into the Justice League production. The studio won’t disclose its findings, but in late 2020, it announced “remedial action” had been taken. A few weeks earlier, HBO had revealed Whedon would no longer serve as showrunner of The Nevers, his sciencefiction series about women with supernatural powers. The network scrubbed his name from the show’s marketing materials.
Over the last year, some of his fans have tried to scrub him out too, erasing him from their narratives about what made Buffy great. In posts and essays, they have downplayed his role in the show’s development, pointing out that many people, including many women, were critically important to its success. It may be hard to accept that Whedon could have understood the pain of a character like Buffy, a woman who endures infidelity, attempted rape, and endless violence. But the belief that her story was something other than a projection of his psyche is ultimately just another fantasy. Whedon did understand pain—his own. Some of that pain, as he once put it to me, “spilled over” into the people around him. And some of it was channeled into his art.
Whedon once wrote a line that could have served as a warning to all of us. In
Firefly, one of the crew members, Jayne, accidentally tosses the spoils of a botched robbery into the hands of the town’s poor. Jayne is not a good man, but when he returns to the town years later, he sees its residents have erected a statue in his honor. When he confides to the crew’s captain that he’s unsettled by this development, the captain just stares into the distance. “It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of ’em was one kinda sombitch or another,” he says. “Ain’t about you, Jayne. It’s about what they need.”
“Nobody ever fell from a pedestal into anything but a pit,” Whedon told me on a call one day. A few months had passed since our conversations at his house. In that time, he’d finally made peace with himself, he said. “Could I have done marriage better?” he asked. “Don’t get me started. Could I have been a better showrunner? Absolutely. Should I have been nicer?” He considered the question. Perhaps he could have been calmer, more direct. But would that not have compromised the work? Maybe the problem was he’d been too nice, he said. He’d wanted people to love him, which meant when he
was direct, people thought he was harsh. In any case, he’d decided he was done worrying about all that. People had been using “every weaponizable word of the modern era to make it seem like I was an abusive monster,” he said. “I think I’m one of the nicer showrunners that’s ever been.” ■
Rulison says. The company disregarded state inquiries about whether it drug-tested its drivers, as required by law, and its out-ofservice rate—how often inspectors deemed its vehicles unsafe to drive—was 80 percent, more than 13 times the industry average. “Why didn’t they just take the stupid keys away or the plates? No one ever wanted to touch those guys,” says Rulison.
“Things always seem to work in their favor,” he adds. “They get a lot of mysterious breaks.” In 2014, Nauman and Haris Hussain were pulled over on Interstate 787. According to the police, Haris, who was driving, had a revoked license with 28 suspensions. Both were brought to a station where officers learned that the brothers had been ticketed more than 70 times and that Haris had repeatedly used his brother’s identity to avoid arrest. (Both Haris and Nauman go by multiple names. Nauman often uses “Arslan” and “Shawn.”) This resulted in a first-degree felony charge of aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, but it was eventually dropped. “The judge in the limo case said something like it was the longest driving record he’d ever seen,” says Rulison. “It bothered him. It bothers everyone. I have to wrestle it off me. It’s the specter of something higher up. I just wonder if the treatment of Shahed Hussain was because of his work with the government and if that contributed to the crash. I always come up against people who said he’d flaunt that he’s FBI and would be like, ‘Stay away from me. Don’t hassle me. Don’t you know who I am?’”
Rulison says he is sustained by calls from former state employees and other knowledgeable sources wanting to discuss the crash. “Everyone would say that this just doesn’t make any sense,” says Rulison. “These were over-the-top violations.” As he pursued the Hussains, he began to feel worse and worse. In the summer of 2019, the then-48-year-old father of two checked into a hospital. His appendix had burst and sprayed a rare malignant cancer all over his abdomen. He took two months off for a procedure in which a surgeon used his fingers to peel tumors from Rulison’s organs, then he resumed filing stories. Chemotherapy numbed his fingers and addled his brain, but when he went to court, he found he could face the families of the crash victims a little easier. “I was like, ‘My life sucks right now too,’” he says.
Many of the Schoharie families have spiraled. Rich Steenburg, who lost his two sons, Axel and Rich Jr., was so destroyed by the crash that his family didn’t realize he had suffered a series of strokes. “Now he doesn’t remember having children,” says his former wife, Janet. “On the days he does remember, it’s October 6, 2018, and he is just hearing of the boys’ accident.” Beth Muldoon lost her son Adam Jackson and his wife, Abby, and retired from her job to raise the couple’s two daughters. Now 4 and 7 years old, the girls “lost their mom, their dad, four aunts, and two uncles,” says Muldoon. “Also a godfather.” Just before the crash, the Jacksons had moved into a house on the same block as Muldoon. For a year afterward, she says, she had to drive around the block in order not to pass her son’s house “because one of the girls would freak out. She thought we were hiding her parents and wouldn’t let her go see them. Or they’d see their cars in the driveway and say, ‘Mommy’s home! Daddy’s home!’ And then they would get really angry at us.”
The NTSB published its full report on the crash in fall 2020. It remains the definitive statement on the disaster despite the difficulties agents had accessing the scene. Addressing the public at an online hearing, board members struggled to contain their fury. Much of it was directed at the Department of Transportation, which knew Prestige was a threat—the report counted 32 times the agency had interacted with the company—and failed to act. But the deepest outrage was reserved for the Hussains. “Prestige,” vice-chairman Bruce Landsberg said, his face glowing red on the screen. “I can’t say enough negative about their disregard for human life.”
for the district attorney to prosecute Nauman Hussain criminally, they considered their options for a civil lawsuit. The NTSB concluded that the state’s “ineffective oversight of Prestige” had been a probable cause of the deaths, but it is extremely hard to sue the government for a disaster like the one in Schoharie. In 2005, in a similar case just 60 miles away, a tour boat on Lake George capsized on a clear day, killing 20 out of 47 passengers, most of them senior citizens. The NTSB placed heavy blame on lax inspection requirements, but when victims’ families sued, a court ruled that the state enjoyed governmental immunity. Essentially, no matter how badly the people entrusted with protecting the public screw up,
their failure has no consequences.
That left the dozen or so lawyers representing families of the Schoharie victims searching for someone else to blame. The Hussains had taken out an insurance policy on the Excursion, but it was for only $500,000, or $25,000 per death. The Crest Inn was worth perhaps $1 million— again, not much when split 20 ways. There was, however, a tantalizing target in Malik Riaz, the billionaire relative. The Times Union helped reveal that he had purchased the Crest Inn in 2010. The Hussains mixed limo and hotel work by storing vehicles on the property and using its address for both businesses, which prompted the Schoharie litigants to name Riaz as a co-defendant in civil suits. The case is considered a long shot. “Malik didn’t know anything about the operations,” one of his lawyers says. In a deposition last year from Pakistan, where he lives, Riaz said he rarely spoke to his brother and hadn’t seen him since the limo crash.
Another deep pocket materialized as the Schoharie district attorney looked into Prestige’s records. Over the years, the Hussains often took the Excursion to Mavis Discount Tire, a national chain, for inspections and repairs. They shouldn’t have: The branch wasn’t authorized to inspect vehicles that large. According to the DA, a Mavis manager admitted to inaccurate billing practices, “where certain services were substituted on invoices for ones actually performed,” including for work done on the Excursion. Nauman Hussain had been billed for a brake repair that was not performed as invoiced. Although the NTSB and a forensic investigator hired by the state police separately concluded the limo had crashed because of Prestige’s “egregious disregard for safety” and “neglect of mandated commercial-vehicle inspections and maintenance,” the Mavis disclosure turned the company into a target, one with the resources to deliver substantial compensation to victims’ families. The chain was recently acquired by a private-equity group for $6 billion. (Mavis maintains that it “bears no legal responsibility for this tragedy and the events that led up to it.”)
The revelation also gave the Hussains, who had recently hired Joe Tacopina, one of the most prominent defense lawyers in the U.S., a potential escape from prosecution. As Casey Seiler said, “Mavis blows a hole in the prosecution’s case.”
The criminal case against Nauman Hussain concluded on a Thursday afternoon in early September. Anticipating an angry and overflowing crowd, court officials converted the Schoharie High School gym into a makeshift courthouse. A bomb squad swept the locker rooms and the cafeteria, and police officers watched as 100 or so people filed in. The victims’ families, wearing sneakers, T-shirts, and hoodies, occupied a space near a podium. The Hussain entourage wheeled in smartly, shoes shined and cuts faded, escorted by a pair of bodyguards. Nauman took his seat at the defense table and stared at the parquet floor, flanked by Tacopina and his other lawyer, Lee Kindlon, both wearing massive gold watches. Nauman’s girlfriend, Melissa Bell, came in clutching a Louis Vuitton purse. Haris Hussain slouched so far back in his folding chair it groaned.
Judge George R. Bartlett III presided from a dais backed by championship banners for wrestling and volleyball. “We are all here today hoping for justice,” he told the courtroom. For almost three years, Bartlett had presided without urgency, allowing repeated delays and doing little to intercede in the dispute between local officials and the NTSB. Now he held his head in his hands, wept, and pleaded with the victims’ families to understand why he was allowing the district attorney to broker a plea deal in which Nauman Hussain would serve zero days in prison.
“I understand that many people, with good reason, feel the proposed sentence here is way too light. Twenty people are dead. How could the justice system even contemplate a sentence that does not impose decades of incarceration?” said Bartlett, reading haltingly from a statement in a tone that grew increasingly detached, as if the author were a mere observer in his own courtroom. “I have given it many hours of thought. It just does not seem right that 20 people are dead and the defendant receives a sentence of probation and community service.”
Bartlett turned to address the victims’ families directly, his voice coming over the gym’s tinny PA explaining why he had accepted the plea agreement the DA had brokered with the defense. Mavis had “weakened the district attorney’s case,” he said. “The evidence shows that Mr. Hussain paid Mavis for certain brake services, but such services were not described or reflected accurately on the Mavis invoices.” According to the agreement, Bartlett said, Hussain could not have foreseen the brake failure. He did not address the likelihood that the limousine had lost its stopping power because it was carrying so much passenger weight— much of it illegal because of the way the Hussains had falsely registered the vehicle. As for whether the Hussains bore any responsibility for the tragedy by taking the Excursion to an unqualified inspector, Bartlett said he simply deferred to the DA, who believed the actions did not “constitute a gross deviation from the standard for care that a reasonable person would observe.”
As the judge read, the families, who had known a deal was brewing, did not visibly react. When it was time for them to read victim-impact statements, it was clear their tempers were boiling over. “You are still a mass murderer,” John Schnurr, the brother of victim James Schnurr, said to Nauman Hussain. “You’ve turned my life into a living hell, pure torture,” said Kim Marie Bursese, mother of Savannah Bursese. “My life has fallen apart, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to get it started again,” said Kyle Ashton, the stepfather of Michael Ukaj. The statements lasted three hours—a reminder of how many people had died.
Then an extraordinary thing happened. Continuing his efforts to convince the families that justice had been served, Bartlett told them what they were getting instead of the punishment many said they desperately wanted Nauman Hussain to receive. “By pleading guilty, the defendant will have admitted his criminal negligence under oath,” he said. “Such will allow this to be used in any civil action. Moreover, by pleading guilty, the defendant no longer has a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. Thus, he can be compelled to testify in any civil actions.”
No one in the gym needed it to be fleshed out. Bartlett had teed up Mavis, which is now the focus of a number of lawsuits filed by the families. “It’s a way of saying, ‘There’s no justice coming out of this courtroom. If you want to get justice, go over there,’” says Kevin Luibrand, who added that “in 38 years of practicing law, I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Then the proceedings ended. The Hussains sped off in a black SUV. They had repeated the pattern again—acting in disregard for life and the law but suffering scant consequences.
While Tacopina expounded before TV cameras, I looked for Larry Rulison, who had locked himself out of his car and was wandering around. Chemo, I assumed. Rulison often said things like, “My brain isn’t right.” His body doesn’t work well either—he holds on to the railings when he climbs stairs—and I thought he might be struggling physically. But when I found him, he was alone in downtown Schoharie, walking away from the scene, distraught.
“I’m shattered,” he told me. “I guess I have no idea how painful this has been to those families. I thought I knew emotional pain. I thought cancer was tough.” I offered him a ride, but he said he was going to type up an account of the day on his phone, find someone to break into his car, and drive home.
who had recently left his hedge fund after decades of pressuring companies to increase shareholder returns, saying he wanted to make investments that contributed to the greater good. (“I’m on a crusade,” Ubben said in 2020. “I’ve got five years to fix the harm I’ve done.”) Nikola raised more than $500 million in venture capital from Ubben and others. Then, in 2020, it went public via a spac, merging with a publicly traded shell company that was run by a former top executive at GM. The deal created a huge windfall for everyone involved. Milton received a $70 million cash payment and became the public company’s largest shareholder. The day he wrote his fateful tweet, he was worth more than $8 billion on paper.
Anderson started to poke around on the internet, where Milton had left a long trail of self-promoting bread crumbs. One reason that spac mergers have become so popular is that they dodge SEC regulations that require companies to observe a “quiet period” around the time of their IPO. Milton tweeted 2,283 times, an average of eight or nine posts a day, during the first nine months of 2020. Internal communications cited by the government in subsequent legal proceedings show that he was focused intensely on influencing Robinhood investors via social media.
On YouTube, Anderson watched a video of a stagy industry event Milton had held at his Salt Lake City headquarters in 2016. The chief executive whizzed onstage in an electric off-road vehicle, emanating booyah energy. Wearing a pair of low-slung jeans, he spoke in front of a semi, the Nikola One, which was covered with a huge white sheet. “For every doubter out there who said, ‘There’s no way this is true; how could that be possible?,’ we’ve done it,” Milton said. Often, prototypes presented at trade shows are dummies known as “pushers.” Milton invited the audience, which included the governor of Utah, to “see the truck, know it’s real, touch it, feel how sturdy it is. You’re going to see that this is a real truck. This is not a pusher.”
From the beginning, there had been skepticism about his claims within the automotive industry. “Trevor Milton Wants to Revolutionize Trucking, and He Doesn’t
Care If You Don’t Believe Him,” read the headline of a 2016 profile in the trade magazine Commercial Carrier Journal. Four years later, shortly after Nikola went public, Bloomberg News published an anonymously sourced story reporting that the Nikola One prototype at the 2016 unveiling was not actually a functioning vehicle. Milton responded on Twitter, calling the reporter, Edward Ludlow, a “deceiver” and a “jackjob” and saying he should be fired. Then he texted one of his board members: “Share value went up after my response.”
It was around this time that Anderson talked with Mark Pugsley, an attorney he knew in Utah who specializes in representing whistleblowers. Pugsley told Anderson that he represented three people who were preparing to file a whistleblowing complaint against Nikola with the SEC. Milton “had left a trail of people in his wake who he had just screwed over,” Pugsley says. He wouldn’t identify his clients to me by name, but he says they were familiar with Nikola and its technology. During the pandemic, one of them had hunkered down in a garage filled with documents and whiteboards in an obsessive quest to prove Milton was a phony.
“They were all experts in the area that Nikola purported to be in,” Pugsley says. “They were watching the ridiculous statements and thinking, This is total bullshit.”
Anderson evaluated the information the whistleblowers had compiled. Some claims were easy to fact-check. Milton had said that Nikola’s trucks were to be powered by batteries and hydrogen-fuel cells. A little research revealed that Nikola had filed a federal lawsuit against a battery manufacturer that it had agreed to acquire, claiming it had only recently discovered the company’s president, a former consultant to was under indictment for putting his visits to prostitutes on his government expense account. As for hydrogen, Anderson was able to confirm that Nikola’s director of hydrogen production was Milton’s brother, Travis. His job before joining Nikola? Paving driveways in Hawaii.
Despite Milton’s boasts that the Nikola One was “not a pusher,” it lacked basic components—including gears and motors— at the time of its unveiling. An inside source told Hindenburg that workers had scrambled to assemble it on the eve of the show with off-the-shelf parts from a hardware store. It had to be towed onto the stage for the event. Its electrical components, including systems in the cab that Milton demonstrated, were powered by an electrical cable running beneath the stage.
The pièce de résistance, though, was the video of the rolling truck. The company had shot the commercial in cooperation with
one of its parts suppliers, and it was Milton who had insisted that it show the Nikola One “in motion,” company executives later told a law firm that conducted an internal investigation. Some insiders insist this was a common automotive-industry practice. (Every automobile company in the world is a liar, Nikola’s head of manufacturing told the internal investigation, “if rolling a truck down a hill is a fabrication.”) But Anderson immediately recognized the potency of the anecdote. “The truck had zero horsepower,” he says.
Acting on information from a former employee, Pugsley’s clients managed to pinpoint the road, a deserted stretch of the Mormon Trail. As a test, one of Hindenburg’s informants drove to the top of the hill, put his Honda SUV in neutral, and let it roll. The SUV reached a maximum speed of 56 miles per hour.
Meanwhile, Milton was obliviously tweeting away. He had recently announced an ambitious pivot into making consumer vehicles, posting a CGI rendering of a hybrid pickup truck called the Badger. He claimed to have “literally built the most badass pickup truck the world had ever seen,” a “fully functioning” prototype that could “whoop a Ford F-150.” Shortly after Nikola went public, Milton tweeted out a new feature: Water produced as a by-product of the hydrogen-fuel cells would feed into a fountain in the cab, producing “cold, clean, pure drinking water.” (A few days later, Milton allegedly Googled a question: “Can you drink water from a fuel cell?”)
In fact, there was no working pickup prototype. But in September 2020, Nikola announced a deal with GM. In return for $2 billion in Nikola stock, the Detroit automaker would engineer and manufacture the Badger using its own technology. Milton had faked it, and now GM was going to make it. Nikola’s share price shot up 30 percent after the deal was announced.
Two days later, Hindenburg published. Pugsley and his clients were waiting, tracking Nikola’s stock chart on their web browsers. They cheered as the line plunged. “It was a blast,” Pugsley says. “It was just a very rewarding experience to watch it come out and watch the stock tank.”
Awanted to know how Hindenburg had done it. Anderson says that private investigators—hired by Milton, he assumed—went to elaborate lengths to identify his sources. A rumor went around the short-selling world that Musk, who also plans to make trucks, had somehow ordered up the Nikola hit.
Anderson laughs off the notion that he is a puppet and defends the motivations of his sources. “I don’t think most whistleblowers and even short sellers, for that matter,” he says, “start with the idea that, like, Wow, this can be a great business; all I need to do is pick fights with corporate sociopaths, and I can do really well.” In the Nikola case, he says, “it started, I think, just as abject horror that something this egregious and wrong could continue to fail forward and upward.”
Shorts see themselves as a force of correction restoring balance to the marketplace. But for every bet they win, there is a loser, someone who believed the stock was headed up. Over the past year, the eternal conflict between bulls and bears has turned into a social-media battle. “It’s not that different than the tribal warfare we see in the political sphere,” says Carey. The dynamic played out most dramatically in last year’s frenzy over GameStop. Rabble-rousers on Reddit decided to coordinate what is known as a squeeze against traders who had shorted the beleaguered strip-mall retailer, driving up the price in order to force them to cover their positions at a loss. This was the first in a series of meme-stock rallies that seemed to be driven less by profit motives than by a mob mentality and a desire to strike a blow against predatory capitalism. After the GameStop squeeze, one of the bestknown activists, who took heavy losses, announced he was giving up on publishing short research. It was just getting too dangerous to be a rationalist.
Anderson says it was a “bizarre period.” It was particularly agonizing because while he felt the anger was misdirected, he understood where it was coming from—it was the same thing that first drove him to become a whistleblower. “I think there was a very legitimate undercurrent of thinking that the elites or the wealthy had long manipulated the system to benefit themselves and disadvantage regular people,” he says. “And that’s something I strongly identify with because we spend most of our time trying to identify those people that manipulate the system.” The irony, in his view, was that “those guns were kind of trained on us, the short sellers.”
Lately, Anderson has been talking about taking Hindenburg in new directions that are not so clearly linked to stock speculation. He wants to turn its website into a platform for the kind of financial investigative journalism that the ailing news industry has largely abandoned. In recent months, he has kept me abreast of Hindenburg’s work on a forensic project involving an overseas conglomerate. “We just downloaded the entire Mauritius corporate registry,” he told me in late November. “It’s a pretty extensive web.” He was still figuring out how he would be able to profit from the investigation’s findings, whenever it ultimately came to completion.
Meanwhile, he has continued to watch Nikola’s stock, which remains one of his largest short positions. Milton resigned in the aftermath of Hindenburg’s report and an ensuing Me Too scandal—CNBC reported that two women had accused him of sexually abusing them as minors. GM scuttled the partnership deal, and the SEC began a fraud investigation of Nikola, which recently concluded with the company’s agreeing to pay a $125 million settlement, of which the whistleblowers in Utah are expecting a significant cut. (Nikola’s management and board members, including Ubben, declined to comment for this article, as did Milton, who has pleaded not guilty to the fraud charges. He has also denied the abuse allegations.) Milton’s indictment produced further damaging revelations about the state of the company’s technology, such as the allegation that, contrary to his claims to have discovered a way to produce hydrogen fuel at a quarter of the market price, “Nikola had never obtained a permit for, let alone constructed, a hydrogen production station, nor had it produced any hydrogen.”
Still, despite all that, Nikola’s stock had not gone to zero. Instead, it’s been hovering at around $10 a share, giving Nikola a capitalization of more than $4 billion. Milton has cashed out millions’ worth of stock, but he still owns enough of the company that he remains a billionaire, or close to it, on paper.
“I view that more as a reflection of the complete market insanity that we’re in now,” Anderson says. “Where pictures of digital tulips are trading for hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
This past fall, the electric-vehicle companies Lucid and Rivian, neither of which has sold more than a handful of automobiles, went public and instantly vaulted past GM in market value. Over just 12 trading days, Tesla gained nearly $400 billion in market capitalization in what Fortune declared to be the sharpest such jump in history. The S&P 500 has gained 40 percent since January 20, 2020, when the CDC identified the first case of covid in the U.S. An average of three spacs a day were going public in December, The Wall Street Journal reported, raising billions in capital from investors despite a dismal track record. (Three in four last year ended up trading below their initial offering price.) Donald Trump is getting in on the boom, naturally, striking a spac deal to raise money for his new media company, which was valued at roughly $2 billion in December. On January 6, the spac’s stock rose another 20 percent following the announcement that it will launch an app, Truth Social, on Presidents’ Day. And the truck just keeps rolling.