Don’t just focus on the victims
The villains deserve our attention, too.
When Reveal reporter Aaron Glantz was investigating the fallout from the 2009 financial crash, he spent a lot of time visiting with the victims — people living in the housing owned and mismanaged by those who’d done some slick real estate dealing. A target of his investigation was Donald Trump’s longtime friend, Tom Barrack.
“I thought the star of that documentary was going to be this woman that I met in Atlanta who was living in one of his properties,” Glantz said, to a packed crowd at Storyology. “She was lying in bed with her newborn baby, and the ceiling fan fell on her.” Glantz thought this would be the moment people remembered, that caused them to care about the story.
Then he called Tom Barrack.
He caught him, apparently, having lunch somewhere in Mexico. Barrack told him to get in touch with his people to arrange a proper interview. Glantz had been trying to contact him for a while, and didn’t want to waste the moment. So he fired off his questions.
Barrack hung up on him.
It was that short phone conversation with the villain of the story, Tom Barrack, that caught the audience’s attention.
“I was shocked that people just really loved it, even though he didn’t answer a question.”
Sometimes, he realized, it’s better to lead with the villain instead of the victim. That’s the thread that connects all the victims.
“Perpetrators are often just fascinating people,” Glantz said. So, all of the work you might put into filling out the victims’ stories—“instead, put all of that into, you know, finding out if Tom Barrack’s wine tastes good, backgrounding his ex-wives.”
But he stressed the importance of telling both sides in a way that doesn’t lose sight of the bigger picture.
“I don’t want people’s reaction to be, oh isn’t that sad,” Glantz said. “I want them to get upset and solve the problem. And so let’s focus on the person causing the problem.”
