Ownership of a Name

In the aftermath of an American mass shooting, a predictable marketplace tends to open. The perpetrator’s story competes with the survivors’ grief, and the coverage hands the killer a perverse sort of immortality. The law has never found a clean way through it, weighing free-expression protections against the revulsion of a criminal cashing in on his own infamy. After a school shooting in Florida, one survivor simply bought the silence instead.

Anthony Borges was fifteen, a soccer player with a defender’s instinct, when he used his body to barricade a classroom door. He shielded twenty classmates and took five bullets doing it. While Borges spent the following years rebuilding himself through a dozen surgeries, the legal system offered a form of restitution that had nothing to do with money. In a settlement between the gunman and the boy he had tried to kill, Borges acquired the exclusive rights to the shooter’s name.

The agreement seals off the gunman’s future celebrity. He cannot grant an interview, authorize a biography, or cooperate with a documentary filmmaker without Borges’s written consent. "Son of Sam" laws—state statutes meant to stop criminals profiting from their stories—tend to buckle on constitutional grounds; this is a binding civil contract, a privatized censorship in which the victim holds the pen.

The surrender is total. The shooter, serving a life sentence, has signed away his standing as a public figure. Any outlet wanting to examine his pathology must first ask the man who carries the scars of the encounter. And the erasure reaches past the paperwork: on the killer’s death, his brain must be donated to science, reducing him to a specimen on a slab. The perpetrator went looking for the fame of the headline. Instead he is a tenant in his own story, his legacy held by the very life he failed to end.