Story on force-feeding teaches author key lesson about negotiating with sources

Bill Coleman was in prison for raping his wife, but I contacted him because I wanted to talk about torture. He had been on hunger strike for more than five years to protest his conviction and the prison in Connecticut where he was incarcerated had received court permission to force-feed him. They did so, repeatedly, over the course of those years, strapping him down and shoving a rubber tube up his nose, down his throat, then dumping Ensure, a nutritional drink, into his stomach.

It was the subject of intubation as torture that caused me to contact Coleman. At the time I had been researching the case of a Florida woman, Terri Schiavo, who had been in a persistent vegetative state, her body kept on a feeding tube. Schiavo’s case turned into a national media scrum in 2005 when the courts and the White House dueled for custody of her body. The courts — and her husband, Michael Schiavo, who wanted the tube removed — ultimately won against her family, the Republican administration, and “pro-life” groups who had taken up the cause. But the case transfixed the American public. At the time, with my own father dying and the idea of a book swimming in my head, I asked myself, “Where else in this country can a person be fed against their will?”

It was a slippery question. The Florida judge had ruled that Schiavo, based on testimony from friends and her husband, would not have wanted to be intubated. So my use of the term “against their will” was based on a court ruling. But the inquiry led me to a slew of related Google alerts (“force-feeding,” hunger strike,” “intubation”), then to prison, to the ACLU lawyer who represented Bill Coleman, and ultimately to Coleman himself.

At first we communicated through letters: formal and narrow inquiries about force-feeding from me; and from Coleman, scrawling, multi-page screeds about men’s rights, child welfare (he had two children), women’s use of sexual accusations to get custody of children in divorce settlements, the Men’s Rights Association that he was affiliated with. Then Coleman and I succeeded in adding my name to his telephone list. If I paid exorbitant amounts of money to a prison phone service, Coleman could call me every Tuesday and Thursday at 9 a.m. And he did, religiously. We spoke for 15 minutes at a time, the duration a prisoner may use the phone. He desperately wanted me to write about his criminal conviction; I desperately wanted to write about his force-feedings. We were both frank about what our interest was in these twice-a-week phone calls. I spent months pouring over his case documents and researching spousal rape. Yet, I felt that regardless of the reason for his incarceration – even rape – he didn’t deserve to be tortured.

After nearly a year of contact with Coleman, I finally pulled together a pitch and then a story on his plight. My editor at Guernica magazine, Jina Moore, and I wavered back and forth: Should we include why Coleman was in prison? If my purpose was to examine bodily autonomy in various contexts, to expose the medical use of a tube to violate a person’s rights, didn’t Coleman’s rape conviction belong in the story? As we worked and reworked the drafts, it became clear to both of us that Coleman’s torture was the thread we wanted to open with and follow throughout.

The reason for his conviction, the rape of his wife, ultimately appears three-quarters of the way through the piece; its purpose is to highlight how little his crime has to do with his torture: I do not know if Coleman’s an “innocent man wrongfully convicted” as the pink and black website kept by his brother Geoff reads across the top. I do know that most of the world agrees that force-feeding someone, even a prisoner who is convicted of raping his wife and has refused solid food for five years, is torture.

When the story, “The Longest Hunger Strike,” went live on January 15, 2013, I sent a copy to Coleman, not sure if he would like it. But we had established a solid friendship over the many months of communication. He realized that I had told at least a part of his story in the truest way I could. The article got me an agent, then a book contract, then a book, “The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America,” which was published by Beacon Press in February of this year.

But the article also taught me a lesson. Sources don’t always want the same thing a journalist does from their generous sharing of the intimacies of their lives. Negotiating what should be told in a story is not easy, and the ethics of clear and consistent communication with a source can be trying, even perilous. Yet, frank communication can produce a lasting piece of journalism with impact.

Coleman and I are still in contact. After his sentence was served, the U.S. deported him back to his native country, the UK. We share links and articles on Facebook almost weekly. Would I call him a friend? Yes. And yet, there are parts of his life that still make me wince. But I will always be thankful for the time and information he shared with me, for the grueling tussles over content, for the disclosure he willingly gave. He trusted me, and it’s that trust that made his tale of torture resonate with so many.

Ann Neumann, a visiting scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University, will appear in discussion with Michelle Levander, director of the Center for Health Journalism, at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism on March 29 at noon to discuss her book “The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America” and offer ideas for how to report on this taboo topic. Lunch provided. Find more info and RSVP here.