The Lie Detector in the Age of Alternative Facts
“I have submitted myself to multiple lie detector tests.”
That was Russell Simmons, responding to a lawsuit, filed last week, that accuses him of rape—the 16th allegation of sexual misconduct that has been made against the mogul since November. Adam Grandmaison, better known as Adam22, the founder of the hip-hop podcast No Jumper, recently addressed the accusations of rape and assault made against him with a similar reference to the lie detector: “I’m taking a polygraph this week fuck it,” he tweeted. The statements came not long after the actor Jeremy Piven, in an attempt to defend against his own #MeToo accusations, took—and passed—a polygraph test. As part of the lead-up to Stormy Daniels’s 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, her attorney, Michael Avenatti, claimed that his client had submitted to a polygraph in 2011 and given what that test found to be truthful answers to such questions as, “Around July 2006, did you have vaginal intercourse with Donald Trump?” and, “Around July 2006, did you have unprotected sex with Donald Trump?”
A report about the test results, provided to CNN by Avenatti, declared that the chance Daniels had lied on the test is “less than 1 percent.”
Is that a lie? (How can you tell for sure?) Is it one more alternative fact, an argument in the guise of a truth, casually flung into the world to tilt it, just a little bit, off its axis? Lying, at this point in cultural history, has the paradoxical distinction of being at once a common practice and a nearly universally agreed-upon violation of Americans’ tenuous social contract; both of those facts have allowed it to become easily weaponized. If you don’t like something someone says, you lie is an easy—and, if your goal is to stymie further discussion, effective—retort. So is bad faith. So is fake news.
Stormy Daniels insists that she has come forward now not, strictly, for a payout or on behalf ofa political agenda, but rather; her suit claims that Trump’s lawyer has made statements “meant to convey that Ms. Clifford is a liar, someone who should not be trusted.” Cable news shows, after Daniels’s interview with Anderson Cooper, filled the air with analyses of her delivery (, some pundits said, assessing the performance; asked others). CNN Trump supporters who had assembled to watch the interview: “I don’t believe itbecause I haven’t seen any hard proof,” one of them said. “Shouldwe believethe president of the United States or a stripper porn star?”
