I thought I had followed the case. I had never seen this video.
This video packs so much of what the case unspools into this like, you know, 29-minute video, and it's so raw and intimate.
I'm Adam Goldman and joined here by one of my favorite reporters, Emma Goldberg. And we're here to talk about reporting New York and this book that I wrote, Men in the Mirror, which is a story about New York City, a story about America in this age.
I'm so excited to be here. So excited to have you here. I have read, I think, all or most of your books. And I feel like often you are taking us deep into a world. And this is maybe your deepest dive. It's like you've tightened, you've narrowed the aperture, and we're going so deep into a world that's both like familiar and then the deeper you get, like totally foreign.
You know, it started as the story of this case, the case of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny, death on the New York City subway.
It happened on an F train Monday afternoon.
Jordan Neely was a homeless man who struggled with mental illness. Neely was reportedly asking for food and shelter on the subway Monday afternoon and was suffering from a mental health episode when a man placed him in a chokehold.
Now, dramatic video of this incident has been released.
A Marine veteran has Neely in a sleeper hold from behind.
Neely passed out and was pronounced dead at Lenox Hill Hospital.
This case highlights many issues New Yorkers experience on a daily basis.
I don't think there should be charges.
Shouldn't be, yeah.
Yeah. No charges, no charges.
I don't know.
Daniel Penny is going to stand trial beginning on October 8th.
A jury in New York City today found Marine veteran Daniel Penny not guilty in the chokehold death of Jordan Neely.
As you know, from the moment it happened, it became this kind of American Rorschach test. This was vigilantism. This was a story of urban anarchy. This was a hero. This was a villain. And I'm curious as you read it, the approach I tried to take was to dive into this thing that everybody had approached full of narrative and full of agenda and full of prefabricated ideas. And to actually render the story with complexity. And I think that's something you do in your work so much. What did you make of the people you encountered as opposed to the narratives that you had heard about the case?
It's yeah, it's fascinating. It's like I feel like one thing that you really do hear is you make us think about how we all see each other almost as projections. Like whether it's like what people project on a video or on social media or as a street performer and like the little glimpse of someone that you get passing by on the street. And it feels like you and your reporting think about like what's behind that projection? Like what is the person who is projecting that image out to the world actually thinking and feeling and how do they become real? And I was thinking cuz when I learned what this book was about, I kind of had a certain idea of how it was going to be told. And then I opened it...
What do you think that was?
I thought it was going to be the Jordan Neely story. And I thought like that was going to be really moving and powerful, but I thought it was going to be sort of about this one man's devastating journey through the city. And instead it was about like this kaleidoscopic view of that story. Like every person who crossed paths with him and who saw him projected in a certain way, but maybe misunderstood him and what was behind his own projection. And that made it so much richer. And I think the minute I started it and you started with Daniel Penny's lawyer, I was like, oh, this book is not what I thought it was going to be and it's so much more complicated.
It's really interesting that word projection is a really powerful word. I think so many of you think about actual projection, you're taking a small thing and then you're putting light there and you're making a big image out of it, but there's a lot of distortion.
Right? But at the heart of this case was a question of whether Daniel Penny didn't merely choke Jordan Neely to death and cause the loss of his life, but whether he did that because he didn't see him as a full person. You know, you and I are both reporters and I think we're also people who care a lot about story and how a story is told. And one of the things that's interesting about that, and I see this in your work as well, is that when you do a lot of reporting, it's messy, it's all over the place, you have a lot of receipts, but you're going to drown in receipts. And if you care about storytelling also, a lot of what happens is you end up kind of concealing the reporting. That's the art of a certain kind of writing and a certain kind of nonfiction. And a lot of readers end up not quite realizing the process of what goes into reporting. I think our profession has been very bad at actually explaining itself. And so what we thought we might do in this show is take what's in the book, that's this very packaged, very sculpted piece of writing based on all this reporting, based on what we sometimes call gathering string in our profession, and actually unspool it a little bit. Take one piece of evidence at a time, one piece of evidence in an episode, and actually just look at it and say, 'What do we see in this?' And show people a little bit of the kind of reporting that goes into making something like this.
I think it's a really exciting chance to kind of hear everything that went into this cuz one thing I thought while reading the book is it would have been so natural for you to use this crutch of just telling us everything you did cuz you like it's so clear how exhaustive the reporting journey was, right? Like we're on a subway platform at 5:00 a.m. We're, you know, in a city official's office. We're in a clubhouse. We're in Tompkins Square Park. We're all over the city. But you don't use yourself as a crutch. You just let us be in the moment with the characters. Like it's almost like a movie. And that did make me really wonder like as such a reporting nerd, like oh my god, like what did you even do to get all of these moments in these scenes?
So why don't we today look at this interrogation video which I think in some ways, you know, was merely one piece of evidence in a trial that had many, many, many pieces of evidence. But to me felt like a very pivotal moment when first you thought you were saying one thing and then you began to see something else and that something else became the very burning heart of the case.
Yeah, I would love to look at it.
Cool. How you doing today?
I'm doing well. How are you guys?
Daniel, do me a favor. Just sit in the seat here for me.
Okay.
Yeah. Served in the Marine Corps, did you?
Served in the Marine Corps.
I know a little bit more than the sanitation. What was your MOS in the Marine Corps?
Oh, cool. You must have gotten your weapons for two years. That's nice.
I don't know what that is, so I don't know what that stuff is.
It's like another language.
So what's really striking at the beginning of this video is the camaraderie. And look, we all know detectives have a skill and a craft as we reporters do to get people talking and that means creating a sense of comfort and connection. But when many people in court saw this, it reinforced this idea that I think had attached itself to the case from the very beginning, which is that Daniel Penny got an easy ride. That was the sort of perception and narrative. Got an easy ride from the police because they identified with him. You served in the Marine Corps, I also served in the Marine Corps. The detective then kind of shows on his sleeve, I got my death before dishonor tattoo right here.
When they have that connection, do you think the detective, it helps humanize him to the detective?
Yes, and as we're going, we're going to be talking about this idea of dehumanization that becomes important in this video, and what you see here is the opposite. You're exactly right. You see humanization. It doesn't feel to me or read to me in that moment like we're merely seeing a shrewd interrogation tactic. It really seems like the detective wants Daniel Penny's approval.
Did my thing and then I ended up here. Now I got close to 22 years in now, man.
Yeah, man. When did you get out of the military?
Uh 2020, 2021. Around there.
How many years did you do?
Any deployments at all or...
Yeah, I deployed twice. I did a float. I was in the Med and then 7th Fleet I think it is, 6th Fleet. Within the Persian Gulf, around there. And then Okinawa.
That's the WestPac, right? That's the WestPac over...
Yeah, yeah.
That's good stuff, man.
I feel like one of the things you're doing in this book is you're interpreting the languages that people speak in the different worlds of New York. And one world that I did not really expect to understand more in this book is the world of like Marines and ex-Marines and like why do people serve and what ethic do they learn there and how does that ethic become kind of a complicated way of navigating the world? So, like how did you report out the ethic and the vocabulary of the world of the Marine?
I really wanted to understand the makings of Daniel Penny's mind and heart. And I did not have access to Daniel Penny except for speaking to him finally at the end of the trial. And so, I had to kind of work around that limitation. And what I decided to do among other things was I spent a lot of time in his town, West Islip, but I also decided to spend time with his former Marine Corps unit, the specific group that he was in. I went, I spent several days with them. I interviewed, you know, many, many people in that unit. I watched them do their training in the woods and really tried to understand the training that I think is deeply formative. The Marine Corps has a philosophy that I think a lot of Americans don't understand.
