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Barrett Brown spends much of his day on an exercise ball in a small bedroom he shares with his fiancée, Sylvia Mann, and a parrot named Esteban. Freed from his cage, Esteban flaps across the room, his green wings gusting open books and causing visitors to duck their heads. Brown sings to him and offers a peanut. Mann enters and the parrot zips over to her, nestling his beak into her collarbone. She edits the radical journal Freedom, is involved in London leftist protest politics, and tends to bring home creatures of mysterious provenance. My arrival in December at their house in Bournemouth, on England’s southern coast, was preceded by that of some small turtles, which rested in the bathtub for a few days before being spirited elsewhere. “My girlfriend is an ecoterrorist,” Brown says, laughing but not joking.
The couple lives with Mann’s mother; a mellow Alsatian; a black-tufted, jacket-wearing cat; another parrot; and four human lodgers: a Ph.D. student from Beirut, who arrived as an Airbnb guest years earlier and never left, and a Czech activist, plus their partners. In winter, Bournemouth is a dreary town, quiet compared with its summer high season, and the house, filled with a catholic mix of books and artwork and this human-animal family, has a tumbledown feel. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way for Brown, an “unapologetic seeker of fame and glory,” as he describes himself. There were people to save, governments to overthrow, hegemonies to dismantle. Yet here he is, drying out in a country he admits he can’t stand. As we sit on his bed chatting, he pops a Suboxone pill; he’s off heroin, he says. He vapes tobacco from a Heet device, a smooth oval of aquamarine plastic that he fiddles with between puffs, and reaches for a glass of red wine.
A former “preppy anarchist” — blazer, dress shirt, bottomless contempt for authority — Brown, 42, now looks tired, his face slouching toward hangdog. Once a gregarious social presence, he doesn’t stray far from his English burrow. “I’ve got plenty to contemplate,” he says. “And a lot of it is hard for people to relate to.”
He has few regrets and a lifetime of enemies. As a one-time associate of the hacktivist group Anonymous who went to prison for four years for his efforts to expose what he has called the “cyber-intelligence complex,” he has many erstwhile friends and colleagues who support the cause but not the man. They praise Brown’s writing, for which he once won a coveted National Magazine Award, and practically smile through the phone when recalling his knack for finding interesting people to collaborate with on investigations — everyone from filmmakers and journalists to sex workers and hackers. “Barrett brought a lot of people together,” says Gregg Housh, an activist and a core Anonymous participant who was close with him. Roger Hodge, his editor at The Intercept before Brown pulled his column, says, “The columns were wonderful. I would read them aloud to the newsroom.”
Some of these people speak of their desire to reconcile but don’t want to go on record for fear of antagonizing him. Others dismiss Brown as a paranoid junkie riding political persecution and old glories — helping Tunisian activists topple their government, uncovering a dirty-tricks program that private-intelligence contractors used to discredit WikiLeaks, and generally playing David to the American empire’s Goliath — past their sell-by dates. “Some of Barrett’s behavior is a result of addiction, paranoia, PTSD and not enough postprison support, but systemic contributing factors don’t excuse a pattern of behavior,” says Emma Best, a member of the whistleblower group DDoSecrets who worked with Brown on 29 Leaks, an archive of communications from a London “company mill” that registered more than 450,000 shell companies in various tax havens. “Especially not when there’s no real acceptance of responsibility, no making amends.”
Brown isn’t particularly interested in making amends at the moment. He has a memoir, My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous, coming out from FSG in July, but he’s mostly reading and gaming while waiting to hear about his quixotic bid for political asylum in the United Kingdom, which he feels is the only way to protect himself from the long, vindictive reach of the U.S. government.
“A lot of people who could have used a path like this are already dead,” he tells me, a grim summation of the fate of a whole generation of radical hacker-activists who, like him, rose to prominence in the age of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange and once seemed on the brink of changing the world. Now, what may be called the “transparency movement” — the unofficial confederation of government whistleblowers, digital-rights organizations, free-speech lawyers, leakers, and mercurial trolls in Guy Fawkes masks — is in tatters, undone by FBI infiltration, public indifference, wanton self-destruction, and the sheer folly of taking on an enemy with limitless power.
After publishing his book, which reads as one last cri de coeur against the monstrous union of corporate and state power squelching dissent and empowering fascism, Brown wants out. “I’ll leave them alone, and they’ll leave me alone,” he says, “and then I can live out my days just in quiet.”
Growing up in Dallas in the 1980s and ’90s, Brown was a precocious writing talent, becoming his school’s poet laureate and winning essay contests, but his young life was defined by an almost pathological resistance to authority and by the roguish example of his father, Robert Brown. “I come from southern-gothic dirt,” Brown tells me.
When Barrett was in elementary school, Robert was charged in a real-estate-fraud scheme, but the charges were eventually dropped. At age 17, losing interest in high school (and his school losing patience with him), Barrett learned some Swahili and moved with his father to Tanzania, where the elder Brown had gotten a concession to harvest a certain wood coveted by high-end furniture-makers. But the project went south and father and son beat a swift retreat back to Texas. After his mom kicked him out, Barrett bummed around with his ne’er-do-well dad. In his memoir, Brown recalls “days spent moving office furniture for some bizarre enterprise disguised as a Pentecostal church or editing investor letters in support of some real-estate deal that would invariably fail, nights spent writing and querying and submitting, my motivation rekindled by pure terror.”
Brown describes himself as a drug addict “since early adolescence.” Ritalin led to suicidal ideation, which led to Zoloft, “which allowed me to function like a regular person and even renewed my interest in other human beings,” he writes. He moved to Brooklyn to write and discovered heroin. Somehow, he managed to carve out a freelance career and co-author a satirical book mocking proponents of creationism. (Alan Dershowitz contributed an admiring blurb.) He gave a talk at Rutgers after a night of smoking crack and showed up high at the offices of the New York Observer.
His work started to dovetail with other obsessions. Smart, prankish, and fuming at injustice, Brown came up through online forums and chat rooms that valued irreverence as much as anonymity. People were starting to use a combination of humor, trolling, denial-of-service attacks, and hack-and-leak operations in the service of anti-authoritarian and left-wing causes. In 2010, Chelsea Manning leaked classified materials to WikiLeaks exposing the brutal violence of the war on terror, including a video of a U.S. helicopter firing on and killing Reuters staffers. That same year, a 29-year-old Brown joined one of the Internet Relay Chat servers of Anonymous, then a volatile petri dish where these new forms of resistance were being cultivated.
Some Anonymous operations were little more than harassment, but over time they took on more deserving targets, starting with the Church of Scientology in 2008. As part of Project Chanology, Anonymous-affiliated hackers broke into Scientology computer systems and leaked church materials. They launched denial-of-service attacks and tied up church phone and fax lines. Beginning in February 2008, Anonymous helped inspire masked protests outside Scientology buildings in dozens of cities around the world, while a church video of Tom Cruise extolling the special powers of Scientologists went viral. “Anonymous was a machine that focused attention — a sort of spotlight that could be turned toward whatever needed to be exposed, and attacked,” Brown writes.
During the Arab Spring, Anonymous launched denial-of-service attacks against Tunisian government websites as part of Operation Tunisia. Brown helped create a manual for would-be revolutionaries to document government atrocities, mitigate the effects of tear gas, and block streets with debris. “The Anonymous Guide to Protecting the North African Revolutions” was translated into French and Tunisian Arabic and distributed in local coffee shops. As their compatriots stormed the streets, Tunisian anons hacked police computer systems and promised more cyberattacks until the government expanded civil liberties. Among these activists was Slim Amamou, a Tunisian anon who eventually became his country’s youth and sports minister in the postrevolutionary government. With a small assist from Anonymous, some guy Brown knew only as slim404 in an IRC chat helped overthrow a regime and then form a provisional one.
The moment was freighted with a profound sense of revolutionary possibility. In its ability to combine cyberattacks with on-the-ground protest while generating viral interest and mainstream-media coverage, Anonymous was practicing a new kind of digitally infused activism that would be adapted by various political actors in the coming years.
Brown’s work brought him into contact with many of the transparency movement’s leading lights. With Aaron Swartz, Brown investigated “persona management” programs that they said would allow government agencies to operate hordes of fake identities on social platforms; this was years before “bots” became the subject of public concern. With national-security reporter Michael Hastings, he developed a pipeline into mainstream media, helping get Anonymous stories in front of readers of publications like BuzzFeed. “He had a curiosity in what people were doing,” says Maggie Mayhem, an activist for sex-worker rights and reproductive justice. “He was able to curate just a fascinating network of people.”
In interviews, Brown was sometimes identified (erroneously, he says) as an Anonymous spokesman or a hacker himself, which put him in the crosshairs of a Justice Department that was beginning to take hacktivists seriously. In March 2012, the FBI raided Brown’s mother’s home in Dallas. She was charged with obstruction of justice for putting two of her son’s laptops in a kitchen cabinet. (She pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of obstructing a search warrant.) Brown lost it. Giddy with fury (and possibly in withdrawal from antidepressants and Suboxone), he posted videos threatening to “ruin” the life of an FBI agent who was investigating him. The FBI said Brown went further, claiming (falsely, according to him) he had promised violence, and arrested him the next day while he was on a video stream with several associates.
Brown was charged with making internet threats and intending to publish “restricted personal information” about a federal employee. The government eventually added other charges in connection with an Anonymous offshoot’s 2011 hack of Stratfor, a private-intelligence firm. Brown didn’t participate in the Stratfor hack — he didn’t even know how to code. (In fact, the attack was directed by a hacker named Sabu who turned out to be an FBI informant working on a government-provisioned laptop.) In an Anonymous IRC chat, someone posted a link to a zip file of pilfered Stratfor data. Brown copied the link and shared it in a group chat he maintained with other journalists and activists. He didn’t know what was in the archive, and it had already been posted online, but it contained Stratfor customer credit-card numbers. For sharing the link, Brown was initially charged with 11 counts of aggravated identity theft and another of “access device fraud.” (Federal prosecutors later dropped the identity-theft charges.)
Brown spent 26 months in pretrial detention dealing with innumerable hearings, legal filings, fundraising challenges, prison transfers, unstable inmates, and power-hungry guards. He received a firsthand education in how the legal process is skewed against defendants. “It became clear that, going to trial, I would lose, regardless of what the facts are,” he says. “Sometimes you have to give them a win when you have a sense of how terrible they are.”
Facing a possible prison sentence of 105 years, he pleaded guilty to reduced charges and was incarcerated for four years in total. (He was also ordered to pay $890,000 in restitution.) “The main sticking point was I would not plead guilty to anything involving fraud,” he says, which he calls a “moral crime.”
“I have no problem admitting to an absurd crime,” Brown says. “My job was not to stay out of jail. It was to cause severe damage to this industry,” by which he means the private-intelligence industry.
Brown did not treat prison as a setback. “We had these huge victories,” he says. His brand of accountability activism was bleeding into the mainstream — it still seemed like a viable path to provoking a response from moldering institutions and an apathetic public. Hastings had published accounts of General Stanley McChrystal, the head of the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan, mouthing off to White House and other government officials, leading to McChrystal’s ouster (the general later apologized). Snowden, their contemporary, had shared NSA secrets with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and other reporters, igniting a global debate about mass surveillance. The culture was starting to bend toward Brown’s views. Perhaps jail would just be a blip.
He went in expressing a satirical optimism. “For the next 35 months, I’ll be provided with free food, clothes, and housing as I seek to expose wrongdoing by Bureau of Prisons officials and staff and otherwise report on news and culture in the world’s greatest prison system,” he said in an announcement. In his memoir, he expresses his longtime admiration for Abbé Faria, a “convict-monk” in The Count of Monte Cristo who tells Edmond Dantès about how prison allowed him to develop his mind. “Dantès wonders aloud how much else this sage would have accomplished had he been a free man,” Brown writes. “The Abbé retorts that he would have accomplished very little.”
Brown certainly developed his mind, reading hundreds of books. He also wrote biting, insouciant columns for The Intercept under the heading of “The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison.” Brown wrote some of his pieces with pencil and paper and mailed them to his mother, who typed them up for Hodge. They were slashing works of satire that read as if written by candlelight, the midnight musings of a droll Texan who “lives in a prison.” Among the most memorable was Brown’s meta-review of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Purity, which featured an anti-hero resembling Assange. Brown, whose literary tastes mostly ended at the 19th century, wasn’t impressed.
“I was interested enough in WikiLeaks, state transparency, and emergent opposition networks to do five years in prison over such things,” he wrote, “but I wasn’t interested enough that I would have voluntarily plowed through 500 pages of badly plotted failed-marriage razzmatazz by an author who’s long past his expiration date simply in order to learn what the Great King of the Honkies thinks about all this.”
Brown’s writing can be great insult comedy — your most savage friend cracking you up at the bar — but it’s in service to a cause. This review finished with the kind of sweeping indictment that showed Brown at his best: “We live in a sort of silly cultural hell where the columns are composed by Thomas Friedman, the novels are written by Jonathan Franzen, the debate is framed by CNN, and the fact-checking is done by no one. Franzen’s nightmare — a new regime of technology and information activists that will challenge the senile culture of which he is so perfectly representative — is exactly what is needed.”
Brown didn’t learn he had won a National Magazine Award until he was released from one of several periods of what amounted to solitary confinement. (He had passed the time reading Robert Caro’s multivolume Lyndon Johnson biography.) Hodge, who this month left The Intercept, says he had hoped to hire Brown full time after his prison release. It didn’t turn out that way.
Jailed since 2012 for his investigations, #BarrettBrown has finally been released from prison,” tweeted Snowden on November 29, 2016. “Best of luck in this very different world.”
A lot can happen in four years. Donald Trump had just been elected president. Snowden was living in exile in Russia, while Assange was four years deep into his bleak stay in the Ecuadoran embassy in London. WikiLeaks, which had released a trove of Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails, was being blamed for her loss. James Comey and the FBI had undermined Clinton, but soon the country’s intelligence agencies would be recast as deep-state heroes investigating Russiagate and Trump’s perfidy. The shock over the mass domestic surveillance conducted by the NSA, FBI, and other agencies during the Bush and Obama administrations, with the lucrative cooperation of private-sector partners, had seemingly been swept away as a matter of concern as people eagerly gave all kinds of private information to Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Those who had given up their freedom to call attention to this institutional corruption were either forgotten or dismissed as traitors.
Despite his bravado in the face of incarceration, Brown was transformed by prison life. He mostly dodged the rampant violence, but he certainly observed it, along with its racial castes. “An American prison is many things,” Brown writes, “and among them is a Nazi training camp.” He had gotten clean from heroin while incarcerated and began regularly taking Suboxone, which was smuggled in as thin strips that could be eaten or broken down and snorted, but he developed other maladies, including complex PTSD, which he says took years to fully manifest. As friends and colleagues told me, it seemed as if Brown didn’t have much postprison support. “I definitely had concern for his well-being because he’d been through an enormous amount,” said Alex Winter, who directed Relatively Free, a short documentary about Brown’s daylong drive with his parents from prison to a halfway house on the other side of Texas.
On probation in his native Dallas, Brown bounced between freelance-writing commitments and antagonizing the authorities. He started the Pursuance Project, a continuation of previous efforts to build digital tools and communities for activists, whistleblowers, and journalists to collaborate on investigations. In April 2017, after giving some interviews about his incarceration, Brown was arrested and held for four days for allegedly violating a ban on talking to the media. (He says he was released without charge and calls it an illegal confinement.) “I would call the people who did this a bunch of chicken-shit assholes that are brutalizing the Constitution,” said Jay Leiderman, Brown’s lawyer at the time.
“All these enemies I’ve made are still out there,” Brown says in Relatively Free, though it increasingly seemed as if his enemies extended well beyond the surveillance state to include people he had once considered friends and allies. After Brown wrote for D Magazine about the murder of Botham Jean, who was killed in his apartment in 2018 by an off-duty Dallas police officer, Brown began receiving death threats. When The Intercept shut down its archive of Snowden documents in 2019, Brown burned his National Magazine Award certificate in protest. Hodge told me Brown’s actions were “incomprehensible,” saying he was prone to the kind of “propaganda of the deed that doesn’t really accomplish any goals, either journalistic or activist.”
Brown denounced The Intercept for insufficiently protecting the identity of whistleblower Reality Winner. In an email to the site’s staff criticizing what he called a cover-up regarding the Snowden archive, he reminded them that he had “won the outlet their first National Magazine Award from a fucking segregation cell during a prison term that stemmed from my attempts to stop firms like Palantir from going after people like Glenn” Greenwald. He believes right-wing tech oligarch Peter Thiel — the archvillain of Brown’s personal cosmology — is in cahoots with The Intercept’s original funder and fellow PayPal mafia member Pierre Omidyar. Brown also fell out with Greenwald, whom he criticized as a tool of Thiel’s.
The institutions around Brown seemed irredeemably rotten. He spent four years in federal prison for a cause he believed in, and now strangers were calling in bomb threats to the magazine publishing his work. The media wasn’t up to the task of fighting the rise of fascism. As he writes in his memoir, “It takes years of direct experience with the press to grasp the real extent of its failures, to recognize the patterns of incompetence, laziness, careerism, and cowardice that may be easily confused with complicity, given that the end result is the same.”
He left the United States vowing never to return and moved to Antigua to live in a house rented for him by a wealthy patron. It didn’t last long. A taxi driver tried to scam him, and the situation escalated. “I said I’d kill him if he came back,” Brown told me. He arrived at his sponsor’s house one day to find a local police captain waiting for him. Brown then decided to follow a “posh British woman” he had started dating to the U.K. That relationship fell apart, but in London, Brown met up with Mann, with whom he had a passing online acquaintance. He was soon dating and living with her, splitting time between a narrow canalboat in London and Mann’s mother’s home in Bournemouth.
In April 2021 at a protest against police violence, Brown and several other people held a large two-piece banner that read “COPS KILL.” Later, the pieces were rearranged, and Brown, maskless and wearing a brown jacket among black-clad protesters, was easily identifiable in viral photos of people holding a banner reading “KILL COPS.” Mann came home one morning to find the canalboat unlocked and Brown gone. She found out where he was being held; he was charged with incitement and “causing alarm and distress.”
London police discovered that Brown had overstayed his visa, so he was turned over to immigrant detention. He was now facing deportation back to the U.S. Then, according to Brown, an overheard conversation changed the tenor of his ordeal: A cop told his colleague that the FBI was interested in their prisoner.
Brown began to wonder if there was a sealed indictment awaiting him in the U.S. No one ever actually knows if there’s a sealed indictment waiting for them until they are arrested on the basis of that sealed indictment. Maybe he was paranoid, but he had good cause. Brown had punched the U.S. government in the face, and it slugged him back, leaving an indelible psychic mark. “I think that we should not underestimate both the power of the U.S. government, the anger that they hold against journalism and information that they would like to suppress, and their long memory,” says Poitras, the Oscar-winning filmmaker and Intercept co-founder who was put on a terrorist watch list. “I have an absolute plan B to get out of this country if I need to.”
“The fact that there is a chance for a sealed indictment is enough for me to think he should be attempting asylum,” says Housh, the Anonymous activist. “This is your life.”
Brown felt he had little choice but to try something difficult and idealistic and foolhardy in a lifetime devoted to such pursuits. He decided to request political asylum in the U.K., claiming he wouldn’t be safe from violence or political persecution in his home country. The U.S. and U.K. are as close as allies come, and it’s relatively uncommon for Americans to attempt to seek asylum across the pond. They rarely succeed.
It wasn’t just prison or deportation that Brown feared; it was the fate that had befallen so many of his friends and accomplices.
In January 2013, Swartz killed himself while awaiting trial for having used the MIT network to download a major repository of research papers that were kept behind paywalls. Hastings died in a car crash less than six months later. (My Glorious Defeats is dedicated to his memory.) Leiderman, Brown’s pugnacious lawyer, died of a likely heart attack in 2021.
When Brown was in prison, Kevin Gallagher, a musician and programmer active in free-speech and digital-rights campaigns, became a steadfast supporter. He raised money for legal fees, coordinated online messaging around Brown’s case, and sued the Department of Justice for collecting information on donors to Brown’s legal-defense fund. After Brown was released, Gallagher became a member of Pursuance. They worked together in Signal group chats while developing a software platform that could allow for secure communications and document management. In June 2021, Gallagher had been missing for about a week, worrying Brown and his colleagues. Brown asked a Pursuance chat member who lived in San Francisco to check on Gallagher at his home. She found him dead in a fetid apartment.
Brown was devastated. Gallagher was widely eulogized, described as the “definition of cypherpunk,” a talented programmer and privacy activist who spread the gospel of encryption and provided legal, financial, and cybersecurity support to whistleblowers, prisoners, and others in peril. Gallagher’s prison-support efforts “saved my life,” Brown wrote on Twitter.
Roiling with grief, the Pursuance group chat began to fall apart. Some members felt they had failed Gallagher, who had been depressed. Others blasted recriminations and suggested darker forces were at work. For a few, Gallagher’s death, or his disappearance before it, became another op, another government conspiracy to investigate. (The medical examiner ruled the death an accident caused by mixed-drug toxicity — fentanyl and meth.)
Brown’s life spiraled. Close friendships and once-nourishing collaborations disintegrated. Colleagues were tagged as informants. In interviews, he accused members of DDoSecrets of being intelligence assets. Brown said he believed Best and other members were faking being transgender to obscure their histories in the intelligence community. “Intentionally or not, sowing dissension and spreading conspiracy theories does the FBI’s and the far right’s work for them,” Best told me, calling Brown’s accusations false. (Best acknowledges having done contractor work for Wikistrat, a private intelligence firm.)
In April 2022, Val Broeksmit, a whistleblower and FBI informant, was found dead on the campus of a Los Angeles high school. The cause was undetermined, though an autopsy report noted he had suffered blunt-force trauma, broken ribs, and a spinal fracture. It appeared he had fallen from a tree. Broeksmit had been an ally, but he was also an unpredictable addict who seemed to relish his cloak-and-dagger relationship with his FBI handlers. In a 2020 meeting with them, a recording of which Broeksmit later posted online, agents asked him about what Brown, then in Antigua, was up to. Broeksmit seemed to think the agents were asking for help in setting up Brown — and he was almost ready to oblige. Then he changed his mind. “I’m not going to give you Barrett Brown right now,” he said. For Brown, the recording signaled that the FBI had ongoing interest in him. It also was a reminder that his friends might betray him.
The same month Broeksmit died, Brown attempted suicide. On Twitter, he credited Mann with saving him and said he would get treatment.
Mann is tender with Brown, for whom she’s trying to cultivate a healthy space away from sectarian rivalries, drugs, and the bitter disappointments of his political struggle. She maintains a somewhat separate life as an activist in London, but the two invariably fall into dinner conversations over movement strategy or London radicals or dealing with British cops. One evening, after a dinner of red wine and rare steak at an Italian restaurant, we start talking about whether protest politics has reached a dead end and the role of political violence in the face of rising fascism. Brown says he believes in violence in theory but doesn’t think it could be done with the necessary scale or intention to accomplish anything.
“The conditions for violence have not been met yet,” says Mann, referring to a general uprising. She offers to send me The Failure of Nonviolence, by Peter Gelderloos, which examines the limitations of nonviolent protest.
“I would say the conditions for violence have definitely been met,” says Brown.
“No,” says Mann, “for effective violence.”
“Oh, oh,” says Brown, nodding his agreement.
Brown has attacked, resisted, mocked, and subverted almost every form of authority he has encountered. He engages systems like a dog gnawing at a bone, never letting go, exhausting their procedural demands in order to show their ultimate corruption. While incarcerated, he followed the Bureau of Prisons’ deliberately byzantine protocols to file complaints about violations by guards and prison officials, eventually realizing that the effort would probably be unsuccessful — and potentially dangerous — but that there was value, maybe even nobility, in revealing the system’s accountability mechanisms to be a farce. He’s doing the same now with the U.K. asylum process. But the bureaucratic battle is also an existential one with daunting odds.
“I will not go back to the U.S. voluntarily,” Brown told me. “I won’t cooperate at all. At this point in my life, I just can’t go through all that again.”
Two months after we met in Bournemouth, the British government denied Brown’s asylum application. His lawyer, Filip Kostanecki, offered to launch an appeal, pointing to some holes in the Home Office’s handling of the case. In an email to Brown, he included an important note in the U.K.’s decision validating the suspicion that had motivated this whole effort: “The Home Office accept that you are of interest to the FBI and Department of Justice in the United States of America.”
I had expected Brown to be deflated about the prospect of deportation, but he seemed practically animated, riffing on the inscrutability of the broken system he was trying to conquer. “The incompetence and slapdashery of the English state apparatus is absolutely confounding,” he said in a text.
He asked me not to tell Mann about the asylum setback. She was in London dealing with some internal drama at Freedom, her magazine, and he wanted to wait to tell her when she returned home. Brown was trying not to think too much about the situation, even as he was sending me long, discursive texts about the state of his case. “Mostly spent weekend watching Killers of Flower Moon three times,” he wrote. “I try to defer major decisions as long as possible these days.”
A few days later, Brown spoke with Kostanecki, whom he had grown to mistrust. “I’m somewhat more confused than previously, which was already quite a bit,” he told me. He decided to fire his lawyer and pursue his appeal with another firm. He had come this far. He would fight a little longer.
