Can This Man Stop Lying?

Christopher Massimine is making an attempt to not lie.

He’s making an attempt to not lie when his spouse asks him whether or not he has sorted the recycling, or when his mother-in-law’s buddy Mary Ann asks whether or not he appreciated the baked appetizers she introduced over.

He’s making an attempt to not misinform his therapist, who has him on a routine of cognitive behavioral remedy to assist him cease mendacity. And he’s making an attempt to not misinform me, a reporter who has come to interview him about how a lifetime of mendacity caught up with him.

This effort started round 15 months in the past, when Mr. Massimine resigned from his job as managing director of the Pioneer Theater Company in Salt Lake City after a local journalist reported that he had embellished his résumé with unfaithful claims.

The résumé, it turned out, was the tip of the iceberg. Over the course of a few years, he has since acknowledged, he lied prolifically and elaborately, typically with none discernible goal.

He instructed buddies he had ascended Mount Everest from Tibet (he was truly in a resort room in Cambodia) and attended Burning Man (on nearer examination, his images proved to have been taken in Queens.)

He instructed journalists he was born in Italy. (New Jersey.) He instructed faculty buddies his birthday was in September. (May.) He instructed his spouse he was having an affair with Kourtney Kardashian. (Not true.)

When his binge of lying was uncovered, it left Mr. Massimine’s life in tatters, threatening his marriage and discrediting his early success on the earth of New York theater.

He spoke to The New York Times to handle what he described as a basic misunderstanding: These weren’t the lies of a calculating con artist, however of a mentally sick one that couldn’t assist himself.

He is just not the primary to recommend that sure sorts of mendacity are a compulsion. In 1891, the German psychiatrist Anton Delbrück coined the time period pseudologia fantastica to explain a bunch of sufferers who, to impress others, concocted outlandish fabrications that solid them as heroes or victims.

That argument is superior in a new book by the psychologists Drew A. Curtis and Christian L. Hart, who suggest including a brand new prognosis, Pathological Lying, to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Psychiatry, they argue, has lengthy misidentified this subset of sufferers. Rather than “dark, exploitative, calculating monsters,” they argue, pathological liars are “often suffering from their own behavior and unable to change on their own.” These liars, the psychologists argue, may benefit from behavioral therapies which have labored with stuttering, nail-biting and trichotillomania, a hair-pulling dysfunction.

Just earlier than his fabrications had been uncovered, Mr. Massimine checked right into a psychiatric hospital, the place he was recognized with a cluster B character dysfunction, a syndrome which may function deception and attention-seeking. For lots of the individuals near him, a prognosis made all of the distinction.

“He’s not just a liar, he has no control over this,” stated his spouse, Maggie, 37, who admitted that, at a number of factors, she had thought of submitting for divorce. “That really was the turning point for me, when I had an understanding of it as an illness.”

Since then, she has thrown herself into the challenge of serving to her husband get well. “It’s similar to Tourette’s,” she stated. “You acknowledge that it’s their illness that’s causing them to do this, and it might be a little odd and uncomfortable, but you move past that.”

A name from Mount Everest

Maggie remembers, with painful readability, the day in 2018 when she realized the breadth and depth of her husband’s drawback.

“I’m in tibet,” his electronic mail stated. “Please don’t be mad.”

He had connected {a photograph} of two males, a Sherpa and a fair-haired alpinist, with Himalayan peaks looming within the background. He had managed to sneak into China with the assistance of sort Buddhist monks, who led him so far as Everest Camp 2, he instructed her. “This is Tsomo,” he wrote. “He is awesome and if he comes to the USA you’ll love him.”

Maggie stared on the image, which he had additionally posted on Facebook; it didn’t make sense. Mr. Massimine, her husband of 5 years, had instructed her he was on trip in Cambodia. He had not given himself time to acclimate to the elevation of Everest Base Camp; he had no mountaineering expertise; he didn’t have a Chinese visa.

“At first, I thought, Why is he posting this when it could get him killed?” she stated. “And then, the crazier his posts got, I was like, This isn’t real. None of this is real.”

That weekend, with assist from her buddy Vanessa, she started a “deep dive,” reviewing all of his Facebook posts and electronic mail accounts. She found elaborate deceptions — voice impersonators, dummy electronic mail accounts, solid correspondences. She was terrified, she stated. “Who is this person?” she recollects pondering. “Who did I marry?”

Mr. Massimine is tall, good-looking and desperate to please. He grew up on a cul-de-sac in Somerset, N.J., the one baby of a nurse and an auditor. His aptitude for theater emerged early — at 10, he wrangled the members of his Cub Scout troop into performing “A Knight’s Tale,” a play he wrote and scored. Family pictures present him in costume, a fair-haired boy with fangs, a knight’s armor, a watch patch.

The mendacity began early, too. He says it started within the second grade, when, nervous about bringing house a B plus in math, he instructed his dad and mom that he had been invited onto the stage in school to sing a duet with an actor from “The Lion King.”

Lying grew to become a “defense mechanism,” one thing he did to calm his anxiousness, normally with out pausing to contemplate whether or not he could be believed. “It was just something where I kind of pulled the trigger and hoped for the best,” he stated.

In interviews, buddies recalled this habits, which they described as “tall tales” or “embellishments” or “campfire stories.” It by no means appeared malicious, stated Jessica Hollan, 35, who was solid reverse him in a center faculty manufacturing of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“It was more just like, you caught a minnow, and then it became a swordfish,” she stated.

No one known as him out on it, stated Lauren Migliore, 34, who acquired to know him in faculty. She recalled him as a loyal, affectionate buddy however delicate and needy, “like a little puppy.” “I always thought it came from a place of insecurity,” she stated. “I never thought it was worthy of mentioning. It was an attention thing.”

By the time he met Maggie, Mr. Massimine was a profitable theater producer with a bent to excessive workaholism. Co-workers recalled his pulling all-nighters as productions approached, typically forgetting to bathe or change garments.

This depth propelled him upward by the business; at 29, he was named chief govt of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, the place he laid the groundwork for a runaway hit, a production of “Fiddler on the Roof” in Yiddish.

But it hadn’t been good for the wedding. Now, Maggie understood that her husband’s work habits weren’t her solely drawback. They separated for a couple of months. Then she softened — perhaps, she instructed herself, he was mendacity as a result of she made him really feel insufficient — they usually acquired again collectively. He began remedy and went on an antidepressant medicine.

They spent months sifting by the whole lot he had ever instructed her about his life, “just figuring out fact from fiction,” she stated.

A small group of prolific liars

In 2010, when researchers from Michigan State University got down to calculate how usually Americans lied, they discovered that the distribution was extraordinarily skewed.

Sixty % of respondents reported telling no lies in any respect within the previous 24 hours; one other 24 % reported telling one or two. But the general common was 1.65 as a result of, it turned out, a small group of individuals lied rather a lot.

This “small group of prolific liars,” because the researchers termed it, constituted round 5.3 % of the inhabitants however instructed half the reported lies, a median of 15 per day. Some had been in professions, like retail or politics, that compelled them to lie. But others lied in a means that had no clear rationale.

This was the group that Dr. Curtis and Dr. Hart. Unlike earlier researchers, who had gathered knowledge from a legal inhabitants, the 2 psychologists set about finding liars in the general public, recruiting from on-line mental health forums. From this group — discovered “in mundane, everyday corners of life,” as Dr. Hart put it — they pieced collectively a psychological profile.

These liars had been, as an entire, needy and anticipating social approval. When their lies had been found, they misplaced buddies or jobs, which was painful. One factor they didn’t have, for probably the most half, was legal historical past or authorized issues. On the opposite, many had been affected by guilt and regret. “I know my lying is toxic, and I am trying to get help,” one stated.

This profile didn’t line up with the same old psychiatric view of liars, who are sometimes recognized with Antisocial Personality Disorder, a bunch seen as manipulative and calculating. This misidentification, the authors argue, has led to a scarcity of analysis into remedies and a common pessimism that ordinary liars are able to change.

For Vironika Wilde, 34, a author whose first-person account is referenced within the e-book, it was potential to cease. She began mendacity as a teen, a “chubby immigrant girl who spoke with an accent,” hoping to win sympathy with over-the-top tales of a drive-by taking pictures or a fall from a roof. Over time, although, maintaining monitor of the lies grew to become traumatic and complex. And as she developed deeper relationships, buddies started calling her bluff.

In her 20s, she stopped by imposing a inflexible self-discipline on herself, meticulously correcting herself each time she instructed a lie. She appeared for brand spanking new methods to obtain empathy, writing and performing poetry about traumatic experiences in her previous. Telling the reality felt good. “You still have these internal mechanisms saying something is off,” stated Ms. Wilde, who lives in Toronto. “That is what makes it so relieving to stop. Those pangs of guilt, they go away.”

But she was by no means in a position to coach different compulsive liars by the method. Several approached her, however she couldn’t get previous a couple of classes and was by no means satisfied that they had been prepared to alter. “I had the impression,” she stated, “that they were trying to avoid negative consequences.”

This was a typical remark amongst researchers who’ve hung out with prolific liars: That it was tough to construct functioning relationships.

“You can’t trust them, but you find yourself getting sucked into trusting them because, otherwise, you can’t talk to them,” stated Timothy R. Levine, a professor on the University of Alabama Birmingham who has revealed broadly on deception.

“Once you can’t take people at their word, communication loses all its functionality, and you get stuck in this horrible place,” he stated. “It puts you in this untenable situation.”

Backsliding

In October 2019, the 12 months after the Tibet lie fell aside, Mr. Massimine known as Maggie in a state of breathless pleasure. There was news: He had gained a Humanitarian of the Year Award, from a bunch known as the National Performing Arts Action Association.

The couple had simply moved to Salt Lake City, the place he had been named managing director of the Pioneer Theater Company on the University of Utah. Things weren’t going properly at work, the place, as he put it, “the people who were supposed to be listening to me weren’t listening to me.” Once once more, he discovered himself pulling all-nighters, lashing out at interruptions from Maggie, who was pregnant.

Aggrieved and uncooked, he reached for an outdated answer. It was a deception that went past what he had executed up to now, and he wanted Maggie to again him up. “I felt like, you know, this was a very big lie, and I want to make sure I got everyone on board, so that it feels like it’s a real thing,” he stated.

Maggie was, frankly, doubtful. But then he flew to Washington for 2 days, coming again with a medal and photos that appeared to show him at a White House podium. “I was like, OK, I guess he really did get this award,” she stated. “Like, he came back, and he’s got an award.”

His new co-workers had been maintaining nearer monitor. In his first month on the job, he requested colleagues to safe him a last-minute observer move to a U.N. conference, then claimed that he had been a keynote presenter, stated Kirsten Park, then the theater’s director of promoting. It appeared like an “enormous exaggeration,” however then once more, it was theater, she stated: “Everybody expects a little bit of fluff.”

She watched him giving interviews to reporters and describing a profession of dazzling breadth and achievement. When he introduced Ms. Park a news release saying his Humanitarian Award, she looked for the group, then the award, on-line, and located nothing.

“I absolutely thought it was a lie,” she stated, however hesitated to report her doubts to superiors. When he flew to Washington to gather the award on the college’s expense, she doubted herself. “Maybe the only worse thing than lying is accusing someone of lying who hasn’t.”

Mr. Massimine’s habits grew to become tougher to disregard in 2021. He started posting amateurishly written articles — he now admits paying for them — that described him in much more grandiose phrases: He had been a vice chair of MENSA International, a guide to Aretha Franklin and a minority proprietor of a diamond firm. Even buddies, watching from a distance, questioned what was occurring.

“I didn’t think half the stuff in it was real,” recalled Jill Goldstein, who labored with Mr. Massimine on the Folksbiene.

Then all of it blew up. In a painful dialog with college officers, Mr. Massimine discovered {that a} group of employees members from the theater had filed a grievance about him, alleging mismanagement and absenteeism, and {that a} reporter from the native FOX affiliate was getting ready an exposé on his fabrications.

Looking again at this era, Mr. Massimine didn’t sound notably remorseful, however as an alternative indignant towards his co-workers: “The audacity that, you know, these employees who have just been fighting me and fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting. And I have been trying to work with them because I had no other choices.” That realization, he stated, “sent me into a complete breakdown spiral.”

Maggie recollects nowadays because the scariest she has ever lived by. She was so afraid he would damage himself, she stated, that she stood within the door when he used the bathroom. Finally, she drove Mr. Massimine to the college hospital’s psychiatric institute, the place he checked in for the primary of three temporary stays.

Once once more, she discovered herself at house alone, reviewing 1000’s of her husband’s emails.

“I called my best friend, Vanessa, and I was just like, ‘He did it again,’” she stated.

A Smaller Life

Dr. Jordan W. Merrill, a psychiatrist who handled Mr. Massimine in Utah that 12 months, recalled him as exceptionally fragile throughout the weeks that adopted.

“There are times, as a psychiatrist, we have patients where we really worry we’re going to get a phone call the next morning that they are dead,” he stated. “There was a period that he was that person.”

Lying had not beforehand been a spotlight of Mr. Massimine’s psychiatric remedy, however now, the docs swung their consideration to it. Dr. Merrill described Mr. Massimine’s fabrications as “benign lying,” which functioned primarily as “a protection of his internal fragility.”

“It’s not seeking to take something from you, it’s about just trying to cope,” Dr. Merrill stated. “I don’t know if they know they’re doing it. It becomes reinforced so many times that this is just the way one navigates the world.”

For Maggie, the prognosis made all of the distinction. Mr. Massimine’s docs, she recalled, “sent me to psychology websites and really walked me through it so I could have a better understanding.” As she got here to see his actions as signs of an sickness, her anger at him drained away.

The prognosis additionally mattered to his employer. Mr. Massimine negotiated a $175,000 settlement with the University of Utah in which neither party acknowledged wrongdoing, in accordance with The Salt Lake Tribune, which acquired the settlement by a information request. Christopher Nelson, a college spokesman, confirmed Mr. Massimine’s resignation however declined to remark additional.

The Massimines offered their giant Victorian home in Salt Lake City and moved in with Maggie’s dad and mom in Queens.

These days, Mr. Massimine meets weekly with a therapist, unpacking the moments when he felt a powerful urge to manufacture. He says he quiets the urges by writing, posting often on social media. When he finds himself on the sting of a bunch of individuals swapping tales, he steels himself, takes deep breaths and tries to remain silent.

Now that a while has handed, he and Maggie can chuckle in regards to the extra ridiculous episodes — “I called my general manager and I was like, I can’t talk very long, I’m on Mount Everest” — and that may be a reduction. The effort of maintaining monitor of lies had grow to be a psychological pressure, “a million different things in my brain that didn’t need to be there.”

“I want to change,” he stated. “I don’t want to be doing this for the rest of my life. It’s taken a toll on my memory. It’s taken a toll on my character.”

Recently, the Massimines closed on a modest three-bedroom home in Hamilton Beach, a middle-class neighborhood in Queens overlooking Jamaica Bay. It’s a good distance from the world of theater and the life they’d envisioned once they went on their first date, at Sardi’s.

Maggie is OK with that. Given his drawback with fabrication, sending him again into the world of present enterprise could be “like telling an alcoholic to become a bartender.”

Early this month, as he watched their 20-month-old son, Bowie, kick a soccer ball throughout their slim again yard, Mr. Massimine appeared impossibly removed from that outdated world. He spoke, a bit of wistfully, in regards to the fictional Chris, the one he has needed to relinquish.

“There was this wonderful character of me, and he did things nobody else could do,” he stated. “In some ways, I’m sad to see him go.”

‘Why would we expect any of this to be true?’

This fall, Mr. Massimine made his first tentative re-entry into the general public eye, publishing a column in Newsweek that tried to elucidate his mendacity.

“As part of my diagnosis, when I am in mental distress, I create fabrications to help build myself up, since that self-esteem by itself doesn’t exist,” he wrote. “I compensated in the only way I knew how to: I created my own reality, and eventually that spilled into my work.”

The column, which ran underneath the headline “I Was Canceled, It Turned My Life Upside Down,” portrayed him as a sufferer of workplace politics and on-line trolls. Judging by the feedback written anonymously, it didn’t win him the sympathy of many readers.

“He made up and accepted a humanitarian award that DOES NOT EXIST,” one wrote. Another requested: “As a confirmed liar writing about how you lied, why would we expect any of this to be true?”

Ms. Goldstein, a buddy, stated she admired Mr. Massimine for pushing the restrict of the sorts of psychological diseases which might be mentioned publicly.

“Some of them are still in the closet, and this is one of them,” she stated. “Compulsive lying, that’s not something that’s out and open. That’s not acceptable. That’s considered wrong.”

Other associates had been much less forgiving. Ms. Park, who labored for Mr. Massimine in Utah, was one of many few former co-workers prepared to touch upon the document.

“I have no doubt that Chris struggles with mental health,” she stated. “Nearly everyone did in 2020. But lying is still a choice. The urge to lie doesn’t mean you have to. Moreover, knowing this about yourself, continuing to lie and then not disclosing it is also a choice.”

She famous that he had secured a aggressive, well-paid place in Salt Lake City with a résumé that falsely claimed that he had a grasp’s diploma and that he was a two-time Tony Award nominee, amongst different issues.

“If this is a characteristic of his illness as he has said, he has clearly been able to use it to his advantage to gain prestige, position and pay,” she stated.

Even buddies questioned whether or not his public dialogue of his psychological sickness was disingenuous, a type of fame administration. “A redemption arc,” as Ms. Hollan, his buddy from center faculty, put it.

“I want him to get better,” she stated. “I love him to death. But at the same time I don’t know how much of what he’s saying is actually true.”

The prognosis is not going to resolve this drawback. For a lot of recorded historical past, mendacity has been counted among the many gravest of human acts.

This is just not due to the harm executed by specific lies, however due to what mendacity does to relationships. To rely on a liar units you on queasy, unsure floor, like placing weight on an ankle you recognize is damaged. “You are always hurting another person with that kind of behavior,” Ms. Wilde stated.

As I reported this text, Mr. Massimine frequently checked in with me to report his progress at avoiding lies, a streak that ultimately prolonged to 9 weeks. He felt good about sharing his story, reasoning, “If there are 100 people who think I’m full of shit, but one person it does help, that’s enough.”

But on my final go to, when Mr. Massimine had stepped out for a stroll, Maggie sat with me on the kitchen counter and listed issues within the Newsweek column that she thought he had exaggerated to make himself look higher.

“Embellishments,” she known as them, like saying he was doing “townwide construction work” when he had truly helped his father-in-law dig a gap for a neighbor’s cesspool.

“I worry about his conversation with his therapist,” she instructed me. “I’m like, are you being honest with your therapist? Are you telling them everything?”

She tries to maintain up with everything he has been posting on social media, however she has a job, and he writes a lot. Maggie sounded drained.

“I am not confident that he has totally stopped,” she stated. “I can obviously not watch him all the time.”

While we had been speaking, Mr. Massimine returned house from his stroll and settled on the sofa, listening.

“I disagree,” he stated. “I think I’ve been good.”

Rebecca Ritzel and Alain Delaqueriere contributed reporting.