We don't need to forgive everyone everything
The Letter podcast fails to understand why victims of crime struggle to forgive
In the coming weeks, I’ll be posting some occasional thoughts on the topic of my forthcoming book. Not So Sorry has a pretty wordy subtitle, but we had to figure out a way to get the book’s message boiled down to an SEOable phrase, so my editor Andrew DeYoung and I came up with “Abusers, False Apologies, and the Limits of Forgiveness.” If you’ve ever read any of my columns at The Revealer, you’re pretty familiar with some of my thoughts on this topic. If you haven’t, well, that’s okay, because here comes an entire book about why we don’t need to forgive everyone everything, and why the pressure to do so can enable systemic abuse.
Recently, on a recommendation that the topic resonated with my book, I listened to the first season of the podcast The Letter. The podcast follows the story of Jorge Benvenuto, who was 19 when he shot a young couple in Utah in 1996. Benvenuto, who was struggling with depression, had purchased the gun with the intention to kill himself, but he instead shot Zach Snarr and his friend Yvette Rodier, both teenagers themselves, about to start college in the fall. Snarr died, and Rodier survived, but barely — she had to play dead until Benvenuto left the scene, and her physical wounds were severe.
Her mental wounds, however, were even worse. At the sentencing, she gave a testimony that included these words:
I hate dealing with the guilt. It’s so unfair. I hate that feeling. A lot of my psychological pain is fear. I’m afraid to cross the street. I’m afraid someone is attacking me. I’m afraid someone is stalking me. I’m afraid of nighttime. I’m afraid of gunshots on the television. My whole family’s had to alter their life so I wouldn’t have to be alone by myself. I’m too afraid of my fears.
I don’t sleep. I have horrible nightmares that I die or the people I love die. I think part of a lot of the psychological stuff is that I know that when he stopped that shooting and reloaded, that he was aiming right at me.
Rodier, who had intended to go into a career in broadcast journalism, instead discovered that she had a passion for the law, and eventually attended law school. Her unique background as a crime victim gave her a perspective other attorneys lacked, and focusing on a career helping victims to get justice helped her to keep the traumatic memories of the shooting at bay. Rodier was not focused on forgiveness for Benvenuto; she wanted justice.
For Snarr’s parents, something different happened. Zach Snarr’s mother Sy Snarr went to a church talk on forgiveness. Like most people in Utah, the Snarrs are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and LDS teaching tells Mormons that forgiveness is necessary to end suffering. During the talk, Sy, who had been struggling with anger about her son’s death, said of Benvenudo that “it just hit me, I thought, I want to be like that. I want to feel that. I want to be able to forgive him.”
Bryce Canyon, Utah. Image via the Utah Office of Tourism.
22 years after the shooting, Benvenuto sent letters to the Snarrs and to Rodier, asking for their forgiveness. The Snarrs were moved to forgive Benvenuto, saying that it gave them a release from the anger they’d held. They even befriended his family, eventually began a correspondence with Benvenuto, and lobbied for his release from prison. The podcast focuses primarily on this narrative, that the Snarrs’ forgiveness of Benvenuto was healing for both of their families, and that Benvenuto must be reformed in order to ask for that forgiveness.
For Rodier, this kind of forgiveness was not possible. She refused to read the letter, saying “I feel like my receipt of the letter would give him some sort of comfort that I don’t feel he deserves.” She added that for her, she needed to put a wall of separation between herself and Benvenudo to continue functioning. She described her emotions toward Benvenudo not as anger, but as neutrality. “I don’t have any extreme feelings about anything toward him,” she told the podcast reporters. “I guess except that I don’t want him to feel comforted by something I’d do for him.”
By the final episode, it’s clear that the producers and journalists behind the podcast want us to feel like the Snarrs are the morally correct parties in this story. The narrative of forgiveness is irresistible, and it offers many heart-tugging moments in the storytelling. At one point, Sy Snarr is recorded on the phone with Benvenuto, telling him she loves him. The podcast ends with the Benvenuto and Snarr families saying they love one another, that they have healed, that they have eased one another’s suffering. Benvenuto clearly struggled with his mental health, and by the end of the series, he does seem to have found some sense of peace. But it all feels just a bit sentimental, a little unrealistic, a little too sweet given the horrors experienced all around.
Rodier, on the other hand, isn’t even interviewed for the final episode. Her decision not to forgive Benvenuto is narratively not as interesting, or perhaps doesn’t have as tidy of an ending. The decision a person makes not to forgive someone for trying to kill her is, perhaps, more morally ambiguous and less dramatic. It doesn’t elicit tears, except perhaps for other victims of violence who might recognize their own thinking about justice in Rodier’s.
Rodier’s decision not to read Benvenuto’s letter is an example of what the psychologist Jeanne Safer calls being a “moral unforgiver.” Moral unforgivers are focused on telling the truth, asserting their fundamental rights, and “opposing injustice.” Safer writes that:
Proponents of universal forgiveness refuse to recognize that moral unforgivers exist. They find it inconceivable that unforgiving victims of injustice could be outraged but not obsessed by their injuries, that they could even sympathize or retain conditional connections with those they refuse to pardon.
Rodier describes the traumatic memories of her near-death experience at Benvenuto’s hands rendering her incapable of living a normal life. She also says she’s happy for Sy Snarr being able to forgive him and understands Snarr found that necessary, but that she doesn’t feel obligated to do that herself. That’s not a great ending to a podcast, but it is an honest reality for Rodier and many other victims of crime.
This season of The Letter was a missed opportunity to think about forgiveness in more nuanced, less black and white terms. Instead of choosing to focus on forgiveness as the more interesting narrative arc, the reporters and producers could have talked to Rodier more about how her position as a moral unforgiver impacts her work as an attorney. They could have talked more about trauma, and more about how people who experience trauma are impacted when someone asks them for forgiveness. Instead, the podcast told the kind of story that makes choosing not to forgive seem selfish and wrong, when, in fact, it’s just as hard as forgiving.