Targeted. Brittany Kaiser
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I was taken with it. And when we regrouped and Alexander joined us for dinner at a nearby restaurant, I learned more about him and warmed to him as well.
He had a much broader view of the world than I’d initially thought. He had a degree in art history from Manchester University. After graduating, he had worked in finance at a century-old securities merchant bank in Mexico, a country I loved dearly. He’d gone on to work also in Argentina, then had returned to England, thinking he could make much more of the SCL Group than it currently was—which was more a loose collection of projects than a company, really. He had built it from almost scratch into a mini-empire in just over a decade.
Alexander had loved running elections in the Caribbean and Kenya. And when he mentioned that he had overseen the company’s work in West Africa, I was moved. In Ghana, SCL had undertaken the largest research project on health in that country, and since my own most recent work had been on health care reform in North Africa, we found common ground.
I shared with him what I had been working on, and I told him about some of my work in South Africa, Hong Kong, The Hague, the European Parliament, and for NGOs such as Amnesty International. I still said nothing about my campaign work, and I suppose that hung in the air between us, but I wasn’t ready. Cambridge Analytica was working for the opposition.
Still, I enjoyed the conversation, and next to me, all evening long, Chester boasted so much about my accomplishments that he was a veritable walking, talking recommendation letter.
“Well,” Alexander said when he heard all that I’d done. “A person like you doesn’t wait around for new opportunities, does she?”
I was only half surprised when Chester called the next morning and said that Alexander had gotten in touch with him and asked if he thought I’d be willing to come back in for a formal interview. I knew that Alexander likely had few occasions to meet a young woman like me, not because I was so rare a bird but because of the world in which he lived.
I was a twenty-six-year-old American woman who seemed unafraid to have entered high-stakes, high-testosterone arenas. He had emerged from a closed society of young, privileged men destined to operate in a world of others who looked just like him.
I was of a mixed mind, though, about a job at Cambridge Analytica.
It was exhilarating to understand how such a small company in Britain could be so bold and have such an impact on political systems, cultures, and economies. I was intrigued by the sophisticated technology and its potential to be used for social good. But I was concerned about the company’s current clients in America. How could I not be? I was who I was: a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat.
But I needed a job. A scrappy self-starter, I wasn’t afraid of doing things that might make me money, even if they weren’t my first choice. I’d pushed myself out of my comfort zone at an early age, volunteering on Howard Dean’s 2003 primary campaign bid for the presidency and then on John Kerry’s run when I was only fifteen years old. To support the unpaid work I was passionate about, throughout university in the UK, I’d taken odd jobs, such as training in wine as an in-house sommelier, and less glamorously waited tables—and when really stuck for money, I’d taken bartending and cleaning shifts to remove vomit from the floors of gritty local pubs.
Then, when I was beginning my MPhil/PhD studies in 2012, I leapt to more entrepreneurial endeavors. I started up an events company that put government officials and businesses in conversation with Libyans to discuss how to help stabilize that country in the wake of the Arab Spring. I had gone on to work on a part-time basis as director of operations for a UK trade and investment association that specialized in fostering relationships between the United Kingdom and nations, such as Ethiopia, where it was difficult to do business or easily engage in diplomacy.
Earlier in 2014, while I was still working on my doctorate, I had aspired to find a plum job with the Ready for Hillary (RFH) super PAC and with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign itself, working all the connections I had cultivated over the years in the DNC and, more recently, in Democrats Abroad in London. But none of my recent efforts to work with the Democrats or with liberal or humanitarian causes had led to opportunities that would truly pay the bills. All the (poorly paid) positions at the small RFH super PAC were already filled, and the Hillary campaign wasn’t up and running yet.
I’d then pursued a dream job working for my friend John Jones QC, a barrister at the Doughty Street Chambers and one of the world’s most prominent human rights attorneys. (On his team was the equally formidable Amal Clooney, née Alamuddin.)
John was an unparalleled champion of global civil liberties. He’d defended some of the world’s most controversial bad actors, from Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, second son of Muammar Gaddafi, to Liberian president Charles Taylor. At tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, and Cambodia, he’d confronted thorny issues such as counterterrorism, war crimes, and extraditions, and he did this in the service of upholding international human rights law. More recently, he had taken on the case of WikiLeaks founder (and the source of primary material for one of my master’s theses) Julian Assange, who was evading extradition to Sweden and had sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
John and I had become friends. We talked about and bonded over our admiration for the infamous whistleblower, and we joked about the rivalry between the prep schools we’d attended; he was British but had attended Phillips Exeter Academy, the rival school to my own, Phillips Academy Andover, both started in the late eighteenth century by two members of the Phillips family. I didn’t yet have my credentials as a barrister, but John had kindly seen in me keenness and the potential to do good work, and he’d been trying to find funding for a position he wanted me to fill in The Hague, where he aimed to open a new branch of Doughty Street called Doughty Street International.
But the money hadn’t come through yet. Even if it had, it wouldn’t have been the type of money commercial lawyers make. That was the world of human rights work. John and his small family sacrificed for their belief in the law, living much more modestly than other world-famous lawyers, as John did pro bono work most of the time. As much out of principle as practicality, he was a no-frills vegetarian who rode his bicycle everywhere.
While I had imagined a close-to-the-bone and ethically authentic life like John’s someday, that didn’t seem in the cards right now. Back home, my parents were on the verge of poverty, the culmination of events over a decade in the making.
For many years, my father’s family owned commercial real estate and a string of upscale health clubs and spas; my mother had been able to stay home to raise her children herself; and my younger sister, Natalie, and I had grown up in a privileged upper-middle-class household, enjoying a private school education, dance and music lessons, and family trips to Disney World and Caribbean beaches.
But when the subprime mortgage crisis hit in 2008, my father’s family businesses suffered. A number of other problems occurred, and these, too, had been out of my parents’ control. Soon, we had no savings left. Years before, my mother had been an employee at Enron, and when that Houston house of cards collapsed in 2001, she lost all her retirement money.
My father was now jobless; my mother, who hadn’t worked in twenty-six years, had to retrain herself to reenter the workforce. In the meantime, my parents refinanced our family home and sold off their assets until, when the bank came calling, they had literally nothing at all but the belongings in our house.
During all this, something deeply troubling was happening to my father’s state of mind. He was strangely emotionless. When we tried to speak to him about what was going on, he wasn’t really all there. His eyes were eerily vacant. He spent his days in bed or in front of the television, and if anyone asked him how things were, he answered flatly, saying that things were fine. We assumed it was clinical depression, but he refused to seek therapy or take medication. He refused even to be seen by a doctor. We wanted to shake him, to wake him up, but we felt helpless to reach him.
By the time Alexander Nix called Chester to invite me in for a job interview at SCL, in October 2014, my mother had found a job as a flight attendant. She’d had to move to Ohio, where the airline was based, and she was living in hotels with her