The Clients I Turned Down

A man who works for an agency has someone above him to say no. A flag, a charter, a lawyer, a director who can take the difficult call and own it. I never had any of that. Thirty-five years freelance means thirty-five years in which the only ethics committee in the room was me, and the only sanction for getting it wrong was that it might get me killed, or worse, get someone else killed who had not signed up for any of it.

People imagine the freelancer is the man with no rules. It is the reverse. The man with no institution has nothing but his rules, because the rules are the only thing standing between him and becoming the kind of instrument that anyone with money can point at anyone they dislike. The list of jobs I refused is, honestly, a truer record of who I was than the list of jobs I took. So let me tell you about the refusals, and why — because the why is rarely the noble reason people expect.

The arithmetic of no

Start here, because it is the unromantic truth: most of my refusals were not virtue. They were sums. A great many bad jobs are also stupid jobs, and the stupidity is usually the first thing you see, before the morality even comes up.

A man came to me once — corporate, expensive suit, the kind who has decided that money is a universal solvent — wanting a competitor's executive managed, his word, with a meaningful little pause around it. Before I considered whether it was wrong, which it plainly was, I ran the chain the way you run any move you cannot take back. And then what? He is gone, and the people around him compare notes, and they have a face and a pattern, and the next operator who comes near that company finds the door watched, and somewhere upstream a man in an expensive suit decides his loose end is now me. The first-order win is always the bait. The trap is in the second and third order, and the second and third order on that job led directly to a grave with my name being penciled in. I declined. I told him it was beneath me. It was also beneath my survival instinct, which spoke louder.

This is worth saying plainly to anyone tempted by the trade: a frightening number of unethical jobs disqualify themselves on competence grounds long before conscience gets a vote. The pressure to decide right now, the client who needs an answer this second or the opportunity evaporates — that is not an opportunity, that is the technique. A real piece of work survives a night's sleep. The one engineered to evaporate if you think about it was built to evaporate, because thinking about it was always going to kill it.

The lines that were not arithmetic

But I will not hide behind the sums, because some of the refusals were not sums. Some were simply lines, drawn in advance, while I was calm, precisely so that the version of me in the room — flattered, well-paid, rationalising — could not move them.

I would not take work that pointed the trade at people who had no part in it. There is a clean distinction, however much the romantics blur it, between the player and the bystander. Spouses. Children. The man who wanted me to lean on a target through his daughter — I have rarely wanted to put someone out of a window as much as I wanted to put him out of one, and I am not, as you have gathered, a violent man. The daughter was not in the game. You do not put people in the game who did not walk into it.

I would not be the instrument of a private grievance dressed up as a contract. A surprising amount of the work that finds a freelancer is not business at all; it is somebody's wound, looking for a hand to hold the knife. REDACTED once offered me a great deal of money that was, when you stripped the professional language off it, a jilted man's revenge with a budget. I have done cold things for clear reasons. I will not do them to settle someone else's heartbreak, because a client running on a wound cannot be trusted, will escalate past whatever you agreed, and will burn you the moment the wound demands it. That one is half ethics and half, again, survival. They tend to braid together, in this trade. The decent call and the smart call are friends more often than the films admit.

What the freelancer actually sells

Here is the thing I came to understand somewhere in the middle of it all. An agency officer is owned — paid by it, trained by it, controlled by it, and when he falls, the institution owns the problem. The recruited asset is the opposite: deniable, expendable, disowned the instant he becomes inconvenient. The freelancer is a strange third creature. Owned by no one, which sounds like freedom and is, but it also means there is no institution to absorb your fall and no one to disown you because no one ever claimed you. You are your own officer and your own asset, your own director and your own deniable instrument.

Which means the only thing you are actually selling, the only durable asset on the books, is judgment. Anyone can be hired to do a thing. The man worth keeping on a quiet list of trusted numbers is the one who can be trusted to know which things should not be done at all — and to say so, and to walk, and to keep his mouth shut about the asking. Reputation, in the legitimate trades, is who praises you. In mine it was who I had safely refused, and who therefore knew I would refuse on their behalf too, if it came to that.

A freelancer's whole career is the no he can be trusted to say. The yes is for sale anywhere; the reliable no is the only thing worth your name.

The ones I am not sure about

I will not pretend the list is clean. There were jobs I took that I have turned over since, in the small hours, and jobs I refused that I am no longer certain deserved refusing. The trade does not hand you a clean conscience and the man who tells you his is spotless either did very little or has lied to himself for so long he believes it. I made the calls with what I had, fast, in rooms where the better information never arrived, and some of them were wrong.

What I held to, mostly, was this: decide the line while you are calm, write it where the committed version of you cannot reach to erase it, and obey it when the money and the flattery are working on you in real time. I broke that rule a few times. I am still here, which means the breaks were survivable, which is not the same as right. The list of refusals is the part of the ledger I can read without flinching. The rest of it I keep behind my eyes, where, as the trade taught me, the dangerous things are safest.

Names withheld, particulars moved off their true coordinates, the choices reported exactly as they were faced.

— M.