Google ‘Jason Cairns-Lawrence’ and you’ll find news sites from around the world citing him and his now-ex-wife Jenny as the ‘world’s unluckiest couple’ having been caught up in New York on 9/11, the London bombings of 7 July 2005, and Mumbai’s November 2008 terrorist attacks. Little surprise the British travellers were branded “tourists of evil omen”, according to the Press Trust of India.
The pair’s terrorism-tinged travels even feature in a couple of books about chance and statistics: Beyond Coincidence, by Brian King and Matin Plimmer, and The Improbability Principle by David Hand. Using theories such as the Law of Inevitability (something must happen) and the Law of Truly Large Numbers (given enough opportunities, unlikely things will happen), David Hand – a multi-award-winning, internationally-acclaimed British statistician and OBE recipient – argues that the odds of two people stumbling across three of history’s worst terrorist atrocities, across three continents, in three different years are not, in fact, as slim, as you might think.
But here’s a statistical twist: what are the odds of all those journalists, authors and publishers getting their facts so spectacularly, so absolutely, wrong? Jason and Jenny hadn’t yet met and weren’t even on the same continent as the Twin Towers when they fell; were over 200km from London when the trains and buses were bombed (and still hadn’t met); and arrived (together) in India days after Mumbai’s terrorist attacks. I know this because I know Jason – he’s one of my very best friends, and, as amusing as it is to rib him about being a world-famous-on-the-internet ‘tourist of evil omen’, it simply is not true.
REVELATIONS
“It was towards the end of 2008, I was in the pub, and one of my mates called up and asked, ‘How much did you get paid for that then?’” recalls Jason, who hails from Birmingham, UK. “I didn’t know what he was talking about.”
He was talking about a double-page spread in local paper the Sunday Mercury, where, around the headline, ‘Are these the world’s unluckiest travellers?’ was a picture of Jason and Jenny on their wedding day – a picture lifted, without permission, from Jason’s Facebook page – and apocalyptic shots of New York, London, and Mumbai.
“Jenny and I had actually separated by then, and I initially thought that she must have sold the story to the paper!”
The real story, however, is far stranger and, in this era of fake news, downright depressing, bringing to mind the Winston Churchill quote about a lie travelling halfway around the world before the truth has had a chance to put its pants on. (Except, fittingly, Churchill didn’t say that, either.)
THE GENESIS
Jason and Jenny were in Mumbai in November 2008 but arrived days after the terrorists had struck. After a morning spent sightseeing, the couple headed back to their hotel to shower for some afternoon drinks before dinner and were soon lured by a street sign advertising beer towers in Leopold Café and Bar.
“We didn’t realise that the bar was one of the places that had been attacked. The waiter lifted some pictures on the wall to show us the bullet holes.”
It was there that they were approached by a young male journalist.
“We only chatted for around five minutes. He made it clear that he was a reporter and did make a few notes, but it didn’t feel like we were being interviewed. I was in New York about three weeks after 9/11, and I made some offhand remark about being impressed how life in Mumbai was already seemingly back to normal faster than in New York – though that attack was obviously far worse. He asked where we from and we told him ‘Birmingham’ and he asked if it was near London, and we said ‘no’. The London bombings were never even mentioned.”
But that didn’t stop the journalist quoting Jenny as saying: “In London, the police appeared more scared than the people.”
Like becoming a victim of revenge porn or a viral meme, it’s the non-consensual, helpless aspect of internet notoriety that’s so hard to deal with, and it has understandably knocked Jason’s trust in journalism to boot.
THE AFTERMATH
The story, unsurprisingly, soon took on a life of its own.
“There were reports on BuzzFeed and HuffPost. We were talked about on the local news, we were in the Daily Telegraph, I was getting calls from the BBC, The Sun, and Sky News. Journalists began calling my workplace. All because of this avalanche of lies.”
Jason managed to get most of the stories quickly removed from the British press, but overseas editors proved “less responsive”. In the age of clickbait, it’s a helluva headline to have. Jason was told by Google that they were unable to remove reports from independent websites, and at the time of writing, a quick search shows it still active on the Brisbane Times, The Times of India, and Stuff here in Aotearoa. Kolkata-based The Telegraph – one of the first outlets believed to have run the story – still has the headline: ‘Thank God! Jason & Jenny aren’t coming here’, adding that tourist boards the world over “will now probably pay them” to stay away.
Jason continues to receive regular interview requests from journalists and even documentary makers from all four corners but has long since given up trying to explain the truth. A few weeks ago, he forwarded me a request from the Guardian to be interviewed for a piece about bad luck.
THE CONSEQUENCES
Luckily, none of the online reports include the couples’ photographs, but not so lucky for Jason is the rarity of his name.
“At the time, I was the only male Cairns-Lawrence in the world!” says Jason, who now lives with his fiancée, Emma Sabell in Gold Coast, where he works as Queensland state sales manager for Oji Fibre Solutions. The couple initially emigrated to New Zealand, and the knowledge of his online infamy made the process “far more stressful” than it needed to be: “As someone who hires people, I certainly do Google checks.”
If New Zealand Immigration Googled Jason, they didn’t say, but he was soon pulled aside in his first job in Auckland at Steel & Tube to be asked by a group of colleagues, “We’ve got ask, is that you?!”
“I don’t doubt that there are job opportunities I’ve lost out on because of it,” laments Jason. “During interviews, it’s always there in the back of my mind. It’s like a stigma. It creates hesitancy. Your name is your brand nowadays and I’ve never known whether it might be better to bring it up first and explain it.”
Like becoming a victim of revenge porn or a viral meme, it’s the non-consensual, helpless aspect of internet notoriety that’s so hard to deal with, and it has understandably knocked Jason’s trust in journalism to boot.
“If there is anything positive that has come from it, it’s that it has made me less judgemental,” he says. “Whether they be stories about celebrities or everyday Joes, I read them through a different lens now, I question their validity. There are real people behind these articles, and reckless journalists must stop and consider the consequences.”
