We stayed at his house until dinnertime, and then all of us, woozy and lightheaded, made our way to a bar somewhere for cocktails, and then for a meal somewhere else, and then to another bar, where we capped off the evening.
It was the kind of memorable event that is difficult to recollect entirely the next day, although in the office, I began to see that Alexander’s excitement about America was more than just idle chat over drinks.
Indeed, while I continued to pursue global projects, my colleagues at SCL were increasingly focused on the United States, and their work was no longer confined to the Sweat Box. They were absorbed in daily conversations I could overhear, about their client Ted Cruz. He had signed on with us back in late 2014, for a small contract, but was now upgrading to nearly $5 million in services. Kieran and the other creatives were now producing tons of content for the Texas senator. They huddled at a desktop computer putting together ads and videos, which they would sometimes show off and at which they would sometimes stare, grimacing.
Meanwhile, Alexander was focused entirely on the United States, too. The Cruz campaign had agreed to sign a contract without a noncompete clause, so Alexander was free to pursue other GOP candidates as well. Soon, he had signed Dr. Ben Carson. Next up, he began systematically pitching the rest of the seventeen Republican contenders. For a while, Jeb Bush considered hiring the firm; Alexander said Jeb even flew to London to meet with him. In the end, though, he wanted nothing to do with a company that would even consider working at the same time for his competition. The Bushes were the kind of family who demanded single-minded loyalty from those with whom they worked.
The Cambridge Analytica data team busied themselves preparing for the 2016 U.S. presidential election by interpreting the results of the 2014 midterms. In their glass box, they wrote up case studies from John Bolton’s successful super PAC operation, from Thom Tillis’s senatorial campaign, and from all the North Carolina races. To show how Cambridge had succeeded, they put together a packet explaining how they’d broken the target audience into “Core Republicans,” “Reliable Republicans,” “Turnout Targets,” “Priority Persuasions,” and “Wildcards,” and how they’d messaged them differently on issues ranging from national security to the economy and immigration.
Also, in the data analytics lab, Dr. Jack Gillett produced midterm data visualizations—multicolor charts, maps, and graphics to be added to new slide shows and pitches. And Dr. Alexander Tayler was always on the phone in search of new data from brokers all over the United States.
I was still pursuing SCL projects abroad, but as Cambridge Analytica ramped up for 2016, I was becoming privy, if accidentally, to confidential information, such as the case studies, the videos, the ads, and the chatter around me. I was never copied on CA emails at that time, but there were stories in the air and images on nearby computer screens.
This presented an ethical dilemma. The previous summer, when Allida Black, founder of the Ready for Hillary super PAC was in town, I’d been fully briefed on Democratic Party plans for the election. Now I was receiving a regular paycheck from a company working for the GOP. It didn’t sit well with me, and I knew that it wouldn’t sit well with others.
No one asked me to, but I began to cut my ties with the Democrats, although I was too embarrassed to tell anyone on the Democratic side why. I didn’t want to put the SCL Group on my LinkedIn or Facebook page. I didn’t want any Democratic operatives I knew to have to worry that I’d ever use information I had from them against them. Eventually, I stopped replying to incoming emails from the Ready for Hillary super PAC and from Democrats Abroad, and I made sure that in writing personally to friends who were Democrats, I never included the SCL name on any of my communications. To the Clinton teams, it must have seemed as though I had simply dropped off the map. It wasn’t easy for me to do. I was tempted to read everything that came in, news about exciting meetings and plans. So, after a while, I just let these messages sit in my in-box, unopened, relics of my past.
I also didn’t want my Cambridge Analytica colleagues or the company’s GOP clients to worry about the same. After all, I was a Democrat working in a company that exclusively served Republicans in the United States. I removed the Obama campaign and the DNC from my LinkedIn profile (my public résumé) and erased all other public references I had made to the Democratic Party or my involvement in it. This was painful, to say the least. I also begrudgingly stopped using my Twitter account, @EqualWrights, a catalog of years of my left-leaning activist proclamations. As much as it hurt to close those doors and hide some of the most important parts of myself, it was necessary, I knew, in order for me to grow into the professional political technology consultant I was to become. And one day, perhaps, I could reopen both those accounts and that part of myself.
My change of identity wasn’t just online. In London, I opened up a big box my mother had sent me via FedEx; because she worked for the airlines, she had virtually free international shipping privileges. She had sent me business suit after business suit from her old closet: beautiful Chanel pieces, items by St. John, and specialty outfits from Bergdorf Goodman—what she’d worn years before, when she worked for Enron. I pictured what she looked like back then, when she left for work in the mornings back in Houston. She was always impeccably put together, dashing out the door in the highest of heels and those expensive suits, her makeup perfect. Now the suits were my hand-me-downs. I hung them in the closet of the new flat I’d rented for myself in Mayfair.
The flat was tiny, just one room with a kitchen counter and an electric burner and a bathroom far down a hall, but I’d chosen the place strategically. It was close to work and, more important, in the right neighborhood and on Upper Berkeley Street. If a client asked, in that presumptuous way Brits had, “Where are you staying these days?”—meaning where did I live, meaning of what social class and means I was—I could say without hesitation that I lived in Mayfair. If they filled in the blanks in their imagination with an expansive flat with a view, all the better. In point of fact, my flat was so small that I was nearly already halfway through it when I walked in the door; and when I stood in the middle of it, I could reach my arms out and touch either wall.
I kept those details secret, though, and every morning I strolled out of my Mayfair address wearing a fancy old suit of my mother’s knowing that no one would notice much of a difference between me and any trust-fund baby that owned half of the neighborhood.
“I want you to learn how to pitch,” Alexander said to me one day. I’d been talking to clients about the company for months, but in the end, Alexander or Alex Tayler always had to come in to close the deal, so he meant he wanted me to learn to pitch properly, as expertly and as confidently as he did.
Although he was the CEO, Alexander was still the only real salesperson in the company, and his time was ever more in demand. He needed me in the field, he said. I had never stood up in front of a client to make a PowerPoint presentation myself. It was an art, Alexander said, and he would mentor me.
What was most important, he said, was that I learn to sell myself, and that I wow him. I could choose whichever pitch I’d seen him give: the SCL pitch or the Cambridge Analytica one.
At the time, given that I was having little luck closing SCL contracts after the Nigerian deal, it occurred to me I might need to rethink things. I was also becoming increasingly uncomfortable with aspects of SCL’s work in Africa. Many of the African men I met with didn’t respect me or listen to me because I was young and a woman. Also, I was having ethical qualms, as potential deals sometimes lacked transparency or even verged on illegality, I thought. For example, no one ever wanted a paper trail, which meant that most often there were no written contracts. In the rare cases that there were, the contracts weren’t to include real names or the names of recognizable companies. There were always obfuscations, masks, and nebulous third parties. Those arrangements bothered me for ethical reasons as well as selfish ones: every time a deal was less than clean and straightforward, it narrowed my chances of making an argument for what I was owed in commission.
I was learning every day at SCL about other so-called common practices in international