The Transparency Offense
“Remove it or we’ll delete you.”
That was J Date support, the Jewish online dating site. My offense this time? Transparency.
“Look, I don’t know about you,” I wrote back, “but I’m trying to be transparent. I think women on this site should know I went to federal prison before they start sending me messages, no?”
“This is our final message. Remove the reference or we delete the account.”
I stared at the screen.
Do I dig in or move on? They must think I’m bragging. Who brags about going to prison?
That month, I was living out of a suitcase, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Quantico. I called it the Why I Went to Federal Prison Tour. After one talk to a room of new FBI agents, a woman caught me afterward and said, “That was surprisingly refreshing and insightful.” Then she asked if I wanted to grab a coffee, smart, confident, direct.
And all I could think was: you train these people, you don’t date them.
The idea of a long-term relationship with an FBI agent or anyone wasn’t appealing. I needed to stay local.
Back in my New York hotel room, more halfway house than hotel, complete with a sign in the lobby about a “bed bug issue”, I gave in.
“Fine,” I typed. “I’ll remove it. I enjoyed our conversation.”
Seconds later, the chat closed. A window popped up asking me to rate the experience.
As soon as I deleted “I went to federal prison” from my profile, I started giving myself a hard time over the betrayal.
“And there it is, JP. You talk to students about ethics, honesty, transparency, and just like that, you delete the one fact you always promised to disclose: I went to the big house for 18 months!”
Then I stopped. I realized how ridiculous I sounded, quoting myself like some moral authority over a dating profile. Camus said absurdity happens when our craving for order meets the world’s indifference. He could have been talking about me that night, turning a J Date chat into a seminar on integrity.
I smiled. “Dude, get it together. Lighten up. Relax. All is fine,” I told myself. “You don’t have to turn every moment into a story about time inside or a quote from a dead philosopher.”
I poured a glass of wine, wondered why I chose this hotel, and told myself, “Alright, enough. Some battles just aren’t worth fighting. And as Eazy-E said, ‘Eazier Said Than Dunn.’”
During my sentence, I promised myself I’d be perfect afterward; flawless, never abandoning my values, no matter what. There are just two big problems: I’m flawed and human.
I laughed, took another sip, and shrugged. “I’ll figure it out. Not everything’s an ethics quiz.”
As soon as I moved on from my biggest post-camp betrayal, deleting five words, ‘I went to federal prison’, I turned to more pressing matters. “Hmm, how will I tell a woman I actually went?”
As I considered the question, I noticed I was holding a book in my hand, From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest, some philosophy book I’d picked up after running ten miles through New York City.
“Ah, this is the problem,” I said. “I read too damn much. It’s all I think about.”
I put the book down and did something I rarely did. I watched TV for a few minutes, then passed out. Enough made-up drama for one day. The real drama would come later.
While getting dressed for my lecture at NYU the next morning, an email came through, one that wasn’t meant for me. It reminded me: prison ends, but the stigma and judgment don’t.
Hold the Line
By that point, speaking had become my new career. I’d just closed out the ACFE conference in D.C. in front of fifteen thousand people. That talk made me the highest-rated speaker of the event. So when another business school booked me that fall, the professor running the program said, “You’ll be our top-paid speaker.”
A few weeks later, I got an email that wasn’t meant for me.
It opened with a line that would have wrecked me years earlier:
“He’s a fraudster out of jail. Yeah, he might be the highest-rated speaker, but that doesn’t mean we should pay him more. Plus, it would be hard to pay him more than a Forbes journalist who’s coming in to speak. Offer him less, I’m sure he’ll take it.”
It wasn’t from NYU but another business school. The professor who invited me and offered me the highest rate for the event didn’t write it; one of the event organizers did.
Now I was a discount.
I just stared at it. Instead of getting angry, I reflected.
Before my conviction, I might’ve thought the same way, not that the person was evil or undeserving, just that they’d take less. I would’ve rationalized it too: He’s been to prison, his options are limited, he’ll say yes. That’s how fast a second chance becomes a markdown.
A government investigation can turn you into a student, if you let it; you meet new people, good people I once would have called criminals. You hear their stories and realize how thin the line is between good and bad decisions. You start to see the world differently as you develop more compassion and perspective. As bad as I thought I had it for a while, someone always had it worse. I never fully understood, “There but for the grace of God go I,” until I served time. Perspective and gratitude, those are the real benefits of federal prison.
Bob Dylan once sang, “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.” My mom grew up with him, so I’ve heard that line all my life.
And yet, people still do. They read a headline, skim a bio, and decide who you are. I get it.
Judging is easy. I’m guilty of it too. Maybe that’s why I can meet judgment with sympathy. I understand it, which makes it easier not to return fire.
A minute later, my phone rang, the organizer.
He tried to spin it. “Justin, that email was—well—it came out wrong. We value your work. You have to understand the budget pressures—”
“Stop,” I said. “You wrote what you meant. You think because I’m a fraudster out of prison and probably broke, I’ll take less money. Right?”
There was a pause. Then: “Yes. I’m ashamed I sent it.”
“I appreciate the honesty. I’ll still come. But the higher rate stays. You don’t get a discount because someone paid their debt.”
Silence. Then: “Understood.”
That was it. No yelling, no follow-up emails. Just clarity.
I didn’t need to win the argument; I needed to hold the line. Had they refused, I wouldn’t have gone, no matter how much I needed the money. Dignity isn’t pretending you don’t need things; it’s refusing to sell yourself short because of who you used to be.
It reminded me of a story Al Pacino once told about filming The Godfather in Italy. There was an extra on set, poor, exhausted, mocked brutally by a director. In the middle of the scene, the man took off his costume, walked away, and gave up the pay he desperately needed.
Pacino said, “I loved him. I admired him. But I could never be him.”
The man didn’t leave because he could afford to. He left because he couldn’t afford not to.
So did I.
I wasn’t at the business school to prove I wasn’t a criminal. I was there to do my job, to help business students understand the motivations and consequences of white-collar crime. Nothing more.
When I met that organizer at the event, I shook his hand. He apologized again, and I told him it wasn’t necessary. Who am I to ask for forgiveness if I won’t give it?
“Don’t worry,” I said, half-smiling. “I’ll wake these college kids up after your Forbes speaker puts them to sleep.”
Katsuya — Studio City, CA
Back home from another long trip, I was ready for a different kind of experience. Not a conference. Dinner. My first J Date.
I was meeting a Merck pharmaceutical sales rep at Katsuya in Studio City, a place I’d been to plenty of times before camp. Familiar sushi, unfamiliar situation.
I’d decided not to tell her by text or email. In person felt right, until it didn’t.
It came out faster than I expected, right after she asked about all the travel.
“So you were traveling for work?”
“Yes,” I said. “Talking to business students about ethics, white-collar crime, prison.”
The server set down crispy-rice spicy tuna and a baked crab roll.
“Why, do you work in prisons or are you a lawyer or something?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I went to federal prison.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, not really confused. She heard me—the words just sat there between us.
“It’s a lot to take in. I went to federal prison for eighteen months. Now I use that experience to help good people who never imagined they’d be in the system prepare properly.”
“Oh,” she said. “I see.”
The pause that followed stretched longer than either of us wanted.
That’s when it hit me. How I could stand in front of fifteen thousand people talking about my time inside, yet feel uncomfortable sharing it with one.
On stage, the frame already exists: the USC athlete turned author, the guy who went to prison and came back to talk about ethics. The audience already knows. NBC and ABC had covered my speaking visits. Eastern Illinois University once shut down the town so I could lecture. They came for the story. They expected it.
A blind date doesn’t come with a trailer.
Without that setup, I wasn’t a speaker or author. I was just a guy who went to prison no introduction, no context, only that word landing between the spicy tuna roll and the baked crab roll. I felt weaker, wounded, like I would be judged for the sentence rather than the man I was becoming.
“I was not expecting that,” she said.
While she searched for her next question, an old Montaigne line returned:
“If I speak the truth, it is not to convince others, but to free myself.”
I first read that quote while standing in line for the chow hall. The truth had followed me from a bunk in a minimum security camp to a sushi bar, asking the same thing of me: stop hiding, tell the truth, hold nothing back, make no excuses.
We didn’t see each other again, but it was a win for me. I told my story over a glass of wine for the first time. I still wonder what the win was for her, if anything. Maybe she appreciated the honesty. Maybe the discomfort taught us both something about grace.
I knew I would be able to find someone who would see my experience as an asset, not a weakness.
Driving home that night, I realized this whole journey (dating, speaking, writing) wasn’t about trying to convince people I was different from the guy in my press release or plea agreement. Certainly, I knew some people would always judge me, no matter what I did. This journey was about fully embracing life and, in a corny sort of way, following through on what I learned from these dead philosophers whose quotes circled in my brain endlessly. Sometimes, for fun, I pretended they were watching me, no different than when I was a kid imagining Wade Boggs or Bo Jackson watching me take batting practice.
The Work of Remembering
As I write this in September 2025, I think about why I’m sharing these stories, or, as someone once put it in the comments of one of my first YouTube videos back in 2014, “random, useless stories from a crook who served 18 measly months in a camp and used the time to steal all of Santos’s ideas.”
When I responded with, “I agree with the 18 months and Santos criticism,” he replied, “Not sure how to react to that. Wasn’t expecting it.”
Why share any of this? A dating story? An event organizer who insulted me? Some random YouTube comment from December 2014?
Because I hope it helps the reader see their own story in it, to access their own plight and understand the value of documenting the journey in real time.
If I’d stopped hiding earlier, faced the shame, written it down instead of running from it, I might’ve made sense of it sooner.
That thought hit me while writing this chapter. I write now so I do not forget.
Lessons from Prison had a chapter called “Writing to Connect.” Back then, writing was about helping others understand. Now it’s about remembering. Maybe this one’s called “Writing So I Don’t Forget.”
That’s really what it is. Writing keeps me grounded. It reminds me where I’ve been, who helped along the way, and how easily convictions and rationalizations can drift into doubt.
And here’s what I’ve learned about writing, or living, through the process: it’s beautiful to look back years later and see the growth, the failed promises, the aspirations that never came to be. There’s always value in the attempt.
In Ethics in Motion, I foolishly wrote that I thought I had arrived. I know now no one fully arrives. Documenting the lessons after the fall at least shows my attempt to arrive, to do better. It doesn’t always work, but I try.
That reminds me of a story Dave Chappelle once told. He was on stage talking about a show that bombed, people booing, demanding their money back. He said, “People of Detroit, let me be clear: you will never get your money back. I am like Evel Knievel, I get paid for the attempt.”
I love that joke. Sometimes we miss; it doesn’t hit the mark. But we try nonetheless. And when it does hit, it’s beautiful to have it memorialized.
When my children, Jason and Alyssa, ask about my grandparents, I tell them stories about perseverance. About my grandfather leaving Chicago in the thirties, buying a building, starting a business. Over dinner once he told me, “I always root for the underdog.” I wish I’d asked him why. I wish he’d written it down.
Then there’s my other grandfather, the dentist who went to war when my mom was born. Two years gone. Missed her first words, her first steps. My grandmother lost her daughter at thirty-five to brain cancer. The pain nearly broke her, but somehow she found a way through it. I wish I knew how.
They never wrote it down.
That’s why I do.
I write for Jason and Alyssa, for their kids someday. I want them to know me, the good and the bad, the parts that took years to figure out. I want them to take what helps and leave what doesn’t.
No one ever regrets writing too early. They regret waiting.
I used to think leadership meant achievement. Now I think it means honesty. You lead by admitting what you’ve learned the hard way, and giving others something to improve their own life. Writing lets you pay it forward, not by coming off as some moralizing, pompous ass, which I can be. I think the moralizing keeps me accountable, but it’s often too much, even annoying.
The legacy isn’t about sharing random prison stories or pretending they’re profound. It’s about showing what happens after. The choices, the stumbles, the small wins, the stuff I used to be too proud to admit. It’s about trying to build something from it, even when no one’s asking you to. It’s about knowing what you’re worth. and never letting anyone price you lower again.
Camus called it absurdity, the fight to build meaning in a world that doesn’t care what you’re worth. I just call it life after the fall.
Justin Paperny
Written by Justin Paperny, author of Lessons from Prison and Ethics in Motion.
Reflection Journal:
When someone discounts you for your past, do you shrink, or do you hold the line?
