Three years ago, St. Petersburg Times reporter Lane DeGregory and photographer Melissa Lyttle introduced 9-year-old Dani as “The girl in the window.”
At the beginning of the 6,500-word story, Dani peeks out the dirty, broken window of a roach-infested home. Before she was rescued at age 6, she spent her days lying on an old mattress, covered in sores, never potty-trained, unable to speak. In the course of the story, Dani is adopted by a caring couple who become entranced by the girl’s dark, distant eyes.
Readers, too, were taken with her. The story became the most popular ever on the Times’ website. People donated $10,000 to help the family. DeGregory still gets emails every week from people asking how Dani is.
Thing is, until recently she didn’t know. After going to Chicago to appear on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” the family cut off contact with the two journalists.
The silence continued until a couple of months ago, around the time that the adoptive parents, Bernie and Diane Lierow, offered DeGregory and Lyttle the followup that they had sought for so long. The Lierows had just published a book, “Dani’s Story,” and they were looking for publicity.
“Dani, in the real world,” was published Sunday by the newspaper, which is owned by Poynter. Like “The girl in the window,” this story provides an inside look into Dani’s world and her growth. But it also shows that a followup can be as challenging, in different ways, as the original, prizewinning story.
The people are the same, but their lives have changed. Readers want a happy ending, but reality is more complicated. And a journalists’ relationship with a source changes over time.
Three years ago, I sat down with DeGregory and Lyttle to learn how they did this story: how they gained the trust of their sources, observed intimate moments, collaborated to capture the best details and images, and balanced complete access with compassion.
Last week, I talked to them again to see how they did the followup. We discussed:
- How a relationship with sources can fracture after a story and how they worked to restore it
- How they balanced the need to ask tough questions with empathy for their subjects
- How online comments can affect people’s perceptions of how they are portrayed in a news story
- How similar moments presented themselves three years later
Here are some highlights from our 90-minute conversation.
Restoring a relationship with sources
Dani became known around the world after “The girl in the window” was published. The family appeared on Oprah. DeGregory approached them with a book proposal, but they decided to do their own.
And over the next several months, the Lierows stopped talking to the journalists who had documented their lives, even after their work won prizes such as DeGregory’s 2009 Pulitzer for feature writing. DeGregory described what happened:
DeGregory: Initially they [Bernie and Diane Lierow] really liked the story. I have a thank-you letter they sent me about how much it meant to them … And they were so grateful for how much attention it had drawn to other foster kids – some kids actually got adopted because of the story. …
They were very pleased with us – until Oprah. Once Oprah called and started working with them and with us, things got really complicated. Oprah made them sign some kind of an agreement that they wouldn’t talk to any other media at all, including us. …
The family recorded the Oprah show in October, but it didn’t air until March. Meanwhile, DeGregory’s editors were pressing her to follow up with the family, in part because of the incredible response from readers. By this time, the Lierows had moved to Tennessee.
DeGregory: I kept calling them and sending them letters and emails asking them, please, can I talk to you? … And they basically said, ‘Stop. Stop bothering us, we’re not going to talk to you, Oprah doesn’t want us to talk to you’ – and basically severed all communication. That was probably about six months after the story came out.
This summer, then, the first question was what kind of relationship the journalists would have with the family on their two-day trip to Tennessee.
DeGregory: Things were different. It had been three years, and all that water under the bridge. But they invited us out there. I haven’t even tried to talk to them since the Pulitzer came out. I wasn’t going to push anymore … It hurt to keep getting thwarted, so I finally just gave up. …
Rather than going into this situation thinking I’ve got to build this relationship or I’ve got a good relationship that I’ve earned, I felt like, ‘Geez, I’ve to go start all over and figure out how to tread lightly.’
At the beginning I just let [Bernie] go. I didn’t ask a lot of questions, that first morning at least. Then we got to get in the car with him and that became a little more intimate and easy to actually interview him. …
Lyttle: While it was awkward at times – just trying to pick up a conversation that was left off three years ago, with the stuff that had happened in between – they were so busy that they’d forget about us. We didn’t necessarily have the most time to sit down and interview them – we’d get questions in on the fly – but it was a lot of narrative, a lot of observation, writing.
Reporting on progress, or lack of it
After their initial meeting, Bernie Lierow took DeGregory and Lyttle to his home, where they met Dani as she got off the school bus. She had been 9 years old when the story was published; now she was 12. But her physical appearance belied the young girl within.
DeGregory: … What was shocking to me was, she was still 9-year-old Dani inside that body. So where you have a 9-year-old having a temper tantrum or needing help with simple tasks, it’s not as shocking as an almost-13-year-old having the same temper tantrum and needing help with everything, like “Pull up your pants, Dani,” and “Let me help you take off your shoes, Dani.” That, to me, was harder to watch.
One of the goals of the story was to see whether Dani was healing and growing after years of crippling neglect. The journalists found that hard to answer. The Lierows thought Dani had made great strides, but for DeGregory and Lyttle, the progress was hard to discern.
Lyttle: The biggest thing we’ve noticed is how aware she’s becoming of the world around her. I think, three years ago when we first met her, her world was limited. Everything was kind of in her head. There was this little sphere around her and that was her orbit.
[This time] we noticed her watching lights go by on a cop car that passed us and making eye contact with people, which is huge, and physically reacting when these little girls came up to her at the carnival. … She recognized them and smiled.
DeGregory: She initiates contact now. Before, she would almost cringe if someone tried to hold her hand or pat her on the head or whatever. And now, she hugged us, she held our hands, she reached out to these little girls, she turned to her parents when they were talking to her. She’s definitely coming out of this cocoon that had been sheltering her for so long.
Does she strike you as unknowable as she was before?
DeGregory: I don’t think I have a sense of what’s going on in her mind except when she would laugh. Or even when she was upset, you couldn’t tell what upset her. You could tell when she was happy. …
Before, we had a big question mark as to whether there was anything in there that could be drawn out. And now it’s like you’re seeing this big crack in the armor or the egg or whatever – that she’s coming out.
DeGregory has said that she often tries to distill a story down to one word. In 2008, she told me that those words were “nurturing” and “hope.” I asked her what the word would be this time.
DeGregory: … It’s about connecting – connections. For whatever she doesn’t have, still, she understands that when she kicks a ball it makes it fly in the air. That’s her doing that. She understands that when someone calls her name and holds their arms out that they want a hug, and she’s willing to go and do that.
Balancing the reader’s important questions with compassion for the sources
In both stories, I noticed that DeGregory addresses important questions of accountability in a muted, nonjudgmental way. She told me how she approaches difficult, yet necessary questions in her reporting and writing:
DeGregory: I try really hard to keep opinion out of all the stories I write. … I feel like my job as a journalist is not to judge people, just to put it out there.
Everybody is predisposed to hold them up to what [he] would do. … But I don’t think in writing a story and offering it to our readers, that that has a place. …
I do anticipate the questions they would ask. If any reader was coming to this story, they would want to know, what’s Dani’s doctor say? So we went down the path and back again about, ‘Can we talk to her doctor?’ And Bernie kept saying, ‘She doesn’t have a doctor.’
OK. That’s their choice, for whatever reason that is. I don’t feel like it’s my place to judge, but I do feel like I need to share that with the readers who are going to wonder.
Journalists often say that they serve their audience, not their sources. But when a reporter and photographer work so closely with the subjects of their story, they can end up in a complex relationship in which they feel protective of them.
That happened in 2008 and again this time. DeGregory said she reread this week’s story after it had been edited and changed some wording out of concern that it would bother the Lierows. “It wasn’t even about Dani, just the way that things were worded,” she said.
I asked her why she cares so much what her subjects think of her stories.
DeGregory: … I don’t want them to think that I did anything for the wrong reasons. I never went into this thinking this was going to win a prize. I was thinking it was going to get a kid adopted – and it did. And maybe this one will too.
But for whatever anyone wants to say about the Lierows, they’ve saved that little girl. And there’s something heroic in that. There’s a lot heroic in that.
How do you think people will react to this story?
DeGregory: I’ve thought about that a lot. … I think people are probably going to be glad to know she’s doing well, given some hope that she’s connecting and she’s giving back love and affection. They weren’t sure she could do that, and that was huge. …
But I think people might be surprised at how little she’s progressed verbally, socially. When we left her she had already been potty trained, but she’s still wearing pull-ups at night. When we left her she could eat with a fork and a spoon, but she’s still mostly eating with her fingers. When we left her she was beginning to follow simple commands and she hasn’t gotten much beyond that.
How online comments can change a subject’s perception of a story
Although DeGregory strives to present a nuanced view of such issues in her stories, that doesn’t necessarily filter into the readers’ comments. DeGregory said “The girl in the window” was the first time that reader comments changed the subjects’ perception of how they were portrayed.
DeGregory: …I worry more about what the commenters are going to say and how the subjects are going to react. …
I try to tell all the people I write about now, no matter what you think about my story, read it without reading the comments. Because it changes people’s perception; it changes their reception of your story. …
Here’s a free Ph.D. idea for some journalism student out there. … The phone calls that I get are overwhelmingly positive. “Great story,” “Loved these people,” “Thank you for making my morning.” “Where can I send money?” The emails are really well thought-out. They either have a problem they want to understand or they want to offer some insight or say, “I know somebody like this.” But the comments are mean.
Capturing images of progress three years later
Lyttle’s photos were a key part of “The girl in the window.” They ended up being important this time, but in an unexpected way.
Towards the end of the trip to Tennessee, Lyttle was going through her images to see what she had to work with. She realized that one photo seemed quite similar to one in the first story. When she started looking, she found several cases in which a photo she had just made mirrored one from three years ago.
DeGregory: Without meaning to, she had shot so many eerily similar moments this time that she had pictures of from last time. … It was amazing – not even just the scenes, but the body language, and the positioning of the people, and the light. …
Lyttle created several “diptychs” with each image side-by-side. One of those photos was published in the newspaper:
Lyttle: It’s the one that was our lead photo the first time around, where [Bernie Lierow is] hugging her and she’s just kind of dangling, lifeless and limp, and not hugging back. And that scene happened again … I made this picture in the living room this time where he was hugging her. It’s very clear: She’s holding his head. She’s kind of playfully biting his nose and kissing him back. … It’s the same down to the fact of lensing and composition and moment.
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- Left: (2/3/08) Two of Bernie Lierow’s favorite things are giving his daughter Dani, 9, (left picture) kisses and hugs, even if she couldn’t give them back. The main question the family had was whether a little girl who’d been neglected learn to love and allow herself be loved. Right: (8/12/11) Three years later, Dani, now 12, has grown, physically and emotionally — she’s a foot taller and clearly responsive to her dad’s affection, hugging him back, kissing and playfully biting his nose. (Melissa Lyttle/St. Petersburg Times)
The changes in Dani are evident in another diptych of portraits from then and now:
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- Left: (2/3/08) For the first seven years of her life, Danielle never saw the sun, felt the wind or tasted solid food. She was kept in a closet in a Plant City apartment, cloistered in darkness, left in a dirty diaper, fed only with a bottle. “She was a feral child,” said Carolyn Eastman of the Tampa heart Gallery. “We’d never seen a case like that.” Right: (8/12/11) Some of the biggest improvements noticeable in Dani are that she’s starting to notice things around her and making eye contact with others. (Melissa Lyttle/St. Petersburg Times)
Lyttle: For the first one, she wouldn’t make eye contact with people. And she was very, sort of hard-edged, and lock-jawed, and clenched. In the second one she definitely looks softer, and she’s looking directly into the camera, which is huge because she would make that eye contact and that connection with people.
Three years ago, the family was concerned that Dani not come off as a monster and that Lyttle didn’t photograph embarrassing moments. This time, Lyttle said, the situation was a bit different.
Lyttle: The first time we did make concessions with how we were covering this. … Those concessions weren’t made this time, and I think a big part of that for me is because they published this book and they did exactly what they had asked us not to do, in the book.
There’s a whole scene in the book about her having an accident and flinging poop all over the house and stuff that we didn’t include in our original story, mainly because they were worried with how it was going to make her look. …
I don’t want to say I went in trying to make them look bad. That certainly wasn’t my goal. I don’t believe they’re bad people; I don’t believe they’re evil. I just think they’re human and they’re imperfect. And part of that truth for me was showing those imperfections this time.
…The way I described it to my editors was, in the comments the first time, a lot of the readers had described the Lierows as “angels on earth.” … But angels on earth are humans, and they sometimes have a broken wing or a tarnished halo. They’re not perfect. I think it’s a very real interpretation of the chaos in their lives this time.
Like other readers, I was eager to learn what had become of Dani, and like DeGregory and Lyttle, I wonder what another three years will bring.
“I’m glad in retrospect that we waited three years,” DeGregory told me. “I think if we had done it after one year we probably wouldn’t have seen something as tangible as we saw now in terms of growth and promise and hope.”
