The Joint Redemption: how one irresponsible publication embarrassed a respected local businessman

In the 70s, Ken Friedlander made a name for himself with his clothing store, Ken and Company. He was well-known, a man with a booming voice, the kind of man who never met a stranger. His son, Paul, remembers his father always smelling of Paul Sebastian cologne, and says, “you would hear and smell him before you saw him.”
   Ken would later go into real estate, where his personality and business acumen translated into a successful second career. In time, however, Ken grew forgetful and began repeating himself. Doctors diagnoses him with a form of Alzheimer’s disease and retired. Paul, then 31, became his father’s primary caregiver.
   Unable to drive, Ken liked to walk his neighborhood with his dog and visit nearby stores, as a way to maintain some sense of normalcy. Paul says his father “was such a good bullshitter, you wouldn’t know he was sick at first.”
One day in Publix, in early 2015, Ken put a small item in his pocket. Store management stopped Ken from leaving and did what anyone would do, they called the police. Police took Ken to jail jail, but soon released him after Paul explained his father’s illness. Publix immediately dropped all charges and apologized for the incident. The Joint Magazine, which publishes open record mug shots, decided not only to run Ken’s photo but also to put the well-respected community member on the cover for their next issue.
At the time, Paul was opening MaBella’s Italian Steakhouse, and every night guests would ask the son about his father. “I spent three months explaining the situation, his illness,” Paul recalls.
   “Made me feel powerless,” Paul says. “You go through the whole realm of emotions—anger, embarrassment, you feel powerless. You try to make light of it.”
   Paul tried for months to contact someone at The Joint, but never received a response. The LocaL has reached out to the publication for comment, and our requests have also been ignored.
   Within a year of the incident, Ken moved into assisted living, where a year later, at age 68, he passed away.
   “It’s like if someone slanders your kid,” Paul says. “There should at least be some kind of… I don’t know how you’d do it. If you can’t put children in The Joint, why can you put a senior citizen with dementia?”
   Ken Friedlander had his name dragged through the mud, and his family was left to handle the fallout. This is not an isolated case. Mug shot gallery magazines, and even special sections published by local newspapers, sometimes online and sometimes in print, often wreak havoc on innocent lives.
   A few years ago, a small paper in Colorado published a special mug shot section after police arrested 40 people in a major drug bust. The trouble? The arrests were made based on the testimony of two confidential informants, and immediately after the arrests were made, it turned out a lot of the information was bogus. While charges can be dropped, not only were innocent people’s faces plastered in the newspaper in a small town of fewer than 10,000 people, but some lost their jobs as a result of the coverage.
Printing news comes with responsibility. While scandal might generate sales and social media clicks, we who tell our community’s stories have a responsibility to tell the truth in the least harmful way possible. We can do this by providing context and following up on stories as they develop. When publications print mugs shots, names and charges without providing any additional information, without ever offering information on new developments in these stories, they risk the reputation and livelihoods of the people they feature. This practice erodes public trust in media, and at a time when public trust in media is at an all-time low, the base pursuit of a little extra revenue at the expense of our ethics is autocannibalism: to do so is to eat yourself.
   Publications do have other options. Rather than disparage the Ken Friedlanders of the world, we can take the time to tell their stories. And we at The LocaL want to tell those stories as often as possible. If you have been misrepresented by a publication like The Joint, let us know. We’d love to play our small part in redeeming your good name.

by Tom Ingram