But the choice also had a dimension that went beyond the immediate social crisis. It involved three decades of systematic misrepresentation to the person most affected by it — to Jack himself. Every time Ethel May referred to herself as his mother in his presence, she was maintaining the misrepresentation. Every time June referred to herself as his sister in his presence, she was doing the same. The misrepresentation was so complete and so sustained that it could not properly be called a white lie or a minor omission. It was a constructed alternative reality that Jack lived inside for thirty-seven years.
The harm caused by this misrepresentation is difficult to assess because Nicholson himself has described the discovery as something that clarified rather than damaged him. He has not, in any available account, said that he wishes the truth had been kept from him, or that he wishes the arrangement had never been revealed. His consistent statement is that he received the truth as an adult with a formed self, and that the truth was something he could accommodate.
Whether a different person, in a different circumstance, might have experienced the same discovery very differently is not in dispute. The fact that this particular person received it with relative equanimity does not mean the arrangement itself was ethically neutral. The harm potential was real even if, in this case, the harm was limited.
The ethics of the disclosure — the fact that the truth came to Nicholson through a magazine investigation rather than through a family member’s decision to tell him — raises a separate question. The family had made, implicitly, a decision never to tell him. That decision was about to be overridden by an external actor pursuing a professional purpose: coverage of a famous film and its star. The magazine’s decision to contact Nicholson before publishing, whatever its motivation, meant that he heard the information from the people who found it rather than from the people who had held it.