True Confessions by Telephone

By Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

Beep. "Mom, Dad," says a 19-year-old, "I'm sorry, but I'm gay. And I will never, never change." Beep. "I just want to say I'm sorry," sobs a young woman, who says she caused an automobile accident that killed five people. "I wish I could bring them back." Beep. "I wish I had someone to share this with," murmurs a man, revealing the secret pleasure he gets from wearing his wife's clothing.

The soul baring goes on and on, recorded in 60-second messages to the Apology Sound-Off Line, a Los Angeles-based telephone service that offers the catharsis of confession for the price of a phone call. The service, started up this summer by a Los Angeles outfit called United Communications, receives some 200 anonymous calls a day from people admitting everything from marital infidelity to murder. "They are gut-wrenchingly honest," says apology-line operator M.J. Denton. But that's just for starters. On another number, callers pay $2 for the first minute and 45 cents a minute after that to listen to confessions. The second number receives up to 10,000 calls a day.

Adultery is one of the most common transgressions. Callers admit their guilt over affairs with friends and next-door neighbors by voicing apologies intended for spouses. Others atone for past failings. Declared a recovered alcoholic: "I would like to apologize to all the people I hurt in my 18 years as an addict."

Admissions of taboo, often criminal behavior pose a more serious dilemma. In fact, the line has become a repository for confessions of rape, incest, child sexual abuse and murder. The phone company's sole restriction is a ban on playing back such calls to other callers. "I just stabbed my wife and two daughters," one man screamed into the phone. "I buried my wife and daughter in the backyard. My other daughter is buried under the pier." The Los Angeles police, who do not monitor the line, say that it is up to the operators to report likely crimes. But Denton does not feel qualified to judge whether someone is telling the truth. Besides, confessors' calls are usually untraceable.

Are these true confessions? Although police are skeptical, experts say many of the calls are probably legitimate. "Desperate people can be uncensored and unguarded at their moment of crisis," says psychologist Gerald Goodman of the University of California, Los Angeles. Though the confessions contain an element of playacting, most callers want support for admission of sins. And listening to the confessions of others makes people feel better. "It normalizes your sense of guilt over transgressions to realize hundreds of others are doing it too," explains Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University.

Why the phenomenal response? "It's the extreme privatization of entertainment," says psychologist Jerald Jellison of the University of Southern California. Experts believe the anonymity of the telephone offers a psychological safety valve to the secret keeper, who feels compelled to unburden himself but fears vilification. Says UCLA's Goodman: "It's the interpersonal parallel of a one-night stand."

Perhaps. Not everyone, however, feels guilty. One man called in to confess he had embezzled $10 million in a computer scam -- and happily announced that % he was well and living in the Bahamas.