Known As Mr. Apology, One Man Launched The Apology Hotline In 1980, Prompting Thousands Of People To Confess Their Dark Acts Of Wrongdoing
In 1980, a man named Allan Bridge, who became known as Mr. Apology, launched The Apology Line, a hotline that people could call and apologize anonymously for their acts of wrongdoing.
Thousands of individuals confessed to theft, infidelity, domestic violence, abuse, murder, and more. The darkness of people’s crimes took a great toll on Mr. Apology. The phone calls took up most of his time, and he ended up losing friends.
The Apology Line all started when Allan decided that he wanted to atone for his sins. As an artist and a carpenter in New York City, he was struggling to make ends meet, so he turned to shoplifting.
Eventually, the guilt began to eat away at him, which led him to set up The Apology Line as a sort of art project and social experiment. The phone line was connected to an answering machine in his Manhattan loft.
He advertised it around town with posters encouraging strangers to call and describe their misdeeds in detail. The posters emphasized that the hotline was not affiliated with the police, government, or religious institutions, so they wouldn’t be jeopardizing themselves by confessing.
Callers were also instructed not to state their names and to call from a payphone so their numbers could not be traced.
Immediately, people started leaving messages on the line. Story after story came rushing in, including a man who claimed to have killed his own mother, a runaway who had left home because she felt unloved, a man with HIV who knowingly spread the virus to men and women, and a man who claimed to beat and rob gay men.
Another man witnessed a crime in the men’s bathroom at Penn Station but did not report it, a cop apologized for all the beatings he had given people, and a man admitted that he had been driving when he skidded on ice and crashed into a greenhouse, destroying $25,000 worth of roses. The man clearly felt bad, saying, “I want to make do for it, but I really don’t have that kind of bread.”
In addition, a little girl called in about hitting a dog that had attacked her. The most chilling call Allan received was from someone who threatened to track him down and murder him.
ronnarong – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
At the time, he was dating Marissa Bridge, who he would marry in 1984. “We were scared,” recalled Marissa in the Mr. Apology podcast. “If somebody said they were coming to kill him, I believed it.”
Once in a while, Allan would pick up the phone and talk if the person on the other line sounded like they wanted to harm themselves.
Over the next 15 years, The Apology Line recorded more than half a million messages. The hotline grew to include extensions to categorize types of confessions, like crime, cheating, and addiction. By the early 1990s, Allan became consumed with his own creation.
“It took up his whole life. He slept very little and worked minimally at carpentry. Keeping up with everything was a Sisyphean task. Calls got dark,” Marissa said.
To make matters worse, some of the callers weren’t really apologizing for their sins and trying to heal from them. Instead, it sounded as if they were bragging about their wrongs.
Allan withdrew from society more and more. Most of the couple’s friends drifted away. Eventually, he thought of giving up the hotline altogether, but he never got the chance.
In 1995, he was scuba diving in Shinnecock Inlet off the coast of Long Island when a Jet Ski hit him. He died at the age of 50, and the culprit was never caught.
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