by A. J. Downey
“Let me just start by saying, believe me, Ms. Banks, I know precisely what you’re going through.”
“It’s Lilli or Lil, and you do?” I asked, and searched both hers and Yale’s faces.
“I do. I went through something similar just last year.”
That’s when things clicked, “Oh, you’re ‒that‒ Chrissy, and you’re here about the pictures, aren’t you?”
She smiled and bypassed the shortened version of her name and said: “The drone footage, yes.”
I paled. “Footage?”
“Yes, Lil, footage. Those were stills from a video,” Veronica said, and I closed my eyes.
“Well,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “I guess I should be fine with it, I mean, I’m a porn author after all, am I right?” I asked bitterly. I wasn’t, but there were a lot of people out there that didn’t see a distinction between romance novels and pornography. It all depended on your level of prude.
“May I ask why you didn’t contact law enforcement when you were made aware of the images when they aired on…” Christina trailed off and flipped through some notes on her legal pad, “Celebrity Beat, this last Monday?”
“I didn’t even think about it being illegal, Lil. I should have, I’m sorry.” Veronica said quickly. I shook my head.
“No, it’s all right. I didn’t either, to be honest. I just passed it to my civil attorneys.” I sat in silence for a moment and said, “Wow, revenge porn. I guess she got way more than she bargained for out of selling her lies to that gossip rag.”
Yale sat up straighter and exchanged a look with Christina. “What did you say?” Yale asked.
I shrugged and said, “It was Backdraft’s ex-girlfriend, some woman named Tori, goes by the name Torrid. She lied and told Celebrity Beat that Backdraft was cheating on her with me. She’s the reason, I think, that that footage even exists. Isn’t that almost the definition of revenge porn? Just because it was a woman doing it to a man doesn’t make it any less so.”
He looked impressed and jotted things down on his legal pad. Christina took up the line of questioning.
“Where was the footage taken? What hotel?”
I looked at her and frowned, drawing my head back in confusion. “It’s not a hotel; that was my bedroom.”
“Excuse me, what?” Yale demanded, and I could tell he was totally out of the loop and not happy about it.
“Yeah, come with me.” I stood and they stood with me, I took them down the hall and into my bedroom. Yale looked a deeply-dark level of pissed-off I don’t think I had ever seen on someone before.
“I don’t even know who took it, the footage I mean.” I said unhappily. “But yeah, it happened here. From the angle of the pictures, likely from out that window.” I pointed up and out the window and said, “I didn’t think I needed blinds on the forty-fourth floor; didn’t think anyone would be looking, or even be able to look, way up here. I never even thought someone would be so depraved as to use a drone, but that’s the only way they could have done it.”
“What do you think, Damien?” Christina asked softly.
“I think this sucks,” he said. “Celebrity Beat isn’t going to give up the source of the images willingly but they can be forced to. It won’t be fast, and your civil attorneys have a better position to work from than we do."
“Can I just ask?” They both looked my way. “Did Backdraft call you?”
They both exchanged a look and smiled, “We are here in an official capacity after receiving a call from a concerned citizen who saw the Celebrity Beat segment. Due to your celebrity status and the delicate nature of the images that were displayed on the show, we thought it best that the DA’s office pay you a visit personally,” Yale said and I nodded and waved him off. He laughed slightly and said, “Actually, Aly’s been bugging me about it since she saw it. I just couldn’t do anything until someone called me in. Backdraft did just that around an hour ago. It’s been a big game of telephone. I didn’t see the segment myself, I’ve just gotten hearsay from Aly.”
“Okay,” I gave a solid nod, because fighting back in any capacity felt a lot better than sitting around sullen and silent doing nothing. “What do you need from me?”
“First, we would like to know if you’re okay,” Chrissy said.
“I’m not, really,” I said with a nervous laugh. “It was, and still is, pretty violating. I can’t stay here, too much bad blood, too many bad things in too short of an amount of time. I’m selling it.”
“I’ll be drawing up some restraining orders and an order of protection,” Yale said. “Any of those paparazzi out there get out of line, you call me and we’ll put their name on them. I’ll save the order of protection for Torrid. Backdraft is right: she didn’t get what she wanted out of this, which was a reaction from you guys. Your keeping quiet is probably driving her up a wall, which is a bad thing when it comes to her.”
“How illegal is what this person did? You know, whoever took the video.” I asked.
“Well, we’re going to have to do some digging. At the very least, depending on who was operating the drone at the time, they could face a charge of voyeurism in the second degree, which is, sadly, just a gross misdemeanor punishable by some jail time that’s not nearly enough for something like this, and a fine anywhere between five hundred and a thousand dollars,” Yale said.
“That doesn’t include what your lawyers are going to do to them,” Veronica said.
“She’s right,” Chrissy said. “If we secure a conviction or even a guilty plea, even if they don’t serve any, or just minimal, time, your civil attorneys will have them dead to rights. Financially, you could ruin them for life.”
I felt my shoulders drop and looked out my bedroom window, up past the platform my bed was on, at the swatch of overcast sky where the drone must have been.
“Ruining someone’s life financially isn’t going to give me my dignity or sense of security back,” I said honestly.
“Trust me, I know,” Chrissy said softly. I exchanged a look with her and we both heaved a heavy sigh at the same time.
“Why just a misdemeanor?” Veronica asked, and I knew it was because she wasn’t nearly as nice as I was, deep down inside.
Yale nodded, his hands stuffed into his slacks pockets. “Truth is, the laws just haven’t, and won’t any time soon, catch up to technology like this.”
“It sucks, but it’s true,” Chrissy said. “There was some seriously fancy lawyering that had to happen when it came to my case which was mostly cyberstalking and using the media like a weapon.”
“I can’t even imagine,” I said.
“Trust me, you wouldn’t want to,” Chrissy said flatly.
“Let’s be real, here please?” I said. “What’s the actual likelihood you can even catch who flew that thing? I mean, I know drones have to be registered, but there’s no telling when or where they fly. I mean, it’s not like it’s something that can be tracked, right?”
“No, it’s not,” Yale said. “In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’m seeing that the only way that we’re going to find out who took those photos and sold them to Celebrity Beat is through your lawyers. I would suggest making that information part of whatever settlement you are seeking.”
“Okay,” Veronica interposed carefully, as she searched my face. “Say I pass that little tidbit along to Timber’s lawyers and they get the information. Why is it only a misdemeanor? Isn’t there anything else you could charge them with?”
Chrissy sighed and gestured out into the hallway. I nodded and led everyone back up the hall to my dining room where we could retake our seats and, my hands shaking but needing to do something, anything, right now, I poured four cups of tea from my little teapot. I didn’t really care if anyone drank them.
“Like Yale said, the laws surrounding situations like this are woefully inadequate to begin with,” Chrissy said unhappily.
“Right,” Yale agreed. “In order to stick a felony charge, we would have
to prove the videographer’s intent.”
“His intent was to earn a buck, at the real cost of my humiliation,” I said, frowning, and I felt my nose start to tingle in that familiar way that meant an ugly cry was coming. I didn’t want to give in to it, so I tried my hardest to force it down.
“Right,” Chrissy nodded. “And that’s the problem. From a legal standpoint, the way the law is written, that’s just a misdemeanor.”
“If I may continue to be blunt?” Yale asked and I nodded. I actually preferred it because I could tell, for him, that ‘blunt’ really meant ‘If I may continue telling you the un-sugarcoated version of the truth’ which, in my line of work, was becoming harder and harder to come by. He went on.
“To be considered a felony, the person would have to be a stranger to you and the intent behind the video would have to be proven to be that he filmed it in order to get himself, or other people off.”
“You’re joking?” Veronica looked a mixture of angry and aghast. In fact, if she were a cat, her ears would have been plastered flat back to her skull. The image made me smile affectionately at my friend.
“I wish I were. If this had been filmed and released on a porn site rather than sold to the gossip show, this would be a whole different set of charges with higher stakes.”
I’m pretty sure it looked like I had sucked a lemon when I said, “Doesn’t matter, though. The same end result was achieved either way.”
Chrissy’s face crumbled into lines of sympathy and I remembered what Backdraft had said to me. That Chrissy’s best friend had died and that she’d been shot during her situation. I had the brief thought that things would be so much easier if Backdraft’s crazy ex-girlfriend had tried to kill me, instead.
“Look, I know it's bad news from a criminally-legal standpoint, but there’s a reason for that,” Yale said and I looked him in the eyes. His jaw tightened and I could tell I really wasn’t going to like what he was going to say as much as he wasn’t going to enjoy saying it.
“Just say it,” I said.
“The law, as written, is classist as hell. It’s mostly inadequate, in my opinion, because people like us, with money, don’t really need criminal charges to even the scales. As a civil matter, you pretty much have everyone over a barrel here. Your lawyers are more than welcome to use my office as leverage. Even saying that the Indigo City District Attorney’s Office is looking into this might be enough to shake-down a settlement in a civil suit.”
“That’s great for me,” I said bitterly, “but what about when this happens to someone without money? Something like this to an underprivileged or even a middle-class girl trying to get in to a good college?”
“Hence, why the law is classist. For a ‘normal’,” he used air quotes around ‘normal’, which only made sense to me, because most people didn’t have the kind of money to burn on something like this, “person, there’s little or no recourse.”
I scrubbed my face with my hands and sighed, heavily.
“What about Backdraft, then?” I asked. “This happened to us, not just me. I mean, I believe he’s added to the suit per my request, but at the end of the day, even if we win, where’s the justice? The person really behind this is Torrid, not even Mark, really. I mean, he’s complicit, but he never would have done this and outted himself on TV like that, without her somehow being involved. He was pretty much home free.” The bitter bite of anger flooded my mouth and I realized something about myself as I sat there.
That people like Torrid, like Mark, were used to getting their way. That they were used to people like me, who were too nice, too forgiving, letting their bad behavior slide and that they counted on it. Maybe I need to rethink some things, here. I thought.
“The justice,” Veronica said derisively, “Is when they can’t get a car or an apartment because their credit is so bad from not paying the judgment against them in your case. The justice is in them having to think about what they did to you every time they sign their name on the check paying out to you, to get out from under the mountain of debt you drop on them.”
“She’s right,” Yale said. “It would take years to pay off the court costs and whatever fines are levied against them.”
“And they would have to think about that, about why they were in the predicament they were in, every single day, for as long as it took to crawl out from under it,” Chrissy added. I raised a hand and nodded, indicating they’d made their points.
“In short,” Yale said, “jail would honestly be shorter and easier.”
I leaned back in my chair and sighed. I looked over at Veronica and said, “I know I’m too nice…”
She gave me a flat look and interrupted me saying, “Honey, you’re a doormat. Let’s be real.”
I laughed, a genuine smile crossing my lips and nodded, “I am what my mother raised me to be,” I agreed. “So, let’s do this. You are not a doormat and you will do the right thing by me and the situation at hand, so you call the lawyers and give them the new information and marching orders accordingly.”
“They’re coming straight from you,” she said.
“That’s right. You know how this is played.”
“I surely do. That’s why I am absolutely indispensable to you,” she said lightly and she was already halfway across my apartment to the door leading into my office.
Yale chuckled and Chrissy was smiling. I couldn’t help but smile, too.
“Thank you for coming,” I said and they exchanged another look and smiled wider.
“You’re part of the Indigo Knights by proxy, now,” Chrissy said.
“It’s how we operate,” Yale agreed. “We help each other where we can and keep it above legal board at all times.”
“I like that,” I said.
Yale gave a tight lipped smile and said, “Well, we like you. Those of us that have had the opportunity to meet you. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.”
I smiled and blushed under the sentiment murmuring and awkward, “Thank you.”
“A piece of unsolicited advice?” Chrissy asked.
“Of course,” I said.
“As someone who’s sort of been there, with the media dogging my steps, don’t play into their hands. Don’t hide. Just go out and live your life accordingly and eventually, they’ll get bored. You and Backdraft staying strong, staying solid as a couple, will do more to make this die down faster than anything. There’s no scandal, no drama, and no story there. You go out and live your lives and your truths, and don’t let these assholes stop you.”
I sat and processed what she was saying for a moment, really thinking about it, and finally nodded.
“There’s absolutely nothing normal about my life anymore,” I said with a strange, nervous sort of laugh. I lost the battle with fighting back my tears and a couple got free. I wiped my eyes with my fingers and sniffed.
The looks of compassion from across the table leveled me and I struggled even harder not to just lose it and cry.
“I think you know that’s not true,” Yale said with a wry grin and I blushed a bit. I mean, he was right. Backdraft and what we shared was definitely a nice, normal, and the happiest thing, oh, my god… They got up, and I rose with them to see them out.
“When you’re club, you’re family,” Chrissy said softly. “You need anything, even if it’s just a girl’s night, you just call. Backdraft knows how to reach everyone.”
I nodded, “Thank you. Um, Yale, can I send you out of here with some things for Aly and Dawnie?”
He smiled and shook his head gently, “I’m afraid not. Considering I’m here in an official capacity, being seen leaving with any sort of gifts could be easily misconstrued.”
“Oh, I didn’t even think of that. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, it was the thought that counts and I appreciate it more than you could know.”
“Tell you what,” Chrissy said, flipping to a blank page on her legal pad. “Why don’t I get all the girls together and you meet us at the 10-13 later
this week? You just name a time.”
“Um, how about the day after tomorrow, around eight?”
“Saturday at eight, it is,” she said with a warm smile.
“Sounds good,” Yale agreed.
I opened my front door and they stepped out into the hall.
“Thank you for coming, and thank you for trying,” I said.
“Believe me,” Chrissy said. “I wish we could do more.”
“Agreed,” Yale nodded, the look on his face one of frustration and futility.
“It’s the thought that counts,” I said using his own words. I smiled wanly and he nodded slowly.
“Ball is in your civil attorney’s court,” he said.
“I’ll see what we can do.”
“Keep us posted.”
“I will.”
They turned and went for the elevator and I closed my front door, letting out a harsh sigh. Veronica sighed behind me in echo, and I jumped.
“Sorry,” she said. “Spoke to our lawyer’s paralegal. They’re on it.”
“Thanks.”
“Go get a shower,” she suggested softly and I nodded.
“I could use one,” I murmured, even though I was mostly clean from my shower at the firehouse the night before, I wanted the hot water to see if I could loosen up my muscles and my own shampoo and conditioner to get my hair under some control.
“I was really hoping there would be more they could do from a legal standpoint, you know?” she said, and I nodded.
“Me, too, but I’m not surprised. Welcome to my life and what I was accustomed to, before I fell face first into all this money.”
Veronica’s face fell and she lowered her arms from where she had them crossed over her stomach. She and I, despite having vastly different upbringings, still managed to work well together and were like two peas in a pod. Still, there were some things that her affluent upbringing didn’t prepare her for and this, unfortunately, was one of them. There was a reason she hadn’t thought to involve the police, and that was just as Yale had said it was. The rich were used to dealing with problems like this through civil attorneys and the private sector.
