Beyond the Headlines

by R. G. Belsky

  “Except the first time she went on air with the hat, it was a windy day and the hat kept threatening to blow away. As she was doing a remote, she kept holding onto the hat at the same time she was talking into the microphone. At first with one hand. Then two. By the end of the appearance, she was pretty much holding onto the hat for dear life. The next time she came to work, she found a memo from the consultant to her. It said: ‘Love the hair, lose the hat.’”

  There was more laughter and a lot more stories. At one point, I asked Dani about her craziest newspaper moment. She said it had been at the New York Post. Dani had worked as a reporter at the Post before I hired her away for TV. I liked hanging out with newspaper people, the way I did when I worked for a paper in New York. Maybe that’s why I liked Dani, despite all the problems she caused for me because of her volatile relationship with Brett.

  “The Post was—and is, as you know—a pretty sensational publication. When I was there, all of us reporters would do anything for a story. So one day I get a tip that this married congressman is shacking up with his girlfriend at a Midtown hotel. I go to the room, knock on the door, and say I’m from the New York Post. I can hear a lot of frantic scurrying around behind the door.

  “Finally, the politician opens the door and I say to him: ‘Where’s the girl?’ He insists there’s no one else in the room. I look over at the bed and see a pair of panties and a bra. I say: ‘So whose are those?’ He thinks about it for a second and then blurts out: ‘They’re mine.’ I tell him: ‘Congressman, the voters might forgive you for cheating on your wife. But there’s going to be an awful lot of jokes if they think you’re a transvestite. Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider that answer?’

  “The congressman mulls that over for a while, and finally he says to me: ‘Well, maybe the maid left them.’”

  I was going to miss all this—I was going to miss the people at Channel 10—if I wound up moving to Los Angeles for the big new talk show job.

  Before we left, Maggie asked me about the Laurie Bateman story. I told her about my meeting with Donna Grieco and my hopes of getting an interview with Bateman herself soon. All the time I was doing this I kept thinking about how much I liked talking about stuff like the Laurie Bateman story. Because it kept my mind off all the other things going on in my life right now. I wondered if a young woman like Maggie had such worries on her mind.

  “What do you want to do—what’s your goal, Maggie?” I asked her now.

  She looked at me strangely.

  “I want to go home and get some sleep so I’ll be wide awake at work in the morning.”

  “No, I mean what do you want to do with your life?”

  “I work on that from day to day, Clare. My goal is to put out the best news show that I can every day. Then do it all over again the following day. Someone taught me how to do that. Taught me how to live for that day’s news—then worry about the rest of it later. Someone I respect a great deal in this business. That was you, Clare.”

  Maggie was right. That was the rule I’d lived my life by and passed that on to others like her. But Maggie was still in her twenties. She had a lot of time yet to make decisions about her life. Me, I was running out of time.

  I had decisions to make about my career—plus the decisions involving my family life with my daughter and granddaughter.

  And I was going to have to make those decisions very soon.

  My phone buzzed. I took it out and saw I’d just gotten a text message. From Donna Grieco. It said: “The interview with Laurie Bateman is on for ten a.m. tomorrow at Rikers Island. I’ll be there waiting for you.”

  CHAPTER 27

  GOING TO RIKERS Island prison was not something I looked forward to doing, even for a big exclusive with Laurie Bateman. I’d been to Rikers a few times in the past, to interview other prisoners when I was a newspaper reporter, and it was always a depressing experience.

  First off, it took a long time to get there. Rikers Island, like the name implies, is located on an island in the East River. To get there, you have to go to Queens—then take a bus or drive across a bridge to reach the prison, which is technically in the Bronx. Then, when you get there, you find yourself in one of the biggest and most depressing prison complexes in the U.S. It houses more than ten thousand inmates, many of them awaiting trial on murder and other serious charges.

  I was uncomfortable just walking into the visitor’s area with a camera crew from the station.

  So, I could only imagine what it must have been like for Laurie Bateman locked up in a jail cell in the place.

  Donna Grieco was waiting for us there. I still wasn’t convinced even now that Rikers officials would give us permission to shoot a television interview with a prisoner. It’s been done before, but not often. Grieco assured me again that not only the warden—but also the city’s corrections commissioner—had given her their personal confirmation we could do a TV interview with Bateman.

  I guess Grieco was really good at her job. Or maybe the Rikers officials wanted to be transparent about the Bateman case, to put the right PR spin out on it—because Laurie Bateman was such a high-profile prisoner. Whatever it was, I was going to get my exclusive by putting Laurie Bateman on the air for Channel 10. That worked for me.

  A correction guard led us to a conference room. There were no bars or glass partitions to talk through like you might expect. But a guard would be present during the entire interview, we were told. I said that was fine.

  A few minutes later, another guard—a female one—led Laurie Bateman into the room to meet with us.

  Except for that brief time outside her building when she was being arrested after her husband’s death, I’d never seen Laurie Bateman in person. Just in movies and on TV and print commercials where she always looked beautiful, glamorous, stylish, and poised. She looked a lot different from that woman now. She was wearing an orange prison jumpsuit that didn’t fit her. She had no makeup on, her hair was uncombed, and she looked scared.

  When she came into the room, she ignored me at first and went directly over to talk to Grieco.

  “Is there any news about my bail?” she asked anxiously.

  “I’m working on it, Laurie …”

  “You’ve got to get me out of here!”

  “That’s why I brought Ms. Carlson here to see you today.”

  “Will she help me?”

  “She’ll get your story out to the public.”

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  “Just tell her the truth.”

  “All of it?”

  “Everything.”

  Grieco introduced me to Laurie Bateman. When she got closer to me, I could see she looked tired with dark circles under her eyes. Her hand trembled slightly when she reached out to shake mine. Prison had already taken quite a toll on Laurie Bateman.

  I asked Grieco if she wanted us to put makeup on Bateman or fix her hair or anything else before we put her in front of the camera. But Grieco shook her head no. I think she wanted viewers to see her like this, rather than the glamorous figure they’d known in the past. To make her seem more sympathetic in the public eye. It was a good strategy. I realized again how smart Grieco was. She played every angle.

  Once the cameras were rolling, I hit her with the most obvious question first:

  “Did you murder your husband, Laurie?” I asked.

  “No, I did not murder Charles,” she said, looking directly at the camera and seeming very believable. “I’ve never killed anyone. I couldn’t kill anyone. This is all a horrible nightmare for me—being accused of my husband’s murder and now locked up in this place. I just want it all to be over.”

  That was pretty much the answer I expected from her.

  It was her follow-up to that question that was more shocking.

  “But I wanted to kill Charles. I didn’t do it, but I wanted to. There were many times I wanted that man to be dead. Because of all the terrible things he did to me.”

  I looked over at Grieco
. She didn’t say anything. I guess she knew this was coming. And I knew it was a perfect time to segue into the domestic abuse stuff she’d told me about in her office.

  “What exactly are you referring to here?” I asked Bateman, even though I knew the answer.

  “Abuse. He abused me.”

  “Emotional abuse?”

  She nodded.

  “Physical abuse, too.”

  “Charles Hollister was an old man,” I pointed out.

  “He was still in good physical shape. Good enough to beat up on me. He did plenty of that. Whenever he lost his temper, he used his fists on me. Never on the face though. He was careful about that. He always hit me on the body below my neck, so no one would ever see the bruises when we went out in public. I’ve kept quiet about it all this time, but not anymore. Now I want the world to know the truth. The true story of my marriage to Charles Hollister. I suffered all this time with him, and now I’m being blamed for his murder. It’s not fair.”

  She kept talking about the abuse she’d suffered at his hands. At first, she went through the details of it all with calmness and determination to tell the story as she looked directly into the camera. But, as she continued, she became more and more emotional. By the end of the interview, she was crying on camera.

  “I don’t belong in here,” she said, sobbing. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t kill Charles. I’m a victim here too …”

  It was powerful stuff that was going to give us blockbuster ratings when it aired on Channel 10.

  But that’s not what I was thinking about at that moment.

  I was thinking about what it must have been like living with Charles Hollister. Oh, I’d heard the stories about what a bad person he was from a lot of the people he did business with over the years. I knew he wasn’t a nice man. But this was much worse than that. I couldn’t even imagine what it must have been like to live with him—terrified that he would erupt in violent anger at any second.

  I’d never experienced anything like that.

  Not really.

  I had a man I was in a relationship with hit me once. Only once. I stopped seeing him after that happened. He apologized profusely and vowed it would never happen again. Maybe he was telling the truth. But I knew I could never be with a man who did anything like that to me. Not all women in that position—battered women desperate for a way out—can just walk away. Mostly it’s because they don’t have the money to leave or nowhere to go or are afraid of being alone. Laurie Bateman certainly had the money to leave. But, like many women, she had made bad decisions about a man who had abused her. She’d stayed with him and continued to be abused until the end. And now she was being blamed for his murder. A murder she insisted she didn’t commit.

  I believed her. About the abuse. And about not killing him.

  A journalist is supposed to be objective on a story, but I wasn’t feeling very objective about Laurie Bateman at that moment.

  I was going to help her.

  I was going to help her get out of this horrible place.

  And then I was going to help her prove she was innocent.

  CHAPTER 28

  IN ANOTHER TIME, another era—maybe even just a few years ago—things might have happened differently after Laurie Bateman made her allegations of emotional and physical abuse while married to Charles Hollister.

  Oh, there probably would have been some sympathy expressed for her and outrage directed at the dead Charles Hollister—except it would have taken much longer to develop, and would not have become THE story of Hollister’s murder the way it did.

  But this was the age of #metoo and viral social posts that reach hundreds of thousands of people immediately and set in motion forces to change public opinion in a matter of hours—or even minutes.

  By the time our newscast ended that night with the emotional interview I’d done with Laurie Bateman at Rikers Island, the station had started receiving texts, tweets, emails, and phone calls—most of them expressing compassion and sympathy and support for her. It was pretty amazing. Laurie Bateman had gone from a greedy murder suspect—a deadly gold-digger out to snare her husband’s fortune—to a wronged woman.

  She had become the victim.

  Maybe even more than Charles Hollister who was the one who died.

  Bateman still denied that she was the person who murdered Hollister, even if she felt she was in physical danger from him and would have been justified doing whatever it took to defend herself. But the public didn’t seem to care whether she did it or not anymore. She was an abuse victim; they were on her side now, no matter what had happened.

  Charles Hollister was a monster—just like Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and the other men who had abused women like Laurie Bateman in the past—and there was no sympathy for him.

  Only for his wife sitting now in a jail cell.

  At the same time as all this, the prosecution’s case against Laurie Bateman—which they, and everyone else, believed so airtight at the beginning—was beginning to show more cracks.

  First, of course, there was the sudden death of the maid, Carmen Ortega, who said she’d arrived to find Bateman attempting to flee the apartment with her husband’s dead body inside. That seemed to be pretty damning testimony. Except Bateman denied she was running away. She admitted she was in the apartment, but said she arrived there after her husband had been killed. She said she was in such total shock that she didn’t remember exactly what she did next, only that she knew she had to get help. That’s all she was doing when the maid saw her, she maintained—trying to get someone to help her. This was much vaguer than the maid’s version that she was fleeing. The prosecution could still introduce the maid’s recorded testimony, but that made it harder for the prosecution to back up the now dead Carmen Ortega’s account.

  Then it was also revealed that there were none of Laurie Bateman’s fingerprints on the gun. No prints of any kind were there, it turned out. The prosecutor said she must have wiped them off, but there was no proof of that either.

  Also, there were now a lot of other potential suspects out there as more information came out—from me and others—about Hollister’s nasty business relationships, his affair with a married woman, and even his fight/argument with his own son on the day before he died. There were plenty of people who could have wanted Charles Hollister dead besides just his wife, Laurie Bateman.

  At the same time, other women from Hollister’s past began to come forward, making claims of abuse and inappropriate sexual actions by him. They said they had been afraid to say anything earlier because Hollister was so powerful and vindictive that they feared retaliation by him and his influential friends. But now they had been inspired by the courage of Laurie Bateman to tell their own story too. A few of these women were likely opportunists out to get free publicity or make a quick buck. But many of the stories sounded authentic. No question about it, Charles Hollister had a lot of skeletons in his closet.

  All this attention put a new light on the people prosecuting Laurie Bateman—especially the lead prosecutor, my old pal, William—Wild Bill—Carstairs. Carstairs’ own track record with women came under scrutiny, and it wasn’t long before there were numerous allegations of his own inappropriate sexual activity in the workplace and elsewhere making the rounds. It became so intense that several media outlets actively demanded he recuse himself from the Bateman case.

  “You screwed me, Carlson!” he screamed at me after that when he called me up to rage about how I’d done all this with my interview of Laurie Bateman.

  “Probably not the best choice of words,” I pointed out.

  “You’re destroying my career. Everything I’ve built up here. All the respect I’ve built up over the years—that’s all gone because of you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think all that many people respected you that much anyway, Billy,” I said.

  “Is this because I stopped going out with you?”

  “Uh, I think I stopped going out with you.”<
br />
  “This is all about revenge, isn’t it? You nasty little bitch!”

  “Again, I don’t think ‘nasty little bitch’ is acceptable language in these enlightened times of male/female relationships. So, as much fun as this conversation is, let’s get down to business. Are you going to recuse yourself from the Laurie Bateman case like everyone is speculating?”

  “No way! I’m not going to be bullied by you and a lot of radical zealots from doing my job. I’m staying on the case. I’m going to prosecute Laurie Bateman and put her away in jail for life. And nothing you—or anyone else—can do will change that.”

  Which wasn’t true, of course.

  I think even Carstairs knew that at this point, but he needed to put up this show of bravado for his own self-esteem.

  Not long afterward, the District Attorney called a press conference to announce that William Carstairs had stepped away from the Bateman case to concentrate on other pressing—although unspecified—matters in the office. He introduced the new lead prosecutor—who just happened to be a woman.

  Meanwhile, Donna Grieco held her own press conference to say that—based on all these new developments in the case—she planned to petition the court for a new hearing to seek bail for Laurie Bateman and also to demand anew that all the charges against Bateman be dropped.

  “Well, you’ve certainly had a big week for yourself,” Maggie said to me at the news meeting.

  “I am the talk of the town,” I admitted.

  “Our ratings numbers—the big boost we got at Channel 10 News from your Laurie Bateman interview and all the other news you’ve broken about the story—are pretty impressive.”

  “Yep, the viewers love me.”

  “That must make Jack Faron happy,” said Brett.

  “My boss loves me.”

  “Our owner, Barry Kaiser, must be pretty happy about it all too,” added Dani.

  Not to mention West Coast Media, the media company looking to hire me away to make me a national star, I thought to myself. Mitchell Lansburg and West Coast Media must be damn happy with me. But I hadn’t told anyone at Channel 10 about the new job offer yet. Not yet.