Malice (39 page)

“They practically said I raped him! Did you hear what that bastard said?” Grace was outraged by what the chief of police had said about her, he had called her “pretty sick” and said she had “tantalized” her father. “Can't we sue them?”

“Maybe,” Charles said, trying to sound calm, for hers and the children's sake. “First we have to see what happens. There's going to be a lot of noise over this. We have to be ready for it.”

“How much worse can it get?” she asked angrily.

“A lot,” he said knowingly. His aides had warned him, and he knew that from his experience with the press years before.

By seven o'clock there were television cameras outside their house. One channel even used a bullhorn to address her, and urge her to come out and talk to them. Charles called the police, but the best they could do for them was get the reporters off their property, and force them to stand across the street, which they did. They put two camera crews in the trees so they could shoot into their bedroom windows. And Charles went upstairs and closed the shades. They were under siege.

“How long is this going to last?” Grace asked miserably after the children went to bed. They were still out there.

“Awhile probably. Maybe a long while.” And then as they sat in the kitchen, looking at each other in exhaustion, he asked her if she wanted to talk to them at some point and tell them her side of the story.

“Should I? Can't we sue them for what they said?”

“I don't know any of the answers.” He had already put in calls to two major libel lawyers, but he also realized that their phones could be tapped by the press, and he didn't want to talk to the attorneys from the house, or even from his office. For the moment, at least, it was a genuine disaster.

The next morning, the press were still there, and Charles and Grace were tipped off again about new coverage on local and national talk shows. She was the hot news of the hour all over the country.

Two guards were interviewed at Dwight, who claimed they knew her really well. Both were young and Grace knew for certain she'd never seen them.

“I've never laid eyes on them,” she said to Charles, feeling sick again. He had stayed home with her, to lend her support, as she was stuck in the house, and Abby had refused to get out of bed. But a friend had offered to take Andrew and Matt to school, and Grace was relieved they'd gone. It was hard enough dealing with Abby, and herself.

The two prison guards said that Grace had been a member of a real tough gang, and they implied, but didn't actually say, that she'd used drugs in prison.

“What are they doing to me?” She burst into tears and put her face in her hands. She didn't understand it. Why were these people lying about her?

“Grace, they want a piece of the action. A moment of glory. That's all it is. They want to be on television, they want to be a star just like you are.”

“I'm not a star. I'm a housewife,” she said naively.

“To them, you're a star.” He was a lot wiser than she was.

On another channel, they were interviewing the chief of police again. And in Watseka, a girl who claimed to have been Grace's best friend in school, and whom Grace had also never seen before, said that Grace had always talked to her a lot about how much she loved her father and how jealous she was of her mother. The impression being created there was that she had killed her father in a jealous rage.

“Are these people crazy, or am I? That woman looks twice my age, and I don't even know who she is.” Even her name was unfamiliar.

They interviewed one of the arresting officers from that night, who looked like an old man now, and he admitted that Grace had looked really scared and she was shaking really badly when they found her.

“Did she look like she'd been raped?” the interviewer said without hesitation.

“It was hard to tell, you know, I'm no doctor,” he said shyly, “but she didn't have any clothes on.”

“She was
naked
?” The interviewer looked straight into the camera, shocked, and the policeman nodded.

“Yeah, but I don't think the doctors at the hospital said she'd been raped. They just said she'd had sex with her boyfriend or something. Maybe her father walked in on them.”

“Thank you, Sergeant Johnson.”

And then came the pièce de résistance on yet another channel. A moment with Frank Wills, who looked even worse and sleazier than he had twenty years before, if that was possible, and he said bluntly that Grace had always been a strange kid and had always been after her father's money.

“What?
He got everything there was, and God knows it wasn't much,” she shouted at Charles, and then laid her head back in despair again.

“Grace, you have to stop going crazy over everything they say. You know they're not going to tell the truth. Why should they?” Where were David Glass and Molly? Why wasn't someone saying anything decent about her? Why didn't anybody love her? Why hadn't they? Why had Molly died, and David disappeared? Where the hell were they now?

“I can't stand this,” she said hysterically. There was no getting away from it, and it was unbearable. There was no relief and in this case, there was no reward for this kind of pain and torture.

“You have to stand it,” Charles said matter-of-factiy. “It's not going to disappear overnight.” Charles knew better than anyone that it could take a long time to die down once the flames had grown to such major proportions.

“Why do I have to stand this?” she asked, crying again.

“Because people love this garbage. They eat it up. When I was married to Michelle, the tabloids crawled all over her constantly, they told lies, they snuck stories, they did everything they could to torture her. You just have to accept that. That's the way it is.”

“I can't. She was a movie star, she wanted the attention. She must have wanted what went with it.” Grace was refusing to see the similarity in their lives.

“And the presumption is that I do too, because I'm a politician.”

She sat in the den with him for an hour and cried, and then she went upstairs and tried to talk to Abby. But Abby didn't want to hear any of it from her. She had been flipping the dial, and hearing all the same things in her mother's bedroom.

“How could you do those things?” Abby sobbed as Grace looked at her in anguish.

“I didn't,” Grace said through tears. “I was miserable, I was alone, I was scared. I was terrified of him … he beat me … he raped me for four years … and I couldn't help it. I don't even know if I meant to kill him. I just did. I was like a wounded animal. I struck out any way I could to save myself from him. I had no choice, Abby.” She was sobbing as Abby watched her, crying too. “But most of the other things they said on TV aren't true.” Grace hated them for what they were doing to her daughter. “None of those things was true. I don't even know those people, except the man who was my father's partner, and what he said wasn't true either. He took alt my father's money. I hardly got anything, and what I got I gave to charity. I've spent my life trying to give back to people like me, to help them survive too. I never forgot what I went through. And oh God, Abby,” she put her arms around her, “I love you so much, I don't ever want you to suffer because of me. It breaks my heart to see you so unhappy. Abby, I had a miserable life as a kid. No one was ever decent to me until I met your father. He gave me a life, he gave me love and all of you. He's one of the few human beings who's ever been kind to me … Abby,” she was sobbing uncontrollably, and her daughter was hugging her, “I'm so sorry, and I love you so much … please forgive me …”

“I'm sorry I was so mean to you … I'm sorry, Mommy …”

“It's okay, it's okay… I love you …”

Charles was watching them from the doorway with tears running down his face, and he tiptoed away to call the lawyers again. But when one of them came to see them that afternoon, he didn't have good news. Public figures, like politicians and movie stars, had no rights of privacy whatsoever. People could say anything they wanted to about them without having the burden of proving whether it was true. And if celebrities wanted to sue,
they
had to prove that what was being said about them were lies, which was often impossible to do, and they also had to
prove
that they'd suffered a loss of income as a result, or the impaired ability to make a living, and they had to
prove
yet again that what had been said had been said in actual malice. And the wives or husbands of politicians, particularly if they had either campaigned, or appeared in public with them, as she obviously had, had the same lack of rights as the politicians. In fact, Grace had no rights at all now.

“What that means,” the attorney who'd come to see them explained, “is that you can't do anything against most of what people are saying. If they claim that you killed your father and you didn't, that's a different story, although they have a right to say you were convicted of it, but if they say you were in a gang in prison, you have to
prove
that you were not, and how are you going to do that, Mrs. Mackenzie? Get affidavits from the inmates who were there at the time? You have to
prove
that these things have been said intentionally to hurt you, and that they have affected negatively your ability to make a living,”

“In other words, they can do anything they want to me, and unless I can prove they're lying, and everything else you mentioned, I can't do a damn thing about it. Is that it?”

“Exactly. It's not a happy situation. But everyone in the public eye is in the same boat you are. And unfortunately these are tabloid times we live in. The common belief of the media is that the public wants not only dirt, but blood. They want to make people and destroy people, they want to tear people apart, and feed them to the public bit by bit. It's not personal, it's economic. They make money off your corpse. They're vultures. They pay up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a story, and then treat it as news. And unreliable sources who're being paid that kind of money will say anything to keep the spodight on them, and the money coming. They'll say you danced naked on your father's grave and they saw you do it, if it gets them on TV, and makes them a buck. That's reality. And the so-called legitimate press behave the same way these days. There's no such thing anymore. It's disgusting. And they take innocent people like you, and your family, and trash them, for the hell of it. It's the most malicious game there is, and yet ‘actual malice’ is the hardest thing of all to prove. It isn't even malice anymore, it's greed, and indifference to the human condition.

“You paid a price for what you did. You suffered enough. You were seventeen. You shouldn't have to go through all this, nor should your husband and your children. But there's very littie I can do to help you. We'll keep an eye on it, and if anything turns up we can sue for, we will. But you have to be prepared for the fallout from that too. Lawsuits only encourage the feeding frenzy more. The sharks love blood in the water.”

“You're not very encouraging, Mr. Goldsmith,” Charles said, looking depressed.

“No, I'm not,” he smiled ruefully. He liked Charles, and he felt sorry for Grace. But the laws were not made to protect people like them. The laws had been made to turn them into victims.

The feeding frenzy, as he had called it, went on for weeks. The children went back to school, reluctantly. Fortunately, they got out for summer vacation after a week, and the family moved to Connecticut for the summer. But it was more of the same there. More tabloids, more press, more photographers. More interviews on television with people who claimed to be her best friends, but whom she had never heard of. The only good thing that came of it, was that David Glass emerged from the mists. He had called, and was living in Van Nuys, and had four children. He was desperately sorry to see what was happening to her. It broke his heart, knowing how much pain it caused her to go through it. But no one could do anything to stop the press, or the lies, or the gossip. And he knew as well as she did that even if he talked to the press on her behalf, everything he said would be distorted. He was happy to know that other than the current uproar in the press, she was happily married, and had children. He apologized for staying out of touch for so long. He was now the senior partner of his late father-in-law's law firm. And then he admitted sheepishly that Tracy, his wife, had been fiercely jealous of Grace when they first moved to California. It was why he had eventually stopped writing. But he was happy to hear her now, he had felt compelled to call, and Grace was happy he'd called her. They both agreed that the press didn't want the facts. They wanted scandal and filth. They wanted to hear that she'd been giving blow jobs to guards, or sleeping with women in chains in prison. They didn't want to know how vulnerable she'd been, how terrorized, how traumatized, how scared, how young, how decent. They only wanted the ugly stuff. Both David and Charles agreed that the best thing was to step back and let them wear themselves out, and offer no comment.

But even after a month of it, the furor hadn't died down. And all the principal tabloids were still running stories about her on their covers. The tabloid TV shows had interviewed everyone except the janitor in jail, and Grace felt it was time to come forward and say something. Grace and Charles spent an entire day talking to Charles's campaign manager, and they finally agreed to let her do a press conference. Maybe that would stop it.

“It won't, you know,” Charles said. But maybe if it was handled well, it wouldn't do any harm either.

The conference was set for the week before her birthday on an important interview show, on a major network. It was heavily advertised, and television news cameras started appearing outside their house the day before. It was agony for their children. They hated having anyone over now, or going anywhere, or even talking to friends. Grace understood it only too well. Every time she went to the grocery store, someone came over to her and started a seemingly innocuous conversation that would end up in Q&A about her life in prison. It didn't matter if they opened with melons or cars, somehow they always wound up in the same place, asking if her father had really raped her, or how traumatic had it been to kill him, and were there really a lot of lesbians in prison.