Through His Eyes
Page 23
‘There’s a lot of sources out there assembling against you. I’m the least of your worries.’
‘You know that I can ruin you. Financially. Professionally. In every possible way. I know you inside out and you are not impressive to me.’
‘Let Skye go to college. Let her study whatever she wants. Let her live in dorms or with roommates like a normal nineteen-year-old. Stop punishing her because she’s living proof of your filthiest secret.’
‘Stop talking,’ he says, and his hand is at my throat now and I’m frozen. I could struggle, I could push him away, but something in me wants to see this through, wants to know for sure. His grip tightens, his thumb and fingers pressing hard into the sinews of my neck, and I don’t stop him. For a moment, I imagine dying.
He lets me go just as my vision is going dark at the edges. I’m still on the ground when he leaves, breathing hard and struggling to swallow, but not so hard that I don’t hear the door slam. And the thought occurs to me very clearly: finally, you’ve met Clark Conrad.
Clark Conrad Is The Kind Of Abuser Hollywood Needs To Stop Protecting
The allegations against Conrad are true. Here is the proof.
Published July 2, 2016 on Reel.com
By Jessica Harris
Four months ago, Clark Conrad was accused of domestic abuse by his former girlfriend, Amabella Bunch. Bunch claimed that Conrad had physically assaulted her on multiple occasions, that he had been emotionally abusive throughout their relationship, and that a recent assault had left bruises on her face and neck.
This year alone, Conrad has won an Academy Award, relaunched the beloved television series that first made his name, and started his own production company. He has been rewarded in all the ways that this industry loves to reward its powerful men, and protected in all the ways this industry loves to protect its powerful men. Meanwhile, Bunch disappeared. Last week, she was found dead in her apartment, from what has now been confirmed as a drug overdose. Her allegations are available to read in full online.
Bunch was not the first woman to accuse Conrad of abusive, violent behaviour. But she was the first to be heard, because his other accusers were muzzled by a variety of means – some legal, some monetary, some purely devious. One woman sold her story exclusively to a tabloid, only to discover that their motivation was protecting Conrad, not publishing the truth. These women’s stories are not mine to tell here, but I am going to tell my own.
I became romantically involved with Clark in March of this year, two months after I was assigned to interview him for the magazine Nest. Our relationship was passionate, intense and all-consuming, and for weeks I saw no bad in him at all. Like much of the American public, I had been besotted with Conrad for years, ever since Richard Loner first brooded his way onto my screen in the late nineties. Clark’s interest in me was intoxicating, and blinded me to much of the truth about him, even as a journalist with some experience in this industry.
It was on the evening of June 27 that Clark put his hand around my throat and squeezed, hard enough to make me wonder if I was going to die. That night, I had told him I was ending our relationship, and confronted him with an allegation that had haunted me since I heard it. In 1997, Clark raped a costume assistant on the action movie Gone, which was filming on location in New Zealand. Her name was Bridget Meriweather, and she died less than a year after the movie wrapped, after having his child. I have no proof except that as soon as I heard this story, I knew in my bones that it was true.
Clark denied it. He threatened me. And then he pushed me into a wall, put his hand around my throat, and squeezed. His grip was hard enough that I came close to losing consciousness. I was hoarse for a full day afterwards, and struggled to swallow, but somehow he did not leave a mark. I suspect he knows by now how not to leave marks.
Clark Conrad is a violent man with a long pattern of abusing, muzzling and ruining women he no longer feels in control of. To most of America, he is still known as a movie star and a mensch. But he is an abuser who has benefited from a system that is designed to protect men and to silence women. I have been part of that system. I published two interviews with Clark celebrating him, his life and his career, fawning over his every word. And there is no denying that he is a talented actor. His entire existence is a performance.
Stop protecting Clark Conrad. Stop casting him. Stop idolizing him. Stop calling him the nicest guy in Hollywood. And start taking his accusers as seriously as you take him.
22
The article is live for less than fifteen minutes. It’s more than enough.
It’s short and disjointed and inelegant, in desperate need of an editor, and throughout the frantic half-hour of writing it I’m sure that there are things I’m forgetting, or omitting, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s out there, and it can’t be taken back, and it can’t be ignored, especially given the source. My login credentials for Reel were never revoked, after Cannes, and though it seemed impossible that the system would really let me publish the article, I also know that digital journalism has evolved too fast for old-school publishers to keep up, and that editorial hierarchy is nowhere near the top of the priority list for the people who build these systems. All I’m doing is exploiting an oversight.
I suspect that Reel’s first move, after taking the article down, will be to claim that they were hacked. So I take a selfie of myself beside the headline on my laptop screen, and post it on my Twitter account with the words: ‘Yes, I wrote it.’
The only part that I left out, the part I deleted and reinserted before ultimately deleting for good, was the truth about Skye. She would be known for ever as the product of rape, if only allegedly, and whatever becomes of her next she deserves more than this.
Going to Tom’s is not fair. I’m not proud. But his is the only address I have in my head, the only place I can imagine feeling safe, and of course he buzzes me in right away. He answers the door in his bathrobe, hair damp from the shower, and I want to bury myself against him and let him save me. But I can’t. I’m on this path now, and I won’t take him with me.
And so we sit across from each other in his messy kitchen, our hands clasped around mugs of strong Tetley tea like we always drank at university, not touching. I tell him, and he doesn’t question my judgement or my motives or my story, doesn’t appear sceptical of the truth about Clark, doesn’t doubt me for a moment.
‘What are you going to do?’ is the question he does ask me.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m not even sure what happens in that situation. A reporter publishing a story without permission – I mean, it’s a true fable for the digital age.’
‘All these big legacy brands now run on a CMS that half their staff don’t understand. It’s amazing this doesn’t happen more.’
‘Has it ever happened before?’
I shrug.
‘I may have done something truly unprecedented.’ My bravado is shaky. The unspoken truth around the edges of all this, the truth neither of us will touch, is that this will likely be the last article I ever publish. That, at the very least, my life as I know it is over.
Tom’s housemates are both thankfully out of town, and after flatly refusing to let him give me his bed, I sleep more deeply on his futon than I have in weeks. My sleep is so deep, my exhaustion so profound, that I pass out while it’s still light outside and wake up in the dark, disoriented, flooded with panic until I remember where I am. And what I did.
My phone is in aeroplane mode. I’m not checking my emails or Twitter or the news, and maybe this makes me a true blockbuster hero, walking stoically away from the explosion I just caused without looking back at the fallout. Or maybe it makes me a coward, head in the sand.
Tom finds me out on the tiny deck as the first pastel flickers of dawn are rising, smoking.
‘Since when…?’ he asks, gesturing between me and the pack of Camels I found on the patio table.
‘Seemed like the time to start again.’
‘I was thinking. We should go home to England.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah,’ he says, as though he’s trying to convince himself. ‘He can’t chase you all the way over there, right?’
‘He probably could.’ I don’t know, in truth, the length of Clark’s reach.
‘Well, they’re not going to extradite you back to the US for a civil case, if he sues you.’
‘You’ve thought about this more than I have.’
‘You haven’t committed a crime. Reel gave you publishing access, it’s not like you hacked them. The most anyone can do is sue, and if you’re in England you’ll be fine. Right?’
‘You just got here. The very first show you got cast in actually got picked up, and it’s a hit. Do you have any idea how rare that is? You’d be insane to walk away.’
‘Jess, it’s you.’
I look at him and wonder when he came to love me this much. How he possibly can when I have nothing to offer him, when I’ve sold out everything I ever was. He can’t see it yet, that I’m a shell, but he will.
‘No,’ I tell him quietly. ‘I won’t let you do that for me. You deserve this. This career, this life. The glow.’
‘What?’
I kiss him quickly, not letting myself linger, not letting this feel like anything but closure. Clark is still all over me, inside me, spilling out of my pores like something rotten. I feel toxic.
He makes me breakfast and I try to eat it. He tries to make conversation, tries to make suggestions, and I try not to snap at him. I know that I can’t stay here for very much longer, but when I imagine what’s next it’s a blank space, an absence where my future should be. When he goes to answer the door, the moment of silence is endless.
‘Um— Jess?’
I follow the sound of his voice, and find Skye Conrad standing in Tom’s hallway, and my first thought is that Clark has sent her like an assassin. She’s wearing all black, leggings and sweater and sneakers, and her hair is cut short.
‘What are you doing here?’ I ask, trying to see behind her to check for Clark or for Lenny. But she came here alone.
‘You said you wanted to get out of town.’
‘Yeah, but that was before—’ Before I published an article calling your father an abusive rapist. ‘How did you even find me here?’
She glances at Tom.
‘This is your boyfriend, right?’
A shiver of guilt, as I remember the lie I told her so effortlessly back in Venice. Trying to convince her that there was nothing between me and Clark. I shake my head, glancing apologetically at Tom whose face is unreadable.
‘You wanted to leave,’ she says, and she sounds resolute, focused. ‘I’m leaving. My car’s outside.’
‘Does Clark know you’re going?’
She looks incredulously at me.
‘You really think he’d let me go? You’re more deluded than I thought. You should leave too, while you still can.’
I don’t hesitate for long. Within ten minutes, I’m letting Tom hold me for too long as we say goodbye, and putting two bags that contain all my worldly possessions into the back of Skye’s car. In the end, I abandoned most of my things at the Studio City apartment – books, toiletries, clothes I used to wear to junkets and premieres and parties. All just stuff, vestiges of a life that’s now over. Let Clark burn all of it.
I watch the Hollywood sign disappear into the distance as we drive down the freeway, growing smaller and smaller until it’s indistinguishable from the hills. Skye keeps quietly crying as she’s driving, and pretending not to be, and I’m pretending not to see. Her one-hand grip on the steering wheel terrifyingly loose, her other hand wiping tears from her face, and if we make it to wherever we’re going then we will have to work on this, we will have to figure out how to speak to each other.
At a gas station just north of Malibu, I try. We bought snacks that neither of us has any intention of eating, and now we’re sitting in the parking lot with them spread out before us, at a stalemate.
‘I didn’t mention you in the article,’ I tell her.
‘I know.’
I steel myself to say something I would never have had the courage to consider a week ago. But now my nerves are already raw and I have nothing to lose.
‘Bridget was your real mother. The woman who Clark—’
As it turns out, there are still things I can’t say. But she knows. It’s why she left.
‘It takes a lot of strength to do what you’re doing,’ I try next. ‘To get out. I know how much you relied on him, how he felt like your only family—’
‘Just shut up,’ she says quietly, and I do.
A couple of hours later as we’re nearing Morro Bay, the sky begins to shift around us. I’ve heard about the microclimates in northern California before, how blazing sun can give way to mist within a mile, but watching it happen is disorienting. The road up ahead is consumed by what looks like a ground-level cloud, obscuring everything beyond, and though I glance nervously at Skye she has no reaction, driving directly into it as the world darkens.
‘Fog isn’t a bad place to hide,’ I joke. But the truth is that this is creepy, and only gets more so as the sun goes down. We agreed to drive until we reach Monterey, where Skye says she has a friend, but it’s another three hours away and I’m exhausted. I’m also afraid to fall asleep in the passenger seat, lest we wake up upside down in a ditch.
‘Maybe we should find a motel,’ I suggest, but she ignores me. And for the first time it occurs to me that I’m sharing a car with someone unstable, someone who could do me just as much harm as the people I’m running from. Maybe she really was sent to kill me, to finish us both off at once.
These anxious, jagged thoughts of death are familiar, they happen to me under stress and when I’m tired, and I have to hold them at bay.
‘Skye?’
‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘Let’s just get to Monterey.’ She sounds tense, an unfamiliar tone for her, and she’s looking in her rear-view mirror more than seems necessary. Dread shuffles in my chest, and I stay silent.
It begins to rain, hard. Watching the windshield wipers clear their circular swathes again and again reminds me of being a child, watching this same endless pattern from the backseat. I’m dozing, half-lost in memory, and wake up with a jolt as the car abruptly picks up speed.
‘What’s happening?’ I ask Skye, and then I see in the rear-view mirror. An unmistakable black SUV is following us, Lenny in the driver seat just visible through the rain. Panic is rising, my chest tightening and I can’t believe that this is really happening, they have really followed us all this way and now they will run us off the road.
Skye takes a sharp turn onto an exit ramp, getting off the freeway at the last possible minute and speeding into the darkness, and for a while I think we’re free. But before long Lenny’s headlights are back behind us, golden in the fog, and now we’re driving towards the sea and soon there will be no more road.
‘Just pull over,’ I murmur finally, resigned. But she lets them pursue us all the way to the beach, finally coming to a stop inches from the ocean. The air is clearer here, the water glistening, and behind us Lenny’s engine stops, and this is yet another moment in which I realize I have underestimated Skye. She wants them to think there’s a possibility that she will drive this car into the sea, drown us both, make them keep their distance out of caution. It works.
‘Skye!’ Clark yells, and she winds down her window to respond but does not get out of the car.
‘Leave us alone!’
‘I just want to know that you’re okay. You just disappeared, honey, you can’t do that – I’ve been frantic.’
‘You were never gonna let me go.’
‘That’s not true,’ Clark says plaintively. ‘If I thought that was what you really wanted, of
course I’d let you leave. But sweetheart, where are you driving to? San Francisco? You’re planning to, what, to get a job in Silicon Valley? You don’t have a plan, you don’t know what you want to do with your life—’
‘How would you know?’ she asks, and I want to tell her to stop engaging him, that the more she makes this a conversation, the more he will think he can win. Every conversation we ever had was a negotiation, a transaction.
He’s closer now, a few feet from the car. I turn cautiously to look behind us and there he is, his hair tousled, his face a mask of pain. He sees me see him.
‘Jessica,’ he calls out now. ‘Listen to me – you were right to publish that article. You were right. I needed someone to hold me accountable, because God knows nobody ever has, and it’s you. You know me better than anyone.’
He thinks I will be swayed by this, that I will swoon, and who can blame him? From the corner of my eye I see Skye watching me, probably wondering too.
‘I need you both,’ he continues, his voice cracking in the wind. ‘I want to be a better man, I want to take responsibility for the things I’ve done, and I can’t do any of it without you.’
‘Leave us alone,’ Skye tells him again, and when he speaks next his tone has changed.
‘Look, I don’t want to do this. But honey, you’re still in outpatient treatment, and if I tell them you’ve absconded they will have you held under a 5150. Every paper will get a hold of it, every blog, every news outlet. You’ve seen what happens to rising stars after a psychiatric hold – they are never known for anything else. I do not want that for you. You have too much potential.’
He is so clear to me now. So craven and small, so monstrous. He’s moving closer, Skye’s silence shredding his composure. ‘Skye. Stop this charade, now.’
Beside me Skye is opening the glove box, and now there’s a gun in her hand. I scrabble blindly for the door handle, pure adrenalin telling me to run, but Skye is already getting out of the car and she’s pointing the gun at her own head.
‘I am not your puppet,’ she screams at Clark, whose face has drained of colour. ‘I’m not some victim you can make disappear. I’m not my mom.’