by Maren Foster
He replied, “Yes. What’s wrong?”
“Need to stop by now. Ok?”
“Of course.”
I gathered my purse and sweater.
“I’m gonna go for a walk,” I announced to the young hacker.
He didn’t acknowledge me.
I left the shop, turned left, and walked up to 5th Avenue. I walked down 5th to 37th, and took the elevator up to the 30th floor of Adam’s office building. The receptionist nodded as I walked past.
Adam was on his cell phone when I walked in. “Yeah, but I told you that I wouldn’t be home until late tonight. I don’t know why you’re mad at me. It’s not like I’m cancelling on you. I never agreed to go!”
He turned around and saw me.
“I have to go. I’ll see you later.” He slammed his phone down on the desk.
“Sorry,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I need money.”
“Is this about him?”
“You said anything.”
“Of course. I just didn’t expect you to ask for money,” he said. “How much?”
“Four thousand. I’ll pay you back of course. But I need cash, now.”
“You need four thousand dollars in cash right now?”
“Yes.”
“Freddie, what the hell is going on?”
I stood up and closed the door to his office.
“He videotaped it,” I said.
“The rape?”
“Yep. That vain bastard videotaped it and I need to find the footage for the case against him. In case it goes to trial.”
“Why do you need four thousand dollars to find it?”
“I found Nate’s old computer but I don’t know the password. I’ve got a guy working on it, but I need it today, so he’s charging me premium to crack the password.”
He nodded.
“I need to pay cash so that he doesn’t have my name, and obviously I can’t take a bunch of cash out right after my husband was arrested. They might think I’m planning to disappear or do something crazy.”
“Are you?”
“No, of course not. I just don’t want to attract any unnecessary attention.”
He shook his head.
“Okay, let’s go to the bank,” he said.
“Can I wait here?” I asked. “I don’t think we should be seen going to the bank together.”
“But you’ve been seen coming in here and then I’ll be seen leaving and coming back.”
“Yeah, I know. I didn’t think ahead. Just go. Please,” I begged.
He picked up his wallet and phone off the desk and slid each into a pocket. He walked around the desk and stood in front of me. I stood up. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me against his chest.
“I’m sorry about all of this,” he said.
“I know. Thank you.”
After he left I fought the urge to snoop around his office. I need him to trust me. I waited alone and watched out the floor to ceiling window.
Where is he? I looked at the clock. Half an hour already. Come on Adam. I paced around his office for another five minutes until I heard the door knob turn.
“Relax,” he said. “I got it.”
He walked in, closed the door behind him, and put a plastic bag with the bank’s logo on the desk. The familiar smell of his aftershave and cologne was comforting. I love the way he smells.
He took his coat off, turned to me, and pulled me toward him.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said. He held my face in his hands and kissed me. His tongue lingered in my mouth. I kissed him back.
“I love you,” he said. It should have been another glorious moment in our story. It should have lifted me up. Instead it felt like just another complicating factor in an already fucked-up situation.
“I know,” I looked up at him. He pulled away, clearly offended that I hadn’t reciprocated.
“I love you too,” I said. I need him on my side now more than ever.
He pulled me closer and I felt his erection against my stomach.
He looked at his watch and then fumbled for the end of my sweater and pulled it over my head. I kissed him. Sure, why not? For all I know, this thing with Nate may never end.
He took off his suit coat and began to undo his belt. His pants dropped to the floor. He was naked. I glanced at the door.
“It’s locked.”
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
He unbuttoned my pants and pulled them off my hips, fidgeting with my bra as I slipped the straps off my shoulders. He pulled my thong down and I kicked it off.
He lifted me up onto the desk and began to kiss my neck, collarbone, and chest. I grabbed his hips and pulled him toward me. I was already wet and I wrapped my legs around his waist, as he worked his way deeper inside. After so many years of anticipation the pleasure was intense. I laid back on the desk and held on to the edge. He put his hands on my hips and held me in place as he rocked back and forth rhythmically.
“Oh my God!” I said quietly. Waves of pleasure spread through my body and I let go. The climax was so intense that I had to muffle my own screams. He began cumming and I felt him let go and hit me in just the right spot. My body convulsed again. We came together. Slowly it passed and he leaned over me and kissed me tenderly.
“I’ve only ever loved you,” he said.
A tear rolled down my cheek. He wiped it away with his thumb.
“I know,” I said, as he gathered me up in his arms. I cried and cried and he just held me and rubbed my back.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted out. I looked up at him and saw the tears streaming down his cheeks. There was a depth of sadness in his eyes that broke my heart all over again.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry all of this happened to you. I’m so sorry that ‘we’ didn’t happen earlier. I’m so sorry we fucked things up all those years ago.”
I nodded. “I know. Me too,” I said. “But it’s not worth dwelling on now. It is what it is. What do we do now?”
“Whatever we need to do.”
I nodded and he kissed me.
“Shit, my meeting is starting,” he pulled his pants back on and buttoned his shirt. “Good luck with the video thing.” He wiped his cheeks. “Let me know how it goes.”
“I will. I’ll stop by tonight.”
“Great.”
He pulled his suit coat on and grabbed a pen off his desk. He looked back at me before he opened the door. A huge smile crossed his face.
“Love you,” he said.
I smiled. “Love you too.”
He squeezed out the door and closed it behind him. I got up and got dressed quickly. I checked my hair and makeup in the reflection of my phone. I put the plastic bag full of cash in my purse, and slipped out past the receptionist.
The Send
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
Old Greenwich
“Long walk,” the hacker said when I walked in the door.
“Are you done?”
“Yep. You got lucky. Password was pretty simple, so the algorithm cracked it fast.”
“You got everything?”
“Yeah, I copied everything there was on both onto this.” He handed me a new external hard drive.
“Okay. Thanks.”
“How do you want to pay?”
I pulled the plastic bag out of my purse and put it on the counter.
“Oh! O-kay then,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Also, I need the laptop and the old hard drive back.” Can’t have evidence laying around here.
“Whatever.” He pointed to his desk. I walked over and grabbed both.
“Thank you,” I said, and walked back out into the cold, fresh air.
Back at home, I ran upstairs to get my laptop, plugged the new external hard drive in, and began searching through the folders. There were two folders, the first called “Laptop” was full of his college applications and essays, scans of important documents: his birth cert
ificate, his condo mortgage documents, and his first life insurance policy. There were photos of him when he was younger with his mom and sister, and his friends from childhood. There were, of course, folders full of pirated music from the late 90s and early 2000s. Not helpful.
I navigated back to the second folder, “hard_drive”, and clicked on a folder labelled only “Graphics”. There were about thirty video files in the folder, each named in the same way: location and then date. Bingo? I clicked on the first file, “dorms_03-18-11”. It was dark and hard to tell at first what was going on. Then the voice of a woman could be heard.
“Yeah, that’s it. Just like that.”
Nate’s voice was clear in response, “You make me so hard.” Getting closer! I watched for a few more seconds, but the sex seemed to be consensual, so I closed the file and moved to the next, “sigchi_06-11-11”. The light was better. He was kissing a tall, thin woman with dark hair, but his face was not turned toward the camera. At first she seemed to be into it, but then she began to resist. Her efforts were futile. He threw her onto the bed. Rape?
I scanned the dates, realizing that they spanned from early 2011 all the way to 2016. My stomach turned. Holy shit, he’s been doing this to other women the whole time. I didn’t want to keep looking. I didn’t want to see him hurting other women after me. Could I have stopped this if I’d reported him right away? Saved these other women from the same fate? No. Nothing would have stopped him. I just have to find my video.
I remembered that Nate kept a few really expensive bottles of wine in the cellar and grabbed the one that Nate had been saving. I got a juice glass from the cupboard, and filled it to the brim.
As I skimmed the files I saw, “phi_psi_NU_06-09-12”, and my heart began to beat faster. I took a big sip of wine. Another darkly lit room filled the screen. It was hard to tell, but the room looked like the one that had filled my nightmares over and over again for years.
The camera was further from the action and it was nearly impossible to see what was happening, except for the outline of Nate’s body which was slightly illuminated by what I could only guess was the hall light coming through the crack under the door. Unlike in the other videos, there was no audible dialogue, but there was music. He walked over to the bed and reached down. He appeared to struggle for a few seconds and then threw an item of clothing across the room. Then the bass became louder and he began to shift his weight back and forth and I knew. The pain came back to me and the aggressiveness of his rhythmic movements sent shivers up my spine. I could almost feel him again, tearing his way into me uninvited. The beat of the first song began to transition and I already knew what song came next. The playlist had been permanently etched into my memory. The beat was a little bit faster and Nate sped up his rhythm to match.
As I sat and watched, my body completely tense, I began to realize that despite the pain that I knew was being inflicted, to anyone else in the world this would just look like a really bad sex tape. So far, the resolution and angle made it difficult to even discern for sure that there was another person in the frame, let alone who. He had started the camera after the handcuffing, gagging, and my vocal protests. I kept watching, hoping that he had forgotten to hit stop and that some of the aftermath would be caught on film, but I glanced at the progress bar and saw that the entire video was only twenty-two minutes long. Had it really only been twenty-two minutes? In my memory it had gone on forever. I had always assumed that what had felt like forever had been at least an hour.
I resisted the urge to skip ahead, afraid I might miss something important. At about the eighteenth minute, just as I remembered it, his body began to convulse and he started cumming inside me.
Once he was done he could be heard saying: “Crying I see. It was that good for you too?” Then he laid down on the bed next to me. Certainly not proof of rape.
And then I could just make out: “That wasn’t bad at all. You were pretty good for your first time. Being tied up really suits you.” Again, not proof of rape. Just proof that I was a virgin. At least that corroborates the story I told the cops.
The video was nearly over. His face was out of the frame as he got up and walked toward the camera, his limp penis swinging from side to side as he walked. His face was still off-frame as he hit stop.
Fuck. Will that help at all? Is it evidence of a rape or just evidence that Nate, or someone who resembles him, likes kinky sex? It’s hard to tell. It’s certainly not irrefutable evidence that Nate raped me against my will, or that I said no. And it’s not even clear that it’s me.
I gulped Nate’s exquisitely smooth wine as I clicked through a few more videos. Most of them were dark; a bit grainy. Many of them unfolded the same way that mine had. Each of the videos was difficult to watch but I couldn’t help myself now. I wanted to see if there was damning evidence among the videos. I nearly gave up and in my distraction I let one of them continue playing. It had begun the way they all had, with passionate kissing and foreplay, but about three minutes in it took a different turn.
“Hey, can we slow down?” The blonde woman whispered just loud enough to be picked up by the small laptop microphone. He continued to grope her, in fact, the suggestion that he slow down seemed to embolden him.
“Hey, I said slow down,” she said, louder than before. Again, it seemed to only encourage him and he pulled at her pants.
“What the fuck?” She was angry.
He responded in kind and pulled the same move on her that he had on me, throwing her to the bed, he grabbed what looked like a tie and bound her hands behind her back. She began to scream and he grabbed a pair of socks off the floor. You could hear her struggle.
“Shut the fuck up, bitch!” he said. She continued to try to make noise but it was clear he’d been successful. He walked over to the computer, although he seemed to intentionally stay mostly off-camera. He fidgeted with the mouse for a minute and heavy metal with a lot of bass began to play. His anger was palpable. He turned back to her and went to work pulling off her clothes. He forced himself inside her and pounded as aggressively as he had me. This video is so much better! I realized that the clear audio in it was key to understanding what had transpired. While the victim still wasn’t completely visible or clear in the images, it was clear what was happening. This is rape caught on tape. Proof! But not my rape. She is blonde though, and it’s not that clear. Would they even be able to prove that it isn’t me in the video? What do I do now? Do I hand this over to the investigator? What if they still drop the charges or he gets off easy despite this evidence? It certainly wouldn’t be unprecedented. What if they fail to bring him to justice? Then I’ll have nothing. No leverage or card to play. I can always turn it over to the DA later and say that I just found it, but if I hold onto it for a little bit, maybe it will prove more valuable. Patience!
I changed the name of my video to “NU_06-09-12” and the file name of the better video to “phi_psi_NU_06-09-12”.
The Send
Friday, March 30, 2018
Old Greenwich
I paced around the house after yoga. It’s been two weeks! What is going on? I haven’t heard anything from the prosecutor or Simon about the charges against Nate or the negotiations. Is that a bad sign? Are they going to let him off entirely? Should I put that video online?
I was nearly worried sick when my phone rang. Simon! I hesitated for a second and then picked up.
“Wyn! Good news!”
“Simon?” Does he know it was me yet?
“Things went pretty well this morning. It looks like they’re open to a plea deal.”
“That’s great,” I lied. “What does that mean for Nate? Would he have to go to jail?”
“The formal charge is criminal sexual assault, which is a Class 1 Felony, but the plea deal would see him plead no contest to a lesser charge of aggravated criminal sexual abuse, which is probationable.”
He’ll never admit he’s guilty, will he?
Simon continued, “Aggravated criminal se
xual abuse is punishable by a minimum of three to seven years’ incarceration. We proposed three years of probation. It looks like some of it might have to be served as home detention, although he’d get credit for time served and could be released from home detention early for good behavior. Obviously it’s not ideal, but he’d probably be able to leave the house to go to work. The prosecutor knows that this case rests entirely on the DNA evidence, which only proves they had sex, not that it was rape. Well, and her testimony, of course. I think they know that they have a pretty weak case against Nate, given how old it is. He would have to wear a GPS tracking device at all times.”