Flawed

by Tracy Wolff

  She stirs again, kicks out—cries out—and I wrap an arm around her. Stroke a hand down the too-prominent bumps of her spine. It’s only been a couple of days and already she’s lost weight she can’t afford to lose, the stress and pain of all this weighing on her more heavily than she will acknowledge.

  My touch doesn’t soothe her the way I hoped it would, so I sweep her hair out of the way and press soft kisses to her forehead even as I murmur a bunch of nonsense, words without any purpose but to let her hear my voice. To let her know that I’m here, that I’m the one touching her, kissing her, stroking her hair.

  It does the trick. She settles down almost instantly, with a barely there smile and a soft sigh that reaches inside me and stokes the fury already burning there. I force myself to stay relaxed, to keep the anger locked inside, as I hold her just a little bit tighter. Comfort her just a little bit longer.

  My brain is racing, trying to figure out how to spare her what she wants to do tomorrow—no, what she has to do tomorrow whether she wants to or not. I get the reasoning behind her going on NBC and telling her side of the story, get that even with the statement Ethan’s PR guy issued, the public is writing the story instead of Tori. If she gets up and tells the truth about what’s going on, she’ll at least be part of the conversation. But the problem is, she has a past. There are pictures of her with different guys all over the world. The media has already dug a lot of them up, the less reputable sites plastering them all over their front pages with all kinds of suggestive headlines.

  Even if she’d slept with every guy she’s pictured with—a veritable impossibility, considering the sheer numbers we’re talking about—it still doesn’t give Parsons the right to do what he did. It sure as hell doesn’t give the Internet trolls the right to tear her apart, to call her a whore who probably loves every second of her sex tape being out there, and a bunch of other things that are too vile for me to even let myself think.

  Tori whimpers again, her head thrashing back and forth against the pillow, and I stroke a soothing hand over her shoulder. My attention is drawn to her dandelion, and I find myself absently tracing the runaway seeds before skimming my fingers along the river tattoo that tumbles down her spine. I palm the elaborate phoenix tattoo on her right hip before sliding my hand down to the intricate dreamcatcher on her inner thigh.

  So much ink. So many stories she has written on her skin. I want to know them all.

  But how can I get her to tell them to me when so much of her life is a battlefield? How can I get her to trust me—to love me—when so many of the men in her life are so completely untrustworthy? How can I get her to want to be with me when she’s about to go on TV and get torn apart because of the actions of some other man she once trusted?

  Especially when he’s probably going to come out of this in even better shape than he went into it.

  The double standard in this country is bullshit. Even after all this time, after all these years of recognizing the ridiculousness of it all, Parsons is going to get away with what he did. Because he’s a guy—and a famous guy, at that. More, he’s the next big thing, a famous guy capable of generating hundreds of millions of dollars in profit for the studios he chooses to work for. They’ll protect him, rally the media behind him, and no matter how eloquent, how right she is, she’s still going to come off as bitter or slutty or attention seeking or (worse case) downright crazy. In fact, the better she is, the more convincing she is, the harder they’ll come at her.

  It’s the nature of the beast. And I am not okay with it.

  My sister suffered for years at the hands of her rapist and his friends. He tormented her, made fun of her, had everyone convinced she was a liar and a whore when the only mistake she’d made was to accept a ride with a guy she thought she could trust. And when the truth all came out years later, it was only the fact that she was with Ethan, the fact that she had all his wealth and connections behind her, that kept Brandon from vilifying her in the press. That kept him from putting the blame for what happened squarely on her shoulders.

  That’s not going to happen to Tori. I’m not going to let it happen to her.

  I lower my head to press kisses along her jaw. When she doesn’t wake, doesn’t so much as stir, I take it as a sign that the bad dreams have passed. And while I should probably try to get a little more sleep myself, I’m too wired to even try. Not when my brain is racing through scenario after scenario, trying to find one where Tori won’t be hurt even worse. Trying to find one that Tori won’t find it necessary to ink into her skin in a few weeks or a few months because it’s the only way she can deal with the pain.

  Just the idea wounds me more than it should, has a mixture of rage and pain slicing through my veins as I roll out of bed. I grab a pair of boxers from my dresser but don’t bother with any other clothes. It’s a surprisingly warm night, and there’s no one but Tori around to see me anyway.

  I pad down the stairs to the kitchen, make a pot of too-strong coffee. While I wait for it to drip through, I open up my laptop from where it’s sitting on the kitchen table and get to work.

  The first thing I do is check the bots I’ve got combing the Internet looking for dirt on Parsons, anything I can find that I can somehow use against him. They haven’t turned up much of anything—and it only grows more obvious to me that his online profile has been professionally scrubbed.

  I scroll through what’s been found anyway. All the publicity for his upcoming movie, all the past interviews and paparazzi mentions and posts from fans who have met him at one time or another. It’s all the same old stuff until I run across a mention of Parsons on a small, out-of-the-way Tumblr. It doesn’t have many followers and the girl who runs it tends to post about boy bands more than anything else. But she’s also quite political, and has a number of posts that run the gamut from commentary on politicians to criticism of current LGBTQ+ legislation.

  And in the middle of all of this, buried between posts about Harry Styles’s wardrobe and Justin Timberlake’s baby, is a picture of Alexander Parsons taken after he starred in one of the huge teen movies, surrounded by a group of young female fans holding up their phones and obviously asking for selfies. It’s been reblogged numerous times, but the original poster’s comment is still visible. #ThisAngel. Which in and of itself isn’t significant. Except the blogger whose Tumblr I’m on has also tagged it. Only her tag reads #ThisRapist.

  Chills skate down my spine as soon as I see it. It might be nothing, might just be this girl sounding off because she doesn’t like him as an actor. Or because she’s jealous she didn’t get to meet him. Or for a million other reasons—I’ve never been able to figure out why people do what they do, say what they say, on social media. This could totally be just one more inexplicable thing.

  Except the more I scroll through her blog, the less likely I am to believe that. She’s smart and aware and seems honest to a fault—she calls herself out for her own mistakes and preconceptions at least as often as she calls out other bloggers or singers. She seems…genuine, for lack of a better term, and while I know how dangerous it can be to buy in to that, I can’t help believing her. At least enough to dig deeper.

  I search her tags, come up with seven more times she’s used the word rapist in the four-year history of her Tumblr. Five of them were to express outrage in response to a recent rape case, where a college swimmer got only a three-month sentence for raping an unconscious girl behind a dumpster. But the other two…the other two were also on photos of Alexander Parsons. One tag was #RapistsAlwaysWin and the other was #RapistsGonnaRape in response to a post about him tagged #HatersGonnaHate.

  So, not a one-off then. And not a short-term thing, as the three comments are spread out over more than three years. The first picture—the one tagged #RapistsAlwaysWin—has numerous other tags, including #Perrysburg.

  Oh shit.

  I click over to another window and Google Perrysburg. But even as I do, I already know what I’m going to find. Years ago—seven years, accord
ing to Wikipedia—three high school football players were convicted of raping an unconscious girl and documenting it in real time on their social media accounts. Evidence pointed to more boys being involved, but only three stood trial, as they were the only ones actively documented while committing the crimes. There was other DNA found, but since the three refused to flip and the judge denied the request to test the DNA of all the other male attendees of the party, at least four people got off scot-free.

  I open yet another window, start searching for information regarding Parsons’s early life. And am not the least bit surprised when his official biography reveals that when his parents divorced, he moved with his American mother from London to a small town in Ohio for high school, though it doesn’t identify which one.

  Son of a bitch.

  I click back over to the girl’s Tumblr, spend some time trying to figure out where she’s from. There’s nothing on the Tumblr to identify her, but I get lucky with a high school yearbook shot from 2011. From Perrysburg High School.

  It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots, to figure out that Parsons was involved in that rape even if he was never arrested for it.

  Son of a bitch.

  I start to dig in earnest now, sending a few bots after anything and everything about anyone with the last name Parsons in Perrysburg, Ohio, and surrounding towns. In the meantime, I pull up lists of all graduating seniors from Perrysburg High School between the years of 2008 and 2012. And then I go after them, sending bots through their social media accounts while I focus on varsity football players in the year the rape took place.

  Once I get a list of the 2010 team, I start finding them online. Once I’ve got their cell numbers, I start tracing them back—most of them have had the same number since high school. And once I’ve got their high school providers, I hack into their accounts and start scrolling through messages from the day of the rape and the days immediately after.

  The problem the authorities ran into is that most of the evidence was erased from cellphones and for whatever reason—corruption, protection, laziness—they didn’t go after warrants to search the actual cell providers’ servers, where all text messages are stored. I obviously don’t have a warrant, either, which means none of what I find is admissible in court.

  But I don’t give a shit about that. I’m not aiming to send Parsons to jail. Just to find enough on him to hang him in the court of public opinion—and in doing so help Tori and ruin his perfect fucking career and life all at the same time.

  It might not be justice for the victim, but it’s more justice than she’s gotten so far. And if I actually find enough, maybe the case will be reopened.

  A quick glance at the clock tells me I don’t have much time. It’s three A.M. and if she goes, Tori is scheduled to do the interview at noon. I can try to talk her into postponing for a day, but if I don’t find anything…the longer this story goes on, the more shit gets said about her. The more shit she has to find a way to ignore or wrap her head around.

  She’s suffered enough. I don’t want her to suffer any more.

  And so I dig faster than I’ve ever dug in my life, knowing I’m missing things as I search desperately for a trail—any trail—that leads back to Parsons.

  It only takes a few minutes for me to find two of the others involved—judging from the photos they took of them raping the unconscious girl’s mouth and coming on her stomach, the unidentified DNA belongs to them. I put what I find aside in another folder, one that I will send to a couple of big newspapers before this is through, and start tracing their messages, trying to find any connection to Parsons.

  I’m moving so fast that I almost miss it when the first connection shows up. It’s a text message between a guy named Taylor Bradley, quarterback of the football team, and a guy he calls Al. The text itself is pretty innocuous—at least compared with a lot of the other texts that were flying back and forth among these guys that night—but combined with the name Al, it’s enough to get me buzzing a little.

  Add in the fact that it includes a picture of a girl’s bruised leg, naked all the way to the upper thigh where the photo cuts out, and it’s enough to have me picking out the phone number of Al and hacking into his account as well.

  And that’s when I hit the jackpot, because Al is no other than Alexander Parsons, a twenty-year-old college sophomore at Ohio State and former quarterback of the Perrysburg Yellow Jackets, who just happened to be home for the long weekend.

  From there it’s ridiculously easy to take a stroll through his incoming—and outgoing—text messages from the night in question. Well, easy if you don’t count the content I have to weed through, which points definitively to the fact that he was not only involved in photographing and texting about the unconscious girl while others performed lewd acts on her, but also very much involved in those lewd acts himself. And at twenty years old, he wasn’t a juvenile like the three who were arrested and charged.

  The bastard. The sick, fucking, sociopathic bastard.

  I save the evidence—text files, videos, and photos—then push back from my desk and walk outside for some fresh air. As the brother of a rape victim, I know better than most just how monstrous some men can be. Just as I know how unfair the justice system and the court of public opinion can be. I saw it last year when the whole sordid mess came out in the national papers, and I saw it years ago when Chloe suffered through the ridicule and violence directed at her by her classmates, led by none other than her rapist. The boy—the man—my parents had allowed to go free in exchange for an obscene amount of money.

  But what I just saw in those videos and photos…It was horrific. Inhumane. Unconscionable. Not just the night-long rape of an unconscious girl by at least eight different males, but the fact that they carried her from party to party, place to place, in front of dozens of their classmates. That text messages were sent out to nearly the entire junior and senior classes and no one did anything to stop them. No one stepped in and helped her and no one, not one person, bothered to call the police.

  I don’t understand. I don’t fucking understand. What the hell did any of them get out of it? How could doing something like that to another human being, or watching it be done, be funny? Or arousing? Or whatever the hell they thought it was? I don’t get it and I never fucking will.

  And Alexander Parsons, movie star, international sex symbol, and media darling, was right in the middle of the entire situation. Oh, he didn’t instigate what happened, but when they texted him somewhere around nine thirty, he made a point of showing up and joining in pretty damn quickly. And from what I can tell, it didn’t take long for him to go from eager participant to fucking ringleader of some of the more heinous things that were done to that poor girl during the night.

  No wonder he had his social media professionally scrubbed when he started to get famous. No fucking wonder.

  The idea that this bastard had his dick anywhere near Tori makes me crazy. He could have hurt her anytime, could have done any number of horrible things to her in the time they were together. Not just could have as in having access to her, but could have as in being perfectly capable of carrying out the most heinous, horrible acts imaginable. And then, seven years after he got away with the rape, kidnapping, and assault of a minor, he is so privileged, so secure in his place in the world, that he doesn’t mind leaking a sex tape that will draw a ton of scrutiny. And not just any sex tape, but one made without his partner’s consent.

  How fucking certain, how fucking arrogant and entitled and smug, do you have to be to do that shit? And how fucking sick?

  I think about Tori lying upstairs, curling into herself and whimpering in her sleep as her whole fucking life falls apart around her. I think of Marli, the girl in Perrysburg that he did this to. Then I think of how many other women this fucking predator has come into contact with in his life.

  And I’m done. I’m so fucking done. He’s going down, will lose his career and his freedom before I’m done with him.

 
; I’ll make sure of it.

  Walking back inside, I make up several completely anonymous email addresses that I then bury under about a hundred different security measures to ensure that they can’t be traced back to me. Or, more important, can’t be traced back to Tori. Then I attach everything I’ve found on Alex Parsons and all the other boys, and I send it out—to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, CNN, MSNBC, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Columbus Dispatch. Then I use another email to send the same information to the Perrysburg Police Department, the Wood County Sheriff’s Department, and the Cleveland branch of the FBI.

  I have more digging to do, more information to gather, but this should be enough to get them started. And more than enough to change the story from Parsons and Tori’s sex tape to how he’s a sexual predator who hurts women just because he can.

  It won’t stop Tori from hurting, but it might give her her life back. It’s not enough, but it will have to do. At least for now.

  Chapter 23

  Tori

  “Holy shit, did you see it?”

  “See what?” I answer groggily, pulling the phone away from my ear to try to distance myself a little from Chloe’s shrieks. This so isn’t the way I expected to wake up this morning, especially since Miles’s side of the bed doesn’t even look like it’s been slept in.

  “The news about Alex! It’s everywhere!”

  Oh God, she’s talking about the stupid sex tape again. I fight the urge to hang up and settle for burying my head under the nearest pillow instead. Which is why my voice is muffled when I finally answer, “Yes, Chlo, I know it’s everywhere. That’s why I’m supposed to do this stupid interview today. To try to combat—”

  “Forget the interview! The video of you two is old news.” She pauses for a second, then corrects herself. “Well, not really old news because the big sites are all mentioning it as extra proof of his predatory habits. The whole world is reusing the statement we issued for you, explaining how the video was made—and released—without your knowledge. Except now everyone believes it and he’s getting hammered online. Absolutely hammered. Not that he doesn’t deserve it.” Chloe’s voice turns dark and a little ugly. “There isn’t enough bad karma in the world for that jackass to get what he deserves.”