The Night Swim

by Megan Goldin

  “Ask any swimming coach. Any swimming commentator. They will tell you that Scott could be one of the greatest swimmers this country has seen. And then this happens.”

  As if to emphasize his point, Greg opened a file on his desk and lifted up a thick pile of newspaper clippings. He held up the top clipping. It was a front page newspaper article with a photo of police officers hauling Scott out of a swimming pool. A second photo showed Scott being handcuffed while dripping wet in his Speedo. “Champion Swimmer Arrested for Raping Teen,” the headline read.

  “Why would a teenage girl make these accusations if they were false?” Rachel asked Greg once they were seated by a glass table on the balcony, overlooking the sea.

  “I have no idea. And I don’t need to know. What I do know is that he didn’t do it. Scott has so many girls coming after him. He doesn’t need to rape an unwilling teenager when there are plenty of attractive young women who are more than willing. Models. Actresses. It makes no sense,” he said. “It’s as if everyone is out for his blood. They hate his success.”

  “Do you really think it’s all a conspiracy to cut him down to size?” Rachel asked skeptically.

  “My son didn’t do it!” Greg said firmly. “Scott could spend the next decade or more in jail. Lose the best years of his life. For what? Because a girl changed her mind after the fact? He was a kid himself. Just eighteen. Drunk. Dumb. He should have known better than to get mixed up with a girl like that. With her family connections and all. Her grandfather was the police chief. The police take care of their own.”

  He sat back and looked out at the panoramic ocean view while he collected his thoughts.

  “Scott didn’t rape that girl. He didn’t. But he’s already being treated like a rapist.”

  “In what way?” Rachel asked.

  “Well, for one thing, based on this girl’s word alone, he is suspended from competitive swimming. He lost his college scholarship and his sponsorships. My fear is that he will always be known as the swimmer who was accused of rape. That it will be a permanent smear. Doesn’t matter that he didn’t do it,” said Greg. “I just hope the jury sees the truth and acquits Scott so he can still fulfill his potential and win those gold medals that he’s been working so hard for all his life. Scotty’s still young. He has years of swimming ahead of him. If we can only get people to see that he has been wrongly accused.”

  He paused as the sliding door opened and a man wearing jeans and a navy shirt joined them on the balcony. His fawn hair was blowing in the wind.

  Rachel knew Dale Quinn on sight. He was a rock-star lawyer who’d cut his teeth by successfully defending a husband accused of throwing his wife off their eleventh-floor balcony. Quinn managed to get the husband acquitted by convincing the jury that the woman might have jumped off the balcony after an argument.

  “Do you know why I chose Dale to defend Scott?” Greg asked. “And it has nothing to do with the fact that we’re old high school buddies from when Dale lived here in his junior year, while his old man was posted at the marine base out of town.”

  “I have no idea.” Rachel asked the question even though she could guess the answer. Juries loved Dale Quinn. He was good-looking, with a boyish charm and a virtuoso talent at playing heartstrings. She’d seen him in action in a courtroom when she was a newspaper reporter. It had been like watching a master class in winning friends and influencing people. Except in Quinn’s case, his specialty was winning over jurors.

  “Six years ago, Dale defended a boy around Scott’s age. Similar scenario. Tell her, Dale,” Greg urged.

  “My client and a girl had sex on the college quad during a party. Consensual. He takes her back to her room out of a sense of chivalry, where she bursts into tears and runs into the bathroom. He waits around to make sure she’s okay. Leaves his phone number before he goes,” Quinn said. “Next morning, he gets arrested for rape. During the trial, my private investigator finds out that the victim has done this before. Twice. False allegations each time. She was a minor. It was all sealed. The judge ruled it was exculpatory, so we can’t bring it up at trial. The only way out of this mess is for me to get her to admit some of this stuff in the redirect.

  “I was nice as pie to her. Asked her questions every which way. Next thing you know, she’s telling the court that she had sex with him to spite an ex-boyfriend who was at the party. She admits on the stand that she never said no and consented at the time. Afterward, she regretted it. Claimed she wasn’t all that enthusiastic. Says he should have realized. Law doesn’t allow for retroactive withdrawal of consent.”

  “It went to the jury,” Greg interrupted. “They deliberated for an hour and found him not guilty.”

  “You got him off. That means the system works,” said Rachel, looking at her own reflection in Dale Quinn’s dark sunglasses.

  “He jumped off a bridge onto a highway three days later,” said Quinn. He paused dramatically to let that sink in. “The stress, the depression, killed him. He knew he’d never get his old life back. That his good name was stained forever. He lost a prestigious internship. Had no hope of getting into a tier one firm when he graduated. His career was dead before it began.”

  Rachel remembered hearing about the case. The boy’s parents had given a tearful interview on a current affairs program after he died. Before he was charged with rape their son had been offered a highly sought-after internship with a congressman. He lost the internship and he was suspended from college in the middle of the semester. His GPA free-fell. He was struggling with depression.

  “What’s your point?” Rachel asked.

  “What happens during a moment of intimacy is complicated and confusing. When we put it under a spotlight in a court of law we discover that, a lot of the time, there is no black and white. Just shades of gray,” said Quinn. “Juries don’t like gray. The law doesn’t like gray,” he said, standing up. “If I was Mitch Alkins, I’d be worried. It’s tough to get a conviction when all you can offer is gray.”

  Quinn took off his sunglasses and tucked them into his pocket as he turned to leave. “I’d better get going. I have a trial that starts in under forty-eight hours and I haven’t written a word of my opening statement.”

  A maid arrived with a bottle of Riesling. Greg poured them each a glass. Rachel didn’t drink hers. The Blairs’ conviviality seemed like a thinly disguised bid to get Rachel on their side. It annoyed her.

  What interested her most was the war room upstairs, where Scott was obviously meeting with his defense team. The doorbell rang three times. Each time, Cynthia excused herself to let more lawyers into the house. Rachel heard hushed murmurs and the sound of footsteps as people walked up the staircase to the second floor. Then the sound of a door shutting and the murmurs would immediately stop.

  All the while, Greg Blair was thumbing through old albums, showing her photos of Scott as an infant, a toddler, a five-year-old with no front teeth. Scott beaming on the winner’s podium when he received his first gold medal. The Blairs wanted to humanize Scott. To an extent, they’d succeeded. By the time Cynthia walked her to her car, Rachel was surprised to feel more sympathy than she’d expected.

  “All we’re asking is that you have an open mind,” said Cynthia. “There has been a terrible rush to judgment. We want Scott to have a fair hearing in court and in the court of public opinion. Surely that’s not too much to ask?”

  21

  Guilty or Not Guilty

  Season 3, Episode 5: The Drive

  I have no doubt that K would have instantly recognized Scott Blair when she saw him standing in the playground that night.

  How can I be sure? Because in this day and age of social media–driven ersatz fame, Scott Blair was a local celebrity the likes of which Neapolis had never really seen before.

  There were articles about Scott in the local newspaper and interviews with him on television. At K’s high school, a huge framed photo of Scott was in pride of place in the Hall of Fame trophy cabinet. The local swim center
had a life-sized photo of Scott swimming freestyle hanging next to the doors leading to the indoor swimming pool. Incidentally, both photos have since been removed following requests from K’s family after Scott Blair was charged with her rape and sexual assault.

  Scott’s celebrity status was powered especially by social media. Like many kids at Neapolis High, K was one of Scott’s one hundred and seventy-two thousand Instagram followers. After all, he was the most famous graduate from their school. Scott posted photos regularly before he was charged. Scott doing his swimming training. Scott weight training. Scott running. I’m sure you get the picture.

  If you look at old posts on his Instagram account, you can see photos of food piled up on the table before Scott tucked into his breakfast. Three bowls of cereal. A pile of toast covered in the equivalent of a small jar of peanut butter. Three glasses of orange juice. I don’t even want to think about what he ate for lunch and dinner!

  There are photos of Scott in the gym lifting weights. Underwater shots of him swimming. Above-water shots of his muscles rippling as his arms cut into the water during swim meets. Action shots of his powerful kick as he sliced through the water. He documented every aspect of his training to all his adoring fans.

  Ever since the cops charged Scott with rape, there are a startling number of Instagram posts with photos of him volunteering at his church, ladling out stew at a soup kitchen, and teaching swimming to disadvantaged kids.

  Of course, maybe that’s just me being cynical. Maybe Scott really did devote himself to philanthropy long before he was charged with several class A sexual assault felonies.

  In the months before he was named as a suspect in the K case, Scott Blair was on a grueling pre-Olympics training schedule. He woke at dawn to train. He swam two hours in the pool in the morning. Two hours in the evening. An hour around midday in the gym working with free weights. He did this brutal training program six days a week. Nothing unusual for a champion swimmer with Olympic prospects.

  During this training, Scott sustained a calf injury. It was a niggling injury that was affecting his swimming times. His swim coach told him to go home for the weekend. Take a few days off from training and get his focus back. That’s why Scott was back in Neapolis that Saturday night.

  In one of the interviews that Scott gave before his new lawyer, Dale Quinn, stopped him from talking to the media, he said that when he was back home on weekend visits he sometimes went to the same playground where K disappeared to meet up with old friends and to relax from the stresses of competitive swimming. He’d grown up in the neighborhood. That’s how he and Harris knew each other even though they were almost two years apart in age.

  Scott said he was stressed that night. He had crucial tryouts coming up in a month and he was worried about that niggling calf injury. So he went to the park to soak up the atmosphere of his old “hood.” To chill. Stare at the stars. Very poetic.

  The prosecution’s claims are less poetic. They say he was there because he’d arranged for Harris Wilson to follow K back from Lexi’s party and keep her at the playground until he could get there and whisk her away in his car. Which is exactly what he did.

  Whether you believe the prosecution or Scott Blair himself, the fact is that Scott was there that night. He saw K on the swing. He gave her a ride in his car.

  She went with him voluntarily. We know that because there is CCTV footage of the two of them leaving the playground. It was taken from the house opposite the playground, which had cameras pointing into the street due to an ongoing graffiti problem. The owners of the house hoped to catch the vandals in the act of spray-painting their fence.

  Instead, the camera caught Scott Blair opening his car door for K and then driving off with her in his silver sports car. The footage was broadcast on a local news channel after he was charged.

  Scott didn’t take K home, as he promised her before she voluntarily stepped into his car. If he had, everything would have turned out differently. He claims that once they were in the car, K asked to go for a spin in his new convertible. It had leather seats and that new-car smell. He claims that he put the top down at K’s request, even though it was October. Neapolis gets biting winds from the Atlantic in October. It would have been freezing driving around in a convertible that night.

  They drove along the coast. After a while, they stopped at an all-night pizza place. More footage documents that visit, this time released to the media by the owner of the pizza place. I guess the pizza store owner believes in the old adage that any publicity is good publicity, especially when it’s free.

  Anyway, the footage shows Scott and K standing next to each other at the counter as they order. They sit and talk while they wait for their pizzas to be made. After about ten minutes, Scott gets up and collects two boxes of pizza and two sodas in those oversized cups.

  Scott walks out of the pizza place carrying the pizza boxes. He has a baseball cap worn backward on his head, jeans, and a dark T-shirt. K is behind him carrying the sodas. You can see her clearly in the CCTV footage.

  The defense will argue that she could have hung back. She could have asked the staff at the pizza place to call the cops or used their phone to call her dad. She could have run for it. She didn’t. She followed Scott to his car and the two of them drove off. That indicates that she was with him willingly, which the defense will argue is indicative of her state of mind that night.

  Scott drove to a beach. He chose the last beaches before the national park, south of Neapolis. There are a few boat sheds on the beach to store Jet Skis and motorboats for water-skiing. Scott’s parents keep a boat there. Scott would have known that nobody goes there. That it’s out of the way and usually deserted.

  In comments to reporters after he was first charged, he said that he and K sat on the beach and ate pizza. They listened to music and talked. It was fun. Romantic. And then one thing led to another and they had sex.

  Here’s what his lawyer says: “My client, Scott Blair, and K went swimming together on the night in question after which they engaged in consensual sex. There was no violence, rape, or coercion of any kind. Everything that happened that night, including sexual activity, was entirely consensual at the time that it took place. If there were regrets afterward, then that is unfortunate, but it has nothing to do with the way my client acted that night. Scott is innocent of the charges against him.”

  The prosecutors give a very different story in their indictment. They say that Scott lured K into his car with the promise of a ride home. Instead, he took her for a drive and stopped to buy pizza, which they took to an isolated beach where he raped K repeatedly, after which he abandoned her and made the three-hour drive back to his college apartment so he would have an alibi.

  They say that Scott Blair raped K because he was in a competition with a friend to see who could have sex with the most girls in a thirty-day period. K was going to be a notch on his bedpost. Whether she wanted it or not.

  I’m trying really hard here to be objective. I need to give Scott the benefit of the doubt. You know, innocent until proven guilty. Plus, it’s my job to keep an open mind.

  The question that keeps bugging me is: Why did Scott leave K alone at the beach and drive back to his college apartment? Why do that if it was an innocent sexual tryst?

  Scott’s parents claim that K asked Scott to drop her at the bus stop. That she told Scott she’d rather take the bus home in the morning so that nobody would see him dropping her off. She didn’t want her parents to find out that she’d spent the night with him.

  Was Scott abandoning K to make her own way home the act of an innocent young man who had truly done nothing wrong? Or the act of a man with a very guilty conscience trying to cover up for a crime he knew that he’d committed? We’ll figure it out together when the trial begins tomorrow.

  I’m Rachel Krall and this is Guilty or Not Guilty, the podcast that puts you in the jury box.

  22

  Rachel

  The southern lawn of the Neapolis
courthouse was cordoned off as TV reporters did live broadcasts with the redbrick neo-Georgian building as a backdrop. The courthouse dated to the late nineteenth century, when Neapolis had aspirations of becoming a major seaport. It had an expansive plaza with a stone staircase that led to a white-trimmed pillared portico at the entrance.

  Rachel joined a group of locals watching from behind a barrier as a TV reporter finished the tail end of a Q&A with a studio host during a live broadcast.

  “The trial has divided this small coastal town. Some say that Scott Blair, the swimming star on trial for raping a high school student, is innocent and has been scapegoated by political correctness gone overboard. Others are worried the verdict in this case will affect the willingness of rape victims to come forward,” said the reporter, pausing to listen to the next question coming through her earpiece.

  Rachel didn’t stay to hear the reporter’s answer to the follow-up question. A long line was forming on the upstairs portico to pass through the metal detectors just inside the glass-door entrance of the courthouse. Rachel rushed to join the line, zigzagging through the crowded plaza and taking the stairs two at a time after flashing her journalist’s credentials at an impassive police officer manning the barricade.

  She looked down at the plaza from the top of the stairs as she waited to go through the metal detectors. The area was bustling with a festive atmosphere that seemed to Rachel to be in poor taste, given it was the start of a rape trial. Food trucks were doing a roaring trade in coffee, doughnuts, and breakfast burritos. Protesters with black T-shirts that said “Stop Rapists” were waving “Lock Him Up” placards. Locals stood around taking selfies.