Danielle Steel - Malice

“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.

“Are you kidding?” Charles said in disbelief. It happened to her the most when she was alone or with the children. Grace complained to Charles about it constantly. A woman had walked up to her that day at the gas station, and out of the blue shouted “Bang, ya got him, didn't you, Grace?” “I feel like Bonnie and Clyde.” She had to laugh at it sometimes. It really was absurd, and although people mentioned it to him sometimes too, they never seemed to ask as much or as viciously as they did of Grace. It was as though they wanted to torment her. She had even gotten a highly irritated letter from Cheryl Swanson in Chicago, saying that she was retired now, and she and Bob were divorced, no surprise to Grace, but she couldn't understand why Grace had never told her she'd been in prison.

“Because she wouldn't have hired me,” she said to Charles as she tossed the letter at him to show him. There were lots of letters like that now, and crank calls, and one blank page smeared with blood spelling out the word “Murderess,” which they'd turned over to the police. But she'd had a nice letter from Winnie, in Philadelphia, offering her love and support, and another from Father Tim, who was in Florida, as the chaplain of a retirement community. He sent her his love and prayers, and reminded her that she was God's child, and He loved her.