Content warning for explicit descriptions and discussions of sexual assault. I am not fucking around. Do not read this if you're not in a place to handle that.
Unsurprisingly, my boss, Harold, does not know who Richard Colby is. He summarizes the situation in his typical brusque fashion. “Some genre writer’s getting me-tooed and his PR team wants a puff piece to remind everyone what a funny, awkward, approachable guy he actually is. Do you want it?”
I shrug, knowing that if I come across as too eager he might give it to someone else. Harold doesn’t like go-getters. He likes solid, reliable people who show up on time, write the things they’re told to, and don’t bother him with too many ideas of their own.
“You’ll take an Uber to his house. It’s in upstate New York. He wants to do the interview there. Says it’ll make him feel more comfortable.”
The day of, I go full femme mode. Shave my legs for the first time in years, makeup, product in my hair, a bra instead of a binder, a suit with a pencil skirt, pumps, and stockings. Looking at myself in the mirror makes me feel dysphoric, but I shove it off. Bigger fish.
It’s an hour’s ride in the Uber to Colby’s house. I know the magazine will cover it, so I decide fuck it and take an Uber Black. Pulling up to a mansion in a luxury car while dressed for the world’s sluttiest business meeting certainly is something else.
There’s no help, no hovering PR people or gofers. Colby answers the door himself. He looks rumpled, a small older man wearing an oversized Aran knit sweater and greying curly hair. “You must be Chris,” he says. His voice is mellow.
“You must be correct,” I tell him. “May I come in?”
He ushers me into a positively cavernous room that’s all white carpet, white leather couches, and giant windows looking out onto his landscaped garden. “Can I get you anything?” he asks. “Cup of tea?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” I tell him. I pull out my phone, set it on the table, pull up my voice recording app, and make a show of pressing the red button. I also pull out my notepad and pen, sitting down on one of the couches and crossing my legs, barely remembering to hook one knee over the other instead of my usual ankle situation. I don’t wear skirts basically ever. “Ready to start?”
He hems and haws a little but eventually settles on the couch, a respectful enough distance away. There is a whole other couch on the other side of a big coffee table, though, so it was definitely a choice to plant himself on the same one as me. “So,” he says. “I suppose you’d like to discuss the current palaver in my personal life.”
He smiles thinly. “A whole lot of fuss over nothing, more or less.”
“Ah. So you’re denying the allegations brought against you?”
“Categorically. Are you certain you don’t need anything to drink?”
“Why, so you can drug it?”
Now he blinks, looking shocked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Right,” I tell him. “Sorry. That’s not your style. You prefer to take advantage of emotionally vulnerable and financially insecure people. Less money spent on drugs that way.”
His face clouds. “Miss –”
“No,” I tell him. “Not a woman.”
That definitely throws him. “I – but –”
“Oh, I know I look like one right now. But femininity is just a performance, after all. I can pick it up and put it down whenever I want.” I pitch my voice high and bubbly. “All it takes is a little practice.”
Now he’s beginning to look angry. “I think you ought to be going, now.”
“No, I don’t think I will.” I pull the last of my interview tools out of my suit jacket. He stops looking angry very abruptly and begins looking scared. This is a natural reaction to being confronted with a Walther PPK.
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen,” I continue. “If you get up from this couch, or try to move toward me in any way, I’m going to shoot you. Naturally police will get called, there’ll be a huge – what was that wonderful word you used – ah, yes, palaver. There’ll be a huge palaver and it’ll ultimately be your word against mine. After all, there are no witnesses. You let all of your staff go when things first started going sideways and it looked like money might start to actually get tight.” I gesture minutely with the gun. “Didn’t you, Richard?”
He doesn’t say or do anything.
“Not that it really matters if there were people around. Everyone you ever employed had to sign an NDA as part of their job. An NDA that threatened them with some frankly draconian consequences both legal and financial if they ever talked about you or your activities to the press.”
“I expect you looked me up when you heard I was going to be your interviewer,” I say. “Here’s what I think happened. You started thinking about this interview, about having this little femme-ish person in your home – I mean, nonbinary people are just ‘women lite,’ right? – and filling my head with nice-sounding bullshit. Maybe you thought about how you would get a little closer to me as we talked, bit by bit, until you were able to touch me. Maybe a hand on my shoulder, or knee, or thigh? Just a little touch at first, but then you’d get more insistent.”
His face contorts in a rictus expression, but he still says nothing.
“Where did it go next?” I ask. “This fantasy version of me. Was I down? Or did I resist? Is it hotter when they say no, Richard?”
I see his Adam’s apple bob a little as he swallows. He still doesn’t say anything.
“Answer the question like a good boy,” I tell him. “Or I’ll shoot you anyway and things will go like I said.”
His eyes flick toward the phone.
“Oh, yes, it is recording,” I tell him. “But you know how it is, Richard. Things get deleted by mistake, or lost. Or, oops, silly little me, I forgot to press the button! This is why we kept women out of journalism for so long.”
“I don’t know how to answer your question,” he finally says.
“Because I didn’t do anything you just suggested. If my employees signed NDAs, it was my lawyers who made them do it. I certainly didn’t engage in lurid fantasizing about you before you arrived. And I let my staff go when this whole thing first started because I didn’t want them getting swept up in it, not because of financial concerns.”
“You didn’t want them talking to the press, you mean,” I tell him. “NDAs or no, you were paranoid about that. But I was able to interview one of them.”
“Now now, Richard, they spoke to me under guarantee of anonymity. I’m an ethical journalist. I don’t reveal my sources.”
“The gun you’re using to threaten me would cast doubt on the credibility of your ethics, I must say.”
I raise my eyebrows in mock surprise. “A little bit of sass from the serial rapist. You love to see it.”
“What is it about anal rape specifically that you like, Richard? The fact that it’s easier to make someone bleed from their ass, or the fact that the angle’s better when you’ve got them pinned on their stomach so you don’t have to see their face?” When he just sits there gaping at me, I continue, “Is it both? Neither? Oh, I forgot about the allegations that after you anally raped some of your victims you made them clean off your cock with their mouths. Do you just like making people eat their own shit, Richard? I’m sorry, I mean, ‘my Lord.’ That is what you insisted people call you, whether they wanted to or not.”
He still sits there and says nothing. He just stares at me. He doesn’t even look angry.
“The thing I keep seeing,” I tell him, “more than anything else, is the grief. Millions of people loved your work, Richard. We grew up with it. We drew comfort from it. We loved the way you insisted on depicting the stories of the marginalized. The unseen. People of color, women, queer folks, trans folks, immigrants, convicts. Victims of systemic discrimination, of assault. We saw ourselves in those stories, some of us for the first time. And you’re so outspoken, Richard. You’re so quick to call yourself a feminist. To tweet about hashtag believe women. To go to bat when famous dickheads go on a twitter rant about men wearing a dress so they can go into women’s restrooms and do vague sex crimes. You talked the talk so well, Richard, and for so long. It really was easy to believe that you were walking the walk.”
His mouth is pressed into a thin line. There are tears in his eyes.
“So, on the record, Richard. Are you sorry for what you’ve done?”
A tear runs down his cheek. “Yes.” His voice is hoarse.
“Do you regret it? If you could, would you go back and change it?”
“That’s a good boy,” I tell him. “And listen, I believe you. I believe that right now, in this moment, you feel like an absolute piece of shit and wish you’d never been born. Humans are extremely reference-dependent, Richard. When we’re in a hot state, when we’re angry or horny or high or some combination of all of them, we have a very hard time thinking about anything more than what we want to do right there in that moment. Regret happens when you look back with clear eyes and really objectively evaluate what you did.”
He nods, still weeping silently.
“So,” I continue. “We’ve established that you regret it, Richard. You regret all the terrible shit you did. You are, in fact, capable of feeling regret, is my point.” I raise my free hand palm up, fingers curled, in an inquiring gesture. “So my next question would be, why’d you keep doing it?”
Back to silence. He has nothing to say.
“We have sworn testimony from five or six women now, Richard. Over a period of years. Decades, even. One or two data points could be coincidence, mistakes, misunderstanding. But there’s a pattern here. And more people are coming forward. My point is, only you – maybe not even you, it’s been so long – know how many people you’ve sexually assaulted. So why, at no point, did you just… stop doing it? Why didn’t you say, I regret this and would like to change it if I could, so I’m not going to do it any more?”
The quiet from him is deafening. The gun is heavy in my hand, but I don’t let my aim waver.
“I’ve read a lot of think pieces about this,” I say. “A lot of very educated people holding forth on generational cycles of abuse and trauma begetting more abuse and trauma. People are talking about how your parents were part of a very wealthy, very powerful cult. About some of the stuff you were obviously subjected to as a kid. That kind of stuff fucks you up, I agree. You don’t live through trauma like that without the brain doing weird things to try to cope.”
I lean forward toward him, lowering my voice a little. His eyes stay fixed on the gun.
“But between you and me, Richard? I don’t care. Your brain isn’t you. Your traumas and triggers aren’t you. You’re you. At the end of the day, you’re the one who controls your actions. You might be predisposed to them, you might even find it overwhelmingly hard not to do them, but the bottom line is that the buck stops with you and no power or force in the universe can change that. You took advantage of people. You violated and hurt people. And you just kept doing it! And the whole time you kept getting up on your little soapbox and telling everyone how good of an ally you were!” I can hear my voice rising and getting shrill and at this point I’m beyond caring. “Fuck, I’m surprised no one twigged to your bullshit much earlier! It’s so obvious in retrospect!"
It is at this point, of course, that he decides to go for the gun. It’s only natural, after all. I’m getting closer to him, I’m agitated, I’m caught up in the moment and ranting. There will never be a better time, and he knows it. One hand seizes my wrist and twists, the other comes around in a solid blow to my jaw. I see stars and feel the weapon fall from my fingers.
When I can see and think again, only a couple seconds later, he is standing, pointing the gun at me, screaming, calling me a crazy bitch, et cetera. I massage my jaw. “Richard, that wasn’t very nice.”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” he says. “That wasn’t very nice of me? To disarm the psychotic cunt that came into my house with a gun to threaten me? I am so very sorry I hurt you! Is that what you wanted to hear? That I’m sorry your little parasocial fantasy relationship with me had its bubble burst when it turned out I’m just another disappointing fuckup?”
“It doesn’t hurt to hear that, no,” I say. “But no, honestly, what I wanted was to make you feel the way some of your victims did. To be paralyzed with fear and impotent rage as someone made you feel like a worthless bag of shit. Didn’t enjoy it, huh?”
“I don’t know how many times I need to explain to people that I’m sorry things went the way they did!” he shouts. “I’m not a comic book villain, I don’t have some evil master plan that I already executed thirty minutes before you got here. I’m just a man who has made bad decisions and wants to put them behind him! I didn’t kill anyone, for Christ’s sake!”
“It’s true,” I say. “You haven’t killed anyone. Yet.”
I make as though I’m going to spring at him. He screams and pulls the trigger.
Nothing happens, of course. There aren’t any bullets in the gun’s clip or chamber.
He stares at the weapon in shock for a long few seconds while I just sit there and go back to rubbing my aching jaw. That’s going to bruise for sure.
“No, it didn’t jam, it’s just not loaded,” I say, finally. “And look on the bright side, Richard. You only pulled the trigger once. You didn’t keep trying after the first time. That’s the difference between manslaughter and murder, right there.”
He drops the gun onto the floor. I lean over and pick it up, putting it back in my jacket. I also collect my phone, which is still recording. I press the red button again and turn that off.
“Naturally, none of this is going to be admissible in court,” I tell him, putting away my notepad and pen and starting to straighten out my outfit, which got rumpled in the tussle. “Confession under coercion, real or imagined, never is. But that was never the point, after all. I just came here to write a story.”
He stares at me with hollow eyes. “It sounded to me like you came here for more than that.”
“Catharsis is nice, sure, but it doesn’t pay the rent, Richard. But the waves this whole thing will make – the two weeks of discourse about whether what I did was okay, the yea-sayers and the nay-sayers fighting on twitter, the long screeds on Medium and WaPo about whether it’s morally justified to bully a bully, et cetera et cetera? It’s all going to add up, Richard. You can take some comfort in the idea that you really are being a good ally, finally, by helping get a queer writer’s career off the ground.”
His mouth quirks in a bitter smile. “So much for the moral high ground.”
“I never laid any claim to that, Richard.” I turn and head for the door.
But I can’t resist looking over my shoulder one more time. “Oh, but just to point out – if I had, I would still have it, because I haven’t raped a bunch of people and then made them sign NDAs to keep them from talking about it.”
He doesn’t say anything. I don’t look back at him again as I leave.
My Uber Black is still waiting for me in the driveway. The driver glances back at me in his rear-view mirror as I slide into the backseat. “That was fast,” he says. “I was expecting to be waiting out here for, like, at least an hour.”
I shrug. “We got to the heart of the matter pretty quickly.”
He nods, putting the car in drive and starting the trip back. “So,” he says. “Did he do all that stuff? Like, for real?”
“What do you think?” I ask him.
With a shrug, he replies, “Probably, yeah. But you know how this kind of thing goes. There’s a bunch of court stuff, a lot of people fighting on the Internet about it, and maybe he gets house arrest and a fine. Maybe. More likely they let him off. He’ll be back to writing stuff next year and talking about how he got unfairly canceled and now he’s trying to just come back and do his thing but the liberal media won’t let him.”
“Yeah, probably,” I say. I’m already drafting my statement for when my phone gets hacked and the recording gets leaked without my consent or knowledge. I also send my girlfriend a message confirming I’m still good to crash at her place for a while so I’m not home when the crazy people show up to threaten me in person after I get doxxed.
I know he’s right, though. Life isn’t story-shaped. There isn’t going to be a nice, fitting end for Richard Colby. He’s going to keep living a very comfortable life with his millions of dollars and he’ll die of old age in his sleep.
That’s what gets me, at the end of the day. That he’s the one who made me believe that life should be story-shaped. That, in the final account, the world should work the way it does in books and television. Bad guy gets caught, gets punished, happily ever after.
Fuck him for that. I’m so tired. I can’t even be angry.
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