Snowblind

Chapter 25: The Court of Public Opinion

The United States of America and a good portion of Canada

February 6, 1996

The American Watcher special edition hit the newsstands and grocery store checkout aisles nationwide on this morning. The headline was big and bold.

IS MINDY SNOW CARRYING

GREG OLDFELLOW’S LOVE CHILD?

Below the headline was a large, high-definition color photograph of Greg and Mindy taken from one of the stills of Us and Them. It was from the first sex scene of the film, where the two of them, Greg shirtless, Mindy in only a skimpy black bra, are staring lustfully into each other’s eyes, about to finish getting naked and start having Hollywood sex on the bed. The caption for the photograph read: Not just acting? Mindy Snow and Greg Oldfellow in a steamy scene from the blockbuster hit Us and Them. It is reported that the two A-list actors had an affair during the premier period of the film’s release and that Snow is alleging she is now pregnant from the encounter. Complete details inside!

And, as promised, there were lots of details inside. The main story of the special edition was written under the byline of Julie Brigg and told the tale relayed to her by Jake and Laura Kingsley, though they were not mentioned by name, only referred to as “anonymous sources within Celia Valdez’s close circle of friends and bandmembers”. Pauline Kingsley and John Stapleton were mentioned, however, and they were quoted as confirming the allegations that Mindy was claiming pregnancy from a one-time encounter with Greg at the Chicago premier of their film. Georgette Minden was also mentioned by name as refusing to confirm or deny the allegations on Mindy’s behalf.

In all, the main article was nearly ten thousand words in length and stretched across fourteen pages of the tabloid. It was accompanied by a dozen full-color photographs, including one that had been shot by Paul Peterson himself, just days before the breaking of the story, that showed Mindy emerging from a trendy restaurant in Hollywood. It had just been a routine shot taken by the notorious paparazzo, a shot he had hardly glanced at afterword (he had basically just stumbled across her and took the shot out of reflex) and had not been planning to try to sell until the Watcher reached out to the paparazzi community asking for any recent pictures of Snow, Valdez, or Oldfellow for an upcoming major story. And so, he sold them the shot for only $200, not realizing that it plainly showed a small swelling in Mindy’s lower stomach region—an unmistakable beginning baby bump once one knew to look for it. The Watcher’s photography editing staff published both the full shot, and a cropped, magnified shot that displayed only Mindy’s stomach with an arrow pointing to the bulge.

The narrative text of the story was about as graphic and descriptive as an article could be and still be openly sold in newspaper check stands to human beings under the age of eighteen. It rehashed how Mindy had been reported to have a crush on Greg when they reported for primary photography on the Us and Them set. From there, it described how Greg had not been attracted to her and had spurned her advances until the night of the Chicago premier when he got drunk and decided to “give her a try” because “I hadn’t been laid in a few days”. It spoke of how Mindy had reported “I’m on the pill, don’t worry” and that, despite this reassurance, Greg had elected to wear a condom anyway. Despite the affair being only a single encounter, performed with two layers of contraception, Mindy Snow had called Greg up nearly three months later and told him that she was pregnant with his child. John Stapleton was on record and quoted as saying Greg found it highly unlikely that the child could possibly be his. Johnny was further quoted as stating that if there was a bigger slut in Hollywood than Mindy Snow, he did not know who it was.

But the main article was not the only article in the special edition. In fact, most of the entire edition was dedicated to the Mindy Snow/Greg Oldfellow story. There was a secondary story that addressed the allegations that Mindy Snow was a notorious floozy. This article contained a long list of men, including Jake Kingsley, who she was known to have or was alleged to have slept with (the writer made no real distinction between these two categories). This article touched upon the allegation that Mindy also had a taste for women on occasion, but only briefly, as that subject was the focus of its own separate article in the edition.

In that article, Cynthia Rasp, one of the most experienced and well-connected Watcher celebrity reporters, had managed to track the story of Greg Oldfellow’s alleged sexual encounter during the filming of So Others May Live to Cheryl Zender herself—the makeup artist that Greg had had the brief affair with. Zender was no longer employed by the movie studio, having moved on to her own private business, and, as such, was no longer bound by the nondisclosure agreement that such employment required, nor afraid of being blackballed. She was also more than a little resentful of the way she had been thrown aside by first Greg and then Mindy. And, the free publicity for her new salon that would be garnered by the article’s publication was just an added bonus. She happily admitted her bisexuality to Rasp and confirmed that she had had sexual affairs with both Greg Oldfellow and Mindy Snow. She also anecdotally confirmed the allegation, made by Julie Brigg’s anonymous source, that Mindy was a lousy lay.

“She is a terrible lover,” Zender was quoted as proclaiming. “All she does is take, and only in the way she wants to take. She gives nothing whatsoever in return.”

She had kinder things to say about Greg Oldfellow’s skill in the sack. “He was a wonderful, generous lover, very attentive, very experienced.”

The story did not touch upon the fact that Greg and Zender had only had one sexual encounter. Either Zender had not mentioned it, or Rasp had not asked, or, more likely, the information was not considered conducive to the main theme of the article.

Yet another article in the edition tackled the subject of Greg and Celia’s relationship. This one was full of quotes from the “anonymous source” of Jake and Laura, describing Greg’s reputation as a notorious womanizer who had cheated on his beautiful musician wife regularly until it got to the point that the marriage was only chugging along. The date of their separation was mentioned again, and there was even a copy of the divorce paperwork with the dates of marriage and separation highlighted.

Before the special edition had even hit the stands on the west coast of the United States, the AP and all of the east coast based media, who had a three-hour head start thanks to the time zones, were all over the story. Pauline’s phone began to ring off the hook at 5:30 AM, with reporters from nearly every major east coast newspaper—including the Wall Street Journal—wanting to clarify details and gather their own quotes. The same thing happened to Johnny Stapleton and Georgette Minden. Pauline and Johnny answered most of their phone calls, despite being annoyed at the early hour. They confirmed that what was published in the Watcher was accurate, at least as far as what they had been quoted on. Georgette, on the other hand, took no calls at all, not even offering a “no comment”.

“I knew I shouldn’t have warned that fucking asshole that this was coming,” Mindy said as she finished reading the article at 8:45 that morning. “Try to do something nice for someone and see where it fucking gets you.”

“I don’t understand,” Georgette said. “What is he hoping to accomplish by this?”

They were in Mindy’s office in her house in the hills. Georgette had driven up directly from the newsstand where she had picked up the copy of the special edition of the American Watcher she had known was going to be on sale this morning. It was even worse than she had been anticipating. The article was almost a complete fabrication of the situation; but it was a fabrication that was being endorsed by John Stapleton and Pauline Kingsley, thus giving it the strong illusion of legitimacy. And now there were reporters and photographers and videographers staked out at the main gate into Mindy’s property. They had never come here before, not even during Mindy’s nasty divorce from Scott Adams Winslow.

“He’s trying to make me look pathetic,” Mindy said. “And, unfortunately, it seems to have worked. This fucking rag is painting me as a slut, a bitch, and a crappy lay all in one stroke.” She shook her head. “And I’m not a crappy lay! I am fuckin’ premo in the sack! Everyone who has ever fucked me knows that!”

“Well ... you certainly have enough experience,” Georgette allowed.

“Hey, fuck you,” Mindy barked at her. “You’ve certainly gotten your share of dick by being my agent all these years, haven’t you? Not to mention the millions of dollars in your bank account.”

“Yes, that is true,” Georgette said. “My relationship with you has been beneficial, both financially and in dick.”

“Goddamn right,” Mindy said. “And to think, you wanted me to keep doing those wholesome good girl flicks after The Slow Lane finally met its merciful end. I would’ve long since faded into obscurity if I’d listened to you and would probably be doing late-night info-fucking-mercials for the thigh-master or some shit like that.”

“That is true, Mindy. You made the right call back then and I was wrong to try to talk you out of it. But let’s not bicker at each other. Let’s try to figure out what the game is here.”

“I told you,” she said. “He’s trying to humiliate me, to make me look like the bad guy so he looks like the good guy!”

“I understand that,” Georgette said. “What I don’t understand is what is the purpose? You seem confident that the baby is Greg’s.”

“It is Greg’s!” she shouted. “I didn’t let anyone else’s dick within five feet of me from the time I reported to Chicago for filming until he finally gave in and hosed me down. And I’m here to tell you, that was a miserable fucking six months! I haven’t gone that long without cock since I was fourteen years old!”

Georgette sighed. “We’ll be sure not to include that quote in our eventual reply to these allegations that you are a slut,” she said. “Anyway, my point is, does Oldfellow really disbelieve the baby is his? Is that why he is making these allegations?”

Mindy thought this over for a moment. “I ... I don’t know,” she said. “It’s possible, maybe even likely. Greg’s a Hollywood insider, and he’s friends with Jake Kingsley. He would know about my ... uh ... proclivity for sexual encounters.”

“He would also know about your proclivity for elaborate schemes as well,” Georgette pointed out.

“True,” Mindy agreed. “In any case, he’s going to be eating a big crate of crow when the DNA test shows that the baby really is his.”

“That’s six to eight months away,” Georgette said.

“No, it isn’t,” Mindy said. “I’m going to call up Dr. Ender and have her give me that amniocentesis next week. They can run the baby’s DNA from that.”

“Amniocentesis?” Georgette asked, horrified. “Mindy, you’re only thirty-four years old! And you’re in superb shape! There’s no reason for that procedure!”

“Sure there is,” she said. “I want to make sure the baby is okay, doesn’t have any genetic defects or anything. And ... as an added bonus, we can run a DNA paternity test.”

“But the risk of...”

“The risk is minimal,” Mindy said. “I’ve already looked into it. I wasn’t going to do it at first because of ... well ... what you just said, but now there’s a really good reason.”

“You would put your baby at risk just so you could show up Greg Oldfellow a little sooner than would happen naturally?”

“Stop being so dramatic,” Mindy told her. “Like I said, the risk is minimal.”

“But what happens if Greg declines to provide a genetic sample for comparison?” she asked. “Have you thought of that?”

“He wouldn’t dare,” she scoffed. “If I file a paternity suit against him, naming him as the father, the burden of proof is on him. If he declines to submit a sample for testing, it will be legally presumed that he is the father. Not only that, but refusal would be as good as admitting the child is his in the court of public opinion, which, in our business, is the highest fucking court in the land.”

“But what about our original story?” Georgette asked. “You know ... that you and Greg fell madly in love with each other during the filming of Us and Them and couldn’t keep your hands off of each other and that you got pregnant from the affair? It’s going to be kind of hard to pull that one off now, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Mindy said with a sigh. “He shot that story right out of the water when he planted this story in the Watcher. Once again, that’s what I get for being nice and letting him know what was about to go down.”

“Yes,” Georgette said, resisting the urge to roll her eyes, “it really doesn’t pay to be nice, does it?”

“You got that shit right,” Mindy agreed, completely missing the sarcasm. “Anyway, let’s talk about what we are going to say.”

“I can’t wait to hear it,” Georgette said, opening her notebook and taking out a pen.

Mindy Snow’s version of the events was published two days later in the Los Angeles Times under the byline of Bernadette Tapp, who Georgette called personally on the afternoon of the Watcher’s special edition release. This story was on the front page, above the fold, displacing headlines about the new president taking power in Haiti and the crash of a Dominican Airlines 757 jetliner into the Caribbean Sea.

“Yes, Mindy is pregnant,” Georgette was quoted as saying. “And yes, Greg Oldfellow is the father of the child. Mindy is quite certain of this as she had no sexual relations with anyone else between her breakup with Raphael Smith, her personal trainer, just before reporting for primary photography on Us and Them in April, and the sexual encounter which Greg, which took place in October. Mindy’s due date is July 16.”

The allegations that Mindy was a woman of loose virtue were addressed as well. “Her reputation among the gossipy Hollywood elite is much worse than the reality,” Georgette explained (with a straight face, even). “Sure, Mindy has had her share of lovers. That has all been well-documented by the entertainment media. But she is also quite monogamous when in a relationship and not prone to casual sex or one-night stands. She is also quite serious about her work and quite professional while on a set. The encounter with Greg Oldfellow came after months of the two of them working closely together and sharing a certain chemistry. And even then, it did not happen until filming was complete. As reported in the Watcher, the encounter was a one-time episode that took place during the premier tour after the film’s release, and after the two of them had more than a few alcoholic beverages in celebration.”

And the birth control pills? And the condom? Though the LA Times liked to portray itself as a family newspaper with high moral standards of community decency, they had no problem printing the discussion on this topic. “Mindy was on birth control pills at the time,” Georgette explained. “But, as you know, no method of birth control, save for complete abstinence, is one hundred percent reliable. As for the condom, there was no condom used as this was a drunken encounter between two people who did not stop to think about such things. Perhaps we could all use this episode as a lesson and teaching moment for our adolescents.”

And as for Greg Oldfellow’s denial of paternity? “As I said earlier, Mindy is quite certain that the baby is Greg’s as he was her only sexual partner in a six-month period. Mindy will be undergoing amniocentesis next week to make sure there are no genetic defects in the baby. DNA paternity testing will be possible once this procedure is done. Mindy asks Greg to submit a sample of his DNA in order to prove that what she is saying is true. The next step, obviously, would be up to Greg.”

But before Greg could even respond to her request, other newspapers and entertainment shows began to print and broadcast a variety of different things related to the story as people who knew Mindy or did business with her or, most common, had been fucked by her (literally and figuratively) began to contact reporters to get in on the story and pass along a few juicy details.

Entertainment Reports, the weekly celebrity gossip show based in Los Angeles, aired a report featuring Raphael Smith, Mindy’s ex-boyfriend and the last person she had allegedly had sex with prior to Greg Oldfellow. The handsome, Adonis-looking figure appeared in suit and tie, looking nervous to be on camera, but determined to earn the fifteen thousand dollars ER was paying him and to get a little revenge on his ex. He let it be known that his reports back in April that Mindy had broken up with him because she had a crush on Greg were not true at all, but fabricated lines that she had paid him to feed to the media.

“She paid me ten grand to say that,” he told the nation. “She had never even mentioned Greg Oldfellow until she got that role in Us and Them. That was when she broke up with me and offered me the money to say she had a crush on him.”

“Did she say why she wanted you to do this?” he was asked.

“She said it was all part of a plan that was too complicated for someone like me to understand,” he said bitterly.

“But you did it?”

He nodded shamefully. “I did it,” he confirmed. “I didn’t really have a choice. I was unemployed at the time and had no place to live once she kicked me out of her place. She offered me the ten grand and three months paid rent at a condo downtown if I just said that.”

“And why are you telling us this now?”

“I’m back on my feet again,” he said. “And I want the truth to be told. Mindy is not a nice person.”

“What about the reports that she is not a good lover?” he was asked next.

“Those are true as well,” he said, lying through his teeth, but feeling great pleasure at twisting the knife a little bit. “She just kind of lays there, like she’s doing you a favor or something. Very uninspiring.”

The day after that, the LA Times ran a lengthy article featuring an interview with Michael Stinson, Greg’s costar in the Northern Jungle, the current treasurer of the Screen Actors Guild, and the man who briefly dated Mindy Snow in the wake of her divorce from Scott Adams Winslow. He too had been treated badly by Mindy during and after their relationship and he too was eager to deal down a little payback. Bernadette Tapp had conducted the interview and wrote the story. Tapp knew that it was Stinson himself who had contacted her and offered to speak about the relationship. Tapp did not know, however, that the contact had come after Greg Oldfellow had visited his former best man at his wedding, had a few beers with him, encouraged him to contact the Times, and suggested certain things be disclosed in their entirety, a few things that were not necessarily the truth. This was called sworn testimony in the court of public opinion.

“It was the worst relationship of my life,” Stinson was quoted as saying. “She was a horrible person, just a user who was only there to try to ride my coattails to further her career. She even told me that while we were together, several times, using just those words. She was a terrible lover—about the worst I’ve ever been with, truthfully—and I’m quite sure she was sleeping around on me the whole time we were together.”

“What makes you believe that?” Stinson was asked.

“Well, she would come home at times smelling of sex, she was always gone a lot longer than necessary on minor errands, and I ended up having to be treated for gonorrhea about a week after we broke up.”

“And what was the cause of the breakup?” he was further asked.

“When Northern Jungle bombed, she dropped me like a hot potato,” was the reply. “Didn’t even say goodbye. Just disappeared from my life and had her publicist issue a statement that we were no longer seeing each other.”

Most interesting and intriguing, however, was an offer made by a man named Jerry Claw. Claw was the owner and editor of the magazine Smooth Operator, a notorious pornographic publication that, in addition to featuring glossy, high-definition pictures of women showing everything they had with a minimal amount of subtlety, also published shots of celebrities, though not the sort of shots found in publications like the American Watcher or Celebrity Times. These shots were of famous people—usually women—showing some degree of nudity: Celebrities experiencing nipple slips, or a brief flash of underwear beneath a skirt (or, on many occasions, the lack of underwear beneath a skirt), or lounging topless or nude on a beach in France or changing in a changing room infiltrated by a camera. Not only did they publish pictures of celebrities in compromising positions, they also penned articles about them, sharing details far too graphic to be published in mainstream magazines—tales about sexual exploits and infidelity were their bread and butter. And Claw wanted in on the whole Mindy Snow and Greg Oldfellow deal.

Claw announced publicly that he would pay twenty thousand dollars to anyone who would give an interview about a sexual encounter they had had with either Mindy Snow or Greg Oldfellow. But he was not a mere gossip magazine. He wanted some weight behind his stories. His stipulation was that he would only pay if he decided to print the tale in question; and he would only print the tale in question if he could verify that the teller of the tale had actually been in a situation where the tale was feasible. In other words, his reporters would have to be actually able to corroborate that the teller of the tale had been in the same place with Snow or Oldfellow long enough to have had sex with them. Georgette, upon hearing this offer made, immediately released an angry statement declaring that if Smooth Operator actually printed some sordid accusation, Mindy Snow would sue the magazine, Claw himself, and whoever spun the tale for libel and/or slander.

This threat did not seem to bother Claw one bit. Nor did it keep more than a hundred people from making contact via the special 800 number he had set up just to field the calls. Most of the callers were idiots and/or scam artists who had never even met Mindy Snow or Greg Oldfellow, people who were just trying to cash in. A few, however, were not.

On February 14^th, Valentine’s Day, and two days before the announcement of the Academy Awards nominees for 1995, Greg released a statement through John Stapleton.

“I will consent to providing a sample of my DNA for the purpose of answering the question of whether or not I am, in fact, the biological father of Mindy Snow’s child. This will be done provided the procedure is performed at a reputable laboratory, that a proper chain of evidence is followed and documented during all steps of the procedure, and that Ms. Snow pays for the procedure. It is my belief that I am unlikely to be the father of this child given Mindy’s well-documented sexual exploits and the fact that I used protection during the incident in question, but I do acknowledge that it is possible in theory. In the event that the child is determined to be of my parentage, I will, of course, accept full financial responsibility as required under the law. However, if the child is determined to be biologically mine, I will have no parental relationship with him or her other than the financial one because, if this child is mine, it was conceived in an atmosphere of fraud and deception. The child will have my pity, but I will not be a father to a child or become emotionally attached to a child that I was tricked into producing.”

And before Mindy could even respond to that quote, another was released the next morning, this one by Celia herself.

“My goal in this ordeal is to just move on with my life. I hold no real ill will against Greg for the circumstances he now finds himself in. Our marriage was already over at the time he committed his indiscretion with Mindy Snow. Like Greg, I believe it to be unlikely that the child is his given Mindy’s behavior. I just want our divorce to go smoothly and be finalized as quickly as possible so I can remain focused on my music career and my touring schedule. As stated before, Greg and I will remain dear friends forever. We just simply cannot be married to each other. And, as for Ms. Snow, despite her well-known reputation for promiscuousness, low moral character, and scheming, I am not prepared to call her a whore ... at least not yet.”

Mindy became so angry after reading this article that she had to pop a couple of Xanax pills and chase them down with a vodka and tonic before she could even start to formulate a response.

“Those assholes!” she screamed at Georgette, who had pretty much moved in with her to keep on top of the crisis management. “Those lying pieces of shit! How dare they?! How fucking dare they?!”

“Mindy,” Georgette said gently, “are you sure you should be drinking that?”

“It’s okay,” Mindy said with a wave of the hand. “I took an extra prenatal vitamin with the Xanax.”

“Oh ... well, in that case...” Georgette said, again resisting the eye-roll urge. Not for the first time (or the last) she started to wonder if it were about time to retire from the celebrity management gig.

“They’re flat out lying!” Mindy said, slugging down a little more of her drink. “They’re lying about the condom; they’re lying about their fucking marital problems!” She looked at Georgette meaningfully. “We’re dealing with liars here, Georgie! Liars! People who have no qualms about telling those dirtbag reporters completely false information just to make me look bad!”

“Yes,” Georgette said soothingly. “Isn’t it awful when people use the entertainment press for their own nefarious schemes.”

Again, the sarcasm and the hypocrisy flew right over her pretty head. “Exactly!” she said righteously. “We have to respond to this! We have to do it today. The fucking nominations are being announced day after tomorrow. I don’t want this shit to detract from that.”

“I think that ship has pretty much sailed,” Georgette opined dryly.

Mindy tensed up, prepared to yell again, but then relaxed. She nodded her head. “Yeah ... maybe you’re right. But I still want to respond to this slanderous crap immediately.”

“What exactly do you plan to say?”

“First of all, that there was no fucking condom!” she said. “I’ve already gone on record with that, but I want to reiterate it in no uncertain terms. No condom was used! It’s the fucking truth! There wasn’t one! How in the hell would I have gotten knocked up with his baby if there was a condom? Why would he even suggest that?”

“Again,” Georgette said patiently, “it is highly likely that Greg really believes the child is not his; that you are just trying to scam him.”

“I am not trying to scam him,” Mindy said righteously. “I don’t give a fuck about his money or about child support. I don’t want to marry him or have an ongoing relationship with him—he’s way too fuckin’ square for me—and nothing would make me happier than for him to renounce all involvement in the baby’s life. I just want the goddamn world to know that my child carries his genes. Is that too much to ask?”

“Apparently so,” Georgette said. “You don’t really want to go into detail with the entertainment press about the use of a condom during the encounter, do you?”

“Fuck yes I do,” she said. “I want the truth to be known.”

Georgette sighed. “Very well,” she said. “I will discuss how you rode bareback on Greg Oldfellow’s cock when I talk to Ms. Tapp later today. What about Celia’s statement?”

“What about that fuckin’ cunt?” Mindy growled. She was still steaming about the ‘not prepared to call her a whore’ quote.

“Do we acknowledge her release? Her accusations about your moral character?”

“Goddamn right we do,” Mindy said. “Whip me up something about how that bitch doesn’t even know me and that she’s only passing on Hollywood gossip and that I’m considering suing her for slander. Yes, I boffed her fucking husband, but only because she didn’t want him anymore and now she’s just a sore loser.”

Georgette nodded. “I will present the concept,” she said. “After, of course, a bit of rephrasing.”

“Probably a good idea,” Mindy agreed.

And so began the back and forth on the issue of protection involved that would be forever known as ‘Condom-Gate’. Mindy’s version was fed to Bernadette Tapp of the LA Times later that day. In it she reiterated that she had a single sexual encounter with Greg Oldfellow while the two of them were intoxicated. She had been on birth control pills but there had been no condom involved. She was unsure why Greg Oldfellow kept insisting that there was a condom involved, but her speculation was that Greg, who had been pretty drunk, might not remember the entire encounter. She also reiterated, once again, that she had had no other sexual partners in the months preceding her encounter with Greg. She once again advanced the opinion that the upcoming DNA paternity test would remove all doubt.

Following journalistic standards—something that was not always done by the entertainment press—Bernadette Tapp then called Johnny Stapleton to get Greg’s response to Mindy’s version of events. Instead of letting Johnny field the interview, Greg gave it himself. Greg told Bernadette that he had perfectly clear memories of the encounter between himself and Mindy and that he had, in fact, used a condom, mostly out of concern for possibly picking up an STD from the drunken actress. He had taken her at her word that she was using birth control pills and the thought that he might accidentally get her pregnant had been the furthest thing from his mind.

“You carry condoms with you just for such occasions?” Tapp asked him at this point.

“No, I do not carry condoms with me,” Greg replied, seemingly offended by the suggestion. “When things started to heat up with Mindy on that night, I decided to put a stop to the encounter because I did not want to have sex with her without such protection. But Mindy apparently does carry condoms with her. She pulled one out of her purse and gave it to me. That was the condom I used.”

“You’re saying that Mindy provided the condom?” Tapp asked, nearly drooling at this point.

“That is correct,” Greg told her. “Since I really had no excuse to stop any longer ... well ... I put it on and we did the deed. I have been regretting it ever since.”

“Did you inspect the condom before you put it on?” she asked next.

“Inspect it?”

“You know ... check it for damage ... holes perhaps?”

“Who in the hell checks condoms for damage right before they get it on in a drunken encounter?” Greg asked.

“So, you did not inspect the condom for damage?”

“No. I did not inspect the condom for damage. I wouldn’t even know what a damaged condom looks like. In truth, I rarely use the things.”

And so, in the next morning’s edition of the LA Times, on the front page, just below the fold, the headline read:

GREG SAYS MINDY PROVIDED THE CONDOM ON THE NIGHT OF CONCEPTION.

Condom-Gate was begun.

The very next day, the nominations for the 1995 Academy Awards were announced. As expected, the film Us and Them was prominent on the list. The film itself was nominated for Best Picture, Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, and Best Editing. Fletch was nominated for Best Director. And, of course, Greg Oldfellow and Mindy Snow were nominated for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively.

Mindy, who was still angry and steaming over Greg’s blatant lies about her giving him a condom—and the not-so-subtle implication that she might have sabotaged it—nonetheless gave a press release (delivered by Georgette) stating that she was honored by the nomination and looking forward to attending the ceremony.

“Will it be awkward for her to attend the ceremony with Greg Oldfellow?” Georgette was asked.

“Not at all,” Georgette replied. “Greg and Mindy are, above all, professionals and colleagues and costars. Mindy will be able to put aside any animosity that exists because of the pregnancy and related issues and stand side by side with Greg for the occasion.”

When contacted for his own statement, Greg once again fielded the issue on his own. “I am honored by the nomination and would like to thank the Academy for considering me,” he was quoted as saying, “but, unlike Mindy, I am unable to put aside my animosity. Quite frankly, I do not want to be in the same room with her. I do not even want to be in the same zip code as her. As such, I will not be attending the ceremony. My agent, John Stapleton, will stand in in my place.”

And that led to the next day’s headline, which was printed above the fold, in type even larger than the headline for the nominations themselves.

GREG, CITING ANIMOSITY TOWARD MINDY, REFUSES TO ATTEND THE ACADEMY AWARDS.

The day after the announcement of the Academy Award nominees, Jake Kingsley flew his Chancellor from Oceano to Palm Springs Airport. There, he rented a Lexus and drove to Greg Oldfellow’s mansion on the fifth fairway of the Mojave Springs Country Club—the winter house where Greg had pretty much been holed up since fleeing Los Angeles after the Mindy pregnancy story broke.

He parked the Lexus in the circular driveway just past noon. He left his luggage and his golf clubs in the trunk, knowing that Greg would throw a fit if he tried to carry them in himself instead of letting the servants take care of it. He walked up to the large double doors and rang the bell.

Jim, Greg and Celia’s long-time butler, opened the door less than twenty seconds later. He was balding, perhaps sixty years old now, and wearing the traditional butler’s uniform. He smiled with genuine warmth when he saw Jake standing there.

“Mr. Kingsley!” he greeted. “Welcome! Come right inside.”

“Thanks, Jim,” Jake said, stepping through the doorway.

“How was your flight in?” the butler asked.

“A little bumpy going over the mountains,” Jake said with a shrug. “Nothing too bad though. Celia wouldn’t have liked it much.”

Jim gave a melancholy smile. “No, I don’t suppose she would have,” he said. “I do miss having her around.”

“She’s a great girl,” Jake agreed. “I hope Greg is still kicking himself in the ass over screwing that up.”

“He is indeed,” Jim said.

“How’s he doing?”

Jim seemed to consider his answer for a few moments. He looked around as if to see if anyone else was in earshot and then, in a quiet voice said, “He’s drinking a lot more than normal. And he sleeps in a lot later in the morning.”

“Understandable,” Jake said. “Breakups suck, especially when they’re highly public.”

“I suppose,” Jim said. “Still, I worry about him.”

“He’ll bounce back,” Jake assured him. “Where’s he at?”

“In the entertainment room. Should I show you there?”

“No,” Jake said. “I know the way.”

“Very good, sir,” Jim said. “If you give me your keys, I will secure your luggage and park your car in the garage.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Jake said, handing over the rental car key.

While Jim walked out the door, Jake headed through the halls to the entertainment room, which was near the rear of the house. There he found Greg Oldfellow sitting at one of the barstools sipping from a glass of amber liquid on the rocks. He was dressed impeccably, as usual, in a pair of slacks, polished shoes, and a long-sleeve dress shirt. His gold Rolex watch was on his wrist and his hair was elegantly styled. His face, on the other hand, looked haggard and drawn. Jake actually winced a little as he took it in. The man looked five years older than he had the last time he had seen him only a few weeks before.

“Day drinking, huh?” Jake asked him as he walked up to the bar.

Greg seemed momentarily startled to hear his voice but then smiled as he saw him. “I’ve been doing a lot of that lately,” he said, standing up.

“It has its place in modern society,” Jake said.

“Indeed, it does,” Greg agreed. They shook hands warmly, like the old friends they were. “I’m glad you could make it out.”

“Hey, I’ve been wanting to kick your ass at golf again,” Jake told him. “What are you drinking?”

“Rye,” Greg said. “I’ve experimenting with various potables of late. I’ve started to develop a taste for this variety.”

“Yeah? Well, light me up. How much catching up do I have to do?”

“Only a little,” Greg assured him, walking behind the bar and pulling down one of the glasses.

He put some ice in the glass and then poured Jake a healthy slug of Celestial Hammer eighteen-year-old double malt. He then proposed a toast to friendship. Jake drank to that and smiled in appreciation as the smooth alcohol traveled down into his stomach.

“Good shit,” he remarked.

“For two hundred and eighty dollars a bottle, it had better be,” Greg said.

They took their drinks over to the couch and sat down.

“You just got back from the tour?” Greg asked.

“Yeah. I flew back to LAX two days ago, the morning after the second Seattle show. I figured I’d better start working on the next songs to promote for the albums.”

“That seems wise,” Greg said. “Tell me ... uh ... how is ... uh ... Celia doing?”

“She’s a bit of a wreck,” Jake said honestly. “Very sad about the whole divorce thing and very stressed about the whole Mindy Snow extravaganza in the media and all the pap following her around and snapping shots of her and yelling questions at her. Still, she’s professional as hell. She steps out on that stage every night and she fuckin’ sings and plays her best. To watch her onstage, you would not know that there is anything wrong in her life; even if all the audience knows exactly what’s going on.”

“I only wish I would have learned to appreciate that quality in her sooner,” Greg said morosely. “Tell me ... do you think there’s any chance, even a little one, that she might...”

“No,” Jake interrupted, though gently. “Not a chance.”

Greg nodded and took a large sip. “I was afraid that would be the answer.”

“It’s not so much that she hates you or anything,” Jake said. “Truthfully, she remains quite fond of you. And she knows that Mindy Snow engineered this whole thing. I mean, you have your share of the blame, of course. Nobody held a gun to your head and forced you to send Little Greg spelunking in Mindy’s cave.”

Greg actually chuckled a bit. “Put with your usual dignity and tact,” he said, hefting his glass in salute.

“Right,” Jake said, offering a chuckle of his own. “Anyway, she knows you were scammed and taken advantage of. I think she even forgives you for that. Maybe if you two were Joe the plumber and Mary Jo the librarian, she would take you back. But you’re not. You’re A-list celebrities and your every move is printed or otherwise reported on. She has to divorce you for the sake of her own image and reputation. She can’t be seen as the poor slob whose husband is a serial cheater and knocked up another woman but who remained by his side through all that. No one would ever buy one of her CDs again.”

“But I’m not a serial cheater,” Greg insisted. “I did it twice in the eight years I’ve known her, both times while drunk. Poor judgement and self-control? Yes. Serial cheating? No. I would, in fact, suggest that my rate of infidelity is quite remarkable for the crowd I’m a part of.”

“Maybe,” Jake allowed, “but you’re talking about reality and I’m talking about public perception. In this situation, reality has little relevance. Mindy was going to make you look like a chump and Celia look like a pathetic, naïve housewife. You twisted the tables on her when you announced the situation first and gave your version of events. It made it pretty much impossible to lay down whatever cockamamie story she was going to tell about how the conception happened. True, her original goal of letting the world know that her child carries your genes has been met, but she is certainly not coming out of this thing smelling like a rose. In fact, she’s scrambling just to keep from being seen as what she really is: an all-out, manipulative slut.”

Greg smiled a little at this. “Yes,” he said, “she is doing a lot of backpedaling these days. I’ll tell you, I felt very dirty, very sleazy at lying to those reporters about the condom, but damned if it didn’t work.”

“You shouldn’t feel bad about any of this,” Jake said. “You’re simply using Mindy’s weapon against her. Obviously, she was not on birth control pills, right? She’s lying about that.”

“If only there was a way to prove that,” Greg said. “That would be the final blow against her.”

Jake simply shrugged. “I don’t see how that could be done,” he said. “It would take an act of God or something.”

“I suppose,” Greg said with a sigh.

“Don’t worry though,” Jake told him. “She’s getting pretty hammered in the court of public opinion as it is. Having Stinson tell his story was brilliant, particularly the part about how he got the clap from her.”

This actually made Greg giggle a little. “Yes, I must admit I enjoyed that little tidbit. It is amazing how being burned by Mindy will convince a person to tell a bald-faced lie to a reporter about her with only a little prompting.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Jake said. “And then there’s that chick you boned in Alaska. Something else we didn’t count on but that helped your cause tremendously. And then there’s the whole thing with Jerry Claw and Smooth Operator. Can you imagine if that actually bears some fruit? If some of the men and women Mindy has fucked come forward and tell their stories and that sleazeball can actually corroborate? Golden!”

“Also true,” Greg had to agree. “Do you really think people will come forward?”

“I have no doubt,” Jake said. “He’s offering twenty Gs. That’s a lot of money just to come forth and say you got to tear one off of Mindy Snow. The hard part will be verifying they were together. But have faith in our friends in the entertainment press. They know how to dig.”

“Yes, they certainly do,” Greg agreed. “Still, the whole birth control thing would be nice to break open. Combine that with the condom story and she would literally have to hide in shame.”

“Well,” Jake said with a shrug, “I guess we’d better pray that the Big Guy gets involved in this thing then, right?”

“Maybe He doesn’t like Mindy either,” Greg said.

“I’m sure He doesn’t,” said Jake.

But, as it turned out, information on the subject of Mindy and her birth control did not quite rise to the level of divine intervention. All it took was a pharmacy clerk and a little bit of Karma.

After splitting off from Interstate 5 in the San Fernando Valley, State Highway 14 headed northeast, passing through the east side of Santa Clarita, not terribly far from the office park that housed the office and rehearsal studio of KVA Records LLC. It was the route that Jake and Laura used to take to get to the studio when they lived in the Nottingham Drive house prior to moving into their Oceano home. It was also the route that Mindy Snow took to get from Hollywood to her home in the hills near the national forest. As such, it was natural for her to patronize the east Santa Clarita outlet of Lister Pharmacy, one of the regional chains striving to go national. Mindy chose Lister, not because she was supporting local business or because she liked the way they did business, but because of simple convenience. Lister Pharmacy was the closest pharmacy to her secluded house, and it was more or less on the way to and from Hollywood and central Los Angeles.

Carmen, Mindy’s domestic servant, was usually the one who picked up Mindy’s monthly prescription of birth control pills at the Lister. She did this while she was shopping for groceries in the same strip mall. On occasion, however, Mindy sometimes had to swing in and pick up the pills herself for various reasons. It was on one such occasion, two years before she had even been cast in the role of Lyndsay in Us and Them, that she had come to meet Daniel Marks, a twenty-three-year-old inventory clerk who worked keeping the shelves stocked and the floors swept in the Lister.

Daniel Marks was no rocket scientist. He would likely never stroll up onto a stage in Stockholm to collect a prize. But he was a very good-looking young man, well-built, strongly muscled, and, at the time, in top physical shape as he was playing for one of the local community college football teams in the hope of being picked up by one of the big football colleges and then, after doing his time there, the NFL. Neither of these goals ended up being accomplished, as it turned out, but he did catch the eye of Mindy Snow that day she came in to pick up her prescription because Carmen had been in Guadalajara that week visiting her dying mother.

Mindy chatted up the handsome clerk for a bit while pretending to look at the cheap scented candles in the aisle where he was stocking. He was initially star struck to be speaking to her but warmed up when she started blatantly flirting with him. When Mindy left the store with her prescription (but no scented candles) fifteen minutes later, Danny (as he liked to be called) had a piece of paper in his possession. On this paper were specific, easy to follow directions to a house up in the forest off of State Highway 14. There was very little ambiguity as to what Mindy wanted to do with him when he arrived there after finishing his shift.

Danny was a likeable guy then and now. Though not very smart, he was polite, was not arrogant about being a football player, was not prone to bullying or making fun of people, and he really liked it when people liked him. He was particularly fond of Emily Strough, the chubby brunette with the glasses who worked in the actual pharmacy part of the pharmacy, ringing up customers and giving them their little white bags with their pills and potions. Emily was smart and he enjoyed talking to her. She was a friend. He had no idea that Emily, who was kind of nerdy and shy, wanted nothing more in life than to get her hands and mouth on Danny’s well-muscled body and her vagina on his athlete’s cock.

Shortly after Mindy left that store on this fateful day, Danny, his head still reeling over what Mindy had just suggested to him (and Little Danny still refusing to retreat back to normal size), worked his way over to the pharmacy, where Emmie (as she liked to be called) was sitting behind the cash register at the counter doing some sort of paperwork. There were no customers at the moment and the pharmacist, an old, haggard looking shrew who had never spoken a single word to Danny, was in her little cubby, putting pills into bottles.

“Hey, Danny,” Emmie said, smiling, when he sidled over to her location. She blushed a bit, as she always did when Danny first approached, but Danny did not notice. He never did.

“Hey,” he returned. “Did you see that Mindy Snow was in here.”

“Uh ... yeah,” she said. “I just gave her her prescription.”

“Oh ... I guess that makes sense. Is she sick?”

“No,” Emmie said slowly. “At least not as far as I know. It was her pills.”

“Why does she need pills if she’s not sick?”

“Her birth control pills,” Emmie said carefully.

“Ohhh,” Danny said, nodding. “Of course. That’s actually a good thing to know.”

“How’s that?” she asked.

Danny looked around for eavesdroppers and then lowered his voice. “She just invited me to her house.”

“What?” Emmie said, her smile turning to a frown in an instant.

“Swear to God,” Danny told her. “She talked to me in the aisle while I was stocking and the next thing I know, she’s giving me directions to her house and telling me to come there as soon as I get off work.”

Emmie’s expression darkened a bit more. “Why?” she asked.

He hesitated for a moment and then decided that Emmie was a good friend, and he could tell her anything. “I’m pretty sure she wants to ... you know ... have sex with me.”

“Have sex with you?” Emmie asked, incredulous, angry. “What makes you think that?”

“Because she told me: ‘I really would like to fuck you after you get off work today. Come up to my house and we’ll make it happen’.”

“She said that? Seriously?”

“Serious,” he confirmed. “Ain’t that some shit?”

“You’re not going to do it, are you?” she asked.

He looked at her as if she were mad. “Of course I’m going to do it,” he said. “This is Mindy Snow!”

And so, he did it. He drove up into the mountains after work and was taken for a three-hour tour of Mindy’s bedroom that left him limping, sore, with multiple abrasions to his penis, and intermittent bleeding from his anus after Mindy crammed three fingers up there during the height of the most incredible blowjob he had ever imagined, let alone had.

He finished the job of lighting the fuse on a bomb that would explode two years later by describing the encounter to Emmie the next day in heavy rated-R detail (he left out the part about the fingers in the butt and the rimjob Mindy demanded he give her and the bites on his nipples), completely oblivious to the knife he was putting in her heart.

Three months later, Danny got a job working at Burbank Airport as a baggage handler. He never played football again. He never went to school again. He never saw Mindy Snow again (except on the big screen or his VCR). He never had a romantic relationship with Emmie, or even realized that she desired one, and he never spoke to her again after his last shift at Lister. He would always have a fond memory of the day he fucked Mindy Snow, and would often tell the tale to friends and coworkers, not a single one of whom believed him.

As for Emmie, she developed a white-hot hatred for Mindy Snow and had been burning with anger and resentment ever since. In her mind, she had been just about to enter that long-sought romantic relationship with Danny when the slutty bitch came along and snatched him away from her at the last second. She did not contemplate the fact that Danny had never been invited to her house again. Mindy Snow had ruined her shot and she hoped Mindy Snow would burn in hell for it.

That resentment and hatred was still burning quite nicely, with plenty of fuel remaining, when the reports about Mindy’s pregnancy began to play in the media and the newspapers. The slut had struck again, this time to one of her favorite actors (she often masturbated to the thought of Greg Oldfellow cuddling with her while they were naked) and, by extension, to her all-time favorite singer, Celia Valdez. She fumed with each new report that she read, not having any problem whatsoever believing that the slut was trying to run some sort of scam. After all, she had experience with what she was capable of. When the Condom-Gate stories began to appear, with the dueling question of whether Greg Oldfellow had been given a condom by Mindy and with Mindy insisting that there was no condom and that she had been, in fact, on birth control at the time, Emmie realized she had access to a significant piece of information.

She was still working at the Lister as a pharmacy technician (and she was still single, her only sexual encounter of her life having taken place in high school during a kegger). During a lull in pharmacy customers on the very same day that Greg Oldfellow and Jake Kingsley (who Emmie had masturbated to on more than one occasion as well) were playing a round of golf at the Mojave Springs Country Club, she logged into the prescription database she had access to as part of her job duties. She did not know Mindy Snow’s date of birth off the top of her head, but there was only one Mindy Snow in the database, so it was not hard to look up the information she sought.

“Well now,” she said, an evil smile on her face. “This is very interesting.”

She used the ‘print screen’ function and churned out a hard copy of the database entry. She then used the Xerox machine in the corner to make three copies of it. She stowed all the copies in her purse.

At the time, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, commonly known as HIPAA, was still six months away from being signed by President Clinton. Nevertheless, Emmie knew that what she was contemplating was illegal and unethical. But then, so was scheming to get yourself pregnant and ruining the marriage of two of her favorite celebrities. Mindy Snow was a slut, and she needed to pay for what she had done. Emmie would see to it that she did.

That night, when she got home to her simple one-bedroom apartment in Santa Clarita that she shared with Frick and Frack, her two cats, she picked up the phone book and found the number for the Los Angeles Times. It took her nearly thirty minutes of sitting on hold and being transferred around before she finally was able to talk to a human being she could tell her tale to. That human being was Frieda Clause, the on-duty secretary for the entertainment department.

“I’ve got documented information on Mindy Snow and her birth control pills,” she told Clause.

“What kind of documented information?”

Emmie told her. Clause gave no indication whether or not she was impressed by Emmie’s claim. But she took her number. And less than fifteen minutes later, Bernadette Tapp called.

Less than an hour after that conversation, Emmie was at the nearest library, faxing a certain document to a certain Los Angeles fax number.

This headline was so juicy it was printed above the fold in the next day’s edition of the Los Angeles Times.

RECORDS SUGGEST THAT MINDY STOPPED BIRTH CONTROL IN APRIL

The article, under the byline of Bernadette Tapp, citing an ‘anonymous source within the pharmacy industry’, revealed to the readers that pharmacy records from ‘a regional pharmacy chain’ show that Mindy Snow put a ‘hold’ on her prescription for Progestin C+, a common birth control pill, on April 19^th, 1995, nearly a month before she reported for primary photography in Chicago for the film Us and Them and long before the purported sexual encounter with Greg Oldfellow that allegedly led to Mindy’s pregnancy. Putting a hold on a birth control prescription, it was explained, was common when a woman was trying to conceive a child, with the expectation that the hold would be lifted and the prescription resumed after the child was born. The hold, as of the date the document was printed, was still in place.

There was a scan of the document printed on the front page as well. Though the name of the pharmacy was redacted, as was Mindy’s date of birth, social security number, and medical record number, it was quite plain to see that the information being reported was there in writing. The large word “HOLD” was plainly visible next to the name of the prescription.

Mindy’s agent, Georgette, had been contacted prior to the story for Mindy’s response. Georgette’s quote was an angry tirade about the unethical lack of medical privacy in the name of popular entertainment and her assurance that Mindy would be demanding an investigation into the blatant breach of her personal medical information and that a lawsuit would be filed against the pharmacy chain and whoever was found responsible for leaking the information. She also stated that Mindy did not put a hold on her birth control pills, but had simply switched pharmacies back in April because she knew she would be out of town. When asked why the records did not reflect this (the entry should have read NLAP, for ‘no longer active patient’ had this been the case) Georgette simply threw it back on the pharmacy, stating ‘you expect me to explain why a pharmacy that cannot even protect private records mislabels the status of a patient? Your guess is as good as mine’.

Nevertheless, Condom-Gate took on a whole new dimension as the story and the scan of the records was shared on every television station, in every celebrity gossip show, on the pages of every celebrity gossip rag. The implication of the information was quite clear, especially in light of Greg Oldfellow’s allegation that Mindy had told him she was on the pill and had provided him with the condom: Mindy had, with premeditation and malice aforethought, deliberately put herself in a position where Greg would get her pregnant. As to what her reasons for this were, nobody knew, but speculation was wide and without boundaries.

As for Emily Strough, she paid dearly for what she did. An investigation was immediately launched into the breach of privacy and it did not take long to home in on her. The investigators knew, after all, which one of their pharmacies Mindy picked up her pills from. A quick look at the computer logs showed that Emily had logged in the day before the story broke and had accessed Mindy Snow’s record without any reason to do so. They also saw that she had printed several documents from the printer and then used the copy machine under her login shortly after accessing the computer data. When confronted with this information, she confessed.

She was summarily fired from her job. The Los Angeles County District attorney’s office immediately opened an investigation into whether or not criminal charges were warranted. She was blackballed from ever again working in a position where she had access to any kind of confidential files. She would, eventually, end up living on welfare and buying her groceries with food stamps.

All in all, however, she considered the price she paid to be worth it.

The amniocentesis exam showed that Mindy Snow was carrying a male fetus with no detectible genetic disorders. DNA from the exam was submitted to Determine Labs Incorporated, a national lab that specialized in legal DNA paternity testing. The following day, Greg Oldfellow arrived at one of their offices and submitted a cheek swab. Five days later, it was official. The fetus in Mindy Snow’s uterus was a combination of DNA between the mother and Greg Oldfellow.

Greg gave his own quote in the article announcing the findings.

“As I said on several previous occasions, I will take financial responsibility for this child as required by the law. I will not, however, have any further relationship than that, as this child was conceived by fraud and deceit. I hope he has a happy life, though I am forced to doubt it.”

Mindy offered no quote of her own. Ever since the breaking of the story about her putting the hold on her birth control pills, she had been in seclusion. Georgette announced on her behalf that ‘in light of the media circus surrounding Mindy, she will not be attending the Academy Awards ceremony in person. I, instead, will stand in in her place.’

The Awards took place on March 25^th at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. It was a good night for Mel Gibson and Nicholas Cage and Susan Sarandon. But Us and Them did not win a single award in any category.

Hollywood insiders blamed this snubbing on the Mindy Snow pregnancy scandal.