True Crime Story(86)

And I’m ashamed, course I am.

But what I’d say to some of the people who’ve lined up to give me a kicking is that most of them won’t ever be tested, not like I’ve been. Most people won’t have to find out what they’re really made of in front of the world. So I might be a monster. I might be a disgrace. I’d go along with both those statements now, to some extent. But I can also say I know myself, really and truly. It’s ice-cold comfort some days, but I can say that at least. And after it all came out, I did what I could to limit the damage. Once I knew the story was running, I resigned my position as part of the board of the Nolan Foundation. I did the decent thing.

FINTAN MURPHY:

Did he now? See, in my recollection of events, I called Robert roughly thirty-five times that day, but he never answered once. In the end, I left a message advising him that we’d held an emergency meeting, that he was being removed from the board, effective immediately, and I told him I’d be briefing as such to the press. I knew I had to act fast if I was going to save everything we’d worked for.

He never called me back, incidentally.

We went from speaking almost every day during the course of those seven years to not exchanging a single word since, with one regrettable exception. I didn’t have time to worry about it. It was more important to me that I make contact with the young women affected and offer them what compensation I could as well as a platform to say whatever they wanted to, with absolutely no conditions or strings attached. They were all grateful, amenable, a wonderful group of young women and a credit to Zoe. None of them suggested I’d known about Robert’s actions, and none of them wanted to see the foundation itself suffer. Once that was done, I notified Kimberly, left a message for Sally, then called a press conference to tell the world. This is all the same day I found out, so I really was doing everything I could.

MARCUS LEE:

It was Shakespearean, or at least I assume that’s the kind of thing they mean when they say that. A father’s response to his daughter’s disappearance ends up destroying him. Who wouldn’t want to read about that? And after all, our readers were acquainted with Rob Nolan from years of stories, initiatives, quotes, interviews—they knew him inside out.

Full credit to Murphy, he staged a real response. He had a local press conference scheduled for 4:00 p.m. on the fourteenth, the same day I’d hit him with the allegations. It just turned out not to be the biggest fish in the deep-fat fryer. Soon as he walked in with his statement, the room, which had already been half empty, started emptying even more. Phones started ringing, local hacks started getting up and answering, walking out. I couldn’t believe it. We were the only national newspaper there, and it looked like these smaller guys weren’t even interested. For a second, I thought I’d misjudged the public interest in Zoe after all these years. I thought, What could be a bigger car crash than this?

ANDREW FLOWERS:

It was something more than simple recognition. These teenage kids were openly laughing, pointing at me. By then, I knew they weren’t buying anything, so I went over and asked them not to let the door hit them on their arses on the way out. I basically gave them both barrels and watched them disperse, still pissing their pants about something.

MARCUS LEE:

By the time poor Fintan hit that stage, he was one of the only people left in the room. It was one of those moments you see more and more of now. News outlets being scooped by the internet. It was my first time being scooped by Pornhub, though.

ANDREW FLOWERS:

I saw what they’d been searching for on this tablet, and it felt like my heart almost literally fucking stopped.

KIMBERLY NOLAN:

When I got home on Friday night, there was one reporter camping outside my house, like, literally camping, in a tent. I’d never seen anything like that, not even at the height of Zoe’s disappearance. There were two or three guys on the street I had to walk through to get to my door, and it seemed stupid to pretend, so I turned and said something like, “Look, I don’t know anything about my dad’s personal life. We’re not that close,” but they couldn’t have cared less. One of them just shoved a camera in my face and shouted, “Yeah, we know, but how close are you to Andrew Flowers?”

ANDREW FLOWERS:

The kids had typed my name into the search engine. My name followed by the letters XXX. The Net Nanny safety settings had prevented any results from popping up, but it gave me another bad feeling. I realized I was getting the same look from my colleagues that the kids had given me, then when I went into the break room a few minutes later, I saw what they’d been searching for over my boss’s shoulder. I realized I was watching the video, the so-called sex tape that we’d recorded seven years before.

It had been leaked on to the internet.

I’d never seen a single frame since then, the night Zoe scratched my face off for it and went missing. My understanding was that it had never been uploaded anywhere, and besides, it was something like six seconds long. Then I realized that this was something different. This wasn’t just those six seconds of me saying, “Zoe, Zoe.” It was the full thing, more like sixteen minutes long.

MARCUS LEE:

I followed the locals out into the hallway to work out what was going on, and suddenly everyone around me’s watching porn on their phones. I twigged it was the much-discussed Zoe-Andrew sex tape leaked in full and started walking back into the conference room for Murphy. He looked close to tears as it was. Then someone grabs my arm, like, “No, Marcus, you’re not understanding what we’ve got here. This is the fucking big one.”