Kiss the Girls and Make Them Cry(24)

His own.

Establish a bond with her, he thought to himself. Find out what she’s looking for. “Lauren—I hope it’s okay if I call you by your first name.”

“You’ve been doing that. It’s okay.”

“I am genuinely sorry about what happened to you. The last thing I want to see is you get victimized any further. How do you want this to end?”

She started tearing up again. “I love what I do. I love working in television. I don’t want to be the next Monica Lewinsky. I know it’s not an exact analogy, but I don’t want the opening paragraph of my obituary to be about the woman who ended the career of the great Brad Matthews. I want to have a normal life and keep doing the work I love.”

Carter could barely contain his excitement as he thought about the opportunity Pomerantz had given him to deal with the highest levels of REL News, as an equal. He pictured himself in the much larger office he would occupy in the not so distant future.

“Lauren, no action I take can undo the hurt you’ve experienced. If you go to an outside law firm, your name will get leaked out. It always happens. Your picture will be on the front page of the New York Post. There is, however, a way for you to get justice and maintain your anonymity.”



* * *



Ten minutes later Pomerantz had left Carter’s office. At his request, before leaving, she had emailed him the recording of her encounter in Brad Matthews’s office.

With his feet up on his desk and his hands behind his head, he smiled broadly as he listened to it for the third time.





28





Michael Carter had met Richard Sherman a handful of times since he started at REL News. As recently as last week he had passed the CEO in the hallway. “Hello, Mr. Sherman,” Carter had said in his friendliest voice. Sherman had brusquely responded “How are you?” without breaking stride or pausing to hear Carter’s reply. It was obvious that Sherman had no idea who Carter was. That’s certainly going to change, Carter mused.

Despite his having progressed only to the level of sergeant, Carter prided himself on his ability to think like a general. First and foremost, the accusation—call it what it is, he thought, the proof—that the venerable Brad Matthews was an abuser had to be contained. This would not be easy. REL News was, after all, a news gathering organization. The worst of all scenarios would be if another news organization broke the story about Matthews. REL would lose the opportunity to take the high moral ground, to say that they had acted immediately when they learned about the problem.

The old adage—when more than two people know something, it’s no longer a secret—likely held true, Carter thought. If he followed protocol, he would bring the Pomerantz situation to his boss in Human Resources. His boss would take it to the firm’s chief counsel, a seventy-year-old attorney who was months away from retirement. In an effort to avoid a blemish at the finale of his career, he would seek guidance from one of the many outside law firms that were retained by the company. All of that would happen before word of the matter got to Dick Sherman, who would ultimately decide how REL News would deal with the crisis.

Or Sherman could hear about it directly from the attorney who had devised a plan that would not only deal with the situation but keep the head count of those in the know to an absolute minimum. It would also make Michael J. Carter an indispensable player in the future of REL News.

His first challenge appeared so simple, but the more he thought about how to make it happen, the more complex it became. If something went wrong, Sherman, in typical CEO fashion, would seek to deny ever having authorized Carter’s plan. But Sherman would find it difficult to explain a series of meetings and conversations with Carter that would be necessary to implement the plan. Emails leave a trail. Phone calls and texts leave a trail. If he sent Sherman a typed note through the interoffice mail, he couldn’t be certain that Sherman’s secretary wouldn’t open it before forwarding it to him.

Her desk was just outside his office. She kept his calendar. If asked at a later date, she would know who met with Sherman in his office, including those who did so without an appointment. He wanted to have the initial discussion with Sherman in total anonymity. But how could he do that?

Later that evening, after looking through Sherman’s personnel file, he settled on a strategy that he believed would work. During dinner his wife, Beverly, observed, “You seem so distracted tonight. Anything on your mind?”

Carter was tempted to say, No, dear. I’m just contemplating what’s likely to be the most important decision in my life. Instead he answered, “Sorry. My mind is on a few projects at work. No big deal.”

After his wife had gone to bed, he entered his son’s room. He kissed him on the forehead and opened his son’s computer to look up the Saturday train schedule from Grand Central Terminal to Greenwich, Connecticut. No one would think to examine his son’s computer.

He went into the kitchen, opened his briefcase, and deposited the legal pad on the table. Scrawled in pencil were the tasks he had to complete to get ready for the meeting that he hoped would take place tomorrow. On the second page were the terms he would insist on if his plan were approved.

“Mistake,” he said to himself as he looked at his precise cursive penmanship on the second page. His handwriting. He went over to his computer, typed what he had written, and printed the page.