The Boy from the Woods(80)
But she wasn’t exactly pulling him closer either.
Rusty’s two female aides blanched.
Gavin asked, “Do you know where this was taped?”
“Looks like Maynard’s New York studio,” Rusty said.
The kiss ends. Kandi Pate quickly stands, smooths her skirt, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. She forces a smile.
Kandi: I have to go now.
Rusty: Tonight then? Nine o’clock. We’ll just talk.
Kandi rushes out of the room.
Rusty turned away from the television and looked at his two aides. “To answer your first question, yes, she showed up that night.”
Anchorman Scott Gallett: Kandi Pate ended up being fired from The Rusty Show for what was rumored to be drug use and insubordination, but we have our expert panel with us who now wonder about the veracity of those rumors and if she was a victim of—
Rusty flipped off the television. “Expert panel,” he repeated. “Give me a break.” He rubbed his hands together. “Lia?”
Lia Capasso looked up in a daze.
“You have the bots ready?”
“They’re on standby,” Lia said.
“Good.” Rusty began to pace. “So get the first group of them to claim that this tape was a teaching demonstration.”
“A teaching demonstration?”
“Yes. That’s why we filmed it. Kandi and I were acting out inappropriate workplace behavior, so that anyone employed by The Rusty Show would know that we would have zero tolerance for this kind of thing.”
Jan Schnall said, “You think that will fly?”
“That’s just bot group one, Jan. For bot group two, we say that Kandi was working on a ‘Me Too’ screenplay. Way ahead of her time. She asked me to act out a scene with her. Lia, get our graphic design people to create a screenplay with this exact dialogue. Use one of the big screenwriting programs from ten years ago. Final Draft or Movie Magic maybe. Tell them to add a page of dialogue before, a page of dialogue after, that kind of thing. Make it look legit. Then we leak it as the ‘unproduced manuscript’ Kandi Pate hoped to develop before her career hit the rails.”
Lia jotted that down. “Got it.”
“We say that as a mentor figure to many young people who appeared on my show, I was trying to be supportive in reading these lines with her, but I was clearly uncomfortable in what she wanted me to do. Jan, get a few body language experts to insist that I’m clearly acting and I look hesitant during the pretend kiss.”
“Right.”
“Next, we go right and left. Jan, get some right-wing bots to say stuff like ‘How come the left is always into sexual freedom and women making their own choices and now they are saying that Kandi Pate is too weak to decide who to date?’—that kind of thing. Then Lia, get the left-wing bots to say, ‘We don’t belong in people’s bedrooms and this mature woman should be able to make her own choices.’ You know the drill. Do you guys know the age of consent in New York?”
Lia tapped something into her iPad. “Seventeen.”
“California?”
“Eighteen.”
He thought about it. “We also have an office in Toronto. How about there?”
Lia typed some more. “It was fourteen. Now it’s sixteen.”
“Okay, cool. Let’s spread another rumor that this happened in our Toronto office. We also get another group of fake profiles to raise the ‘macho man’ excuse.”
Jan frowned. “Macho man?”
“You know, like ‘What red-blooded all-American male wouldn’t make a move on a hot piece of ass like Kandi Pate?’ and ‘All the whiny babies online are just jealous of a real man,’ that kind of thing. They should all keep repeating that Kandi was of legal age.”
Lia and Jan both nodded, warming slightly to the task. Gavin just watched in silence.
“Finally, let’s get the ‘fake news’ groups to say the tape had obviously been doctored. Again we have those social media accounts with various levels of”—Rusty made quote marks with his fingers—“‘expertise,’ right? Let’s get them to work up the conspiracy nuts. Have them notice, I don’t know, some kind of irregular shadows in the film and claim that it’s a clear Photoshop job or that the sound is off. Have them make up those YouTube videos where they circle stuff and say, ‘Whoa, this shadow or whatever can’t be, someone had to have tampered with it, yada yada.’ Oh, then get a few voice ‘experts’ to say that it’s not my voice, that it is someone doing a bad impression. Have some of the bots say it sounds like it was spliced from old footage or something. With me?”
“With you,” Lia said.
Jan added, “That’s perfect.”
Neither woman was blanching anymore. They were both, in fact, smiling.
“Then I want our own bots fighting with each other. ‘Who cares if it’s a Photoshop? It’s totally legal anyway!’ Or ‘Stop worrying about the ethics—the tape is fake news, it never happened.’”
Lia asked, “You want to go with all these?”
“All these and let’s come up with a few more. Like, why don’t the networks show what happened before this—like when Kandi Pate was hitting on Rusty? Oh, that’s good. Let’s get a group posting ‘Here’s a link to the WHOLE tape where you can see Kandi is aggressively making moves on Rusty and he’s trying to back off, why don’t they show that?’ But then—oh, I’m loving this—the link will lead to an error message and then the bots will claim the mainstream media or the government took it down. It’s a cover-up, they’ll scream. Full bot attack—get the right-and left-wing ones on that. I want people fighting over how we can’t blame me for any of this.”