Because there was an election coming up in the spring, Brooke knew, but what she said was, “We’re talking about grown-up people making their own choices. Those women knew what they were doing.”
“Oh, honey,” said Lindsay, and that was the limit. Brooke was fine with disagreement—anyone who’d worked in politics had to be. But being patronized was something she was unwilling to put up with. Lindsay said, “You think a twenty-three-year-old woman knows what she’s doing?”
“I’m twenty-three,” Brooke said.
And Lindsay replied, “That’s what I’m saying.”
* * *
—
Brooke went down into the stacks and hung out in Natural History, around a corner so remote that no one ever went there. Here she could finally click on the story, the one Derek’s press conference had tried and failed to pre-empt. She’d managed to avoid the details so far, preferring to glean what she could from the headlines, Twitter threads, gossip and hearsay. From skimming. On the one hand, she’d told herself, she didn’t even have to read the story, because she’d been in the business long enough—the business of politics, if not the business of Derek—that the story would only follow a template she knew well. In a day or two, as they say, the whole thing would blow over. But on the other hand—the hand she’d never show, and even had trouble admitting to herself, because it was the truth of the matter—maybe she didn’t want to know, out of fear the story might turn out to be something different altogether.
But it was time now, because Lindsay and Sheila had caught her off guard. There wasn’t a template for what was currently unfolding, at least one that wasn’t terrible and torn from the pages of a supermarket tabloid, and everything was changing so fast. This wasn’t blowing over. Pulling out her phone, typing into Google, there it was:
TWO WOMEN ACCUSE MURDOCH OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT
Who were these two women? It was possible she’d met them both—politics was as small as Lanark was—but then, ten years ago was an eternity, and most of the people she knew hadn’t been around back then. Not women, certainly, who tended to burn out on the long hours, low pay, and the realization that it would be their male colleagues who were promoted and moved up through the ranks. Each one hoped that she might be the rare exception, not merely one of the others. But of course, they all were the others, and there had been so many of them, women who, like the two in the article, had met Derek back home in a bar downtown and gone on to work for him. Not a lot had changed, and the stories were familiar, even though Derek had worked in municipal politics back then.
So it could have been anybody—this was the thing. Speaking of templates.
Derek always said it was “HR expediency,” the way he reached out through his social networks, recruiting staff from a dive bar. People would call him on it, and he’d try to explain, saying, “I don’t know a better place to find young, dynamic people who are looking for their first jobs, for summer jobs.” Derek had a talent for making anything he thought up seem entirely reasonable, mostly because he really tended to mean what he said.
But reading the details made her feel sick to her stomach, and she sank from her squat against the bookshelf, dissolving onto the dusty floor.
“I told him to stop,” one of the women was quoted in the article as saying a decade on from the alleged incident, which had begun at one of his parties. She’d had too much to drink, and he’d taken her keys away from her, offering her a place to stay in his spare room. That sounded like Derek. But then. Later that night the woman awoke from her stupor to find him with her in bed without any pants on, attempting to penetrate her, and he wouldn’t listen to her protests. “I tried to get him to stop, but he ignored me. It was almost like I wasn’t even there, except as a body. That was all I was to him.”
Was she even capable of presuming the truth of this woman’s story? Brooke asked herself. She knew that Derek had been with other women before her—he was so much older than she was. He came with a history, and she couldn’t hold that against him. But she had never liked to think about that history too much, certainly not in this kind of detail. Could he really have done something like the article said? She could even picture the room where it had been said to happen. Whose side was she on?
The woman continued to work for Derek for another year, the article reported, in summer and between her terms at college. She accompanied him on business trips. Their relationship became intimate. Which didn’t help the woman’s case, Brooke thought.
“But it wasn’t like I got over it,” she said in the article. “It wasn’t even that I put it aside or forgot, but instead I pursued our relationship. I wanted it to happen, because if we were together, I thought it would make what happened that night all seem okay. But it was never okay. It just took me a long time to realize how wrong it was.”
The second story was even harder to fathom, and reading it made Brooke feel even sicker. This woman had been at Slappin’ Nellie’s with Derek, and he’d tried to force her to give him a blowjob out back, behind the patio, where the garbage cans were. “He had me pinned against the wall,” she said, “and I kept trying to get away but I couldn’t. He kept pressing his erection against my leg, and he undid his pants. I honestly thought he wasn’t going to let me go unless I did it.” He eventually relented, but she was still traumatized, the woman said. “Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. It’s just not the kind of thing that normal people do. He was like an animal.” This woman, at least, had not agreed to travel with him to Barcelona after the fact, and she only worked for him for the rest of the summer. But still.
The original article from the night before had been updated to include details of the mass resignation. “I cannot in good conscience continue to support this man,” Marijke Holloway had written to the press in an email. “It’s a time for all of us to stand with survivors. Our party needs to do better.”
Which sounded noble, but wasn’t the whole story, because Marijke had never properly stood with Derek anyway, and Brooke knew she didn’t have his interests at heart. It disgusted her, too, the way that these women’s stories were being used and manipulated so that somebody out there—a whole bunch of somebodies, Marijke Holloway among them—could score a few cheap political points. So that people like Sheila could have their opinions on the matter, asking just what exactly had that girl been doing with Derek out by the garbage cans at Slappin’ Nellie’s? Was out by the garbage cans even an actual location? Brooke couldn’t visualize it, but it sounded sordid. Hearing a voice that sounded like Sheila’s in her mind: And what did someone imagine was going to happen in a place like that? And Brooke knew that if everyone listened to voices like Sheila’s, no man would ever have to be responsible for anything.