Flawed (Ethan Frost 4)

I scroll through what’s been found anyway. All the publicity for his upcoming movie, all the past interviews and paparazzi mentions and posts from fans who have met him at one time or another. It’s all the same old stuff until I run across a mention of Parsons on a small, out-of-the-way Tumblr. It doesn’t have many followers and the girl who runs it tends to post about boy bands more than anything else. But she’s also quite political, and has a number of posts that run the gamut from commentary on politicians to criticism of current LGBTQ+ legislation.

And in the middle of all of this, buried between posts about Harry Styles’s wardrobe and Justin Timberlake’s baby, is a picture of Alexander Parsons taken after he starred in one of the huge teen movies, surrounded by a group of young female fans holding up their phones and obviously asking for selfies. It’s been reblogged numerous times, but the original poster’s comment is still visible. #ThisAngel. Which in and of itself isn’t significant. Except the blogger whose Tumblr I’m on has also tagged it. Only her tag reads #ThisRapist.

Chills skate down my spine as soon as I see it. It might be nothing, might just be this girl sounding off because she doesn’t like him as an actor. Or because she’s jealous she didn’t get to meet him. Or for a million other reasons—I’ve never been able to figure out why people do what they do, say what they say, on social media. This could totally be just one more inexplicable thing.

Except the more I scroll through her blog, the less likely I am to believe that. She’s smart and aware and seems honest to a fault—she calls herself out for her own mistakes and preconceptions at least as often as she calls out other bloggers or singers. She seems…genuine, for lack of a better term, and while I know how dangerous it can be to buy in to that, I can’t help believing her. At least enough to dig deeper.

I search her tags, come up with seven more times she’s used the word rapist in the four-year history of her Tumblr. Five of them were to express outrage in response to a recent rape case, where a college swimmer got only a three-month sentence for raping an unconscious girl behind a dumpster. But the other two…the other two were also on photos of Alexander Parsons. One tag was #RapistsAlwaysWin and the other was #RapistsGonnaRape in response to a post about him tagged #HatersGonnaHate.

So, not a one-off then. And not a short-term thing, as the three comments are spread out over more than three years. The first picture—the one tagged #RapistsAlwaysWin—has numerous other tags, including #Perrysburg.

Oh shit.

I click over to another window and Google Perrysburg. But even as I do, I already know what I’m going to find. Years ago—seven years, accord

ing to Wikipedia—three high school football players were convicted of raping an unconscious girl and documenting it in real time on their social media accounts. Evidence pointed to more boys being involved, but only three stood trial, as they were the only ones actively documented while committing the crimes. There was other DNA found, but since the three refused to flip and the judge denied the request to test the DNA of all the other male attendees of the party, at least four people got off scot-free.

I open yet another window, start searching for information regarding Parsons’s early life. And am not the least bit surprised when his official biography reveals that when his parents divorced, he moved with his American mother from London to a small town in Ohio for high school, though it doesn’t identify which one.

Son of a bitch.

I click back over to the girl’s Tumblr, spend some time trying to figure out where she’s from. There’s nothing on the Tumblr to identify her, but I get lucky with a high school yearbook shot from 2011. From Perrysburg High School.

It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots, to figure out that Parsons was involved in that rape even if he was never arrested for it.

Son of a bitch.

I start to dig in earnest now, sending a few bots after anything and everything about anyone with the last name Parsons in Perrysburg, Ohio, and surrounding towns. In the meantime, I pull up lists of all graduating seniors from Perrysburg High School between the years of 2008 and 2012. And then I go after them, sending bots through their social media accounts while I focus on varsity football players in the year the rape took place.

Once I get a list of the 2010 team, I start finding them online. Once I’ve got their cell numbers, I start tracing them back—most of them have had the same number since high school. And once I’ve got their high school providers, I hack into their accounts and start scrolling through messages from the day of the rape and the days immediately after.

The problem the authorities ran into is that most of the evidence was erased from cellphones and for whatever reason—corruption, protection, laziness—they didn’t go after warrants to search the actual cell providers’ servers, where all text messages are stored. I obviously don’t have a warrant, either, which means none of what I find is admissible in court.

But I don’t give a shit about that. I’m not aiming to send Parsons to jail. Just to find enough on him to hang him in the court of public opinion—and in doing so help Tori and ruin his perfect fucking career and life all at the same time.

It might not be justice for the victim, but it’s more justice than she’s gotten so far. And if I actually find enough, maybe the case will be reopened.

A quick glance at the clock tells me I don’t have much time. It’s three A.M. and if she goes, Tori is scheduled to do the interview at noon. I can try to talk her into postponing for a day, but if I don’t find anything…the longer this story goes on, the more shit gets said about her. The more shit she has to find a way to ignore or wrap her head around.

She’s suffered enough. I don’t want her to suffer any more.

And so I dig faster than I’ve ever dug in my life, knowing I’m missing things as I search desperately for a trail—any trail—that leads back to Parsons.

It only takes a few minutes for me to find two of the others involved—judging from the photos they took of them raping the unconscious girl’s mouth and coming on her stomach, the unidentified DNA belongs to them. I put what I find aside in another folder, one that I will send to a couple of big newspapers before this is through, and start tracing their messages, trying to find any connection to Parsons.

I’m moving so fast that I almost miss it when the first connection shows up. It’s a text message between a guy named Taylor Bradley, quarterback of the football team, and a guy he calls Al. The text itself is pretty innocuous—at least compared with a lot of the other texts that were flying back and forth among these guys that night—but combined with the name Al, it’s enough to get me buzzing a little.

Add in the fact that it includes a picture of a girl’s bruised leg, naked all the way to the upper thigh where the photo cuts out, and it’s enough to have me picking out the phone number of Al and hacking into his account as well.

And that’s when I hit the jackpot, because Al is no other than Alexander Parsons, a twenty-year-old college sophomore at Ohio State and former quarterback of the Perrysburg Yellow Jackets, who just happened to be home for the long weekend.

From there it’s ridiculously easy to take a stroll through his incoming—and outgoing—text messages from the night in question. Well, easy if you don’t count the content I have to weed through, which points definitively to the fact that he was not only involved in photographing and texting about the unconscious girl while others performed lewd acts on her, but also very much involved in those lewd acts himself. And at twenty years old, he wasn’t a juvenile like the three who were arrested and charged.

The bastard. The sick, fucking, sociopathic bastard.

I save the evidence—text files, videos, and photos—then push back from my desk and walk outside for some fresh air. As the brother of a rape victim, I know better than most just how monstrous some men can be. Just as I know how unfair the justice system and the court of public opinion can be. I saw it last year when the whole sordid mess came out in the national papers, and I saw it years ago when Chloe suffered through the ridicule and violence directed at her by her classmates, led by none other than her rapist. The boy—the man—my parents had allowed to go free in exchange for an obscene amount of money.

But what I just saw in those videos and photos…It was horrific. Inhumane. Unconscionable. Not just the night-long rape of an unconscious girl by at least eight different males, but the fact that they carried her from party to party, place to place, in front of dozens of their classmates. That text messages were sent out to nearly the entire junior and senior classes and no one did anything to stop them. No one stepped in and helped her and no one, not one person, bothered to call the police.