“Six years ago, Dale defended a boy around Scott’s age. Similar scenario. Tell her, Dale,” Greg urged.

“My client and a girl had sex on the college quad during a party. Consensual. He takes her back to her room out of a sense of chivalry, where she bursts into tears and runs into the bathroom. He waits around to make sure she’s okay. Leaves his phone number before he goes,” Quinn said. “Next morning, he gets arrested for rape. During the trial, my private investigator finds out that the victim has done this before. Twice. False allegations each time. She was a minor. It was all sealed. The judge ruled it was exculpatory, so we can’t bring it up at trial. The only way out of this mess is for me to get her to admit some of this stuff in the redirect.

“I was nice as pie to her. Asked her questions every which way. Next thing you know, she’s telling the court that she had sex with him to spite an ex-boyfriend who was at the party. She admits on the stand that she never said no and consented at the time. Afterward, she regretted it. Claimed she wasn’t all that enthusiastic. Says he should have realized. Law doesn’t allow for retroactive withdrawal of consent.”

“It went to the jury,” Greg interrupted. “They deliberated for an hour and found him not guilty.”

“You got him off. That means the system works,” said Rachel, looking at her own reflection in Dale Quinn’s dark sunglasses.

“He jumped off a bridge onto a highway three days later,” said Quinn. He paused dramatically to let that sink in. “The stress, the depression, killed him. He knew he’d never get his old life back. That his good name was stained forever. He lost a prestigious internship. Had no hope of getting into a tier one firm when he graduated. His career was dead before it began.”

Rachel remembered hearing about the case. The boy’s parents had given a tearful interview on a current affairs program after he died. Before he was charged with rape their son had been offered a highly sought-after internship with a congressman. He lost the internship and he was suspended from college in the middle of the semester. His GPA free-fell. He was struggling with depression.

“What’s your point?” Rachel asked.

“What happens during a moment of intimacy is complicated and confusing. When we put it under a spotlight in a court of law we discover that, a lot of the time, there is no black and white. Just shades of gray,” said Quinn. “Juries don’t like gray. The law doesn’t like gray,” he said, standing up. “If I was Mitch Alkins, I’d be worried. It’s tough to get a conviction when all you can offer is gray.”

Quinn took off his sunglasses and tucked them into his pocket as he turned to leave. “I’d better get going. I have a trial that starts in under forty-eight hours and I haven’t written a word of my opening statement.”

A maid arrived with a bottle of Riesling. Greg poured them each a glass. Rachel didn’t drink hers. The Blairs’ conviviality seemed like a thinly disguised bid to get Rachel on their side. It annoyed her.

What interested her most was the war room upstairs, where Scott was obviously meeting with his defense team. The doorbell rang three times. Each time, Cynthia excused herself to let more lawyers into the house. Rachel heard hushed murmurs and the sound of footsteps as people walked up the staircase to the second floor. Then the sound of a door shutting and the murmurs would immediately stop.

All the while, Greg Blair was thumbing through old albums, showing her photos of Scott as an infant, a toddler, a five-year-old with no front teeth. Scott beaming on the winner’s podium when he received his first gold medal. The Blairs wanted to humanize Scott. To an extent, they’d succeeded. By the time Cynthia walked her to her car, Rachel was surprised to feel more sympathy than she’d expected.

“All we’re asking is that you have an open mind,” said Cynthia. “There has been a terrible rush to judgment. We want Scott to have a fair hearing in court and in the court of public opinion. Surely that’s not too much to ask?”

21

Guilty or Not Guilty

Season 3, Episode 5: The Drive

I have no doubt that K would have instantly recognized Scott Blair when she saw him standing in the playground that night.

How can I be sure? Because in this day and age of social media–driven ersatz fame, Scott Blair was a local celebrity the likes of which Neapolis had never really seen before.

There were articles about Scott in the local newspaper and interviews with him on television. At K’s high school, a huge framed photo of Scott was in pride of place in the Hall of Fame trophy cabinet. The local swim center had a life-sized photo of Scott swimming freestyle hanging next to the doors leading to the indoor swimming pool. Incidentally, both photos have since been removed following requests from K’s family after Scott Blair was charged with her rape and sexual assault.

Scott’s celebrity status was powered especially by social media. Like many kids at Neapolis High, K was one of Scott’s one hundred and seventy-two thousand Instagram followers. After all, he was the most famous graduate from their school. Scott posted photos regularly be fore he was charged. Scott doing his swimming training. Scott weight training. Scott running. I’m sure you get the picture.

If you look at old posts on his Instagram account, you can see photos of food piled up on the table before Scott tucked into his breakfast. Three bowls of cereal. A pile of toast covered in the equivalent of a small jar of peanut butter. Three glasses of orange juice. I don’t even want to think about what he ate for lunch and dinner!

There are photos of Scott in the gym lifting weights. Underwater shots of him swimming. Above-water shots of his muscles rippling as his arms cut into the water during swim meets. Action shots of his powerful kick as he sliced through the water. He documented every aspect of his training to all his adoring fans.

Ever since the cops charged Scott with rape, there are a startling number of Instagram posts with photos of him volunteering at his church, ladling out stew at a soup kitchen, and teaching swimming to disadvantaged kids.

Of course, maybe that’s just me being cynical. Maybe Scott really did devote himself to philanthropy long before he was charged with several class A sexual assault felonies.

In the months before he was named as a suspect in the K case, Scott Blair was on a grueling pre-Olympics training schedule. He woke at dawn to train. He swam two hours in the pool in the morning. Two hours in the evening. An hour around midday in the gym working with free weights. He did this brutal training program six days a week. Nothing unusual for a champion swimmer with Olympic prospects.

During this training, Scott sustained a calf injury. It was a niggling injury that was affecting his swimming times. His swim coach told him to go home for the weekend. Take a few days off from training and get his focus back. That’s why Scott was back in Neapolis that Saturday night.

In one of the interviews that Scott gave before his new lawyer, Dale Quinn, stopped him from talking to the media, he said that when he was back home on weekend visits he sometimes went to the same playground where K disappeared to meet up with old friends and to relax from the stresses of competitive swimming. He’d grown up in the neighborhood. That’s how he and Harris knew each other even though they were almost two years apart in age.

Scott said he was stressed that night. He had crucial tryouts coming up in a month and he was worried about that niggling calf injury. So he went to the park to soak up the atmosphere of his old “hood.” To chill. Stare at the stars. Very poetic.

The prosecution’s claims are less poetic. They say he was there because he’d arranged for Harris Wilson to follow K back from Lexi’s party and keep her at the playground until he could get there and whisk her away in his car. Which is exactly what he did.

Whether you believe the prosecution or Scott Blair himself, the fact is that Scott was there that night. He saw K on the swing. He gave her a ride in his car.

She went with him voluntarily. We know that because there is CCTV footage of the two of them leaving the playground. It was taken from the house opposite the playground, which had cameras pointing into the street due to an ongoing graffiti problem. The owners of the house hoped to catch the vandals in the act of spray-painting their fence.

Instead, the camera caught Scott Blair opening his car door for K and then driving off with her in his silver sports car. The footage was broadcast on a local news channel after he was charged.