My Roommate Tried to Frame Me for Giving Her Syphilis, So After Rebirth, I Went on the Warpath Chapter 08
(Regarding the allegations circulating online about one of our students, the university states the following.]
The statement laid out the full timeline of Chloe’s lie, point by point.
The university went further and attached three high-resolution images with nothing blacked out.
The first was the police notice that criminal charges for harassment and defamation had been filed against
Chloe.
The second was the certified medical record from Mercy General showing that Chloe had been treated for syphilis two weeks before any of this started.
The third was the vice unit’s enforcement report on the nightclub, with Chloe’s name printed on the list of women working there illegally.
The last line of the statement didn’t pull a single punch.
[The internet is not outside the law. This university will defend the legal rights of the student who was targeted here against anybody who tries to turn the truth upside down.]
[Our legal department has filed police reports and civil suits against the people who posted the video and the accounts amplifying it.]
The hammer came down, the internet lost its mind, and the whole conversation flipped inside of an hour.
The best part came that same evening, on a livestream.
Chloe’s parents had gone live to cash in on the attention.
The two of them wept into the camera about being crushed by people with money.
Donations poured across the screen, and the total was closing in on $200,000.
Gary was in the middle of a tearful speech.
“I would work myself to death if that’s what it took to save my daughter,” he was saying when the comment feed turned on them.
[Drop the act. Go read the university’s statement.]
(Frauds. Your daughter was escorting, and the police posted the hotel records.]
[Refund me. I want my $50 back, you animals.]
Gary and Donna watched the words fraud and refund fill the screen, and the color went out of both their faces.
They fumbled to end the stream, but it was already too late.
Their front door burst open with a crash.
Officers came through it fato frame with their body cameras pointed straight at the lens.
“Gary Marsh, Donna Marsh. You’re under arrest for fabricating evidence, criminal harassment, and large-scale wire fraud.”
The cuffs closed around their wrists with a click, live, in front of a few hundred thousand people.
The stream cut out in the middle of Donna screaming her head off.
The screen went black, and the comments celebrating it kept rolling long after.
Their accounts were frozen and the money was refunded, and the internet dug up the two properties and the luxury car in their names, which nailed the fraud charge shut.
The whole family got their reunion in county jail, exactly like I said they would.
Bree’s parents and Kayla’s parents were terrified that they would be next.
They spent the night deleting every post they had paid for and then wiped the accounts entirely.
By the next morning $40,000 had landed in my account, double damages, down to the last cent.
A long, begging text came with it.
Bree’s mother: [Mia, the money has been sent. Whatever went wrong here is on us as parents. Please write a letter asking for leniency so these two girls don’t go to prison.]
I read it, laughed once, and blocked every one of their numbers.
Leniency wasn’t on the table. I wanted the two of them carrying this stain for the rest of their lives.
The case went to open trial at the county courthouse a month later.
I sat in the back row of the gallery and watched a bailiff walk Chloe to the defendant’s table.
One month had put ten years on her.
County jail didn’t have the medication that had been keeping it down, and the disease had taken over.
Her hair had thinned out in patches, $ores covered her neck and her wrists, and something dead hung
around her.
She turned around, shaking, searching the gallery for her parents and the expensive lawyer she was counting on them to buy.
What she found instead was her own mother and father in handcuffs, being walked to a second defendant’s
table across the room.
“Dad? Mom? What are you doing here?”
Chloe screamed, and her legs folded under her at the defense table.
“You little curse! You dragged this whole family down with you!”
Donna screamed it from the other side of the room, and if the bailiffs hadn’t held her back she would have
gone for her own daughter’s throat.
The three of them turned on each other in open court, passing the blame back and forth, and made a spectacle out of every minute of it.
The verdicts, when they came, were everything anybody could have asked for.
Chloe got 18 months on the combined harassment and defamation counts.
Her parents each got three years and a fine for wire fraud and criminal harassment.
Grant lost his job and was barred from working in education again.
The financial crimes unit opened a case on him, his wife took their children and filed for divorce, and his
name was finished in the field for good.
Bree and Kayla avoided jail time and got probation instead.
The day they came back to the dorm to pack, every girl on the floor stood in her doorway and pointed.
The record would follow them permanently, and whatever careers they had planned were gone.
Every last one of them had been pulled out by the roots.
The weekend the settlement came through, the sky was so bright it hurt to look at.
I bought myself the newest laptop on the market and hired movers.
They carried my things out of that cursed dorm and into a bright, roomy studio apartment off campus.
I sat on the rug in front of the floor-to-ceiling window with a hot coffee and opened the campus forum out of habit.
All the threads full of insults and rumors about my sex life had been scrubbed clean.
What filled the board now was finals talk and club events.
Everything about it looked alive and clean.
I smiled, locked my phone, and took a long breath while I watched the traffic move under a hard blue sky.
This time I didn’t burn myself out trying to prove my innocence over and over, and I didn’t let the pile-on push me up to that cold roof,
I had finally learned something.
When a rabid dog covered in open sores came at somebody, there was no point crouching down to reason with it or proving that nobody had taken its bone.
The only thing to do was pick up the heaviest stick within reach and swing.
Then knock every tooth out of its mouth, one at a time.
A clean life had to be taken by force. Nobody ever handed one to the person who swallowed the insults quietly.
