The Backlash
The truth has enemies with excellent lawyers.
Legal || Pressure || Danger
By Monday the station’s owner, a man named Frank Bellows who lived in Scottsdale and cared about KWRN primarily as a tax instrument, had received two cease-and-desist letters, a call from a congressman’s aide, and a personal visit from a man he described only as “corporate.” He called Marcus at seven a.m. and Marcus called Elena at seven-fifteen and Elena called Gina at seven-thirty, and by eight a.m. the machinery of press freedom defense had begun to grind, slowly and expensively, into motion. Gina had prepared for this. There were lawyers. There were documents. There was a coalition of press organizations whose statements of support were already drafted and waiting for the occasion.
None of which helped with the other thing. The other thing was her car. She had parked on the street outside her hotel — she hadn’t gone back to the Millhaven cottage since the first night she fled — and when she went to it Monday morning she found all four tires slashed and, on the windshield, a single index card with three words printed in block capitals: STOP. ENOUGH. NOW. She photographed it, bagged it, called Diaz, and then stood on the sidewalk in the Monday morning drizzle and felt the particular quality of fear that comes not from threat of violence but from the demonstration that someone knows exactly where you are and wants you to know that they know. They could have done worse than slashed tires. They had chosen to do exactly this much. The message was calibration. We’re measuring how far we need to go.
She sent the photograph to six people before she walked away from the car. Chain of custody, she thought. Always chain of custody.