This story can stand alone, but details of the events referred to can be found in TV Takeoever, to which this is nominally a sequel.It was two o’clock. Time for the show. Jessica took a deep breath. The classroom was packed. Every seat had been taken with a long waitlist to get it. Modern Ethical Crises in Journalism didn’t seem like it should be that popular. She had to wonder how many of them were perverted lookie-loos. For once, she was not going to let the question slide. Time to make the biggest leap in college lecture history. Own it or give up forever.
“Hi everyone,” she said casually as she walked in and eighty pairs of eyes turned to face her. The class, but basically the audience. Once they hadn’t scared her. Then they only scared her. Now she was in the middle. Her heart was racing. Some of them, she guessed, looking out at their faces, had to know. Some surely didn’t. All were going to remember her opening lecture, though. “This is Modern Ethical Crises in Journalism. If you’re expecting calculus, you’ve got the wrong room.” No one left. Sometimes they did, but not this time. “I’m passing around a syllabus, and we’ll review it later today. I’m Jessica Chandler, I recognize a few of you but most of you are strangers to me. We’ll do introductions later. While the syllabus is going around, I wonder if anyone would like to get us started by stating what they think has been the biggest issue or incident or otherwise noteworthy topic to define an ethical crisis in recent journalism. It doesn’t have to be broadcast, though that will be our focus. Print or online is fine too. And it doesn’t have to actually be the single most important. Just noteworthy or interesting to you. Anyone brave enough to begin?” A few tentative hands went up. She waited a moment and called on one. “Yes, your name first, and then your answer.”
“Monica Gellar,” the young coed replied. “Is it Wikileaks?”
“There’s no specific answer,” Jessica replied. “Why Wikileaks?”
“Well, there was classified material printed, and some people said it got soldiers killed.”
“That would certainly qualify it as a major issue,” she replied. “And we will be talking about Wikileaks this term. Anyone else? You.”
“Yeah, Tom Szalsby. How about the politicization of the press? Like, Fox vs MSNBC or stuff like that?”
“A broad enough topic, yes. That could fill a graduate seminar on its own. And it does. We’ll be talking about politics and journalism. Next?”
“What about sensational coverage of unfolding crimes and disasters?”
“What’s your name?” she asked. He looked like an older, non-traditional student. He was looking at her without blinking much. She felt her heart racing.
“Nate Johnson,” he said.
“What kind of coverage, Nate?” she asked him directly. His gaze seemed to waver.
“Well, that suicide guy, back in the nineties I think. The politician who blew his brains out on live TV during a press conference. Half the stations aired it live through to the end instead of stopping.”
“Bud Dwyer,” she said. “We’ll cover that case too. Is that the only one you can think of?”
He looked like he was losing his resolve, but he continued. “I guess there’s that live rape from back in 2010,” he mumbled.
“It was 2009,” she replied. “A terrorist group took over a live news broadcast and attacked the woman who was anchoring that night. Who here knows about that case? Show of hands, please.”
She watched as hands went up. Some casually. Some nervously. Some avoiding eye contact. And a few trying not to grin too widely. She felt the butterflies in her own stomach threatening to break out anytime. It was now or never. “So few willing to admit it. Yes, that’s a touchy subject, a newswoman being raped on live television for seventeen minutes, no cut in signal, though the terror group threatened the whole station if the signal was turned off. Some might argue that removed the station management’s culpability. As an exercise, let’s start the class with that case, which I happen to have cued up and ready to go. And with about one minute on Google, so can anyone else.”
She turned the lights down, lowered the screen, and started the video on the projection screen. Up came the blonde news reporter, twelve years younger but even in the darker room Jessica could see some of the students’ eyes and heads turning from the screen to her and back to the screen again. A few jaws were dropping perilously close to the floor.
“Turning to the south valley,” Jessica Barone began, but it was the last part of the news she delivered.
“Everybody freeze! Nobody move! Do not cut the signal or people will be killed!” She felt something akin to the same chill hearing the words. As the class watched the vintage TV footage, she wondered what they were thinking, about the film and about her. How many of them would believe she hadn’t watched the footage at all until this very moment? She’d watched the first few seconds and the last, to make sure it was complete. That was it. It wasn’t a bad copy. The sound was clean and the video sharp. Someone had helpfully but somewhat redundantly placed a scrolling text across the bottom: ‘Footage aired live from 11:06 to 11:23 PM, October 14, 2009, Channel Eight, WXXX, unedited as viewed in metro area’.
“Get it all off right now you fucking bitch! Strip naked this second, I don’t care how you do it!” The lead guy was no less terrifying now than he’d been twelve years ago. Jessica sat on her hands to keep them from trembling, but back then she’d had to rip her own blouse off to avoid being shot.
A class full of students that had never had a first day like this one sat, some shaking, some trying not to cry, and a few shifting positions to hide the bulges in their jeans’ crotches. There were no gaps in the coverage. It was even hi-def, so be it. “I love the semen of strange men,” screen Jessica Barone continued, her voice wracked with sobs as she spoke. “I wish to be manhandled and abused forever now, and pray that my clothes will never be worn by me again ever.” And there they went, her clothes, up in flames in the pile. It was one of the few moments the camera was allowed to stray from her naked, abused body on screen. And then they were back at it. It was turning surreal, like a dream of another person. Jessica Barone was gone, not just gotten married and changing names. “I am Jessica Barone, and I thank the People’s Army of World Liberation for teaching me the error of my ways. I am a fuck slut.” Her final broadcast words, then a good minute of her sobbing on the floor before the camera guy realized he could turn it off and not be shot.
She turned the lights back on. “Any questions?” she asked the class. Dozens of hands went up. “Yes, you, miss…”
“Summer Hendricks,” the girl said, “And, uh, how could you show that!”
“It’s relevant to the class material,” Jessica said. She knew full well it wasn’t a sufficient answer.
“No! I mean, I mean. I mean what I said! How could you show that?”
“How can I show that? How can I, a female professor trying to be taken seriously, show her class pornography on day one of class. A movie she stared in, and didn’t get paid for, by the way. Is that the question?”
“Something like that, yeah,” Summer said.
“First of all,” Jessica began, “I know I fed the words into your answer, so this isn’t directed at you, but that was not pornography. That was a crime caught on tape. And part of journalism is reporting crime. No one has ever gotten a jumbo-jet crash landing on tape, but it would lead off the very next news broadcast if it ever was, deaths notwithstanding. It is news. What happened that night was a serious crime and a major news event. And now, as a journalism professor, I find myself uniquely able to show it and discuss it free from the blowback any other reporter or professor would get for doing the same.
“And I know this isn’t a psych class, although I do encourage you to always consider the states of mind of figures in and reporting the news, you’ve just had a chance to witness someone, me, owning something that could otherwise ruin a life. Don’t think I’m blasé about showing you all that video. I’m not, and I’ve got the liquor at home waiting for me to prove it. I truly believe that journalism is a major way that we as humanity can overcome our weaknesses and frailties by opening up about our shared and lived reality. If revisiting the fourth worst night of my life can help make that point, I’ll do it.”
Someone had to say it. “Fourth?” someone asked. He didn’t bother to name himself or even raise his hand.
“Here’s an important lesson too,” she said. “Sensation and ratings gold don’t correlate perfectly to importance in life. Seeing me, my being raped on live TV is something not easily forgotten. If I showed you footage of myself the day my mom died, or the day my divorce was finalized, or the day my baby died of SIDS, you’d faster forget them. But those, in that order, were worse. Those days mattered. This,” she said, gesturing to the now-blank screen, “This is just bad shit that happened one day.
“So, let’s go over the syllabus now. Grading will be based in five case studies, each with a presentation, plus a few quizzes and a final exam.”
A hour later the class let out and Jessica beelined it for her office. She had lied on one point. The liquor waiting for her wasn’t in her house. It was in her desk drawer. She drank the first swig straight from the bottle. “Holy shit,” she said out loud to no one in particular. “Holy fucking shit!”
She did not have long with her thoughts. There was a knock at the door. She emphatically was not seeing students, but she peeked out and saw her friend Anne. “Come on in,” she said. “Lock it behind you, okay?”
“Yeah,” Anne said, locking the door and sitting down. “So,” she said, seeing the Black label bottle on the desk. “You actually did it. You went through with it.”
“Yeah, looks that way,” Jessica replied.
“How did they take it?”
“It’s a first day of class they won’t soon forget,” she said. “Half the girls wanted to cry. Half the guys probably wanted to jack it. Maybe some of the girls too.”
“Oh, I think we’re more evolved than that,” the professor of Women’s Studies said, getting a glass off the shelf and pouring herself a casual shot or three.
“No you don’t.”
“No I don’t. But still. Ew.”
“Oh, don’t mind the booze, Anne. I’ve got a case of nerves out the wazoo, yeah, but I needed to do that. I needed to own it. They never caught those men. They never will. That’s how it goes. But I feel like I’ll never again, I don’t know. I was going to say, I don’t know what I was going to say. But it felt right. I owned it, it doesn’t own me. It just shit that happened once.”
“How did the Bishop take it?” Anne never hid her opinion of the overtly religious head of the Journalism department.
“Don’t know. I gave him fair warning. It’s not like it was a secret. Google Jessica Barone and I’m there, Chandler and all.” She took another swallow. “End of term, most of the room would have watched that vid or another one like it, at least a few minutes worth. There’s no secrets, Anne. Not for a human. Secrets are for shadowy figures that don’t live in our world. For the rest of us, it’s all right out there, all the time.”
“Let’s go get drunk,” Anne suggested.
“God yes!”
The two middle-aged milfs walked out and headed off campus. Anne drove, suggesting they head to Discount Night at McArbuckles Tavern. Jessica countered with a trip to Sam’s Wholesale Spirits and Wines, and an hour later the two burst into Jessica’s front door ready for binging on Scotch and Netflix romance films.
“I still can’t believe you did that,” Anne said. She’d been on the topic again and again all evening.
“Oh, jeez, it’s done. Better or worser, it’s done now!” Jessica said. “Hell, you’ve seen worse, miss consultant for the Feds Bureau on sex crimes.”
“Yeah, I assume so,” Anne said, filling her tumbler glass.
“You assume so. Sure, wait, what? Wait, you’ve seen that tape yourself, haven’t you?” Anne didn’t reply. “You haven’t! How? How is that even possible? You study sex crimes for a living!”
“You’re my best friend. It seemed, rude?” She took another drink.
“Oh, that’s just, wow. That’s precious. But I didn’t bare my soul and more to a bunch of college kids just to find out my BFF is in the freakin’ dark.” She brought up a browser window and went to Google.
“You’re going to make me watch that thing?” Anne asked.
“As women, as representative of the higher sex, we are emotionallyly supportingtive, right?” Jessica asked.
“Well put.”
“Well I need support by a someone who has seen the fucking vid and thus knows as much as some dorky guy who jacked it in the men’s room five minutes after my class ended.”
“I need more ice, then,” Anne replied, getting up and plowing her way to the kitchen. Jessica did her same Google search from before and found the same video, one of dozens of sites showing the same footage, in whole or in part, in varying qualities.
“I can’t believe you never watched this. I mean, I’m not dying to show you one of my worst days. But still. You’ve seen snuff films in police evidence rooms. You’ve testified for the attorney general’s office on sex crimes,” Jessica said as she waited for Anne to return. “You’ve sat and talked personally with surviving victims of Heidnik and Castro and Bundy. Does anything shock you at this point?”
Anne didn’t answer, but Jessica heard her coming back in. “Really, does anything…?” she asked as she turned around and saw Anne slowly walking in, one big male arm wrapped around her throat and the other holding the big revolver to her temple. And his companion stood beside them both, holding the shotgun, leveled in Jessica’s direction. Both wore all black, including masks.
“The professor asked you a question,” the one not holding Anne asked her. “Does anything shock you, lady?” Slowly, trembling, Anne nodded yes. He swung the shotgun over and held the tip of the barrel inches from her face. “Like this? Does this shock you?”
“Yes! Please, don’t kill me! Please!” Anne sobbed.
“Kill you? We just came for some fun. Looks like movie night. We heard what you’ve got cued up there, Jessica. Let’s all watch together.”
“Make them get naked,” the one holding the gun to Anne’s head said.
“Yeah, right. Okay, ladies, get the clothes off. Now!” Gunman one released his hold on Anne, but the two women were trapped with no place to run. The larger armed men were blocking the way out.
“Please,” Jessica begged. “You don’t have to do this! Just go! We’ve got nothing on you now.”
“I said strip, you fucking slut! You’re all staring in porn so don’t you tell me you’re shy all of a sudden!”
“Oh my gawd!” Jessica cried, but then began hurrying to get undressed. “Okay, I’m doing it. I’m stripping!”
“What is it?” handgun guy asked.
“She figured it out. She knows we’re in the class. Just keep disguising your voice.”
“You’re in her class?” Anne cried. “You know what happened to her and you do this!?”
“Keep going, bitch. Get those clothes off those bodies. Now!”
In a minute the women were naked. They stood there, close together, shivering, terrified, hyper-focused on the firearms pointed at them. Jessica kept seeing the guns from the newsroom. Now these. All held by men in black. Faceless, nameless. Likely to get away with it.
“Watch them,” shotgun guy said to his friend. He went to Jessica’s laptop and fiddled around with it a bunch. His body blocked their view. But when he finally stepped away, she did notice the light on the webcam lit up. The camera was on.
“What are you doing?” Jessica asked, terrified of the answer.
“Shut your hole, whore.”
“What are you doing to us! Why did you turn the camera on!” she almost screamed. The men stepped towards her. Two steps, then backhanded her across her jaw. She cried out and fell back onto the sofa with a split lip bleeding.
“Quiet. We’re going to have some fun. Both of you whores, hands and knees, facing the TV. Now!” The two of them had no real choice. They got down into doggie-style position. They faced the TV. Jessica knelt there, shaking, weeping. The screen came to life and there was her video playing. She saw herself reading the first minute or so as normal. And then they burst in.
She watched, and Anne watched. The men knelt behind them, and Jessica felt the warm flesh on flesh of a cock at her crotch. He was rubbing it around her pussy and her ass, but waiting. Waiting for something. But when the video got to her first penetration by the first terrorist, her current rapist slammed it into her. She cried out. She tried to stifle it. Anne cried out too, even louder. Jessica heard her friends cries of distress right beside her, mingling with her own as the two men steadily but surely raped the two older women.
Jessica was aware, probably vainly, that she wasn’t the thirty-one year old on the tape. Now forty-three she was still slim, but not as much so. She was a bit flabbier. But her breasts were also a lot larger. They swayed more, particularly bent over as she was, facing down, letting the twins sway and bob under her chest. And all for the newest camera, streaming to? Where? She had no idea.
For a couple college guys, they had decent staying power. Jessica just wanted it to end and for them to go away. She’d deal with round two of internet infamy some other time. But they pounded away for a good ten minutes or more, over half the tape. Only then did Jessica feel the hot goo in her belly as her rapists gasped and stiffed up behind her, venting his pleasure into her while she cried.
Beside her, she now realized, Anne was taking it worse. Much worse. Her first rape, no doubt, after studying the worst of them for a lifetime. Her attacker finally came in her. The twisted sorrow in her face gave away when she felt the jizz in her womb. But it wasn’t over. The two rapists waited for the tape to end, making both women keep their heads up and watch it to the end. It ended.
The men stood up, letting their milf victims wonder what would happen next? Freedom? More abuse? Death? They remained on their knees, crying beside each other while the guys dressed.
“Alright, you two, make out,” shotgun guy said.
“Yeah, make sweet sweet love to each other,” his friend added.
“What?” Anne asked. In response, shotgun guy aimed the barrel at the floor between them and fired, blasting a hole in the floor between them and making their ears ring. Anne began weeping out of control.
“Dyke action, now!”
Trembling and sobbing, Jessica and Anne moved closer to each other and laid down on the floor, awkwardly kissing. Jessica roamed her hands over to Anne’s smaller breasts while Anne lay there uncertain.
“Grope her pussy!” handgun guy ordered her. Jessica soon felt Anne’s shaking hands at her slick folds, dripping her man’s cum out.
“Alright, you cunts want to risk a pregnancy? Huh?”
“No,” they muttered, somewhat together.
“Jessica, you turn around. I assume you cunts know what sixty-nine means. Lick your pussies clean. Lick and swallow our jizz from your pussies! Get to it!”
“Oh god!” Anne cried as Jessica turned herself around. She wasn’t gay. Neither of them was a lesbian, they each knew that. As Anne’s pussy folds got closer and closer Jessica blanched but she did what she had to, sticking her tongue out and sliding it up her best friend’s orifice. And she felt Anne down there, doing her the same favor. She could taste the cum in Anne’s gash. The guys watched, making first one woman and then the other be on top, for the view and to help their pussies drain the cum out.
“Lick harder! You’re not stopping until you both finish each other. Understand?”
They did. Jessica held back tears badly as she licked harder. Just focus on the clit, she told herself. Get it done faster. She attacked Anne’s clit with her tongue and teeth and finally got her best friend to cry out and shake and clench up and juice up. But Anne had no such control, continuing her weak approach to Jessica’s pussy.
“Please, just do it harder!” Jessica finally begged her. Out loud. On camera. But her words got through and Anne’s efforts improved. Jessica finally felt the horrid orgasm building and exploding in her, finally allowing both to stop the muff dives.
“Please, just go now!” Jessica begged them through tear-filled eyes.
“Get up! Into the bathroom! Get up now!” shotgun guy shouted, his cool gone. He seemed angrier. But they stood and shuffled to the bathroom, shotgun guy pushing them, and handgun guy carrying the laptop behind everyone. “Into the tub, whores!”
They did so and their attackers turned on the shower, hot. He found a brush under the sink, a long one used to scrub tiles. And he found the powdery Comet used for cleaning. He dashed a bunch onto the wet brush.
“No! No!” Jessica cried, trying to be firm as he handed it to her.
“Clean up there!”
“We have soap!” she sobbed. “This stuff isn’t meant for people!” Then she screamed as a bullet from the revolver shattered several tiles on the shower wall.
Shotgun guy stepped forward and while his friend continued filming, he shoved Jessica to the wall and rammed the caustic cleanser up her pussy. She felt it burning in her innards, but he jammed it in hard and rapid, brush-fucking her and destroying the DNA evidence. He gave her several applications and then shoved her down to the shower floor.
“No, please!” Anne wailed hysterically as he now went for her, coating the scrub brush in Comet and jamming it up her pussy. Her screams were as loud as Jessica’s. And as pained.
But finally it was over. The guys dragged the dripping wet female college professors out to the living room and set the laptop down on the table. They sat Jessica in front of it. She saw they’d pulled up a web page.
“Log in,” shotgun guy said.
“That’s my faculty account,” she said.
“Duh. Log in!” The barrel of the big gun touched her head. She logged in. It wasn’t hard to guess what he had in mind. And sure enough, she was right. Once logged in as Jessica Chandler, the guy uploaded the video they’d just made to the class web page and sent an announcement to the whole class instructing them to view it before Thursday’s class. Then ‘she’ made an announcement that all the women in the class would be required to do a rape video of their own to get class credit and that she was shutting down drop privileges to anyone still enrolled in the class. She couldn’t actually do that, Jessica knew, and nor could he. But the girls in the class would still read it and panic.
Then he uploaded the video to several public sites and used her faculty email to send the links to everyone in the university email system. Even if IT could block them later, a lot would be auto-forwarded to private emails and it was not even all that late in the evening yet. It was out there. It would get around. Again. And though the guys didn’t seem to realize Anne was also a faculty member, it wouldn’t take long for her to be recognized too.
Finally, the guys led the two women down to the basement. They found themselves hogtied, back-to-back, arms and legs wrapped around the central post of the big room. “You don’t know our faces, our bodies, our real voices, or our DNA. Don’t bother trying to figure out which of us is in your class. It could be one, or both, or maybe neither, Jessica. I’ve been following you a long time, since my best friend’s older brother gave us that ninety-proof bragging confession about the time he raped you on live TV. Our tracks are covered, bitch. Now you’re exposed as what you are.”
They turned and left. Jessica and Anne, naked and shivering in the chill, were left until the police arrived the next morning. And events unfolded as expected. Everything from the class being canceled to both women taking indefinite leaves of absence and trying to find somewhere on Earth with no web presence, a search that remains without end, forever.
