Chapter 4 - THE MEDIA BLITZ
By the next morning, the sun rose brightly over the Vance estate, casting golden light across the marble foyer that had been meticulously scrubbed clean by Luis and the rest of the staff.
I had given every single employee a five-thousand-dollar bonus out of my personal account as an apology for what they had endured under Chloe’s brief reign of terror. Luis had nearly cried when Julian shook his hand in the garden, apologizing profusely for not listening to the staff sooner.
We thought Chloe would take her failure, cut her losses, and quietly disappear into the shadows. We underestimated how desperate—and how delusionally arrogant—a cornered social climber could be.
At 10:00 AM, my assistant, Sarah, walked into my study holding an iPad with a horrified expression on her face.
"Mrs. Vance, you need to see this," Sarah said, setting the tablet on my desk. "It’s trending on social media, and three local news outlets have already picked it up."
I leaned forward and looked at the screen.
It was a video posted on Chloe’s public Instagram page, which had gained over fifty thousand followers during her engagement to Julian. In the video, Chloe was sitting in her luxury apartment, wearing no makeup, her hair artfully disheveled, weeping dramatically into a handkerchief.
"I never wanted to speak out," Chloe sobbed into the camera, her voice trembling with manufactured pain. "But I can't stay silent anymore. For the past six months, I have been subjected to terrible emotional abuse by the Vance family. Especially Eleanor Vance. She forced me to perform humiliating tasks, dictated my every move, and yesterday, when I finally stood up for myself, she staged a fake incident in her home and had her son throw me out onto the street with nothing."
The caption beneath the video read: #ExposingTheRich #EleanorVance #JusticeForChloe #AbusiveInLaws.
It already had over two hundred thousand views, thousands of comments calling me a monster, and local tabloids were re-posting it with headlines like: MAFIA MATRIARCH? ELEANOR VANCE ACCUSED OF ABUSING SON'S FIANCÉE.
Julian walked into the study right at that moment, holding his phone, his face pale with rage.
"She posted a video," Julian said, his knuckles white around his phone. "People are threatening our foundation! People are commenting on our corporate pages calling us abusers! She’s playing the helpless victim!"
I looked at the screen, then at my son. I didn't feel anger. I felt a cold, sharp sense of absolute clarity.
"Sit down, Julian," I said calmly. "And Sarah, call our public relations head, Marcus, and our lead legal counsel, Victoria Vance."
Within thirty minutes, Marcus and Victoria were sitting in my study. Victoria Vance—my late husband’s cousin and one of the most ruthless litigation attorneys in the state—was practically vibrating with professional delight.
"This is defamation per se," Victoria said, tapping her gold pen against her pad. "She is publicly accusing you of criminal emotional abuse and financial fraud without a shred of evidence. We can file a multi-million-dollar libel suit by 2:00 PM."
"No," I said softly, resting my chin on my hands. "A lawsuit takes months. A lawsuit gives her a platform to play victim in court. Chloe wants a spectacle. She thinks she can use public pressure to force us into paying her off to keep quiet."
Marcus, our PR head, leaned forward. "Then what's the play, Eleanor? The internet moves fast. Right now, the narrative is that rich, snobbish Eleanor Vance hated her middle-class daughter-in-law and destroyed her."
I picked up the small digital recorder from my desk drawer. Beside it, I placed a USB drive containing the high-definition security footage from the foyer, which caught the entire bucket incident from three different camera angles.
"We don't make a statement," I said, a slow, icy smile spreading across my face. "We host a press conference."
Julian looked at me, surprised. "A press conference?"
"At the Vance Foundation Headquarters today at 4:00 PM," I instructed. "Invite every major local news station, every entertainment reporter, and every social media outlet covering this story. Tell them Eleanor Vance will be making an official statement regarding the allegations made by Chloe Bennett."
"Are we going to play the video?" Julian asked, a mixture of nerves and satisfaction in his voice.
"We are going to play the unedited audio," I replied. "And then we are going to show the security footage. But before we do that, I am going to make a short speech."
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Victoria chuckled darkly. "Oh, this is going to destroy her career, her social standing, and her entire life."
"She destroyed her own life the moment she dumped a bucket of filthy water on an old woman," I said coldly. "I am simply making sure the public gets front-row seats to the wreckage."
