Face-Slapping16 min read
The Livestream That Tore My Life — and Built Me Back
ButterPicks15 views
I woke to the shape of accusation laid on a china saucer.
“You pushed her into traffic, Athena. The video proves it,” a man's voice slammed like a palm on the tea table across from me.
I looked up. My name in his mouth felt like someone else’s key in the lock of my skull. The screen on the table replayed a short clip: two women beside the road, one suddenly grabbing the other's hand — then a shove. Lights from oncoming cars blurred. The woman who shoved looked exactly like me.
I blinked. My chest did a silly little flip. “I didn’t—” I started.
“Don’t lie.” A woman in pearls leaned forward, breath sharp with accusation. “How can you still pretend? We have proof.”
That was the wrong word for what crawled into my head: memory. Not my memory. A flood of details that were not mine filled me like color spilling into a blank page. Last night’s cheap paperback, the one I’d been devouring until sunrise — it broke its spine in my head.
I had been reading a novel about a thorny family, a jealous second daughter who was clever enough to weaponize foresight, and a beautiful natural daughter who lived quietly, loved, and was destroyed by rumor and fabrication. The villain had rewound time and tried again. Now, I realized with theatrical horror, I had woken inside the gentlest of those heroines.
“I’m not her,” I whispered. “I don’t know the woman in the video.”
“Save it.” The man — the one who’d slammed his hand on the table — tossed his phone toward me. “Calixto said it’s clear. You filmed it yourself. Explain.”
I clutched the arm of the chair with both hands. Everything had weight and history now: the place, the faces, the soft clatter of a chandelier. The name the household used for me — not mine at birth — fit my borrowed reflection. I had become Athena Goto, the sheltered daughter of the Dixon family. I had been loved, pampered, and then framed.
“I didn’t do it,” I said again. My voice refused to be frantic; a stranger’s composure sat on me like a borrowed coat. “You’re watching the wrong footage.”
Calixto Dixon — the head of the household, the man in the pearl woman’s storybook recollection — glaringly asked, “Then who did?”
“Someone made that video appear to be me,” I said. “Someone who can mimic me.”
“Oh please.” Graham Jacobs — my brother by blood in this life — leaned forward, jaw tight. “Who would mimic you?”
“Your adoptive daughter.” My mouth shaped the words as if parsing script into truth. “Jenna Rizzo.”
“Jenna?” The pearl woman’s fingers dug into the armrest. “But she fainted! She said—”
“—she said it was an accident,” Graham finished for her. “And now you want us to believe —”
“Watch the footage again.” I stood. “Now.”
They did. The same shaky camera, the same push. Except now I pulled a different source, the house’s indoor feed, and I opened playback to catch the moment before the push. I froze the frames. “Look at hands.”
Graham stared. “It’s… different.”
“You see how she shields her face? When someone is shoved, they put their palm out to protect themselves. Jenna’s hand faces away from her. In the street video, the hand faces the other way. The person in the road footage moved to protect herself from the car. The woman who is shoved put her hand down. The woman in the other clip—her palm faces her own body. She staged it.”
“Prove it.” Graham’s voice was cold.
I didn’t need to shout. I pulled the living room’s surveillance footage to the clip where I allegedly shoved. I mimicked the motion as the footage played: the natural instinct, the inward palm. “If I pushed,” I said, “my palm would face you. Watch.”
The room bent toward the screen. For a breath everyone seemed to hold their humanity.
Jenna’s lips trembled. “I fell by myself.”
“No,” I said softly. “You pushed yourself. You staged the scene, and you filmed a different moment and posted it.”
“You lie.” Jenna’s voice snapped.
“Why would I lie?” I asked. “Because in your playbook you are always the only victim. You rewrote the scene. You have advantage because you know the future.”
The room exploded with voices. I could feel the narrative ring around me — a family used to polished performances and public relations had a playbook for everything except being proven wrong on camera.
“Enough.” Calixto’s palm hit the table like a gavel. “Either we settle this quietly —”
“We do not bury this.” Graham’s face was storm-cloud dark. “We expose her for what she is.”
“Expose me?” I felt ridiculous and steady at the same time. “If you want exposure, then fine. We will show the world exactly what happened.”
Calixto swallowed. “You really want that?”
“Yes.” I had a plan the heroine in the book had never executed: I would use the truth faster than their lies.
I dug out an old phone from a safe, reinserted a simcard, and registered a livestream account. My thumb hesitated over the broadcast button. “This will get ugly,” I said.
“Do it,” Fabian Bloom — the boy who’d been the family’s adopted son, the one who’d been used to tie praise to Jenna’s knees — murmured. “Show them.”
I went live. The feed was raw and breathless. I walked them through the room: the tea table, the CV calloused on the house phone, the shaky surveillance. The comment stream crawled: some in the house watched, some outside. Within minutes, the family group chat I had forwarded to someone in the company began to blow up.
“Calixto!” I said into the camera. “Who paid for the videographer who posted the traffic clip?”
He opened his mouth to say something measured and then closed it. I knew his silence. In the book, he had been fooled. This wasn’t the time for that.
“Yes, Athena,” he said at length, quieter. “You’d better stop.”
“No.” My voice didn’t falter. “You want to disown me. You’d sell me for your stock price. But I’m not invisible anymore.”
Someone in the house opened a corporate WeChat and posted the surveillance clip to the employee channel. The chatter rippled outward. Within hours, accounts dissected frame by frame. The marketing team that Jenna had thought would back her suddenly couldn’t ignore the damning differences.
Jenna looked at me like a struck animal. “You made them watch.”
“I made the truth watchable.” I kept my eyes on the camera. The more public the evidence, the closer the family came to reality. “If you want to blame someone for me being alive and inconvenient, blame me, because I will stay alive and inconvenient.”
“You think posting a clip will erase everything?” Graham snarled.
“It will keep you from pushing me in private while you publicize your grief,” I said. “And if you want to take this to the courts — bring it.”
He didn’t bring it. They chose instead to send me away.
“You can go to jail for this,” Kingston Benson — the man Jenna’s life orbited around in the book — said coldly. “You can rot.”
“I can go to work.” I told them. “In fact I already have an interview.”
Nathan Wright, the quiet owner of a rival entertainment group I’d read about in margins of the book, answered my email that morning. He hired me as a junior agent. “We share a common enemy,” he told me, effortlessly cool. “I could use someone who understands the playbook.”
“You?” Jenna scoffed. “Why would a man like him pick you?”
“Because he knows vulnerability when he sees it.” I turned to my phone-on-screen. “And because I know where proof is kept.”
That scene — the way Nathan looked at me as if measuring the ripples I’d make — felt like a promise. “I’ll sign,” I said.
A week later, I was walking into his glass tower, dizzy with adrenaline and a sense that I was finally steering the ship.
“I don’t do charity,” Nathan said when he offered me a contract. “You’re talented, and you know the terrain. I keep dangerous people on leash. You’ll be an agent enough to bind your mouth to my goals.”
“Which are?” I asked.
“Truth.” He smiled like a knife with velvet. “And profit. In that order.”
The comfortable thing in the old script had been to stay small, to accept exile and quiet. I would not.
“You’ll be my junior agent,” I told my first recruit, Gus Svensson, in the elevator. He was fresh-faced and nervous, the kind of boy who could look like a century of stories in a single candid smile. “You will be careful. You will make me money. And you will never step where they set a trap.”
“I won’t,” he said. His voice was thin with gratitude. “Thank you.”
We started small: buzz clips, auditions, careful interactions. I learned to thread public opinion like beads on a wire. I also learned Jenna’s pattern. She had an appetite for being loved, and she fed it by directing generosity into a ledger that became hers. She gathered people the way a spider gathers flies — by promising favors and then building debt.
When she pushed a trap at Gus and a director, I expected it. When she created a scandal to disgrace him, I expected it. But I also expected that she could be outmaneuvered.
“I saw their video,” she hissed one night in the company’s public courtyard after a shareholder dinner. She had that practiced innocence on her face the book described. “How dare you use the company like this?”
“We don’t use—” Nathan closed his mouth and laughed once, small and dangerous. He’d already agreed to let me defend our roster. “We don’t use the company to bully talent.”
“You call making noise ‘defense’?” She stepped closer, too close for diplomacy. “You will regret this.”
“Maybe.” Nathan shrugged. “But we don’t owe you a clean stage to keep ruining. Athena, what do you want?”
I looked at Jenna. The woman who had hurt me in narrative and would have killed me if I had let her — who had pushed me to the edge of a plotline — looked suddenly small under lights. The world always notices the smallness of someone used to being manipulative only when the small person is exposed.
“I want her apologies public and her manipulations undone,” I said. “I want transparency on every deal she gained through favors given by you, your company, and others.”
“You can’t be serious,” Jenna said, breathless more with fear than anger.
I raised my hand. “Then I will make it easier. I’ll show how she took wealth, manipulated artists, and traded favors for equity. If she resists, we will show the contracts. If she pleads, we will show the bank transfers. If she begs, we will show witness testimony.”
There was a long moment of silence, the kind that smells of the world pausing before someone’s name is pronounced in the wrong court.
Jenna tried to laugh. “You think you can bankrupt me with words?”
“We will bankrupt your illusions,” Nathan said. “Words are evidence when they’re backed by records.”
The public punishment needed to be more than words. It had to be theatrical — a scene that would strip the mask in front of everyone who had once applauded Jenna’s “kindness.”
I planned it like a director. We gathered witnesses: Fabian Bloom, who had once been fiercely loyal to Jenna until she used him to enlarge her grip on the family; Boris Pereira, an actor Jenna had charmed into endorsing an opportunity that never reached his bank account; Emilia Xu, a young actress Jenna had almost destroyed by engineering a fake scandal. We collected documentation Natalia — our head of legal — could make speak.
“Are you certain you want everyone here?” Fabian asked. He had the twitch of someone who still missed the warmth of the family hearth.
“I want everyone here,” I answered. “I want the house’s shareholders, their staff, the actors, the publicists, the bloggers. I want the people who cheered her to see the truth. I want the people she hurt to take back their stories.”
The stage was the charity gala Jenna herself loved, the one where she always read other people’s suffering like a litany she deserved. It was the one the town respected, and she had a taste for looking magnanimous there. It would be crowded — perfect.
I waited until the center of the gala, until the candlelight was soft and the crowd had settled. Then Nathan’s team dimmed the lights and put my footage on the main screen. It started small: a grainy clip showing Jenna in a corporate office; a ledger; an email where she requested an “arrangement” for “favor exchange.” Then the screen flipped to banking transfers, and the audio played: voicemail where Jenna instructed an assistant to “make sure his name appears on the deed.”
Jenna’s face went white as paper.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Nathan’s voice was calm and salted with authority. “We are here for charity tonight, but charity begins with truth. This woman—”
“—is a fraud.” I said it into the microphone I had been given. My voice was steady. “She has been operating a shadow ledger within the family to take assets, sell favors, and influence company direction for personal gain.”
A murmur rippled. Cameras panned. The rich and the influential shifted in their seats like trees before a storm.
Jenna’s mouth formed an apology before she even knew she meant it. “I—no. I did things to help. I did not—”
“Fabian,” I said, and he stepped forward with slow, solemn dignity. “Tell them about the manuscript payment.”
Fabian’s voice quivered but held. “She offered to help my mother’s small shop get a contract but instead put it under a company she controlled. She said I owed her. I thought… I thought family was family.” He looked at Jenna as if expecting warmth. Instead she stared at the floor.
“Boris,” I called, and the actor’s face hardened. “Tell them about the so-called promotional deal.”
Boris explained how he had been promised a profit share that had never reached him; how, when he asked questions, the answer was always “not yet.” He produced emails.
“Emilia,” I said. She was hard to see tonight; the room still held tension for the actress who had nearly been ruined by Jenna’s scheme. “Tell them how they tried to bury you.”
Emilia rose, and the room drew a breath like an intake of cold water. “She called the journalist who threatened me. She said she would ‘control the narrative.’ She sent messages threatening my team, promising favors if we played along. When I resisted, she mobilized a smear.”
One by one the stories stitched together into a net too heavy for Jenna’s charm to hold. The evidence — contracts, transfer notices, witnesses — was a flood. The crowd buzzed. Phones came up. Clips were shared live. Someone yelled, “She’s been stealing from the charity!” Someone else cried, “How long have you been manipulating donations?”
The cruel thing about public fall is how immediate the reversal is.
“You lied to my father,” Graham said with a voice like blade, “and to all of us. You made us believe you loved us.”
“I did!” Jenna cried out, then shook her head as if at a fever dream. “I— I wanted… I just wanted to be loved! I thought if I made myself useful, if I bought their trust—”
“You bought it with other people’s livelihoods,” Calixto said. The words fell like gavel strikes.
“You think that makes you a savior?” Fabian spat. “It makes you a thief.”
The cameras recorded every contraction of Jenna’s mouth. Samantha, one of the board members who’d once smiled with Jenna at openings, now stood with a phone recording, her face flat with betrayal.
“Shut up!” Jenna barked suddenly. Her hands trembled. “You have no idea. You will all pay for this.”
Around her, people whispered, some recorded, some laughed, some gasped. A woman in the third row let out a small, hysterical laugh. “She’s not the first,” she said. “Why did I ever believe her?”
Then the change came: a man in the crowd stepped up with a stack of documents. “I was promised a share of the proceeds Jenna took in exchange for quiet,” he said. “I kept the receipts. She bought silence with charity money.”
The room dissolved into chaos. Phones flashed. Men argued. A woman — a columnist I’d seen mocked Jenna’s rivals on her blog — stood up. “I believed you,” she said to Jenna. “I wrote your praises. I should have looked harder.”
“Please,” Jenna begged. She was shrinking. The practiced defense she had polished for years was collapsing into something thinner than shame.
“You made me lose my job,” an assistant called out. “You told me to stage an incident. You guilted me into silence. I have nightmares.”
“Why won’t you stop?” another voice demanded. “Why did you do this?”
Jenna’s posture broke in half. Her bravado slipped into panic. “I was afraid of being nothing,” she sobbed. “I thought if I had them, I would be safe.”
“You never were safe,” I said quietly, watching the color leave her face. “You used fear to control. But tonight they see you. They see that the kindness was ledgered.”
“Stop!” Jenna leapt forward suddenly, hands flailing. For the first time she looked small and determined to cling to anything that might cushion her fall.
“Sit,” a woman near her ordered sharply, and a dozen heads turned. Security moved in, not yet to arrest — though an assistant I’d brought forward was already dialing — but to keep her from a theatrical collapse.
Jenna looked at me, raw and pleading. “Please,” she whispered. “There are reasons.”
“There are always reasons,” I answered. “Tonight, we listen.”
She begged and pleaded and apologized, shifting through the classic stages: denial, astonishment, petulant blame, profuse admission, bargaining, finally a thin, heaving breakdown. The crowd watched like an audience at the end of a play where the script had finally unraveled.
“You will be charged,” one board member said to Calixto. “This goes beyond family.”
“Not everything becomes a courtroom,” Calixto said slowly. “Sometimes we have to choose public truth over private preservation.”
Jenna’s public reaction changed like weather: indignation to denial to bargaining to pleading to collapse. Cameras panned and recorded each shift. People crowded around, some murmuring forgiveness and caution, others hurling insults — a frenzy of public mercies and condemnations.
The aftermath moved fast. Bloggers framed Jenna as a cautionary tale; charity donors demanded audits; actors who had quietly been paid with favors spoke up on the record; a legal case assembled itself like a puzzle finding its final piece.
In the public square of the internet, her fall was spectacular. People filmed her leaving the gala with eyes like shutter clicks. “Don’t forget what you did,” someone shouted. “You will lose everything.”
She tried to step away, and the crowd turned into a wall of witnesses. Phones were thrust in her face. “Why did you do it?” they asked. “Why did you steal?” She folded, finally, and tried to say something to each accusation, to each plea, catching at the stream like a drowning person grabbing at air.
When she failed — when her explanations were swallowed by evidence and proof — the sound of the first, reluctant applause came from a place no one expected: people who had had the courage to speak finally felt heard.
The punishment wasn’t a single dramatic act. It was a thousand small ones: contracts rescinded, board members asking for returns, publicists withdrawing backing, donations frozen pending audits, her agents quitting. The thing about being powerful is that your empire often depends on doors that you can no longer open when no one answers.
Jenna’s face when she realized the weight of the very silence she had cultivated — the mass of people who now would not lie for her — was the last thing the cameras recorded before the gala cleared.
She fell into a heap of pleas and recorded apologies, begging for mercy, begging for the family to save her from herself. People filmed her begging. People posted. People sent links to journalists who loved fall-from-grace stories more than they loved redemption.
“Please,” she repeated. “Please forgive me.”
“Forgiveness is not the same as impunity,” Calixto said. “You will answer for what you did.”
When she left the room, the applause was strange: not joy, but a tight, furious relief that truth had at least had its hearing. The audience dispersed. The charity’s donors demanded internal audits. Lawyers were called.
In the days that followed, Jenna’s reaction continued to oscillate. She tried to blame staff; then she tried to play the injured party. She attempted to rally sympathizers — some old cronies tried to spin the narrative — but every attempt met a new piece of evidence. She called for calm. She posted contrite videos. She recorded confessions and apologies. Each statement was met with a hundred snippets of contradiction and another document proving the lie.
Her public humiliation was not a one-scene spectacle but a slow swallowing of her constructed mythology by the factual teeth of records and people who had done the brave thing: speak.
I watched it all with a strange calm. Revenge had never been about joy for me. It was about undoing the thing that would have killed me again in quiet rooms. It was about letting the world know that a woman had been made a story against her will — and had fought back loudly enough to be heard.
When the final audit was posted online, showing the charity accounts Jenna had routed for her uses, the chorus of condemnation shifted into won't-forget-this. Jenna's face was marked with exhaustion and a pleading that turned to bargaining then to a hollow resignation.
The last public moment of the punishment was when she stood on a makeshift stage outside the Dixon estate, a few weeks later, and read a statement crafted with legal counsel by her side. She read, voice breaking, “I apologize.” She catalogued a dozen small confessions: the favors, the transfers, the manipulations. A crowd gathered. Some shouted their outrage. Some sobbed. Some filmed.
“You used our trust,” an old volunteer said through a megaphone. “You sold our good will.” People clapped. They were not applauding her apology. They were applauding the end of her performance.
Jenna’s face broke then into something like regret, and then into an utterly human collapse. She crouched and covered her face with her hands. Cameras zoomed. People took pictures. For hours after, the internet filled with images of the woman who’d once been a queen of smiles and “kindness,” now sunk into a heap on the lawn.
At last the officials came to collect statements. She tried to bargain for leniency. “I’m sorry,” she said again, in every interview. “I didn’t know how else to be.”
Her public collapse had every stage we had demanded: smugness, rage, denial, bargaining, collapse, pleas. The witnesses — the people who had been hurt — said their pieces when called. Some confronted her in front of camera crews. Some simply refused to speak.
The result was as cinematic as anyone could wish: contracts that had been signed back to the rightful owners, donations repaid, corporate directors pushed to resign, and a long audit that created a long paper trail. Her public standing was ruined; her sense of security, once purchased with favors, evaporated.
It was not a perfect revenge. It was necessary.
Afterward, I sat alone in Nathan Wright’s office, watching the feeds. Nathan came in with his hands in his pockets and a soft, congratulatory nod.
“You didn’t become the story you were handed,” he said. “You rewrote it.”
“You can’t really undo everything,” I answered. “But you can prevent the same pattern from eating someone else.”
“And you did.” He smiled like a locked drawer opening. “We’ve secured Gus’s career, and we have new clients who were tired of being directed as props. Now we can rebuild.”
We rebuilt. Gus landed roles, Emilia’s name came back from the edge because the pieces of her life were proved true, and Nathan’s quiet ruthlessness kept a careful winnowing of talent that refused manipulation.
Jenna faded into a shrinking orbit. She tried to call me once that month, voice small and shaking. “Athena,” she said, too late.
“I heard you,” I answered. “You can say sorry all you like. But you took time from people that you can never return.”
“I wanted to be loved,” she said.
“So did a lot of us,” I said. “But love isn’t a ledger.”
Her public downfall had satisfied the bookish appetite for balance — but it had also taught me something else: the world could be reshaped with evidence, with courage, and with the willingness to be seen.
Months later, when a small reporter asked me on camera why I had livestreamed the first clip, I said:
“I didn’t want to be the story of someone else’s cleverness. I wanted to be the woman who kept living.”
The live stream that had started it all — the ridiculous, raw five-minute clip of a staged shove — remained pinned in my mind like a pebble thrown into the surface of a lake. It had rippled outward, and those ripples had rearranged more than one shoreline.
My life after that night was not easy. It was fuller. I learned to fight in daylight. I learned to anchor loyalty in contracts and witnesses, and to never presume that affection equaled immunity. The people who had once cheered Jenna’s stories were now busy building new stories about empathy, accountability, and craft.
“You were always more brave than you knew,” Nathan told me one evening as the city dimmed into neon.
“I’m not brave,” I said. “I was planted into a story. I picked up the pen.”
He smiled and left me there with my laptop and a cup of cold coffee and the feeling that sometimes the world — perversely, painfully — needed a live audience to make a wrong a right.
I left the final word for myself.
When Jenna’s recorded confession was posted — the one with her every small admission listed and timestamped — the comment section was thick with judgements, forgiveness offered sparingly, and the kind of human complication that cannot be solved in a single paragraph.
One comment stayed with me: “The truth is messy. The truth is loud. And sometimes, the truth must be broadcast.”
I closed the laptop and stood up. Behind me Nathan’s office window framed the glittering city. Below, a new generation of assistants and actors shuffled off to performances, interviews, and a million small lies and half-truths that would be fought tomorrow.
I turned off the live feed in my mind like a switch. The livestream that had torn my life had also taught me to hold a lens up to everything.
I smiled because I had not been broken. I had been remade.
The End
— Thank you for reading —