Chapter 7 - The Smear CampaignBy Thursday evening, the emergency restraining order had been officially served to Bernice at the budget hotel where she was staying near the freeway.
Deputies reported that she threw a glass ice bucket at the wall and screamed obscenities when handed the court summons.
Deprived of her physical access to our home, Bernice launched her retaliatory strike where she knew it would hurt most: public reputation and social destruction.
At 7:00 AM on Friday morning, my phone began ringing off the hook.
"Christopher, have you checked Facebook?" asked Marcus, my senior managing partner at the law firm where I worked as a corporate litigation attorney. "You need to log on right now. It's spreading like wildfire among the regional legal network."
When I opened the app, my stomach dropped into a abyss.
Bernice had created a public page titled Justice for Bernice Sterling. She had posted a tearful, three-minute video filmed in her hotel room.
Wearing a faded cardigan and clutching a rosary, she wept uncontrollably into the camera, claiming that Savannah had physically attacked her in a fit of rage, and that I had dragged my elderly, frail mother out into the hallway by her hair and thrown her down the stairs to steal her life savings.
Attached to the post were photos of small, old contusions on Bernice's wrists—bruises she had likely inflicted on herself in the hotel room to fabricate counter-evidence.
The post had already been shared over four thousand times.
“Monster son kicks elderly widowed mother onto the street!” read the trending captions.
“Boycott Sterling & Associates—they employ an abusive lawyer who beats his own mother!”
Below the video were hundreds of comments calling for my immediate firing, detailing threats against my office building, and demanding that child protective services take our baby away the moment she was born.
My mother knew the legal system moved slowly. She was trying to destroy my career, our social standing, and our mental sanity before we ever reached a courtroom.
My hands shook as I closed the app. Beside me in the breakfast nook, Savannah reached over and laid her hand over mine.
"She wants us to panic, Christopher," Savannah said, her voice remarkably calm and centered. "She wants you to call her, beg her to take the video down, and offer to drop the criminal charges."
May you like
"She’s destroying everything," I whispered, looking at her. "Your reputation, my job..."
"No," Savannah replied, opening her laptop and pulling up a clean file. "She’s digging her own grave. In California, fabricating evidence and launching a malicious defamation campaign to influence an active criminal trial carries severe penalty enhancements. Let’s call our civil attorney."
Related Stories
