First thing Monday morning, Marcie showed me all her notes and the security cam footage of the flash mob rampage at the Waterstones. Sure enough, someone had filmed the whole thing on their phone and had uploaded it to YouTube, so we looked at that footage, too. “Bookshop Flash Mob Attack” had gone viral. It also made the TV news and the papers.
“Vandalism, property damage,” Ken mused as he glanced over at the video. “Runs the gamut of public order offenses if they’re ever nicked.”
“Don’t these arseholes have anything better to do with their time?” Clive asked.
“And it’s not as if any of them was going to go home and brag about it so their mums will turn them in,” said Mark, emerging from his haze for a few seconds.
“An act of literary terrorism,” Marcie said. “Coupled with some misogynist character assassination against my client.”
“I just don’t get all the hate,” I said. “Why go batshit over a fluffy celebrity memoir?”
The book in question was Delia McCarthy’s Confessions of a Bunny Boiler, which was a chick-lit mega-seller last year. Benjamin glanced at a few pages and thought it was a bunch of arse. Olivia thought it was amusing, which was as close to a compliment you were ever to going to get from her. Mark actually read the book from cover to over, but then it was probably easy, since he was stoned that weekend. Nobody asked Ken and Clive if they had read it.
Since she was Marcie’s client, I didn’t actually have to meet her. Marcie was the one to take point on any face-to-face and had already gathered all the information I needed. Sometimes it was a relief to just get on with the legwork without having to talk to the clients and hold their hand.
Delia McCarthy herself was far from the worst person who ever lived, contrary to what her attackers would have you believe. She wasn’t some frothing right-winger spouting racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric. She hadn’t gotten her start on a reality show. She started out writing for the NME, a no-nonsense music fan from Wolverhampton with a snarky sense of humor. From there she became a tongue-in-cheek agony aunt for the people, got on the radio, got more and more gigs on Radio 1, then continued on to TV, hosting Top of the Pops in its last years, then a women’s lifestyle show, then a talent show, and now a talk show, the TV personality’s version of hard work and paying dues. She managed not to be tabloid fodder, being one of the early adopters of social media to galvanize and centralize her fan following, a mix of young women and young men who liked a funny, no-nonsense female voice. As an avowed feminist, she was well aware of the haters who had always been around since her music paper days. Delia, to her credit, was someone who owned up to her flaws. She admitted to anorexia in her teens, went through a few years of tabloid wildness that were mild by today’s standards—a few drunken pictures from nights out in Soho, photos of the actors and football players she dated briefly—but overall didn’t do anything too damaging that her enemies could use against her. “You just need to be a woman in public for misogynists to want to come after you,” she wrote in a column for the Sunday Times.
And, of course, she was one of Marcie’s clients in her PR days.
“It’s not the book,” Marcie said. “It’s her whole social media presence. Her whole public persona that the trolls are attacking.”
Ah, yes. I’d read through the printouts of Delia’s tweets and Facebook posts. They were all perfectly innocuous ruminations about feminism and empowerment to her million-plus fans, most of them women and teenagers. I wouldn’t exactly call her a proper role model, considering she wrote mostly about dating and finding the right bloke, but they offered mostly sensible advice about not losing their identities to some bloke. Ever since she started using her social media accounts as part of her agreement with the TV company and her publishers to promote her books and image, Delia had often received tweets and posts from men and the odd women calling her names. Looked like envy, since she was a TV personality with a glamorous life that made her and every celebrity a lightning rod for the envious, unstable, resentful, and unhappy. Then three months ago, the tone changed. The trolling became outright harassment, rape threats, death threats, attacking her books, her shows, her looks, her body parts.
“I’m gonna kick you in the womb!” . . . “fukkin kill yrself” . . . “feminists are a waste of air” . . . “Raped first or killed first?” . . . “I’m going to piss up your cunt” . . . “kill yourself” . . . and on and on for over a hundred pages.
At first she didn’t take them seriously. She toiled long enough in TV to grow a tough shell. She certainly wasn’t going to kill herself at the request of a bunch of saddos on the Internet. It was easy enough to just block them as they popped out of the woodwork. Even she had to admit that the people tweeting her photos of their cocks, of executions and animal cruelty, of her photos sliced up was a bit much. She reported it all and sent them to the police, of course.
Then she got doxxed.
One of the trolls managed to find out Delia’s home address and posted it online. Three months ago, a man showed up on her doorstep and rang the bell. Her Filipino housekeeper answered the door but didn’t take the chain off because he looked dodgy. He looked like a sad sack in faded denim and trainers and demanded to see Delia. Fortunately, she happened to be out at brunch. The housekeeper wouldn’t let him in and shut the door. Delia came home late in the afternoon to find the cops waiting for her. They explained that the man had stood outside for the next two hours before her housekeeper called the police. When they showed up and arrested him, they found a kitchen knife in his jacket. He said he just wanted to see Delia. He pointed them to a tweet that posted her address, calling on everyone to show up and “get the bitch.” That tweet had been taken down within an hour of its posting but it had already been screencapped and posted to a website devoted to hating Delia McCarthy. That was when Delia got herself some bodyguards and moved out of her house. That was also when she called up her old PR agent, Marcie Holder, for advice, only to find out that Marcie was now working for Golden Sentinels. Delia hired Marcie straightaway.
“Delia thinks there’s a mastermind behind all this,” Marcie said. “She wants us to track him down.”