From: MikeReynolds@etainmanagement.com
To: Seraphina Bell’s Management Team
Date: October 7, 2:30 p.m.
Subject: Urgent – Read ASAP
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By now I’m sure you’ve all heard the news. Somehow it leaked to TMZ, and we’re still trying to figure out how and from whom.
Seraphina called me less than an hour ago, demanding answers, and I explained to her that I wasn’t sure what happened. I assured her that as soon as we know more, she will be informed. I also stressed that it was imperative she tell anyone who asks that she has no idea why Trent McAllister would have been in Gleason, California, let alone in that trailer park.
I must stress this again to the team: Seraphina must have full deniability.
Here is what we know thus far:
Trent’s last progress note came in at 5:30 p.m. yesterday. When I didn’t hear anything by 11:00 p.m., I texted him and received confirmation that he was continuing the surveillance. That was the last I heard.
This morning I received a heads-up from a contact at TMZ minutes before the story went live: Trent’s body was found in Jennifer Smith’s trailer. He had been stabbed multiple times in the chest. (My contact, by the way, has no idea who leaked the story, though he suspects it came in via the tips section of their website.)
Police had received an anonymous complaint of a disturbance. When they arrived at the trailer around 1:30 a.m., they found Jennifer passed out on her bed. She still had the knife in her hand. When awakened, she appeared disoriented. She denied having stabbed Trent. She did admit to meeting him at a bar, though she stated she did not remember leaving with him. She was placed under arrest and transported to the nearest detention facility to await arraignment.
I’ve been in touch with a law enforcement contact who reached out to the current investigators in Gleason. He claims the police found no evidence inside the trailer that links Jennifer Smith to Seraphina. I told him that we believed there were items under the mattress, but he insisted the police did a thorough search and found nothing. When asked about a notepad, he said that some papers were found in the trailer, but not the paper tablet I had described.
My suspicion is that Trent was trying to cause an escalation which would warrant a petition for psychiatric hospitalization; this was something he had mentioned to me privately before he left for Gleason, an idea he wasn’t quite prepared to share with the rest of the team. He may have provoked Jennifer Smith to the point where she stabbed him to death. Though knowing Trent and how professionally he’s handled challenges in the past, it’s hard to believe he would have allowed things to progress so far—that he’d provoke Jennifer to the extent that she would have grabbed a weapon. My contact stated that Trent did not have any defensive wounds on his hands or arms.
As I’m sure you all now know, the TMZ article goes into great detail about how Trent had been accused by multiple women of sexual assault over the years, though none of the charges ever stuck. Still, it is true that this ultimately drove him into early retirement from the police force and led him to start his own security firm. We have to consider the possibility that Jennifer Smith acted in self-defense. In any case, it is imperative that Seraphina’s name comes nowhere near this. At least, no closer than it already has. The TMZ article notes that Trent and his company work exclusively with Seraphina, which, let’s be honest, is the only reason TMZ is covering the story in the first place. (And now, of course, it’s being picked up by every trade magazine and tabloid in the country.)
All of the letters from Jennifer Smith have been shredded and burned. Trent’s correspondences had been sent via encrypted email, so we should be good there. Everyone must delete those messages, as well as this one, immediately after reading. As far as we know and as far as the media is concerned, he acted alone.
Mike Reynolds
Senior VP of Etainmanagement