JULY 2004
Helicopters swarm over a mansion in Beverly Hills, Harper Moore emerges, sunglasses on, head bowed as she rushes to a car.
Kayla Alexander: She was at my New Year’s party when she found out Joel was dead. I’ve never seen Harper so upset. She’d been on edge for months, and then she got the news and … I didn’t get it before. The “break” in “breakdown,” but it’s like everything in her crumpled.
Jasmine McKenna: I think by that point we were all prepared for a body—we just thought it would be an overdose in a locked room or a corpse in a crushed car. An accident. Not a grave. Not a woodland. Not a murder.
Caleb Krause: I was at a bar with Nadine when the news hit. I guess we both felt a little culpable because she fully fainted. Passed clean out.
Nadine Heywood: Our rivalry had never felt fiercer, but sometime around autumn it had begun to fizzle out.
Harper was far more concerned with Joel, and I was wracked with guilt about the role I had played in that …
but I suppose the long and short of it was that I hadn’t been okay in some time.
I didn’t realize it was possible to grieve so deeply, that sadness could tear a pit inside you.
So when Harper lost Joel, my first thoughts were compassion.
I wouldn’t wish loss on anyone. And I knew what the paparazzi had done to me, their relentless digging like they wanted the darkness to consume me solely so they could photograph that too.
It began almost immediately—the press hounding her and making up stories.
If I, the woman whose hatred was legendary, could see she was innocent and hurting, how could the rest of the world not?
And I think the public did; it’s just the paparazzi who wanted to sell a lie. They should be ashamed.