[Disclaimer- I’ve been reluctant to share this story here, but if I remain vague with the details, add some nuggets of BS, and omit a few good parts, then I think it’ll be fine. Still, please don’t post this anywhere else. I won’t be responding to guesses or offering any further specifics. Posting here bc I think y’all will appreciate it and the community isn’t too big.]
A couple years ago, I was out of town for a conference and met up with an old college buddy (we’ll call him Bob). He’s a lawyer, but he’s a great guy. After a couple hours of catching up and many, many drinks, a memory sparked in Bob’s mind of me once mentioning that I had a thing for newswomen. Here’s the story he told me:
Before joining his current practice, Bob cut his teeth as a junior associate for a larger firm. In that role he did some estate-planning work and would occasionally assist with the accounting/distribution of the assets left by some extremely wealthy folks after they’d died. In the course of investigating why a VERY large sum of cash had recently been deposited into a deceased client’s (we’ll call him Warren) bank account, one of Bob’s fellow associates discovered a legal contract between Warren and a national media personality (we’ll call her Sara). Warren apparently lusted pretty hard for Sara (as most all of us here do) and offered to pay her a small fortune if she’d pose for a private set of nude photos.
Bob doesn’t know how the first contact was made or how the negotiations went, but Warren and Sara had worked out a deal that ensured the photos could never be made public and neither party could blackmail the other. Warren put a large sum of money into an account as collateral, and it would go to Sara if the pictures ever got out. Warren provided the camera and the memory card that would be used, and Sara provided the photographer. [I should also mention that Sara may or may not have been familiar with Warren before he reached out to her, and this may or may not have provided her with some initial level of comfort that made her open to the whole idea.] Warren recognized that Sara could potentially frame him and collect the collateral if she were to take and release a separate nude photo. To nullify that threat, they agreed that she’d pose beside a unique, one-of-a-kind artifact that Warren owned, and it would appear in each picture as a kind of watermark. I assume Sara was already fairly well-off and doubt either had any real motive to take the photos or their deal public, but it apparently made both parties feel safer to have all these details in writing.
As for the photographs themselves, both the number of pics and their degree of explicitness was agreed upon beforehand. There weren’t specific requests- nothing about costumes or fetishes or anything weird. Nothing sexual either, just nudity. Warren basically bought himself a personal Playboy shoot (I suppose “personal OnlyFans subscription” would be the contemporary analogy if their arrangement were happening now). The photo-session apparently happened, Sara was paid her money, and the pictures now exist only on a laptop that will never again be unlocked. Sara had the option to do more shoots in the future if she wanted, but Warren croaked not too long after that first set. The collateral was released back to the man’s estate upon his death, and everyone except Warren lived happily ever after (though he too was probably happy until the end).
After my initial surprise, I realized it wasn’t actually all that scandalous. I was a little taken aback that Sara, specifically, had agreed to the deal. She doesn't seem particularly prudish, I just would've guessed she'd publicly shame anyone for making this kind of offer. Maybe it was a kink she wanted to try. The truth is we don’t really know these women, and I'd imagine many of them, to some degree, are now just playing a character. Celebrities and anonymous folks alike regularly get paid to shed their clothes for tv/film/websites, and no one thinks anything of it. Maybe this kind of deal happens more often than we think…granted probably not among news reporters, but among other notable people with uber-wealthy admirers. Hell, Lindsay Lohan purportedly took money to sleep with a Saudi Prince. Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, Usher, and Lionel Richie all flew to Libya and performed for Muammar Gaddafi—probably a hell of a concert, actually…especially if it was around the holidays. I might take issue with the state of modern journalism, but I don’t disparage Sara or Warren for their agreement. I only wish she'd made the photos available for us all to see
.
It’s a shame that she didn’t, because it seems we’re approaching the end of an era. As the mask continues to slip, and the lines between reporter, entertainer, provocateur, and propagandist become more blurred, I expect that it’ll become commonplace for media outlets to hire women who have one foot in the news business and the other in a different medium of entertainment. It’s a natural evolution—no longer beholden to even the pretense of journalistic integrity, network managers will recognize the value of hiring attractive and established actors/actresses who are better skilled at persuading viewers to accept an agenda or reaffirm already-held beliefs. Maybe Alyssa Milano and Kristen Bell will cohost a show to kick-off prime time for CNN.
The sacrifice we’ll have to accept for the thrill of seeing more skin from these quasi-journos will be the loss of a novelty. Because if all we wanted was skin, there’s an entire world and internet loaded with it. No, there’s a reason we’re drawn to newsreaders and to sites like this: it’s the thrill of those rare glimpses of a professional, for whom we have at least a marginal amount of respect, choosing to show just a little more than she’s normally comfortable showing. But when that trust and respect is gone, so too is the novelty of it all.
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