And the birth control pills? And the condom? Though the LA Times liked to portray itself as a family newspaper with high moral standards of community decency, they had no problem printing the discussion on this topic. “Mindy was on birth control pills at the time,” Georgette explained. “But, as you know, no method of birth control, save for complete abstinence, is one hundred percent reliable. As for the condom, there was no condom used as this was a drunken encounter between two people who did not stop to think about such things. Perhaps we could all use this episode as a lesson and teaching moment for our adolescents.”
And as for Greg Oldfellow’s denial of paternity? “As I said earlier, Mindy is quite certain that the baby is Greg’s as he was her only sexual partner in a six-month period. Mindy will be undergoing amniocentesis next week to make sure there are no genetic defects in the baby. DNA paternity testing will be possible once this procedure is done. Mindy asks Greg to submit a sample of his DNA in order to prove that what she is saying is true. The next step, obviously, would be up to Greg.”
But before Greg could even respond to her request, other newspapers and entertainment shows began to print and broadcast a variety of different things related to the story as people who knew Mindy or did business with her or, most common, had been fucked by her (literally and figuratively) began to contact reporters to get in on the story and pass along a few juicy details.
Entertainment Reports, the weekly celebrity gossip show based in Los Angeles, aired a report featuring Raphael Smith, Mindy’s ex-boyfriend and the last person she had allegedly had sex with prior to Greg Oldfellow. The handsome, Adonis-looking figure appeared in suit and tie, looking nervous to be on camera, but determined to earn the fifteen thousand dollars ER was paying him and to get a little revenge on his ex. He let it be known that his reports back in April that Mindy had broken up with him because she had a crush on Greg were not true at all, but fabricated lines that she had paid him to feed to the media.
“She paid me ten grand to say that,” he told the nation. “She had never even mentioned Greg Oldfellow until she got that role in Us and Them. That was when she broke up with me and offered me the money to say she had a crush on him.”
“Did she say why she wanted you to do this?” he was asked.
“She said it was all part of a plan that was too complicated for someone like me to understand,” he said bitterly.
“But you did it?”
He nodded shamefully. “I did it,” he confirmed. “I didn’t really have a choice. I was unemployed at the time and had no place to live once she kicked me out of her place. She offered me the ten grand and three months paid rent at a condo downtown if I just said that.”
“And why are you telling us this now?”
“I’m back on my feet again,” he said. “And I want the truth to be told. Mindy is not a nice person.”
“What about the reports that she is not a good lover?” he was asked next.
“Those are true as well,” he said, lying through his teeth, but feeling great pleasure at twisting the knife a little bit. “She just kind of lays there, like she’s doing you a favor or something. Very uninspiring.”
The day after that, the LA Times ran a lengthy article featuring an interview with Michael Stinson, Greg’s costar in the Northern Jungle, the current treasurer of the Screen Actors Guild, and the man who briefly dated Mindy Snow in the wake of her divorce from Scott Adams Winslow. He too had been treated badly by Mindy during and after their relationship and he too was eager to deal down a little payback. Bernadette Tapp had conducted the interview and wrote the story. Tapp knew that it was Stinson himself who had contacted her and offered to speak about the relationship. Tapp did not know, however, that the contact had come after Greg Oldfellow had visited his former best man at his wedding, had a few beers with him, encouraged him to contact the Times, and suggested certain things be disclosed in their entirety, a few things that were not necessarily the truth. This was called sworn testimony in the court of public opinion.
“It was the worst relationship of my life,” Stinson was quoted as saying. “She was a horrible person, just a user who was only there to try to ride my coattails to further her career. She even told me that while we were together, several times, using just those words. She was a terrible lover—about the worst I’ve ever been with, truthfully—and I’m quite sure she was sleeping around on me the whole time we were together.”
“What makes you believe that?” Stinson was asked.
“Well, she would come home at times smelling of sex, she was always gone a lot longer than necessary on minor errands, and I ended up having to be treated for gonorrhea about a week after we broke up.”
“And what was the cause of the breakup?” he was further asked.
“When Northern Jungle bombed, she dropped me like a hot potato,” was the reply. “Didn’t even say goodbye. Just disappeared from my life and had her publicist issue a statement that we were no longer seeing each other.”
Most interesting and intriguing, however, was an offer made by a man named Jerry Claw. Claw was the owner and editor of the magazine Smooth Operator, a notorious pornographic publication that, in addition to featuring glossy, high-definition pictures of women showing everything they had with a minimal amount of subtlety, also published shots of celebrities, though not the sort of shots found in publications like the American Watcher or Celebrity Times. These shots were of famous people—usually women—showing some degree of nudity: Celebrities experiencing nipple slips, or a brief flash of underwear beneath a skirt (or, on many occasions, the lack of underwear beneath a skirt), or lounging topless or nude on a beach in France or changing in a changing room infiltrated by a camera. Not only did they publish pictures of celebrities in compromising positions, they also penned articles about them, sharing details far too graphic to be published in mainstream magazines—tales about sexual exploits and infidelity were their bread and butter. And Claw wanted in on the whole Mindy Snow and Greg Oldfellow deal.
Claw announced publicly that he would pay twenty thousand dollars to anyone who would give an interview about a sexual encounter they had had with either Mindy Snow or Greg Oldfellow. But he was not a mere gossip magazine. He wanted some weight behind his stories. His stipulation was that he would only pay if he decided to print the tale in question; and he would only print the tale in question if he could verify that the teller of the tale had actually been in a situation where the tale was feasible. In other words, his reporters would have to be actually able to corroborate that the teller of the tale had been in the same place with Snow or Oldfellow long enough to have had sex with them. Georgette, upon hearing this offer made, immediately released an angry statement declaring that if Smooth Operator actually printed some sordid accusation, Mindy Snow would sue the magazine, Claw himself, and whoever spun the tale for libel and/or slander.
This threat did not seem to bother Claw one bit. Nor did it keep more than a hundred people from making contact via the special 800 number he had set up just to field the calls. Most of the callers were idiots and/or scam artists who had never even met Mindy Snow or Greg Oldfellow, people who were just trying to cash in. A few, however, were not.
On February 14th, Valentine’s Day, and two days before the announcement of the Academy Awards nominees for 1995, Greg released a statement through John Stapleton.
“I will consent to providing a sample of my DNA for the purpose of answering the question of whether or not I am, in fact, the biological father of Mindy Snow’s child. This will be done provided the procedure is performed at a reputable laboratory, that a proper chain of evidence is followed and documented during all steps of the procedure, and that Ms. Snow pays for the procedure. It is my belief that I am unlikely to be the father of this child given Mindy’s well-documented sexual exploits and the fact that I used protection during the incident in question, but I do acknowledge that it is possible in theory. In the event that the child is determined to be of my parentage, I will, of course, accept full financial responsibility as required under the law. However, if the child is determined to be biologically mine, I will have no parental relationship with him or her other than the financial one because, if this child is mine, it was conceived in an atmosphere of fraud and deception. The child will have my pity, but I will not be a father to a child or become emotionally attached to a child that I was tricked into producing.”