Author's Note: This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and scenarios depicted in this chapter — including portrayals of real public figures — are entirely fictional and invented for narrative purposes. No real events or actions are implied or represented.
The lawsuit landed like a grenade in a crowded room.
People had opinions about Myla — they always had. The estrangement between her and Lucas was old news, chewed over by tabloids for years. Hearing that she'd allegedly conspired to have him killed was horrifying, but it tracked with a narrative the public had already half-written in their heads.
Geoffrey Eckstein was the part that didn't make sense.
The man was a philanthropist. A financier with buildings named after him. He sat on charity boards, attended galas, gave keynote speeches about corporate responsibility. Before the documentaries dropped, most people couldn't have told you a single negative thing about the man. He had no known history with Lucas — no feud, no rivalry, no public friction of any kind.
The only connection anyone could point to was the defamation suit Geoffrey had filed against Netflix and HBO Max, claiming Lucas had weaponized his influence as a stakeholder to push hit-piece documentaries. And that was recent. The assassination attempt was years old.
So how did Geoffrey Eckstein end up named in a murder conspiracy?
The internet wrestled with it. Some people took it at face value and condemned him outright. Others weren't buying it — not yet. A vocal contingent argued this was exactly the kind of move a man with Lucas Knight's resources would make: file something explosive, bury the defamation case under the weight of a bigger headline, and let public opinion do the rest.
Two days after the filing, Geoffrey stepped out of a building in Midtown Manhattan and walked directly into the press.
He didn't rush. Didn't shield his face. His security flanked him in a tight formation, broad-shouldered men in dark suits who moved the crowd without touching it.
Geoffrey stood at the center of the scrum with his hands clasped loosely in front of him, expression flat, posture relaxed.
The questions came fast and overlapping.
"Mr. Eckstein, what is your reaction to Lucas Knight's lawsuit?"
"Did you have any involvement in the assassination attempt?"
"What are your alleged motives?"
"What is your relationship with Myla Knight?"
Geoffrey let the volley hang in the air for a beat, then tilted his head slightly.
"Why are you already turning me into a criminal?" His lips curled into something that wasn't quite a smile. "This is obviously another play by L.K. — or, as everyone knows him, Lucas Knight. He's doing this to divert attention from my defamation case. I'm suing him and two major streaming platforms for a coordinated campaign to destroy my reputation, and suddenly — right before I'm set to face him in court — he files this?" He spread his hands. "Come on. You're all smart people."
The reporters kept recording. Every one of them knew this clip would lead the cycle tonight.
A BBC correspondent pushed through to the front. "What about Myla Knight specifically? The complaint alleges a direct connection between the two of you. Can you address that?"
Geoffrey's answer came without a beat of hesitation. "Who is Myla? I don't know her. I have no memory of ever speaking to her, planning anything with her, or having any involvement in whatever she may or may not have done with her stepson." He shrugged. "It's absurd. It's petty. And it won't hold up."
The delivery was clean. Measured. Convincing in the way that only someone who had rehearsed it extensively — or believed it completely — could manage.
He let two more questions bounce off him, then ended it.
"Lucas, if you're watching — and I know you are — we'll see each other soon enough. In my case. The real one." He adjusted his cuff. "Let's see how you face me after pulling a stunt like this."
He turned and walked to the van. His security closed ranks behind him, forming a wall between the press and the vehicle. The door shut and the noise dropped to nothing.
Geoffrey sank into the leather seat and let the mask fall.
His jaw was tight. His hands, which had been so relaxed in front of the cameras, gripped his knees. The composure that had played so well for the press was gone, replaced by something raw and corrosive.
Beside him sat Giselle, his right hand, and Dominic, his lead attorney. Neither of them spoke first.
Giselle broke the silence with a careful half-smile. "You've been through it, boss. It's not like you to look this rattled."
"Can you blame me?" Geoffrey's voice was low, stripped of the polish he'd just performed for the cameras. "I never expected that woman to be this careless. Whatever she left exposed — whatever trail she didn't clean up — it's dragged me into this. And now I'm standing in front of reporters denying a murder conspiracy two days before I'm supposed to be the plaintiff in a defamation case." He pressed his thumb against his temple. "I need to know exactly how much evidence they actually have connecting me to this."
Dominic pulled a folder from his briefcase, his expression tight. "I've had the team working through the night since the filing hit. We've gone through every line of the complaint. The language is aggressive, but a lot of it is framed around circumstantial links — financial proximity, overlapping timelines, communication patterns. The problem is the recorded communications and the witness testimony they reference. We don't know what those contain yet, and until discovery, we're working blind."
"Working blind isn't good enough," Geoffrey said.
"I know that." Dominic closed the folder. "We're filing a motion to dismiss on Monday. Separately, I'm exploring whether we can challenge the admissibility of whatever recordings they claim to have, depending on how they were obtained. If there's a chain-of-custody issue, we can suppress before it ever reaches a courtroom."
Geoffrey nodded, but the tension in his shoulders didn't ease.
Giselle glanced at her phone. "Myla's been calling me nonstop for two days. She's desperate — trying to reach you, trying to reach anyone connected to us. She even showed up at the office this morning asking to speak with someone."
"And?"
"Security turned her away."
"Good." Geoffrey's voice went cold. "No contact. None. Not a text, not a call, not a meeting through a third party. She doesn't exist to us anymore." He looked at Dominic. "I want every record — every email, every transaction, every communication log — that could tie us to her scrubbed, archived, or destroyed. Whatever it takes. If Lucas's team comes looking for a connection, they find a dead end."
Dominic and Giselle exchanged a glance but didn't argue.
"Whatever she did, whatever she left behind — that's her problem now," Geoffrey said. "We are not going down with her."
---
The Tribeca townhouse had been buzzing since the filing went public.
Lucas's phone hadn't stopped. Jennifer's hadn't either. Texts, DMs — a rolling wave of support from people they knew and plenty they didn't.
Dwayne sent a message at two in the morning that read simply: Whatever you need, brother. Name it.
Chris Evans posted a photo of himself and Lucas from years ago with no caption, no context — just the image. The industry understood what it meant.
Kobe posted a single line on Twitter: "Real ones don't fold. @LucasXKnight" — and within an hour it had a hundred thousand retweets.
Leonardo DiCaprio, who almost never posted anything personal, put up a black-and-white photo from a fundraiser he and Lucas had attended together with the caption: "Some people you just know. Standing with my brother."
Taylor texted Jennifer directly.
"Hey. I've been watching everything. I'm not going to blow up your phone with calls because I know it's chaos right now, but I need you to know I'm here. Whatever you guys need — literally anything — I'm a text away. How are you holding up? How's the little one?"
Jennifer replied within minutes.
Taylor didn't push for details. She didn't ask about the case, didn't speculate about Geoffrey, didn't try to insert herself into the strategy. She just stayed in the thread — checking in, sending a voice note the next morning, keeping the line warm without making it heavy.
Behind the public gestures, the private messages ran deeper. Studio heads, producers, directors — people who didn't put their names on anything remotely controversial — reached out through back channels. Most said some version of the same thing: We believe you. Let us know how we can help.
The support was real. But so was the noise on the other side.
Geoffrey's sidewalk performance outside that Midtown building had done exactly what it was designed to do. The clip traveled fast — his composure, the flat delivery, that line about not even knowing Myla. It played well. Within twenty-four hours, the narrative had split clean down the middle.
Lucas's fanbase held the line. They'd been with him through worse. But the undecided middle — the people who didn't follow celebrity feuds closely enough to have an opinion until one landed in front of them — were starting to tilt.
Geoffrey looked calm. Lucas looked silent. And in the court of public opinion, silence read as either confidence or guilt, depending on which side you'd already chosen.
The trolls came out in force.
"Lucas Knight filed a murder conspiracy lawsuit to dodge a defamation case!!!"
"Imagine being so rich you can just accuse someone of trying to kill you and the whole world takes your side without evidence."
"Geoffrey looked pretty convincing to me. Lucas hasn't said a word. Make of that what you will."
The coverage wasn't much kinder.
BBC: "Geoffrey Eckstein Denies All Links to Myla Knight: 'I Don't Even Know Her'"
Fox News: "Billionaire vs. Billionaire: Is Lucas Knight Using the Courts to Bury a Legitimate Defamation Case?"
The Wall Street Journal: "Legal Experts Question Timing of Knight's Civil Suit as Eckstein Defamation Trial Approaches"
The headlines did their work. Dinner tables picked it up. Barbershops. Office break rooms. Group chats that had nothing to do with entertainment.
A father in Ohio looked up from his phone during dinner and said, "You know what I think? I think Lucas is trying to bury this guy before the defamation case goes anywhere. Think about the timing. Geoffrey sues him for those documentaries, and suddenly Lucas files a murder conspiracy? Come on."
His wife shook her head. "That's a reach. You don't file something like that to distract from a defamation suit. The evidence has to be there or his lawyers wouldn't touch it."
"His lawyers work for him. He's worth — what, dozens of billion? More? The man literally manipulated Bitcoin and made the whole market move. You think he can't get a legal team to file whatever he wants?"
"That's not how courts work."
"That's exactly how courts work if you have enough money."
Their teenage daughter, who'd been scrolling under the table, looked up. "Dad, Lucas literally helped take down Harvey. And even Shawn. He's been going after powerful people for years. Why would he fake something like this?"
"Because rich people protect themselves, sweetheart. That's what they do."
The conversation repeated itself in different forms across the country. Coworkers debating it at lunch. Friends arguing in bar booths. College students going back and forth in lecture halls before class started.
The question was always the same: Lucas or Geoffrey?
People remembered what Lucas had done — the vaccine, the foundation, Harvey, Shawn, the string of powerful men who'd thought they were untouchable until Lucas proved otherwise. That record meant something. But it wasn't a blank check.
The public didn't follow anyone blindly, not even Lucas Knight. And Geoffrey had given them just enough to work with: a calm face, a clean denial, and a narrative that was simple enough to repeat.
Lucas is retaliating. Lucas is using the courts. Lucas hasn't responded because he doesn't have anything to respond with.
A few days passed. Lucas said nothing.
No press conference, no interview, not even a tweet. The only thing that came out of his camp was a two-line statement from his attorneys the morning after the filing — standard legal language about the complaint speaking for itself — and then nothing. Complete silence.
And while the internet ripped itself apart trying to figure out what that silence meant, Geoffrey was on every screen in America looking like the reasonable one.
People filled in the gaps the way people always do when someone powerful goes quiet.
"It's been days. No press conference, no interview, nothing. Either he's got a plan or he filed something he can't back up."
"Honestly? I just want to hear the man talk. Give me five minutes of Lucas explaining why he filed this and I'll make up my own mind."
Geoffrey's performance had done its job. It gave people permission to doubt, and doubt spread faster than conviction ever could.
---
What the public didn't see was Lucas and Jennifer walking into a members' club off Greenwich Street that evening, sitting down across from Ted Sarandos and Tobias in a back room with good scotch and no assistants.
Ted and Tobias were already settled in — jackets off, ties loosened, two glasses on the table.
They stood when Lucas and Jennifer came in, and the greetings were warm — these weren't strangers circling each other. Lucas had history with both of them. He'd helped shape content slates at both platforms, held equity in Warner, and had been a shareholder in Netflix long enough that Ted had stopped treating him like talent years ago.
They ordered food, loosened up, and spent the first twenty minutes on everything except the reason they were there. Tobias talked about a film he was trying to greenlight. Ted complained about a director who kept dodging his calls.
Jennifer asked after Tobias's kids and actually listened to the answer. It was the kind of dinner that happened when people who genuinely liked each other also happened to run half the entertainment industry.
Then Ted set his glass down.
"Alright. I'm just going to say it." He looked at Lucas. "We want to do a documentary. The real story behind the assassination attempt. Not the watered-down version from before — the full thing, built around the evidence you have."
Tobias nodded. "Same. Our side's been sitting on the defensive with Geoffrey's defamation case for months, and honestly, it's been annoying more than anything. But your filing changed the whole picture. The man who's suing us for ruining his reputation is now accused of helping plan a murder." He shrugged. "Our legal team stopped worrying about his case the morning your complaint hit the docket."
Lucas leaned back. "You two call each other before coming here?"
"Didn't have to," Ted said. "We both reached out to your team the same day. Found out we were thinking the same thing and figured we'd save everyone the trouble of having two separate dinners."
Jennifer caught Lucas's eye across the table. She knew the look — he was already running the angles, weighing what to give, what to hold back, how far ahead he could see from where he was sitting.
"I'm open to it," Lucas said. "But my legal team decides what goes in. There's evidence we can show the public and evidence that needs to stay locked until we're in a courtroom. If Geoffrey's lawyers get a preview of our strongest material through a documentary trailer, they'll spend every day between now and trial preparing a counter. I'm not giving them that."
"Understood," Ted said. "We're not asking for everything. We're asking for enough to tell the story honestly."
"And we'd rather be the ones telling it," Tobias added, "than sit back and watch cable news butcher it for ratings."
Lucas looked at Jennifer again. She gave a small nod.
"Then we'll make it work." He picked up his glass. "But I need something else."
They waited.
"I'm doing a press conference," Lucas said. "Day before Geoffrey's hearing. And I want to hold it at your building on Broadway, Ted."
Ted leaned back. "888 Broadway. We've got a full media floor up there — screening rooms, press seating, the whole setup. We've hosted events like this before. Plenty of space for every camera in the city." He didn't hesitate. "It's yours. I'll have my team clear whatever day you need."
Tobias set his glass down. "Hold on. Why Netflix? Geoffrey is suing both of us. We've got a production studio at our building literally built for cameras. Park Avenue South is a block away —"
"A block away with half the press capacity," Ted said.
"We hosted the HBO Max launch event in that studio. Three hundred journalists, full broadcast setup, live-streamed to forty countries."
"And my media floor —"
"It doesn't matter," Lucas said.
Both of them stopped.
"I don't care whose building it's in. I care about what gets said inside it. You two can figure out the venue."
He picked up his menu and went back to reading it like the conversation was over.
Ted and Tobias looked at each other. The silence lasted about three seconds.
"Our studio has better acoustics," Tobias said.
"Nobody cares about acoustics at a press conference."
"Journalists care when they can actually hear the answers."
"My building is on Broadway. Every camera crew in the city knows the address."
"And mine has a built-in control room. Your media floor needs a mobile production truck parked outside."
Jennifer caught Lucas's eye across the table. He was still reading the menu. She could tell he wasn't reading the menu.
They went back and forth for another two minutes. Jennifer counted.
Finally Ted exhaled and put his hands flat on the table. "Fine. Warner hosts. Your studio, your building, your team runs the floor." He pointed at Tobias. "But I want Netflix on that stage. Logo on the backdrop, visible in every shot. If Geoffrey sees this press conference, he sees our name right behind Lucas."
Tobias looked at Lucas. "You good with that?"
Lucas set the menu down. "Put both logos up."
Ted blinked. "Both?"
"Geoffrey is suing both of you. So let him turn on the news and see both your names behind me the day before his hearing." He shrugged. "Let him sit with that."
The table went quiet. Tobias looked at Ted. Ted looked at Tobias. Jennifer watched both of them arrive at the same place at the same time.
Tobias exhaled. "Lucas, I've never been more happy to win an argument that I didn't actually win."
"You didn't win," Ted said. "You just talked longer."
"Shut up, Ted."
Jennifer shook her head.
Lucas raised his glass. The other three met it.
---
The announcement dropped the next morning. Joint statement. Netflix, HBO Max, Lucas Knight's team. Press conference at Warner Bros. Discovery's building on Park Avenue South, scheduled for the day before Geoffrey's defamation hearing.
No details beyond that. Nothing about what Lucas would say, what evidence he'd bring, what the press conference was even about. Just the date and his name.
It didn't need anything else.
"LUCAS IS DOING A PRESSCON??? THE DAY BEFORE GEOFFREY'S CASE??? bro I need to sit down"
"wait Netflix and HBO Max are both backing this?? the companies Geoffrey is suing??? lmaooo they don't even care anymore"
"all the people who said he was hiding?? he just gave you a date and a building. your move."
"don't talk to me tomorrow. don't call me. don't text me. I'm watching this live and I'm not moving until it's over."
The countdown began.
People had every reason to be excited. The Lucas Knight–Geoffrey Eckstein saga was shaping up to be the most talked-about story of 2023 — maybe the decade. Two billionaires, one assassination attempt, a defamation lawsuit going in the wrong direction, and a press conference nobody saw coming. It had everything.
Twitter and Vine — both Lucas-owned platforms — were flooded. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube — every corner of the internet had picked a side and was fighting about it. Comment sections had turned into war zones.
Fan edits of Lucas's past takedowns were racking up millions of views. Old clips of Geoffrey's charity speeches were being dissected frame by frame for signs of dishonesty. Hashtags trended and died and trended again within hours.
The split wasn't even. Lucas had the numbers. His track record — Harvey, Shawn, the vaccine, the foundation — bought him a level of public trust that Geoffrey couldn't match no matter how many times that sidewalk clip ran on every network in the country. People remembered. And people were choosing.
Everyone understood this was going to be historic. Whatever Lucas said at that podium would set the direction of the biggest legal and public battle the entertainment world had seen in years. There was no pretending otherwise.
The media understood it too.
Crews started arriving at the Warner Bros. Discovery building on Park Avenue South five hours before the press conference was scheduled to begin. Five hours. Satellite trucks lined the block. Producers staked out camera positions on the sidewalk.
Reporters did stand-ups in front of the entrance, filling airtime with speculation because there was nothing else to report yet.
The crowds came with them.
By mid-morning, the sidewalk across from the building was packed. Mostly Lucas supporters — handmade signs, printed photos, phone screens held up with messages of support. A few read "JUSTICE FOR LUCAS AND JENNIFER." Others were blunter: "LOCK UP GEOFFREY" and "MYLA YOU'RE NEXT."
Someone had printed Geoffrey's sidewalk quote — "Who is Myla? I don't know her" — on a poster with the word LIAR stamped across it in red.
Five hours early, and it already looked like an event.
By the time the doors opened for credentialed press, the crowd had tripled. The energy outside felt more like a premiere than a legal proceeding. Police had set up barricades. Every major network had a live camera pointed at the building.
Inside the studio, the journalists found their seats and immediately started taking notes.
The backdrop told the story before Lucas said a word. Netflix and HBO Max logos, side by side, stretched across the full width of the stage behind the podium.
Clean, oversized, impossible to miss in any camera angle. And seated off to the side, in the front row reserved for non-press guests, were Ted Sarandos and Tobias — not hiding in a back office, not watching from a monitor somewhere. Sitting there, visible, present.
A murmur rippled through the press section. Reporters leaned toward each other. Cameras swung to capture the two CEOs before swinging back to the empty podium.
The message was already landing. Lucas hadn't said a single word yet, and the room understood: Netflix and HBO Max weren't just hosting this. They were standing behind it.
The two companies Geoffrey Eckstein was suing for defamation had put their names on the wall and their leaders in the chairs, and they wanted everyone to see it.
The press conference hadn't even started yet and the numbers were already absurd.
The YouTube livestream from Reuters hit seventy thousand viewers within the first three minutes of going live — just a static wide shot of an empty podium with two logos behind it. By the time the CNN and BBC streams joined, the combined viewership was climbing past two hundred thousand and accelerating.
TV ratings would come later, but the networks already knew what they had. This was going to be one of the most-watched press events of the year, and nobody had said a word yet.
Then Lucas walked out.
He came from the left side of the stage, unhurried, Neil right beside him. Both in suits, both composed, but the energy they carried was different — Lucas moved like a man who'd already decided how this was going to end, and Neil moved like a man who'd helped him plan it.
They reached the podium. Neil stepped slightly to the side and stood with his hands clasped in front of him. Lucas adjusted the microphone, looked out across the room, and let the silence hold for just long enough that every camera locked on.
"Thank you all for being here," he said. "I know there's been a lot of speculation over the past few days, and I appreciate your patience. We're going to keep this straightforward — I'll make a brief statement, and then we'll open it up for questions. Ask whatever you want. I'm not here to dodge anything."
That last line landed. Reporters shifted in their seats. A few exchanged glances. Lucas Knight doing an open Q&A at a press conference was rare enough that the format itself was news.
Hands went up before he even finished the sentence.
Lucas scanned the room and pointed. "Wall Street Journal. Go ahead."
A young reporter near the center stood up, notebook already open. "Mr. Knight, thank you. The civil complaint you filed names both Myla Knight and Geoffrey Eckstein as co-conspirators in the assassination attempt against you and your wife in New York City. Can you speak to what evidence supports those allegations, and how two people with no publicly known relationship to each other ended up connected in this filing?"
Lucas didn't hesitate.
"The short answer is they do have a relationship. They've had one for years." He leaned into the microphone slightly. "Geoffrey Eckstein went on television a few days ago and said — and I'm quoting him — 'Who is Myla? I don't know her.' That's what he told the world. He looked right into a camera and said he'd never spoken to her, never planned anything with her, never had any involvement."
He paused.
"That's a lie. And it's not even a good one."
The room went dead quiet.
"Myla Knight has a second Facebook account under the name Mylene." Lucas let that sit. "Not her legal name. No photo of her face. On the surface, it doesn't look like her. But we've confirmed it through IP login data, device fingerprinting, and content that directly ties the account to Myla — personal photos shared from her primary phone, check-ins at locations matching her known travel, and private messages referencing details only she would know." He glanced at Neil, who gave a slight nod. "That account — Mylene — was friends with Geoffrey Eckstein. Not for weeks. For years."
Neil stepped to the laptop on the side table and the projector behind Lucas lit up.
The first slide showed the Mylene profile — sparse, no clear face in the profile photo, seemingly anonymous. The second slide laid out the digital forensic trail connecting Mylene to Myla: matching IP addresses, device IDs, timestamped photo uploads that corresponded with Myla's known locations.
The third slide showed the friends list. Geoffrey Eckstein's name and profile, connected to Mylene, dated well before the assassination attempt. The fourth showed the block — timestamped three weeks after the attack. Geoffrey didn't just unfriend the account. He blocked it.
"So when Geoffrey says he doesn't know Myla," Lucas said, "maybe he's technically right. Maybe he knows her as Mylene. But he knew her. And he blocked her three weeks after someone tried to kill me and my wife."
The reporters were on their feet. Cameras zoomed in on the projector screen. Photographers fired off shots so fast the shutter sounds blurred into a single continuous rattle.
Lucas let them take it in. He didn't rush.
"We also have Twitter interactions between them. Direct replies, public exchanges — Myla using yet another handle, but the same device, the same IP patterns. And we have emails." The next slide showed a redacted email chain, headers visible, body partially blacked out — but the sender and recipient lines were clear. "Back and forth. Multiple threads. Exposed through the same device connecting the Mylene and Myla accounts."
He looked directly into the center camera. "This is what we're comfortable showing publicly. What we're keeping for the courtroom is worse."
A reporter from CNN didn't even wait to be called on. "Mr. Knight, Geoffrey Eckstein has characterized your lawsuit as a retaliatory move designed to distract from his defamation case against Netflix and HBO Max. How do you respond to that?"
"I'd respond by asking him to explain why he was Facebook friends with a woman he claims he's never met — for years — and then blocked her three weeks after someone tried to kill me." Lucas's voice was even, but the edge was there. "He can call it retaliation. He can call it a distraction. He can call it whatever helps him sleep. But I didn't fabricate device fingerprints. I didn't forge email headers. And I didn't invent years of digital history between two people who supposedly have never spoken."
He tapped the podium once with his index finger. "He said what he said on camera. Now he gets to explain why none of it was true."
A BBC correspondent jumped in. "Are you confident this evidence will hold up in court?"
"I wouldn't be standing here if I wasn't."
"And regarding Myla Knight — is she cooperating with your legal team?"
"No. And I don't need her to."
The questions kept coming. Lucas answered every one. No dodging, no deflecting, no legal boilerplate. Neil stood to his side the entire time, occasionally leaning in to murmur something when a question touched on evidence that hadn't been cleared for public discussion, and Lucas would adjust — pulling back just enough without ever looking like he was hiding something.
The evidence was plain and it was on the screen behind him and it was being recorded by every camera in the room and streamed to every corner of the internet.
The journalists didn't know exactly what would happen to Geoffrey Eckstein after today. But they knew one thing with absolute certainty.
He had a lot of explaining to do.
Not every reporter in the room was there to report.
A few of them — scattered across the press section in seats that didn't correspond to any major outlet — worked for Geoffrey. Not officially, not in any way that would show up on a payroll, but the arrangement was understood. Small outlets that ran favorable coverage.
Digital publications that had received quiet funding through shell companies tied to Eckstein's network. Freelancers who'd been handed credentials and talking points in the same envelope.
They were planted, and they'd been watching the press conference with tightening jaws and restless hands since the first slide went up.
Lucas was winning the room. And they couldn't let that stand.
A man near the back raised his hand. He didn't wait to be called on.
"Mr. Knight — Ryan Callister, Independent Media Wire." He stood up, holding a small recorder like a prop. "You've shown screenshots and metadata on a projector. That's compelling for television, sure. But screenshots can be fabricated. IP logs can be spoofed."
"Device fingerprints can be planted by anyone with the right technical resources — resources that someone with your wealth has easy access to." He tilted his head. "So my question is simple: who provided this information? What is the original source? Because without knowing who gathered this evidence and how, everything you've shown us today is just a slideshow."
A few reporters in the room nodded. It was a fair question on the surface. Even the ones who weren't on Geoffrey's payroll had to admit the sourcing mattered.