His Lesson Killed My Mother Now He Will Pay Chapter 49
The night before the hearing, Sloane released another interview.
She no longer had an account, so the video was posted on her law firm’s public page.
“Nora’s so-called nonprofit system is nothing more than my intellectual property in a different wrapper. First she destroyed me with litigation, then she took everything from me.”
The reporter asked why she had never claimed infringement before.
Sloane’s eyes reddened.
“Because I thought she was just overwhelmed by grief. I didn’t want to drive her into the ground.”
The phone on my desk rang.
It was the director of one of our partner institutions, his voice strained. “Ms. Reyes, until the copyright dispute is resolved, we have to suspend our use of the system.”
“I understand.”
“And our staff are worried the court will subpoena user responses.”
“They won’t get them from us.”
I opened the permissions log.
Every refusal to upload, every skipped question, every withdrawal of consent had been recorded.
But any content involving users’ real experiences had already been deleted, according to each person’s choice.
The director was silent for a moment.
“Won’t this hurt your case?”
“Yes.”
Without the original data, we would lose some of the material that could have demonstrated how the system functioned.
But that material had never belonged to me.
I could not prove I respected privacy by first holding someone else’s privacy hostage.
After the call, Aisha set the evidence box for the next day on the desk.
“Ready?”
I picked up my mother’s handwritten drafts.
“This time, I don’t need a single user to testify for me.”