Chapter 2 - The Digital Smear Campaign
The silence that settled over the cove after the caterers fled was thick and heavy, punctuated only by the cries of gulls and the rhythmic crashing of the tide. But by Sunday morning, the storm had simply migrated from my lawn to the internet.
I didn't have an Instagram account, nor did I care to learn how TikTok worked. But my former nursing supervisor, Clara Higgins—a woman with whom I had shared night shifts at Maine Medical Center for twenty-two years—called me at six-fifteen in the morning.
"Marilyn," Clara’s gravelly voice barked through the receiver. "You need to see what this little viper is posting about you."
"Good morning to you too, Clara," I said, setting my oatmeal on the small wooden table. "I don't need to see it. I already lived it."
"No, Marilyn, you don't understand. She’s got over two hundred thousand followers, and she’s turning you into the devil incarnate. She posted a video of herself crying in her ruined wedding dress. She's claiming you have early-onset dementia, that you agreed to host the wedding months ago, and then you had an unprovoked mental breakdown, locked them out of the house, and called your 'warden friends' to execute a family vendetta."
I chewed my oatmeal slowly, looking out at the dunes. Down on the beach, the bright orange cord had already been re-strung by the conservation volunteers at daybreak. Three little eggs were still safe in the shallow divot of sand.
"Let her post, Clara," I said. "Paper lasts longer than pixels, and federal judges don't read Instagram."
"Marilyn, she’s doxxing your address!" Clara's voice spiked with genuine concern. "She posted a picture of your cottage with the caption: *'Pray for my fiancé’s mother. Her mind is going, but her cruelty is deliberate. We are heartbroken.'* People are commenting that they should come egg your house. They're calling your phone company, your local clinic—someone even posted your old hospital department!"
I stopped chewing.
In my line of work, you learn very quickly that you do not negotiate with an infection. You don't try to reason with sepsis. You isolate it, culture it, and apply a lethal dose of broad-spectrum antibiotic.
"Clara," I said calmly. "Do you still have your nephew’s contact information? The one who works for the state attorney general’s cybercrimes unit?"
"David? Of course I do."
"Call him. Ask him if doxxing a federal witness in an active Endangered Species Act investigation constitutes witness intimidation under Maine statute."
There was a long beat of silence on Clara’s end of the line, followed by a low, wicked chuckle. "God almighty, Marilyn. I forgot how terrifying you are when you're awake."
"I spent thirty years managing residents who thought they were gods," I replied. "A twenty-six-year-old girl with lip filler doesn't frighten me."
Within three hours, Sienna’s narrative began to hit snags.
What Sienna Price had failed to realize was that small-town Maine has an immune system of its own. The local tow-truck driver who had been hired to clear the illegally parked wedding overflow vehicles was the brother-in-law of the town selectman. The caterer whose staff had been left with eight thousand dollars worth of braised short ribs and salmon was based out of Kennebunkport, and she was furious.
By noon, the caterer had posted her own side of the story on Facebook:
>*"Regarding the 'tragic' cancellation of the Price-Smallwood wedding: Our company was provided with a forged venue agreement signed by Sienna Price, claiming she held legal title to the property at 42 Heron Cove Road. The homeowner, Mrs. Marilyn Smallwood, never consented to this event. Furthermore, our staff was subjected to racial slurs by the mother of the bride when we refused to drive our ten-ton refrigerated truck across an active sand dune. The Price family has currently canceled their credit card payment for our services. We are filing a police report for theft of services."*
The internet is a volatile creature. It loves an innocent victim until it smells a fraudulent villain.
Within hours, internet sleuths began picking apart Sienna’s "heartbreak" video. Someone noticed that the background of her video—supposedly filmed while sobbing in her hotel room—featured an open bottle of champagne and her mother, Lorna, calmly inspecting a pair of Louboutin shoes on a bed in the background.
Then came the conservation community.
The Audubon Society and the Maine Plover Project shared the official press release from the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. The release didn't mince words:
>*"Three individuals have been cited under Title 16 of the United States Code, Section 1538, for intentional destruction of an active nesting site of Charadrius melodus. Wildlife cameras captured clear footage of the deliberate destruction of an egg and nesting boundary markers. Fines and restitution are pending federal court review."*
Under Sienna’s viral video, where thousands of sympathetic comments had originally cheered her on, the tide turned with the speed of an Atlantic squall.
*“Wait, you stepped on an endangered bird egg for your photo shoot?!”*
*“You tried to steal your mother-in-law’s house?!”*
*“The caterer says you bounced a check for eight grand!”*
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By five o'clock that evening, Sienna’s account had gone private. But the damage had already begun to metastasize.
***
