“I was wrongfully accused of crimes committed by my brother, yes,” I replied, my voice like ice.
“Wrongfully accused?” Vance whipped out a thick folder. “I have here medical and psychiatric affidavits from ten years ago. Signed by top doctors. They detail a young woman, traumatized by a near-drowning, who developed severe paranoia, delusions of grandeur, and an obsessive, violent jealousy regarding her brother’s financial success.”
“Objection! Hearsay, highly inflammatory!” Jenkins shouted.
“Sustained. Mr. Vance, move on.”
But the poison was already in the water. Vance spent the next hour twisting every piece of my life. He painted my ten-year absence not as a tragic exile, but as a deliberate, psychotic estrangement. He made my intelligence work sound like the paranoid delusions of a broken mind trying to frame her innocent family out of spite.
Then came the knife twist.
To corroborate his narrative, Vance called my parents to the stand as character witnesses for the defense.
