I roll over slowly and find him standing in the middle of the cabin. The early morning light cuts across his face, turning his skin beautifully golden as he stares at his phone.
I whisper his name and he doesn’t respond.
His eyes stay on his phone. His silence is unsettling and I ease out of bed carefully, my bare feet cold against the cold floor. I stand in front of him, naked, soft shivers running over my skin. I want to be warm again; I want him warm against me again. I press my hand against his face, tilting it toward me.
Something is wrong.
He hands me his phone and abruptly walks out of the cabin, closing the door behind him. I turn to the screen and find SVO’s website there, its logo leading the latest headline.
I stop breathing.
INSIDE THE UNITY PROJECT: BRUTAL RITUALS, PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL ABUSE DEFINES LIFE INSIDE ONE OF UPSTATE NEW YORK’S MOST BELOVED ORGANIZATIONS.
My thumb scrolls the article, trying to make sense of the words.
SVO has a policy of the extremely judicious use of anonymous sources …
The information we’ve presented to you has been verified …
The op-ed you are about to read was written by someone intimately familiar with the inner workings of The Unity Project, who cannot be named …
* * *
I go to Lev. He turns to me, all of me unclothed, freezing in the early morning air.
His eyes travel over my body while my eyes study his face and I feel I’m seeing more of him than I ever have, the boy he was, the one who stood at the mercy of his mother’s anger, who suffered it, who suffered every day of his life and still managed to find a world worth saving in spite of it.
He was only a boy.
“You don’t believe it,” he says. “Do you.”
I press my hands against his face, refusing to let the lies of the op-ed fill what little space there is between us.
He tells us to stand.
I tell him I only believe in things I can see.
The last seventy-two hours have been a waking nightmare. SVO’s op-ed topped the national trending topics on Twitter for twenty-four hours. The public response has bordered on theatre of the absurd. The AP picked it up. Vice is having a field day. The NYC media has dug in, staking out all three Unity Centers, discouraging the cold and hungry from seeking food and shelter in hopes for a statement from any Project members who just want to get past them to help those who need it the most. Casey begins fielding calls from Project connections—counselors, doctors, mentors, educators and on and on—who are worried about guilt by association because no one has any strength of conviction anymore.
But Lev says this was always the world The Unity Project was up against.
I stand quietly outside of Casey’s office, listening as they map the fallout, of their directives for members in terms of navigating the press (say nothing), what they’ll do about the spring outreach initiatives they’ve planned, whether to wait for the worst of this to pass—if it will pass—or if those things are lost to them now.
Paul keeps texting me, asking me what I thought and congratulating me as though I had anything to do with it. He wants to meet with me, to talk. He has things to say he thinks I’ll want to hear. I don’t answer him.
Lev is choosing silence, more now than he ever has, and maybe if this was another Vice piece, he could get away with it—but I’ve seen movements live and die on social media. Once it gets its hooks in like this, the window for recovery closes fast.
“You need to issue a press release,” I say, letting myself into the room because I can’t stand it anymore. They look at me. “A wholesale denial.”
“It would only be seen as an admission of guilt,” Casey replies. “The problem with the op-ed is there was just enough truth in it that we can’t totally refute it. Yes, we have a Reflection Room. We don’t record Attestations, we don’t use them as collateral to prevent members from leaving—it’s no different than Catholic confession. Yes, we have meetings where we hold each other accountable and work as a group to resolve conflict, but we don’t abuse each other. Right now, the most frequently used search keywords alongside The Unity Project are Peoples Temple, Jonestown, Dust and Stars, Haven and Branch Davidians. This discourse leaves no room for