Kate Harding

“Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist. This story is not that. The story is not that.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“I despised Judge Lambert with every fiber of my being, the way he addressed me as ma’am and The Defendant as young man, then later as cowboy, compadre, partner. I was twenty-three years old to The Defendant’s thirty-two. I had earned top marks in my first year of law school. I was the young woman, the compadre, closer to his equal than The Defendant, but you never would have known it by the way the judge spoke to him.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“The Defendant flaunted his true nature with audacious displays of ineptitude time and time again, and I wanted to tell these girls, I wanted to tell everyone in that Starbucks, that they should be irate that effort and money had gone into dusting off the story and telling it again for a new generation, only for the filmmaker to wear the same blinders as the men who wrote the headlines forty years ago.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“Sometimes I think The Defendant is just another old wives’ tale. That law enforcement backed up his self-purported claims of brilliance to cover up their own incompetence—in interviews they gave the media, in testimonies they made before the judge—and it all cemented from there, hardening into a generational truth passed down from mother to daughter. Consider this my own warning: The man was no diabolical genius. He was your run-of-the-mill incel whom I caught picking his nose in the courtroom. More than once.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women