Center Stage
Copyright© 2025 by Lumpy
Chapter 12
I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing. The sun was all the way up and I blearily noticed the clock said it was half past noon as I slapped the nightstand a few times before finding my phone, which had stopped ringing by the time I found it. I vaguely remembered an alarm going off sometime around nine and shutting it off.
The phone started ringing again, and I saw I had nine missed calls, meaning it had been going off for a while before it managed to wake me up. I was exhausted when I rolled into bed last night, but I hadn’t thought I was that tired.
I saw it was Warren’s name on the caller ID. I wasn’t late for my call time, which wasn’t until three, but maybe he was calling to check in and see how everything turned out last night.
“Hey, Warren, what’s up?” I said, answering the phone and sitting up in bed.
“Have you seen the article?” he asked, a weird tone in his voice.
“The what? No, I literally just woke up. I didn’t get back to the hotel until almost two.”
“We have a problem. There’s an article on SpilledTea about last night.”
SpilledTea was a gossip website calling itself a celebrity news site, but was more of a celebrity gossip site that had a bad history of invading people’s privacy. One which I, sadly, read from time to time because their stories were outrageous.
“What do you mean?”
“The article is actually about Alina. They’re claiming she was drugged at the party and that the winner of the last season of The Stage was seen carrying her out unconscious. They’re suggesting you took her back to a hotel and took advantage of her while she was out of it, and they have several quotes from the party that you were drunk, reeking of booze.”
“What? That’s not true at all! I was on the phone with you half the time. She was on something, but there were these other guys assaulting her. I only took her back to her hotel because she was too wasted to be left alone. And I don’t drink.”
“I know, Charlie. I know,” Warren said, trying to calm me down. “I’ve already talked to Arthur and Benny about this. They’re confident there won’t be any legal trouble, even if Alina or someone from her camp tries to press charges. The real problem, for us, is public perception. The optics on this are bad, and so are the pictures of you putting her in the taxi and getting in with her.”
“Shit. Okay, give me a second.”
I pulled the phone away and put it on speaker, then opened a browser on my phone, going to SpilledTea. Right there on the front page was a picture of me half-carrying Alina into the cab. The headline read, “Alina’s Night of Terror: Alina Petrova’s Disturbing Ordeal with Reality TV Star.”
I skimmed the article, my stomach sinking further with every word. It was full of innuendo, never quite saying it but strongly hinting that I had drugged Alina at the party and then taken her back to her hotel room where I assaulted her. There were quotes from anonymous sources claiming I had been drunk and reeking of booze.
Nothing in the article outright accused me of assaulting her, but it heavily implied it. And the pictures of me practically carrying Alina and pushing her into a cab before getting in were, indeed, very bad. It was obvious from the pictures that Alina was completely out of it and I was doing all the work to put her in the cab.
“Warren, this is bad,” I said, feeling sick. “Really bad.”
“I know.”
I switched over to my social media accounts. My follower count had exploded over the past month as my appearances on talk shows and the footage of me performing had made the rounds.
On Switcher, where I’d gotten the most traction since it started as a music video app where people lip-synced to songs or showed clips of performances, the comments were a mix of people defending me and others condemning me.
“He said on The Stage that he doesn’t drink. Why would he be drunk?”
“Just another celebrity thinking they can do whatever they want. Disgusting. #Scumbag”
“Can’t believe Charlie would do something like this. He seemed so genuine on The Stage. Guess it was all an act. #CancelCharlieNelson”
“Another man taking advantage of a vulnerable woman. When will it end? The music industry needs to do better. #TimesUp”
“Innocent until proven guilty, people. Let’s not jump to conclusions based on some gossip site. Charlie deserves the benefit of the doubt. #IStandWithCharlie”
“So disappointed right now. I was rooting for Charlie, but if these allegations are true, I can’t support him anymore. Fame really does change people.:(“
“Y’all are so quick to believe the worst. Where’s the proof? These are serious accusations to make without ANY evidence. #InnocentUntilProvenGuilty”
I was reading it all out loud to Warren as I read the comments. On Cadence, where we were doing the most streams, people could leave comments on songs, and my album was on the front page as the “most talked about” with people arguing back and forth on my tracks. Some insisted I was innocent; others claimed my nice guy persona on The Stage had been an act.
Widget, which was mostly for older people but where I’d gotten a following thanks to Kat, was even worse, with people viciously fighting amongst themselves. The article was getting posted and reposted. The site was usually toxic, which is why I hardly ever went there, but this was worse than anything I’d seen on other sites. The threads accusing me of being a predator were beating the posts arguing the article didn’t actually prove anything.
All of that, thousands and thousands of messages, for an article that had only been up for three hours.
“I know,” Warren said when I finally stopped reading off the angry comments and dropped my phone on the bed. “You’re not the first to go through this, and we can survive it, and you have a lot of people defending you, which is good. It’s also why we need to get you a PR person as soon as possible. This week at the latest.”
“I know, I know,” I said, flopping back on the bed. “What do we do next, while we wait to find one?”
“It depends on what Alina decides to do. Has she reached out to you at all?”
“No, nothing. You think she will?”
“Hard to say. Her team might advise her to steer clear entirely, or they might reach out privately. If we could get her denying it, that would go a long way.”
“I’m not sure she was conscious enough to deny it,” I said.
“I know. Were you ever alone with her? Even for a minute?”
“No. We were at the party, then in the cab with the cabby, and then with the doorman who helped me get her upstairs. An assistant showed up as soon as we got to her room and took over from there. I rode the elevator back down with the doorman.”
“At least that’s good. The drunk part hurts, but we can work with it.”
“I didn’t drink anything but Diet Coke,” I insisted. “I had a run-in with Kirsten Lindstrom. She was hammered and invited me back to her hotel. When I turned her down, she threw her drink on me and started screaming. Everyone at the party saw it. I swear, people saw what happened. The cabby and the doorman, at the very least, can back up my story.”
“Alright, I’ll get on it. See what statements we can get out there letting people know what really happened. But Charlie, for now, you need to keep a low profile. No going out, no parties, no public appearances unless absolutely necessary.”
“But the tour...”
“The shows will go on as planned. But outside of that, you need to be a ghost. We can’t risk any more bad press or opportunities for people to twist the narrative.”
“They lied, though. Can’t we ... I don’t know, sue them?”
“Arthur and Benny are working on the legal end of things already, but Benny said there probably isn’t any way we can go after the website. They were very careful to walk the line of defamation, which is harder to prove as you get more name recognition, and they’ve got a lot of experience fighting bigger names than yours over their stuff. Right now, let’s focus on the PR aspect of it and make sure it doesn’t derail anything we have planned. We’ll weather this storm, Charlie. Hang in there,” Warren said, disconnecting.
After Warren hung up, I checked the three dozen unread messages that had come in since I got back to the hotel ten hours ago. It wasn’t hard to figure out what they were. The news had spread fast and I had texts from what felt like half the school, or at least those who knew me, along with messages from Chef, my bandmates, and even Mrs. Phillips.
Mrs. Phillips and Chef were checking in on me and making sure I was okay, while the rest were varieties of ‘omg, what happened.’
There was one text, however, that was noticeable by its complete absence. While I had faith that Kat trusted me, she’d gone through a lot of her own trauma and the article was written in a way to very much make me come off as guilty. That she hadn’t texted me when everyone else did worried me.
“Hey, you,” Kat answered on the fourth ring, slightly out of breath. “What’s up?”
“Hey, have you been online at all this morning? Or maybe had some calls?”
“I had some calls, but I was in practice and figured I’d call them back. I was about to, since I just finished, but you called before I could. Everything okay?”
“So you haven’t talked to anyone?”
“No, I’ve been in the pool. Why? What happened?”
“There’s an article. About me. From last night.”
“What kind of article?” she said.
It was a matter of fact, not accusatory or even concerned.
“It’s on SpilledTea; I’ll send you the link when we’re done. They’re saying I drugged and assaulted a model at the party last night.”
“What?” Kat’s voice pitched up. “That’s insane. You would never-”
“I didn’t,” I cut in quickly. “I swear, Kat, it’s not true.”
“Of course it’s not. If I had to guess, you were white knighting and someone’s taking things out of context. So just tell me what happened for real. Not what the article says.”
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