He looked down at me from the stage with an expression of calibrated, sorrowful pity, and he picked up his microphone.

“I’m so sorry,” he told the room, his voice thick with counterfeit grief.

“My wife has been struggling with a serious illness for months.

I’ve tried to protect her.

But you can see that she’s a danger to herself.” On cue, the screens behind him changed — the logo gone, replaced by grainy, doctored footage of a woman who resembled me in an intimate embrace with a man I had never met.

The crowd gasped; the whispers caught like fire.