My father nodded slowly, and something like shame moved across his weathered face.

“Everyone knew, in the end.

At first people laughed at him.

Some college kid who thought he could take on a whole corporation with a notebook and a handful of questions.

They mocked him for it.” My father’s voice was heavy with a decade of hindsight.

“That is how they get away with it, you know,” he said.

“Not with guns or threats, not at first.

With ridicule.