If she wasn't so busy pretending not to be embarrassed, celebrity author and sex-crimes prosecutor Linda Fairstein would have no choice but to acknowledge that the strange case of Oliver Jovanovic has all the makings of a very good book.
As with all her previous best-sellers, it would be a work of fiction - but only just. And like the graphic, gritty novels that have earned her more than $2 million, the plot would hang on the exploits of heroine Alexandra Cooper, who, Fairstein admits, is her "younger, slimmer, blonder alter ego".
Except this time, if her next novel were to mirror the real-life prosecution that put Jovanovic behind bars for kidnapping, rape and sexual torture, Fairstein would be forced to introduce a different kind of villain. Someone like herself.
And this time, the plot would come with a twist that would shock the likes of feminist Gloria Steinem and first lady Hillary Clinton, two leading voices in the chorus of admirers that has hailed Fairstein for her two decades of putting rapists and molesters behind bars.
"This case is about a young man who was railroaded by an ambitious and ruthless prosecutor - but that is only where it starts," said Jovanovic's lawyer, Jack Litman, as he stood beside his newly released client."It is also an indictment of our criminal justice system. It is a lesson in the ways a fanatical, zealous prosecutor can convict a man in the press, and how to poison public opinion so thoroughly that there is no chance of an unbiased jury or even a fair judge.
"And it is also about cowardice - the cowardice of people in Fairstein's office who knew what was going on and did not utter one single word to stop it."
Eighteen months ago, when Fairstein's team from the Manhattan Sex Crimes Unit prosecuted Jovanovic at what was billed as "the first cyber-rape trial", the verdict was a sensation. Peppered with testimony that might have been lifted from the imagination of a sado-masochistic pornographer, the three-week trial was played out before a public gallery in which there was seldom an empty seat. Outside the courthouse, women's groups dangled Jovanovic's effigy at the end of a rope and a congresswoman suggested he be castrated with a blunt knife. All this before even a single word of evidence.
And all the while, as Fairstein darted from one TV interview to the next, she smeared Jovanovic in one breath and promoted her whodunnits with the next.
The bizarre case began in 1998 when the 30-year-old Jovanovic met his victim in an Internet chat room, took her to dinner and then back to his tiny apartment near Columbia University, where he was studying for a doctorate in microbiology. No sooner did the victim step inside, Fairstein's team alleged, than Jovanovic threw her to the floor, gagged her with electrical tape, trussed her with a nylon clothesline, and then spent the best part of the next two days using her as his plaything. The 22-year-old victim, dubbed Madame X by the tabloids, said the quietly spoken defendant subjected her to an ordeal of abuse, torture and degradation.
Jovanovic denied everything apart from what he said was a short and relatively conventional sexual encounter that concluded when his companion got dressed and left. He admitted to police that he found her "a bit flaky", but added that since she was keen to have sex so was he. The next he heard from her was when detectives kicked in his door almost three weeks later.
When the trial was over and Jovanovic had been sentenced, Fairstein seemed even more eager than before to milk the case. With her new book, Cold Hit, in the stores, she embarked on a nationwide tour to promote it, handing out press kits filled with laudatory newspaper clippings about the Jovanovic prosecution. One particularly self-serving item described Fairstein as "the country's most courageous courtroom crusader". Another reminded reporters that Mrs Clinton had suggested she might make a good attorney-general.
But there was more to the story, as the Appeals Court ruled when it overturned Jovanovic's 25-year sentence. Not only did Fairstein's underling attorneys sit on a wealth of physical evidence that might have exonerated Jovanovic, she also appears to have deliberately ignored the one fact that the appellate judges found most obvious: it is physically impossible to rape a woman whose legs are tied together at the knees.
"Prosecutors were well aware that their `victim' was a thief and an habitual liar who had accused three other men of rape, including her own father and uncle," defence attorney Litman said. "We know this because her own grandmother and aunt both contacted Ms Fairstein's office to plead with her not to proceed with the case, to tell her that the alleged victim is a very, very troubled young woman.
"But nobody associated with Fairstein had sufficient decency to say `Hold on! We're here to prosecute the guilty, not to help our boss score another best-seller'."
Beginning with the pre-trial publicity blitz, Fairstein's office did a painstakingly thorough character assassination on Jovanovic.
When the victim's relatives tried to tell of previous attempts to frame her father, an uncle and a former beau, they were ignored. And when Jovanovic's own mother attempted to raise the victim's history, she was pointedly reminded that she might yet faces charges herself, as she had counselled her son to bar police from his apartment until a lawyer arrived.
As it happened, the evidence of the victim's grandmother and aunt was deemed inadmissible because it related to the victim's previous sexual history, the so-called Rape Shield Law intended to spare victims from aggressive cross-examination.
At Columbia University, Fairstein's investigators hunted for "the other victims" whom she "knew for a fact" to exist. The next day, after a feminist group had plastered the campus with posters bearing a mugshot of Jovanovic, unnamed sources told the papers that "two more victims have been found". Later, prosecutors admitted they had no such witnesses. But by then it was too late to save what little was left of Jovanovic's reputation.
Two weeks after the alleged attack, when the victim went to the police, she gave them a pair of panties said to be stained with Jovanovic's semen. Nothing of the kind was found - although forensic tests did recover a pubic hair belonging to a still-unidentified third party.
Finally, there was the unheard evidence spelling out the victim's passion for hard-core SM fantasies. In the cyber-courtship that preceded their date, the victim sent Jovanovic thousands of words detailing her visits to Manhattan's whips-and-leather clubs and why her ambition in life was to direct a snuff film in which an abducted victim would be slowly tortured to death.
Jovanovic's responses, describing his own, much milder fantasies, were entered into evidence while the victim's words were never presented for the jury's consideration.
"This has been a nightmare that never ends," Jovanovic said last week when Fairstein, displaying an unusual reluctance to go before the cameras, quietly announced through an aide that she intended to try the case all over again. "The prosecution threw the rule book out the window to convict me and now they are trapped: If they don't do anything, if they just walk away, everyone will know that the whole case was bogus.
"So now I am to be prosecuted again to preserve the reputation of a prosecution team that should be on trial itself."