occurred, the information listed in the corporate heading would be changed. This was simply a cosmetic change, but one that gave Schyman in-house clout. It didn’t happen very often.
Anders Schyman tore his hair. The situation was unpleasant. Michelle Carlsson had caused Kvällspressen a lot of trouble for a long time, and if truth be told, Kvällspressen had caused Michelle Carlsson trouble too. Some of his associates at the paper had decided that the TV personality didn’t cut the mustard, something they delighted in telling their readers. For two years running, she had topped the ‘Worst-dressed women of the year’ list. She had been called ‘The most over-hyped Swede of the millennium’, a ‘TV bimbo’ and other even less flattering names that Schyman couldn’t immediately recall. They jeered at her shows and lampooned her in the culture section of the paper, they gave her scathing reviews in the TV column and poked fun at her when she was given Kvällspressen ’s People’s Choice award. Her landslide victory caused the paper to revise the rules for the award. The readers were no longer allowed to vote for anyone they wanted. A jury at the paper, led by Barbara Hanson, nominated four TV personalities that the readers could choose between. The last time around, Anders Schyman had never even heard of two of them.
As long as the criticism and the antics had remained at that level, Michelle Carlsson and her representatives had kept their distance.
She started suing them when the articles about her alleged shell-company dealings were published. As far as Anders Schyman could tell, the paper was going to go down for this.
The second time Michelle sued them was when they published nude photos of her and a man who was claimed to be an escaped convict. Michelle Carlsson was offended by the inference that she would have anything to do with a criminal. And to make matters worse, the paper had got the man’s identity all wrong – he was a Norwegian film star, and he decided to sue the paper as well. The film star was a married man with children and he claimed that the nude pictures had violated his privacy. The paper’s strategy in the two different cases was somewhat schizoid.
With regard to Michelle, they claimed that her companion was clearly identifiable as being the Norwegian film star, which meant there was no reason for her to take offence even if the paper had happened to infer that the man was a criminal.
With regard to the film star, the paper claimed that the photos did not depict the star at all, that the man in question was alleged to be an escaped convict, a criminal, which meant that they could not possibly constitute a violation of the film star’s privacy in any way.
Anders Schyman sighed and rubbed his forehead.
The third court case, which was almost settled, concerned Michelle Carlsson’s mother. A reporter had found the TV star’s lush of a mother at a hotel in Riga where she, with limited success, supported herself as a prostitute.
‘These days there are too many young and good-looking girls in the business,’ the woman complained on the front page of Kvällspressen.
She had also been allowed to beg Michelle to get in touch with her, since she missed her little girl so much and their falling-out had pained her to such an extent that she had succumbed to drink and drugs. Schyman’s cheeks burned with shame when he remembered the headline: ‘Help me, my beloved Michelle!’
The fact that Michelle Carlsson’s mother had abandoned her husband and daughter when the girl was three was never mentioned. The only reason they had been able to reach a settlement at all was because of Michelle’s reluctance to discuss her mother publicly. Naturally, this was an expedient solution for the paper, and one that was cheaper than paying a lawyer for a protracted court case. The reason they hadn’t settled the other cases out of court in a similar way was because Michelle Carlsson had refused to do