I was scrolling through pictures of Jeff Goldblum from some of my favorite movies, including Nashville, The Fly, The Player, and The Big Chill when I stumbled onto something new.
Someone had recently uploaded some behind-the-scenes photos from a 1980 TV show starring Goldblum called Tenspeed and Brown Shoe.
I’d seen clips of Jeff Goldblum in some older movies like Death Wish and California Split, but I’d never heard of Tenspeed and Brown Shoe.
After that series of photographs ended, I found myself clicking through another recently added group of pictures related to a disaster movie from a couple of years ago. That movie was better than it had any right to be, but it was all due to Jeff Goldblum. He played an eccentric geologist concerned with global warming. He stole every scene he was in.
I was two or three photos into this new series when I noticed a familiar face.
It was the blond publicity assistant from the Tabitha Henry video.
She was standing in the background of a photograph that had been taken on a red carpet somewhere in Italy. I wasn’t surprised to see her—after all, the studio she worked for had made a bunch of films with Jeff Goldblum—but, because she was such a huge part of that disturbing video, I moved over to the studio’s Facebook page and continued clicking through images.
I started by looking through the publicity photographs from their most recent movies, but I wasn’t able to find the tall blond woman anywhere. Then, I went back and started looking through photographs taken the year after the Tabitha Henry incident.
I was clicking through the press tour photographs of a blockbuster comedy film that had premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival when I found her.
She was standing in the background of a few of the pictures featuring the female lead of that movie. I was about to shut down my computer and make something to eat when one of the photographs caught my eye.
It looked like this particular picture had been taken in some kind of on-set makeup trailer. The female lead of the movie, a well-known A-list actress, was leaning back in her chair. Her eyes were wide and she was clearly laughing about something. The blond assistant was leaning forward, facing the camera, her left arm resting on the actress’s left shoulder, her right hand reaching down and grabbing the arm of the actress’s chair. It was an energetic and beautifully candid moment caught on camera. The composition and the lighting were perfect; so perfect, in fact, that it took me a second to notice something was off.
On the blond publicity woman’s right arm, just above the wrist, was a long, thick scar, in the exact place she’d been cut in that Tabitha Henry video.
I called Chloe, and immediately hung up when I noticed the time.
It was the middle of the night.
I went back to searching.
It took me a few minutes to dig up the blond publicity woman’s name. Some additional photographs led to a few leads on social media, and a comment posted by one of her online friends eventually led me to a LinkedIn profile.
The scar woman was Silvana Kulig. She no longer worked for the studio, and currently lived in Romania with her husband.
I sent a message to the email listed on her profile. I lied and told her that I was researching an article on contemporary movie studio publicity and its effect on Hollywood blockbusters.
About forty-five minutes later, I received a response. It included a phone number.
I did a quick online search to figure out what time it was in Romania. It was midafternoon, so I opened WhatsApp and called the number.
“Hello?” It was a woman’s voice.
“Hi. Is this Silvana?”
“Yes.”
“My name is K. I’m sorry to bother you, but I was hoping to ask you a couple of questions. Do you mind if we switch over to video?”
“Sure,” she said, “just a sec.”
Silvana’s hair was much shorter, her face a bit fuller, but she was clearly the woman from the photographs.
“I was wondering if you could take a quick look at something for me?” I asked.
“Okay,” she said.
I sent her a copy of the photograph with the scar.
“I’m sure it was traumatic, and I apologize in advance if I’m being insensitive for asking,” I said, “but I was wondering if you could tell me how you got this scar on your arm?”
“What the fuck is going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why are you people doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Photoshopping scars on my fucking arm and then calling to talk to me about it.”
“Are you saying something has been altered in the picture?”