Within hours, my phone rang with calls from legal counsels of other major tech firms. They had recognized their proprietary algorithms in his video. Daniel hadn’t just stolen from me; he was a serial thief, and the entire industry was now watching.
Employees started coming to my office, closing the door, and whispering. “I didn’t want to say anything,” one engineer told me, “but Daniel has been asking for my passwords for weeks.” The office gossip wasn’t about the affair anymore; it was about the treason.
Then came the final nail in the coffin. A moderator from Daniel’s private Discord server, disgusted by the manipulation, sent us a zip file. It contained thousands of messages between Daniel and Lisa explicitly planning the theft of trade secrets.
Lisa, unaware of the leak, walked onto the stage at a “Women in Tech” conference to tell her side of the story. She began her speech about innovation, but the audience grew strangely quiet. People started holding up their phones, showing screens to one another.