This is where she drew her face onto the head of a little chicken. I guess because at the time, I sometimes referred to women as "chicks."
This is a bucket of coal. This is probably a reference to a time when she did something stupid-I cannot remember what it was specifically was, she did so many stupid things-and I said, "You are dumber than a coal bucket." At least, I think that's what she's referring to. It might also be a reference to what she thought she was getting from Santa that year because, of course, she still believed in him.
This is a reference to the "book" I wrote called The Definitive Book of Pick-Up Lines. I put "book" in quotes because it was just a self-published thing I put together for my law school friends, with all the ridiculous lines we compiled hitting on girls in law school.
And then of course, there is what she actually wrote. You can see it in the picture, but I'll transcribe it too, in case you can't read her pre-pubescent, multi-colored writing: Thank you very much for taking me to shoot a gun! I had a mind-blowing experience! I hope you have a safe trip and have a really fun time at the wedding! I'm sure it won't be quite as eventful as the last one ... (or at least you hope not!) It is too bad that things are not better between us. Things were so perfect the first 29 days. Now all we do is fight and are mean to each other. You taught me so much and you have made me a much happier and more productive person! My gossip is a lot more juicer because of you!
I wish we were better together, so I guess it's goodbye. I don't want to make you mad anymore.
Katy As I stood at my car reading this, my first thought was "29 days? Who counts the exact number of days you see someone?" Then I realized I was reading this on a shot-up gun target that had been placed on my car, and thought, "Oh Jesus ... What have I done?"
Not only did I teach her how to shoot a gun, I once had a conversation with this girl after watching a war movie about why the ambushes in the movie were technically incorrect and how to set up a good, L-shaped ambush (by setting-up overlapping fields of fire and stuff like that), AND I described to her, in accurate detail, the basics of how sniping in a urban environment differed from wooded environments, another area that the movie was weak on.
I drove to the airport looking over my shoulder the whole way like a mafia snitch, fully expecting a hail of gunfire to break out at any moment. I must have circled the parking lot at the Fort Lauderdale airport ten times trying to see if anyone was following me.
After I returned to Florida, and a week went by free of any sniper attempts, I let my guard down. It was then that I answered my phone without checking the caller ID, and lo and behold, it was Miss AK-47. She was just as happy and bubbly as ever, and asked me a question: MissVermont "Hey Tucker! I was calling because I wanted to talk to you about something. You know so much about women and relationships and stuff like that, and I've learned so much from talking to you ... I was wondering if you could give me advice on how we could get back together."
I swear to God she asked me this. I was flabbergasted.
Tucker "You want advice? Go find a really good psychoanalyst, and get help, because you are fucked up."
She hung up. I would not hear from her for almost two years. But once she came back on my radar, it was with the type of vengeance that can only come from a cunty stage mom from hell, and I would get to know, firsthand, the woman responsible for the creation of this shitstorm of a girl.
PART 3: THE LAWSUIT.
Occurred, May 2003 I read a news report Some lawyer in Florida wanna take us to court Somebody tell that country ass hick To go suck a dead man's dick -Geto Boys, "We Can't Be Stopped"
I didn't think about MissVermont again until sometime around January of 2003, when I mentioned something about her on my messageboard. My website had been up for about four months at that point, and I had a small but dedicated readership (for the people who read AFF-this is right about the time the TuckerFest party was being planned), so when PWJ, Jojo, and SlingBlade began regaling my fans with their favorite MissVermont anecdotes, everyone asked for the full story.
I resisted at first, until I saw on her website that she was going to do an MTV episode of "MADE", where she would be the pageant coach to a tomboy girl and enter her in a pageant. After seeing that she was still making herself out to be a sober, abstinent pageant girl, I decided to write up my version of our time together.
Now, even though the story I ended up writing was true, it's never that simple. I recognize that the way I see the events in my life is not always precisely the way other people see them. Every story has three truths-my truth, your truth, and the real truth-and I was not foolish enough to think I had a monopoly on all of them. So I emailed the original story to her before I posted it. She didn't respond, so when I put my story up in early 2003, I posted this at the top of the page: "And to Katy: Even though you haven't responded to the email I sent you, I know you check this site every few weeks. You're welcome to email me with corrections or additions to the story. If I got something wrong or left something out, please let me know and I'll be happy to change it. In fact, if you want to write your own version of our relationship, I swear that I will post it, COMPLETELY UNABRIDGED, right next to mine. This is your opportunity to rebut anything I say here."
Obviously part of my desire to do that was for entertainment purposes, but part of it was also because if I was gonna use her real name, she deserved a chance to respond with her version of the events, in her own words, in the same space I tell my story. That's only fair.
I didn't hear anything. Not even a simple, "Fuck off." I assumed she either didn't care or didn't have anything to add.
Boy, was I wrong.
On May 4th, 2003, I got a frantic voicemail from my mother. She was yammering about some reporter calling her and saying my website had been banned or something like that, none of it made any sense. She left a name and number-some reporter from the Palm Beach Post-so I called. The reporter shocked me to the point that I needed her to repeat and explain what she said several times. I still didn't believe it: MissVermont's lawyer had convinced a judge in Palm Beach County, Florida to issue an ex-parte temporary restraining order against me, forcing me to remove the MissVermont story from my site.
Why is this so shocking? It is what's called a "prior restraint" order, and this was the first time in US LEGAL HISTORY one had been issued against a website. In fact, it was one of the only times it'd even been issued ever, in the long history of the American legal system. A "prior restraint" ruling is the highest level of speech restriction and is issued almost exclusively in cases of national security-for example, if someone wanted to publish the name of an undercover CIA operative in a foreign country. This judge was brazenly ignoring the First Amendment and 200+ years of US legal precedent. This was truly breathtaking.
But don't take my word for it. Check out these selected excerpts from the longer New York Times article about the case [all bolding is mine]: "... Until a Florida judge issued an unusual order last month, Mr. Max's site also contained a long account of his relationship with Ms. Johnson, whom he portrayed, according to court papers, as vapid, promiscuous and an unlikely candidate for membership in the Sobriety Society.
The order, entered by Judge Diana Lewis of Circuit Court in West Palm Beach, forbids Mr. Max to write about Ms. Johnson. It has alarmed experts in First Amendment law, who say that such orders prohibiting future publication, prior restraints, are essentially unknown in American law. Moreover, they say, claims like Ms. Johnson's, for invasion of privacy, have almost never been considered enough to justify prior restraints.
Ms. Johnson's lawsuit also highlights some shifting legal distinctions in the Internet era, between private matters and public ones and between speech and property. Judge Lewis ruled on May 6, before Mr. Max was notified of the suit and without holding a hearing. She told Mr. Max that he could not use 'Katy' on his site. Nor could he use Ms. Johnson's last name, full name or the words 'Miss Vermont.'
The judge also prohibited Mr. Max from 'disclosing any stories, facts or information, notwithstanding its truth, about any intimate or sexual acts engaged in by' Ms. Johnson..."
"... This victory should send a clear message to all parasitic smut peddlers who live off the good names of others," [Michael Santucci] said in the release, which also noted that Ms. Johnson 'emphatically denies the story contained on Tucker Max's Web site.'
Mr. Santucci did not respond to an e-mail message asking whether his issuing a news release was at odds with his request to seal the court file on privacy grounds..."
"... That the sites are also used to make money should make no difference in whether Mr. Max may be forbidden to write about Ms. Johnson, said Gregg D. Thomas, an expert in First Amendment law at Holland & Knight in Tampa, Fla. 'This is clearly a suppression of free speech,' Mr. Thomas said of Judge Lewis's order.
Prior restraints based on invasion of privacy are unusual. 'It has happened perishingly rarely,' said Diane L. Zimmerman, a law professor at New York University and an expert in First Amendment and privacy law. 'When it has happened it has generated enormous controversy..."
"... The prohibition on linking to Ms. Johnson's site is 'kooky,' said Susan P. Crawford, who teaches Internet law at Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University..."
Fucking crazy, isn't it? It got even more ridiculous. Look at the press release her lawyer sent out just days later (again, all bolding mine-you can just read the bold parts and skip the rest if you want, it's boring BS): Former Miss Vermont, Katy Johnson, Breaks Silence On Injunction Against 'Depraved Web Site'
BOCA RATON, Fla., June 5 /PRNewswire/ - The former Miss Vermont and Miss Vermont USA, Katy Johnson, who won a preliminary injunction against a web site that demeans women and promotes character assassination, is speaking out.
According to Ms. Johnson, Tucker Max exploited her image and published scurrilous lies about her on his web site just to sell T-shirts and other merchandise. Last month, a Florida judge ordered a temporary injunction against Max forcing him to take down all references to "Katy Johnson" and "Miss Vermont" on his web site.
"I feel vindicated by the judge's decision, and I hope this suit will put an end to the ugly untruths he parades on this reprehensible web site. Since the lawsuit began, I have been contacted by other victims of his lies who have offered their support," said Ms. Johnson.
Ms. Johnson says Max's assertions published on his web site that she is a "whore" and a "prostitute" are malicious, false and hurtful. She vehemently denies the story about her on the web site.
"I never intended to be a champion of privacy rights or become involved in First Amendment issues; to me this is about Right vs. Wrong, and he was wrong to attack my reputation on the Internet for no other reason than his own commercial gain."
Ms. Johnson says that she did not file the lawsuit out of vengeance but to stop further damage to her reputation and others. Her biggest concern was that little girls trying to visit her web site to see the Starrlettes or Miss Vermont web sites for pageant information were being diverted by search engines to Max's depraved web site.
She filed the lawsuit under FL Statutes 540.08, which prevents unauthorized use of name or likeness and provides for punitive damages and royalties, in order to get swift justice through an injunction and conclude the lawsuit quickly. Ms. Johnson says that Max has willfully violated the injunction since it was issued, and she intends to go back to court to find him in contempt. "This person is greatly harming me by the way he is associating my name with his immoral web site and the disgusting products he promotes."
Ms. Johnson, a member of MENSA, is a columnist for Pageantry Magazine and author of "True Beauty: A Sunny Face Means A Happy Heart." She will be appearing on the MTV documentary "MADE" on June 28, as a coach who has one month to turn a tomboy into a beauty queen. Katy's cartoon web site, katyjohnson.com, promotes character for 8 to 12-year-old girls through her Starrlettes comic strip.
And no, I did not make up the part of the press release that reads, "Ms. Johnson, a member of MENSA." I wish I had, because it might be the funniest line in any of my books.
But it gets even better. I was served papers a few days later and read the actual lawsuit. All the case materials are online (www.tuckermax.com/missvermont), and you can read them yourself if you hate your life. There is a reason I never went to class in law school and people pay lawyers to do this shit-it's boring as fuck. I will try to explain everything in the plainest language possible. She sued me for three different things: Unauthorized use of likeness: She accused me of selling things with her name or likeness on them, without her permission. This was just silly. I did have affiliate links to buy t-shirts on my site, but the shirts themselves had nothing to do with her in any way.
Invasion of privacy: This is a common law tort, which accuses me of making private facts about Katy public, by publishing them to the public at large. In plain language, she is saying I told everyone her secrets.
Battery: She accuses me of civil battery-hitting her, basically. There were no details to this baseless accusation in the legal filing of course, because it was not only a lie, but it was nothing more than a jurisdictional ploy. Basically, this was their way of trying to make me resolve the case in Florida court instead of having it moved to a court in Illinois (jurisdictional issues are big deals in most lawsuits, but are so tedious if I took the time to explain them to you, you'd burn this book and then try to fight me).
That's it. That's everything she sued me for. When I first learned about the lawsuit, I assumed by her statements-like any normal human being would-that she'd be contesting the truth of my story. And honestly, I was kind of excited about that. I had intentionally left out anything even remotely debatable and only put in the events with witnesses or pictures-her behavior at the wedding, her blowing me in the bathroom, the gun target, etc. I was more than willing to defend the truth of my story in a court of law. Then I saw her actual pleading-no mention of libel, defamation, slander ... there is NOTHING in her lawsuit that actually contests the truth of the story.
I repeat for emphasis: The lawsuit NEVER accuses me of saying anything untrue about Katy. In fact, in order for count #2 to be valid, what I say about her has to be true. Her lawsuit is, in effect, legally admitting that my story is true, and then taking the position that I didn't have the right to say it.
Katy's lawyer was using a very shrewd legal strategy that allowed them to deny the facts of my case to the press, but never actually put the facts of what happened in front of a court of law. By not suing me for libel, the only issues were technical aspects of the law, and NOT the truth of the story. This strategy is what you would use ONLY if you're trying to hide something and silence a voice you don't want to hear. And though it was within the letter of the law, it was so far outside its spirit that the whole thing verged on immoral and unethical chicanery. More importantly, what it meant was that Katy knew what was up, she was just trying to intimidate me into taking my story down.
I'll never forget the moment I came to the realization that this was no longer about truth. This was someone trying to use power and influence in an illegitimate and unethical way to bully me into shutting up, to silence the truth and steal my liberty from me.
What the fuck? I live in America, right? This shit isn't supposed to happen here, is it?
Well, it was happening to me. And if I didn't do something about it, I was going to get fucked. Make no mistake about it, this was a big deal, and this was a serious attack not only on my First Amendment rights, but on anyone who published truth on the internet.
I may have gone to a top ten law school, but this shit was beyond my ability. I needed a great lawyer, one, you know, who actually took the bar. I went to the best internet First Amendment lawyer I could find, a guy named John Carey. He was very interested in the case, discussed it thoroughly with me, and I was impressed. This dude got it. He would be able to help justice prevail. He was even willing to do it at a steep discount, but he wouldn't do it without getting paid something, at least, a $7,000 retainer to start.
I checked my bank account. I had $44. Freedom is not free, indeed.
I was fucked. But my fucking went deeper than my account balance. It went to the core of all my decisions in the two years between when I met MissVermont and when she sued me. Let me explain: I met MissVermont in the summer of 2001, right after I graduated from Duke and moved to Florida to work for my father. The summer before, I'd hated being a lawyer so much that it only took me three weeks of acting like a complete asshole to get fired (that is the charity auction story from IHTSBIH). It didn't take too much longer than that for me to hate the restaurant business and get fired from there as well. The only thing that was different was how and by whom I was fired.
When I got to South Florida, my dad's entire company was fucked up. All the stuff my dad saw was great: the restaurants ran really well, he was making money, customers were happy, etc. But the backend of the business was a total shitshow. Costs were way out of whack and the mid-level employees were thieves and liars who didn't care about the business as much as they did about massaging my dad's ego so they could keep leeching off of him. I figured this out quickly, and realized immediately how to turn the business around. I could get rid of the shitty employees, reconfigure the backend to make everything more efficient, renegotiate contracts with vendors and reduce prices-I could, in effect, add all sorts of value by bringing it into the 21st century.
I made a major error in implementing my plan, one that is totally obvious in retrospect: I TOLD all the toxic middle management thieves all about my great plans. As quickly as I had realized that they were the problem, they figured out that most of my plan would involve either firing them or cutting off their gravy train. I didn't care though; I thought that because my plan was the right one, and my name was on the door, my father would back me over them. [Adding to this scorched earth tactical blunder was the fact that I had done enough reckless shit-like having MissVermont blow me in the bathroom-to give them ammunition to use against me.]
One day my dad sat me down to talk about some recent issues in the restaurant. I thought he was going to discuss a way to at least solve the problems. I was wrong.
Father "Tucker, I'm going to have let you go."
Yes, you read that right. My father fired me from the family business because he picked his ass-kissing employees over his own son.
As I sat there and listened to his bullshit rationalizations for why he was doing this, something became crystal clear to me: The disease does not cause itself. The employees weren't the problem. And even though I'd approached this wrong, I wasn't even the problem. The problem was my father. His employees were able to act the way they did because he'd implicitly allowed it for years. Those toxic shitheads knew my father better than me. I thought the best of him, but they understood he actually wanted employees who kissed his ass, not people who had ambition to do things the right way. At 25, I was still naive enough to think life and business were about truth; they knew it was really about feeding the egos of those above you. They gave him what he wanted and I didn't, so he protected them and not me.
It was nice to understand this, even if it was a little late, but regardless of how right I may have been, I gotta be honest: It was pretty shitty to have my own dad fire me from the family business. This meant-after also getting fired from my law firm-that I'd now failed at the two things I was supposed to have been training for in college and grad school. That sucked, and those failures forced me to really examine my life, and ask myself some hard questions: What kind of life did I want to lead? One I loved, one I was proud of and that made me happy ... or a life that other people told me I was "supposed" to lead but I hated?
What kind of person was I going to be? Just another sheep, another cog in the machine, working a crappy job I couldn't stand ... or was I going to be the type of person who blazed my own trail and made an awesome life I loved living?
I realized I had a choice to make: swallow my pride, go back to the corporate machine, and try to be a lawyer or a businessman, but this time make sure I acted like a sheep and did it their way ... or do something where I carved my own path in life and didn't have to eat anyone else's shit. Something I really loved doing.
Looking at it that way, there wasn't really a choice. I had to leave that world and go create my own life. It came down to one simple thing for me: Every day I have to wake up and look at myself in the mirror, and if I'm not excited to live the day in front of me, proud of who I am and what I'm spending my time doing ... then what's the fucking point?
It took a while to figure out what I wanted to do (that's a whole different story), but in August of 2002, I moved to Chicago and started writing full time. I did nothing but dedicate myself to my work. I refused to get a "normal" job to support myself, only doing side things to cover bills (like teaching for Princeton Review). For me, it was sink or swim.
By May 1, 2003-despite a lot of initial setbacks-my site had officially blown up. I had hundreds of thousands of readers, I had been featured on MTV, I had girls coming to me for sex (like it should have been all along). I'd bet everything on myself, taken a series of immense risks, almost failed, and here I was, making it. It was the greatest feeling in the world.
There was only one problem: money. My small savings had run out real fast. This was 2002/2003, remember. People were just starting to get real-world famous for their writing on the Internet, but no one was making any money at it. No shit, it got to the point where I was eating ramen on the days I was lucky enough to eat at all.
With that backstory, you understand my mindset and my financial position in May of 2003. So, on the verge of getting everything I wanted, here comes the MissVermont lawsuit, threatening to take everything away. The most frustrating part was that even though I was right, even though I had truth on my side, it didn't matter. I needed a lawyer to defend that truth, and if I couldn't find the $7,000 to hire him, MissVermont was going to beat me simply by manipulating the law. She was lying, threatening my future as a writer with her flagrant hypocrisy, and she was going to win ... by default.
But where the fuck do I get $7,000? I had $44 in my bank account. Yeah, tons of people read my writing and knew my name, but none of them were paying me (this was also a few years before my book came out). I had nowhere else to turn, so I did the only thing I could do: I humiliated myself, and went to my father. I begged him to put up the money for the retainer.
Even though my father had fired me from the family business because he's an insecure narcissist who picked his sycophants over his own son, he's not an evil monster-he understood how fucked I was, and he agreed to help me. But he put a condition on his financial assistance to me: In return for him paying for my legal defense, I had to promise him I would drop my dreams of being a writer, start studying for the bar, take it, and then go to work as a lawyer.
You see, my dad was fixated on me "doing something" with my life, and the only way he could see that happening was "putting my education to use" by becoming a lawyer. That's one of the main reasons I even went to law school at all-because my dad wanted me to be a lawyer. It fit his image of success for me. When I moved to Chicago to become a writer, he was pissed at me because there was no place for "struggling writer" within his image of success for his son. He did want me to succeed at life-it was just that his notion of success was vastly different from mine, and now he had the leverage he needed to get me to go back into the law, something I had left because I hated it.
In order to save my dream of becoming a writer ... I had to give my dream up. The irony is so fucking thick it makes me sick.
I took the deal. What choice did I have? Sometimes you have to cut the deal with the devil. It was so fucking depressing, but he paid the retainer, and as usually happens once you take the devil's deal, shit immediately started going right: I complied with the court order and took "The MissVermont Story" off my website-only because my lawyer insisted-which inspired about 100 other sites to host the story. My original MissVermont story went from what was essentially a completely anonymous story on some random website, to being the most read thing on the Internet for a week or two. By suing me, dumbass Katy Johnson attracted 1,000x more attention to me and my story than it would have gotten on its own. I became a First Amendment hero, to the point where even the ACLU filed an amicus brief on my behalf (essentially saying that my side of the position was the right one).
My lawyers did what they said they would: They smoked Katy's dumbass lawyer. They called his bluff. Since Katy Johnson went on record as saying that this story was so harmful to her reputation, and needed it to be taken down immediately, we filed a brief asking for expedited discovery.
"Discovery" is the portion of a court case where the two sides get to have their lawyers interview the witnesses from the other side and examine all their relevant files. What this meant was that my lawyer would be able to sit down and ask Katy all sorts of questions about the facts of the case-ON THE RECORD. This would mean she would have to tell the truth, under penalty of perjury, about everything I wrote in my story.
So if she denied, say, sucking my dick in the bathroom of Max's Grille, then I would bring in the waiters who walked in on us. Or if she denied anything about the wedding, I'd bring in the guests. It would put every single fact of my story under legal scrutiny-which is what I wanted, because I was telling the truth and she was lying. [And not only that, but my lawyer would ask her about exactly WHY she was no longer at Stetson law school, which would mean-on the record-she'd have to explain the whole story behind her decision to send envelopes of fake anthrax to her own mother.]
As soon as we did that, Katy sent me an email asking me to settle the case. Oh no, honey, I WANT discovery. I WANT you to answer these questions. Let's bring it ALL into the light and bathe in truth.
Pretty predicable what happened next: They dropped their case against me, without a whimper or any bullshit news stories or press releases. Since then, I've heard nothing from Katy or her lawyer.
I won. I fought for my freedom and won.
But that wasn't the last battle I had to fight. I'd promised my dad I would quit this "writing thing" and go take the bar and be a lawyer. For two months, I tried to keep my word to him. I started studying for the bar. I got my bar application and started filling it out. The Illinois Bar application has to be typed or printed out, and I didn't have a printer, so I had to go to the Lincoln Park library and use their typewriters. That's right, MECHANICAL FUCKING TYPEWRITERS.
I'll never forget the day I went there to type out my bar application. Sitting in this tiny, moldy smelling room, as I punched away on this ancient machine, I felt sicker and sicker. Physically ill, like I had been gut-punched. I tried to ignore it, but I couldn't-I ended up vomiting in the trashcan. I didn't have the flu or anything. This was my body sending me an unmistakable message.
I threw away all the bar materials and left the library. I told my dad I wasn't taking the bar, I wasn't going to be a lawyer. I was going to pursue my dream and be a writer, regardless of what he said or did. It was my life to live the way I wanted to live it, right or wrong. I told him I was sorry I went back on my word, but I wasn't going to have my life held hostage by his desires. I promised I'd pay him back the $7,000 when I could afford to.
He cut me off. He's never given me anything again. The supreme irony is now that I'm a #1 best-selling author and all his friends are fans of my writing, he thinks what I did was a great idea, and he loves to brag about me to his friends. Yeah, OK.
It's funny because my dad was doing to me exactly what Kathleen Johnson was doing to Katy: Both of them were forcing a life on us we didn't want. They tried to make us into something we weren't. But that doesn't work. You can't live a lie-not without destroying yourself. That's probably why I took this fight so personally, why it made me so angry at the time, and why I refused to go back to being a lawyer. Both Kathleen Johnson and my father wanted to shut me up and reinforce their own lies through mine.
But that's not going to happen, not to me at least. I'd rather die standing than live with a boot on my neck. As I write this, it's 2011. I did become a successful writer, my dad got his money back, and MissVermont is ... well, I don't know what she's doing now. Hopefully for her sake, she's figured out the things I have and found a way to live her own life.
But the offer will always be out there: Katy Johnson, you are welcome to write your version of what happened between us, and I will publish it, unedited, either on my site or in a revised version of this book. I'm as interested to read it as everyone else is.
There was one good thing that came out of her lawsuit. She released a whole raft of hilarious new cartoons based on me. [You can see them along with the rest at the end of this story.]
[This part of the story isn't all that funny, and you can skip it if you want. But I had to write it, and if you're interested in this case, it might be worth it.]
POSTSCRIPT: SOME SPECULATION.
You scream obscenity, but it's publicity You're all hoes, so don't act like you don't know Better fuck with somebody else before you get popped Because we can't be stopped -Geto Boys, "We Can't Be Stopped"
I know I talked about how angry I was at this lawsuit and how I took it personally because it threatened not only my very existence as a writer, but my struggle to find my identity. That's all true. And I'm still pissed about it, years later.
But here's the thing: At this point in my life, I don't hold any animosity toward MissVermont (Katy Johnson). I don't think she was the reason for the lawsuit. As the months and years went by, more and more facts got filled in and added to the things I already knew, until a clearer picture emerged of what actually caused the lawsuit: I think Katy was a pawn in this, and that her mom, Kathleen Johnson, was the entire cause of EVERYTHING.
Consider these facts: I know it was her mom who made Katy do all the things that Katy did-pageants, charities, cartoons, law school, modeling, everything. The fact that is Katy didn't want to do any of that, but did it because her mom made her, was a constant and recurrent theme in her life. It was like her job was being Kathleen Johnson's daughter, not being herself.