Callie Kim and the Measure of a Man

Enzo reached out with his other hand and grabbed Callie's free arm around her wrist, anchoring it to her side.

"Now, see, I'm really in control of the situation," Enzo smirked.

"Callie, are you okay down there?" Carmen asked from the studio, a note of concern in her voice.

"It--it doesn't actually hurt," Callie said, fidgeting slightly against the restraining hold. "But I... I can't really move."

"That's right," Enzo said, a note of smugness in his voice. "If this were a real match, I could lever your arm to force a submission. But if we're talking about an assailant in a real world situation, it's usually enough just to neutralize the threat by restraining their movements."

Enzo took a step forward, moving Callie closer to the camera

"Go ahead, Callie," he said, looking at her over her left shoulder. "See if you can try to break free."

"O--okay," she said, her breathing a little bit labored.

Along with our live broadcast audience, I watched through the camera as Callie squirmed in Enzo's arms, her body twitching as she struggled against his grip.

"I--I really can't move," Callie mumbled, a note of concern tempering the brightness of her on-air voice. "I'm... I'm really stuck..."

"Once you have the assailant in a lock, you generally want to go to ground," Enzo continued. "This is the most effective way to subdue them."

Enzo lowered his body, lowering Callie as he pushed her forward into a kneeling position, her arms still restrained behind her back.

"How are you doing there, Callie?" Carmen asked again, a little warily.

"I'm... I'm okay," Callie responded, blushing furiously now, whether from exertion or embarrassment. "But wow, this lock is really tight!"

"At this point, I can move Callie around however I want," he said, arching her back to demonstrate his control. "So I'd say that you've been fully subdued, right, Callie?"

"Y--yes," Callie panted, turning away from the camera to look over her shoulder at Enzo.

"Usually, Callie would tap out here, but since she can't use her arms, we'll wait for a verbal cue," Enzo grinned. "Callie, are you ready to submit?"

From the kneeling position, Enzo forced Callie to arch her back even more, pushing her chest towards the camera.

"I--I submit," Callie murmured, straining her neck to look back at Enzo, as if she'd forgotten about the camera altogether. "I submit!!"

For an extra second, Enzo held her there, the two of them looking into each other's eyes as the rest of us watched. Then, Enzo released his grip, and Callie tumbled forward onto all fours.

"That was pretty intense!" Carmen exclaimed in the studio. "Callie, are you okay? Did you learn something?"

"Yes," she panted, finally looking back at the camera. "I'm Callie Kim, and I think I'll stick to yoga from now on!"

"Alright, Callie," Carmen laughed. "Take it easy this weekend, okay?!"

"And... we're out," I said, quickly stepping out from behind the camera. "Callie, are you okay?"

"I'm... I'm fine," she said, looking at me. "I just need some water."

"Why don't you go get her some water?" Enzo said, glancing at me.

"I don't think so," I said, glaring back at him. "C'mon, Cal, there's water in the truck."

I reached down and helped Callie to her feet.

"Dude, what the fuck was that?" I said, turning to Enzo.

"That's BJJ, bro," he said, cocking an eyebrow at me. "Relax."

"You took that shit too far," I said, stepping in between him and Callie. "That wasn't cool."

"It's fine, Nate," Callie said, catching her breath. "I'm... I'm okay."

"See, bro? She can take it," Enzo smirked at me. "Can't you, Callie?"

"I'm gonna go get that water," she murmured, looking almost dazed.

"You do that," I said, keeping my body between Callie and Enzo as I watched her walk outside.

"That truck got a backseat?" Enzo asked with a smirk as soon as we were alone.

"Okay, asshole," I said, turning around to pack up the camera. "That was some bush league bullshit, what you did."

"Why don't you go shoot some B-roll outside while I go finish what I started?" he smiled, licking his lips. "Unless maybe you like to watch."

"Hey, FUCK you!" I said, whirling around to face him. "Don't lay another fucking finger on her."

"Or what, big man?" he sneered, clearly relishing the potential confrontation. "You gonna stop me?"

I stood up, slinging the camera equipment over my shoulder. I was taller than Enzo, but he was clearly more a fighter than I was, and I'd just seen what he was capable of.

"Just leave her alone," I said, turning around and walking away.

"It'll never be you, man," Enzo called after me. "You know that, right? I'll never be you..."

...

I was sure that this time, Callie would tell the social media manager not to post the BJJ segment. I figured that after the lewd comments she got on the capoeira video, she would think twice about letting the segment with Enzo go up online.

But to my surprise, she didn't object. So, just like the day before, the station posted the BJJ video without tagging her personal account.

The BJJ segment went viral in a way that completely overshadowed the capoeira story. By the time we showed up for work on Monday morning, the video had been viewed more than 5M times on Instagram, and Callie's personal Instagram account had shot up to over 150K followers.

The comments on the video ran the gamut. Some people expressed disgust at the way Enzo had handled Callie. Others praised his behavior as emblematic of what women won't admit they really want in a man. Some accused BJJ of promoting "rape culture." Others called Callie a slut who was asking for it.

But most of the comments were just men openly lusting after Callie, without judgment or apology. And because our social media manager didn't work on Saturday or Sunday, most of these comments went unmoderated through the weekend.

I know this because I spent the entire weekend watching the video, over and over again, reading the comments as they piled up:

"Jfc morning shows be doing straight-up porn now???"

"Asian chick finna put the BJ in BJJ"

"Fuck but if that was me, I wouldn't have let her go"

As I watched Enzo bring Callie to her knees over and over again, my eyes were glued to her face, searching her expression for signs of meaning. Over and over again, I kept coming back to the same frame.

It was the moment, right after Callie had called out her submission, that stolen second before Enzo released her. In that moment, they were looking at each other, both of them ignoring the camera entirely.

Enzo's expression was stern and demanding, his brow furrowed, his eyes looking down at her, cold and unflinching.

Callie's expression was very nearly the exact opposite: soft, doe-eyed, and yielding, her full lips slightly parted, looking up at him with docile compliance.

I watched the video over and over, searching her face for other interpretations, but I kept back to the same conclusion. That despite how carefully I'd watched her--despite the fact that I'd been her cameraman for more than six months, observing her on a daily basis--that despite all of that, there was something inside her that I had overlooked. There was something about her that these two Brazilian men--first Davi, then Enzo--had sensed instinctively, something that I had missed.

But now that they had exposed it--now that they had shown it to the world, allowing me capture it on camera--I couldn't unsee it.

Now, whenever I looked at her, all I could see was that single moment, that single frame: Callie, pinned by the arms of a brute, looking up at him with obedient eyes. Looking up at him, not with shame or indignation, but with eyes that seemed to beg for mercy. Eyes that seemed to say: Please, be gentle.

I'd worked with Callie for six months by that point, and during that time, I'd felt protective of her. I knew she was gorgeous from the first moment I saw her--breathtakingly so, to the point where it felt silly to deny it--but I'd decided it was okay for me to enjoy her beauty the way one might appreciate a painting.

I maintained an avuncular distance, looking after her, trying to show her the ropes of TV. After all, I was a 38-year-old white guy with a high school diploma and the body of a gym teacher, and she was a now 23-year-old Korean-American girl with a college degree and a centerfold's body. We were coworkers, and that seemed like the only relationship we could ever have.

At the beginning, I was grateful just to be around her on a daily basis, even though this wasn't always easy. Working so closely with such a beautiful woman probably never is.

But that weekend, after watching the video of her and Enzo one too many times, the fantasies started. And then, they wouldn't stop.

...

Clearly, I wasn't the only person whose view of Callie changed after that video went viral. Because less than two weeks later, she came into the station with an engagement ring on.

I can't possibly prove this, but I'm pretty sure that I know what happened. I don't know, but... I know.

During my first six months of working with her, Callie had told me that she'd gotten together with her boyfriend, Jacob, back at Syracuse. I didn't know too much about him, except that he'd been two years ahead of her, was the president of his fraternity, and--judging from his last name--was almost certainly Jewish.

He and Callie had gotten together during her freshman year, when Jacob had been a junior. This meant that they'd been a couple for more than four years now, but a big chunk of that had been long-distance. See, after Jacob graduated, he'd started medical school in New York City, so they weren't in the same place, but he was close enough to see her regularly on weekends. But then, after Callie graduated, she'd been unable to land a TV job in NYC, so she'd settled for the job out here in LA.

Their plan, as Callie explained it, was to wait and see where Jacob would get matched for his residency after med school. She was hoping he would land in LA, but if he didn't, then presumably she would have to start looking for jobs wherever he ended up.

Of course, none of that explains why Jacob decided to propose less than two weeks after Callie's martial arts videos went viral. He still had a year of medical school left, plus the residency matching process, before they could really contemplate building a life together in the same place.

So what changed all of a sudden? What compelled Jacob to drop everything, right in the middle of his last year of med school, and fly across the country on a random weekend to surprise Callie? And what made him decide to bring a ring?

My guess--and it's just a guess--is that Jacob saw those videos on Instagram, the same as I did. He saw them going viral, and he saw the way that men on the internet were talking about his girlfriend. He probably made himself crazy imagining the messages she was getting in her DMs. After all, if men were openly lusting after Callie in the public comments, it was hard to fathom what they might be sending her in private.

My guess is that he saw her follower count exploding--50K, 100K, 150K, all in the span of a single weekend--and he started to worry. She'd been just another college girl back at Syracuse. An absolute knockout, sure, the kind of girl he probably worried about every weekend that they weren't together. But still, at the end of the day, just another random college girl.

Even after Callie started to post more regularly on Instagram, even as she racked up five or ten thousand followers, that probably just felt like validation to Jacob. Hell, it was probably a point of pride: his girlfriend wasn't just hot--she was smoking hot, Instagram-hot. Maybe it even turned him on to know that random guys on the internet were looking at his girl.

But now, Callie was on TV in LA, and she was blowing up. If she could go from 50K to 150K overnight, then how long until she was pushing 500K? What if she reached 1M followers?

How many of those followers would be guys who wanted to fuck her?

How many of them would be in Los Angeles with Callie while he was stuck with his nose in a textbook thousands of miles away?

How many of them would be taller, better looking, and more successful than he was?

Hell, Jacob was just a med student carrying a truckload of student debt. Maybe he'd be able to compete with these guys eventually, when he was a successful doctor, but that day probably felt years away. How was he going to keep her around until then?

My guess is that Jacob probably tried to reassure himself with the knowledge that Callie loved him, and that no matter what happened, she would never cheat on him. And maybe, for awhile, that worked.

But my guess is that it stopped working when Jacob saw those videos going viral on Instagram.

My guess is it stopped working when he saw his gorgeous, bubbly, 23-year-old Asian girlfriend getting manhandled on live TV, not once but twice. My guess is that Jacob saw not one but two Brazilian martial artists--one Black, the other white, both of them huge--putting their hands on Callie's mouthwatering, perfect-ten body and realized that he couldn't do a damn thing about it.

My guess is that Jacob saw the same thing that I'd seen, the same thing that millions of guys on the internet had now seen, the sordid truth about Callie that Enzo had so brazenly exposed: that for a certain kind of guy, under just the right circumstances, his girlfriend would submit to another man.

And my guess is that Jacob thought maybe, just maybe, he could change that by putting a ring on her finger before it happened.

The poor bastard.

...

I wasn't a martial arts instructor with shredded abs and bulging biceps. I didn't have a fancy college degree. I wasn't famous. My bank account only had one comma in it.

But when it came to Callie, I had one advantage over all the other men in LA, an invisible edge that was almost unfair: I was her cameraman.

This meant that I probably spent more time with Callie than anyone else, her fiancé very much included. It meant that we were often alone, just the two of us, driving around LA to scout locations, check out stories, and shoot segments. It meant that I had plenty of time to get to know her, one day at a time.

So unlike Davi or Enzo, I didn't need to bring Callie to heel inside a single 90-second TV spot. I didn't need to seduce her all at once. I could afford to be patient. I had the luxury of time. Because I was the only man in LA who was being paid to watch Callie Kim.

...

The more I watched Callie, the more I became convinced that she knew what she was doing.

Callie never struck me as ditzy, but at first, I'd pegged her as a naive young woman who needed my help to navigate LA and the entertainment industry. She had a degree in broadcast journalism from a good school, so I knew that she was smart, but there are plenty of smart girls in LA who end up waiting tables (or worse) because they don't know how to play the game.

But as I started observing her more and more closely, I began to believe that Callie's behavior was more deliberate, more intentional, and more sophisticated than I'd given her credit for. I began to believe that Callie had an instinctive understanding of something most young girls learn the hard way: that the entertainment industry hates ambitious women.

Maybe things have started to change in this regard, but even as recently at 2017, I can tell you that women who were seen as too driven or too striving or too competitive were often viewed with suspicion, and sometimes outright scorn. But like a lot of beautiful women who came before her, Callie had found a way to thread this needle, hiding her ambitions beneath a bubbly, vivacious personality.

And it seemed to be working. The producers on our show couldn't ignore Callie's ability to go viral, and even executives at the station had started to take notice. As Callie's follower count continued to grow, they began carving out more time for her on-air, and giving her more creative control over her segments. After all, the martial arts profiles had been her idea, and they'd gone supernova. What other ideas did she have in that pretty little head of hers?

What impressed me the most about all of this was the way Callie conjured these things into being without ever asking for them. If she'd advocated for herself directly, pushing for more screen time or editorial control, there's no doubt she would have rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Instead, she just floated around the station, all sunshine and smiles, as if she was just happy to be there, and any success beyond that was more than she could even dream.

Callie never talked about her followers on Instagram and never asked how her videos were doing for the show. She seemed almost unaware of how popular she was becoming online.

But that wasn't possible. It couldn't have been. Not with all of those follows, all of those comments, all of those DMs that she must have been getting. Nobody was that aloof, and especially not a girl like Callie Kim.

Still, she never drew attention to her popularity, and that was a stroke of genius. Because Callie's audience online was so public--right there, where anyone could see it--she never had to mention it. She just went about her day, charming little minx that she was, letting everybody else talk about it for her.

How could anyone accuse Callie of being too ambitious, or too attention-seeking, when everyone else at the station seemed more fixated on her popularity than she was?

This approach was brilliant, and it seemed bulletproof, for a time. But this kind of thing requires a delicate balancing act, a tightrope walk that most girls can't sustain forever.

Then, about ten months after Callie had joined the station, something happened that knocked her off-kilter.

We were driving back from shooting a segment, just like any other day, when Callie's phone buzzed on the dashboard. She picked it up right away and almost immediately burst into tears.

"What--what's wrong?!" I said in alarm.

She was always so irrepressible and energetic that I knew it must be something awful.

"Jacob... he--he got his residency match," Callie sobbed. "He--he promised me that he was going to match in LA or New York! He told me it was a sure thing!"

"Jeez, Cal, I thought somebody died," I joked, trying to lift her mood. "Where did he end up matching?"

"In... in fucking Cleveland!" she cried, her voice choked with tears. I'd almost never heard Callie swear. "I... I don't know ANYONE in Cleveland!"

"That's... shit, Cal, I'm sorry," I said, putting a consoling hand on her shoulder. "That sucks..."

"He promised me this wouldn't happen!" she sobbed inconsolably. "Why--why would he do that? Why would he tell me... why would he lie to me?! I don't... I don't WANT to move to Cleveland!"

Just then, her phone began to buzz again. I glanced over and saw that Jacob was calling her.

"Nate, he's calling," she said, wiping tears from her eyes. "Can you--can you pull over for a minute?"

"Sure," I nodded, pulling the truck into the parking lot of a donut shop. As soon as the car was stopped, Callie hopped out and put her phone to her ear.

One minute turned into two minutes turned into 45 minutes. The whole time, Callie was pacing back and forth along the edge of the parking lot, still wearing the pretty coral dress and matching heels that she'd styled for the segment earlier that morning. The warm colors were a striking contrast to her dour mood.

From the driver's seat, I watched her closely, just like I did everyday. Although I felt sorry for her, there was something strangely erotic about watching such a gorgeous girl bawling her eyes out. I'd never seen Callie cry before, but the tears lent her beauty a kind of fragile, vulnerable quality that stirred feelings deep inside me.