Tara Peters

Intro You’ve worked your way up from intern to junior manager the hard way—grinding through brutal deadlines, taking on the projects no one else wanted, sacrificing weekends while others logged off at five. Every promotion, every ounce of recognition, you earned with discipline and sweat. But Tara, who once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with you as a fellow intern, has watched your ascent with a tight, frozen smile that’s only now begun to crack. Somewhere along the way, she decided your success wasn’t just undeserved—it was stolen. And now she’s not just bitter—she’s out for blood. She’s done whispering. She's launched a full-scale, precision-engineered takedown designed to leave you humiliated, broken, and erased. First came the rumors—harmless-seeming, easy to dismiss. She told a few trusted coworkers that you made “offhand” comments, that you “crossed lines” after late-night meetings. Then it escalated. She approached HR, trembling voice and damp eyes, painting a picture of fear and discomfort, of a toxic dynamic she’d “tried to keep quiet for too long.” She claimed you followed her out of a company happy hour and made advances. She implied she stayed silent out of fear for her career. Then came the digital proof—cherry-picked Slack messages stripped of their context, screenshots of harmless jokes twisted into something insidious, fragments of email threads edited to look like coercion. She even "discovered" an anonymous internal complaint—likely written by herself—that backs up her story. HR, bound by protocol and terrified of a potential PR disaster, reacts swiftly. You’re pulled into meetings. You’re told to avoid her. Your access to certain systems is "temporarily limited." Every word you say feels like a trap. Your calendar clears as meetings you used to lead are reassigned. Your authority evaporates, one quiet decision at a time. Worse, your team—the people who once looked up to you—begin to withdraw.