54 pages • 1 hour read
Ella BermanBefore We Were Innocent
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 31-45Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 31 Summary: “2008”
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains a suggestion of suicidal ideation.
Bess and Joni go to the police station to give statements. The officer with whom Bess speaks finds her memory surprisingly sharp, given how much alcohol the girls consumed that day. Bess and Joni sign their statements and are allowed to leave. On the way out, there are photographers waiting to question them.
Chapter 32 Summary: “2018”
Bess returns to her cabin near the Salton Sea. Her mother calls, and the two chat about Joni’s current situation and about memories of the three girls when they were young. Bess is a little surprised that her mother has been following the media circus. Bess’s mother recalls feeling uncomfortable with Joni’s intensity and explains to her daughter that to adults, it was obvious that Joni’s bravado masked an inner insecurity. Bess’s mother had been sure that both Joni and Evangeline had adored Bess, but she knows how easily teenage girls can hurt one another, even when their intentions are not malicious.
Chapter 33 Summary: “2008”
Joni and Bess find their hotel room oppressive and see signs of Evangeline everywhere. They decide to go to the beach. Once there, because they have not eaten in an entire day, they buy ice cream. They swim, talk, and temporarily manage to forget about Evangeline. However, they are unaware that a photographer has been capturing their every move. After they leave the beach, they walk around the area shops, and although Bess has episodic crying fits, none of the many gawkers who are clandestinely taking photographs deign to capture those moments. Instead, the pictures taken will portray two young women enjoying what appears to be a carefree shopping spree.
Chapter 34 Summary: “2018”
After waking up to a yard full of reporters, Bess returns to Joni’s the next morning. She arrives just in time to catch the news on television. Willa’s body washed up on the rocky California coast just that morning, and the evidence indicates foul play. The media storm intensifies. Bess wonders how the media will characterize Willa, and there are signs that she is not as easy to categorize as Evangeline had been. Evangeline was so young that the media found it easy to paint her as a saint. By contrast, Willa is an adult with a massive social media following and is inherently more complex. Bess and Joni watch hour after hour of coverage. Eventually, it is revealed that Willa was hit on the head and asphyxiated. Joni has become the main suspect, and the media begins to overtly draw connections between Willa’s murder and Evangeline’s death.
Bess and Joni go out paddleboarding. Afterwards, Bess questions Joni directly about the night that Willa disappeared. She also asks about the scratch on Joni’s chest and the mystery of which paddleboard had been Willa’s. Joni admits to fighting with Willa. She injured Willa by throwing a piece of rose quartz, and she claims that after that moment, Willa took off. Later, Willa texted Joni and threatened to reveal who Joni “really was” to the whole world. Bess does not want to lie for Joni, but Joni insists that she did not kill Willa and that the lie is the only thing that will save her. Later, before falling asleep, Bess thinks to herself that although Joni is violent, she would never risk her career by killing Willa and that she is too smart to believe that an alibi from Bess would be enough to save her.
Chapter 35 Summary: “2008”
Theo arrives and asks Bess and Joni to tell him about Evangeline’s last moments. They explain how drunk they all were. Joni adds that they are too upset to discuss the death right now and that they will have to fill him in later. The girls are called back to the police station. The police no longer think that Evangeline’s death was an accident, and they want to question Bess and Joni further about the party and the argument. They also inform Bess that one of the party organizers is a known sex trafficker. Bess learns that Evangeline texted Theo, upset about being “dragged” to a party by Bess, and it becomes clear that the police wonder if Bess and Joni were planning to give Evangeline up to the trafficker. The officer questioning Bess asks her how many men she has slept with. He also informs her that because she and Joni are suspects, she needs a lawyer. Afterwards, Joni makes sure that their stories are still straight, and the girls call their parents. They sneak down to the hotel computer at night and realize that the entire world is talking about them. Photos from their social media profiles, leaked emails, and other damning bits of “evidence” are being published everywhere.
Chapter 36 Summary: “2018”
Joni voluntarily goes to the police station to provide information. She returns late, and although Bess is in a state of heightened anxiety, Joni remains calm. She explains to Bess that everything is going to be just fine. The two talk about their responses to Evangeline’s death and the isolation that they both felt in the years following the tragedy. Although Joni has lived very much in the public eye, she admits to struggling, and she scares Bess by saying that she sometimes thinks about paddling out into the middle of the ocean and finally being “free.” She quickly clarifies that she is not talking about suicide.
Chapter 37 Summary: “2008”
Bess and Joni are arrested. By now, the media circus has become so intense that the press is already convinced of their guilt. The internet is flooded with images of the drunken Bess and Joni flirting with guys at parties and generally behaving “badly.” The narrative that the two “experienced” girls planned to offer their friend up to a sex trafficker is also bolstered by years’ worth of damning photographs. Several email hacks reveal a series of conversations in which Bess and Joni shared details about their various sexual partners. Bess feels that her entire life is now being viewed through the “prism” of Evangeline’s death.
Chapter 38 Summary: “2008”
World News Today prints a salacious article painting Bess and Joni in an unflattering light and suggesting that Evangeline was an innocent, manipulated victim. Much of the article focuses on a text message sent from Evangeline to Theo that reads, “If I die tonight you know who is to blame” (244). Although the text is not definitively damning without context, it is easy for the periodical to suggest that Evangeline was truly afraid for her life.
Chapter 39 Summary: “2018”
Willa’s secret boyfriend, Lucien, is arrested for her murder.
Chapter 40 Summary: “2018”
Bess wants to look at Evangeline’s childhood home, and Joni accompanies her. They spy Evangeline’s mother and Theo inside and reminisce about their friend. Joni argues that Evangeline was not perfect; she was controlling and snobbish, and she was not the saint that the media portrayed her to be.
Chapter 41 Summary: “2008”
The girls are charged with murder. Based in part on their own leaked communication and on Evangeline’s text to Theo, the police believe that Bess and Joni, envious of Evangeline’s wealth and privilege, intended to sell their friend into sexual slavery to get back at her for her controlling behavior. Joni and Bess are transported to a Greek prison.
Chapter 42 Summary: “2008”
In prison, Joni tells Bess that everything will be okay. Bess still struggles to accept the situation.
Chapter 43 Summary: “2018”
Steven calls Bess. He is upset that she is still in Malibu and thinks that she should go home. He objects to her being so near to Joni, and it is clear that he believes Joni to have been involved in Willa’s death.
Chapter 44 Summary: “2009”
Six months have passed, and the Greek authorities review the case against Bess and Joni. The charges are dropped and the girls are released. Joni seems unfazed, but Bess has struggled deeply during her time in prison. Their mothers come to Greece to pick them up, and they fly back to the United States.
Chapter 45 Summary: “2018”
Bess worries when she sees the same Tesla drive by Joni’s house multiple times, but Joni rolls her eyes and explains that every other person in Malibu drives a Tesla. Bess works online, moderating complaints for the dating app, and Joni works on the press for her upcoming book launch. The two spend the afternoon together, and later, Bess finds Willa’s blue paddleboard. She is relieved that Joni was not lying and that the board is still in her house.
Chapters 31-45 Analysis
In this action-packed section of the novel, Berman reveals much about Bess through the way that she responds to various events, and the issue of True Crime and Media Distortion drives many of Bess’s choices in these chapters. Because Evangeline’s death was so traumatic for Bess, the narrative implies that she never truly recovered from it and still does not truly know herself. During this portion of the 2018 timeline, she begins to think critically about her own past experiences and tries to understand Joni on a deeper level. Through a key conversation with her mother, her own memories of the media storm that followed Evangeline’s death, and through the way that she analyzes and interprets Willa’s death, Bess begins to emerge as a more thoughtful character. However, when Bess shows a deep, visceral fear of the reporters who accost her after Willa’s body is discovered, her behavior proves that she is still traumatized from the widespread vilification she experienced 10 years prior.
As a counterpoint to the distortions of the media, Bess’s mother provides her with some much-needed perspective upon her current dilemma and past experiences. By conveying her own impressions of the teenage Joni, Bess’s mother strips her of several long-held illusions about her friend. For example, Bess is surprised to realize that her mother was always instinctively wary of Joni and saw beyond the girl’s bravado to the intense neediness and insecurity underneath. As she now tells Bess, “It was almost painful to watch you girls together sometimes, she needed so much from you” (199). Bess, sure that she had been the one to need so much from Joni, is struck by this observation, and the intensity of her surprise reveals how deeply convinced she has been of the authenticity of Joni’s confident persona all these years. Because so much of the novel depends upon Bess’s self-knowledge and her interpretations of Joni’s actions, this conversation represents the first moment in which Bess is confronted with an alternative interpretation of Joni’s behavior. The conversation also serves as a form of foreshadowing, for these revelations will soon lead to further discoveries, for if Joni was not truly calm, collected, and secure in her own charisma, then Bess must also confront the probability that Joni was never as honest as she claimed to be.
As these chapters examine the media circus that erupts immediately after Evangeline’s death, Berman emphasizes the lifelong impact that these events have on Bess. Significantly, the issue of true crime and media distortion invades the narrative almost immediately, for although the girls’ desire to go shopping and distract themselves from the horror of their situation is a fairly innocent—if misguided—motivation, the resulting photographs of their seemingly carefree activities characterize them as suspiciously remorseless in the wake of their friend’s death. When the clandestine photographers publish these images as evidence of the girls’ callousness, the media coverage of the two spirals out of control, and as Bess later recalls, her distorted portrayal in the press seems like “a version of [her]self that [she] can’t quite access” (210). Significantly, the skewed portrayal of the two girls as remorseless does not capture the full complexity of grief and its manifestations, and while a more thorough investigation into Bess’s and Joni’s actions in the days following their friend’s death might have revealed how upset they truly were, the snapshots published by the Greek press did not capture their raw expressions of grief. Bess realizes that this distortion is repeated again and again, and each inaccurate portrayal that is published online strengthens the growing misrepresentation of the two girls. For example, because she and Joni were both more sexually active than Evangeline, and because they unknowingly attended a party at the home of a notorious sex trafficker, the girls’ previous sex lives therefore became fodder for public judgement. With this aspect of the story, Berman highlights the fact that female sexuality is typically vilified by sensationalistic media coverage; thus, this aspect represents another way in which the novel critiques the patterns of contemporary culture and discusses the long-term damage of true crime and media distortion.
Berman also draws explicit comparisons between the two timelines when Bess responds to the discovery of Willa’s body. For example, Bess thinks to herself that unlike Willa, Evangeline was younger and much easier to pigeonhole as a “saint.” By contrast, Willa is an adult with a massive social media presence and a more developed personality. Reflecting on her own past experiences, Bess is sure that Willa will continue to be of interest to the international media, and she wonders how the media will manage to distort Willa and Joni to fit the narrative they choose to develop. At this point, Bess is deeply cynical about the ways in which women are depicted in the media, but her analysis of the current media storm surrounding Willa and Joni also helps her to think more critically about Joni’s character, and she gradually comes to new realizations about both the adult Joni and the brash girl she used to be. However, although Bess shows some progress in terms of emotional growth, the media storm surrounding Willa takes its toll. In the light of her increasing fear and paranoia in the face of the new public scrutiny, it becomes obvious that Joni’s choice to involve Bess in her own problems is callous and insensitive, and this aspect of the 2018 timeline confirms that Joni is manipulative and self-serving and was never an authentic friend.
