For a while I did wonder if Alex was so bothered by the book because she was as in denial about being raped/coerced and has buried it for years so reevaluating what happened in the light of the revelations was very traumatic for her.
The fact she has a lot of back pain amplified that for me. She’d buried the trauma in her body and now that the truth is surfacing again she’s having a somatized reaction.
She’d done some very convoluted mental gymnastics over the years to shield herself, rationalised it away and having that stripped off is potentially devastating and she’s trying to avoid it.
So at first when she said to Mitch in the villa in Italy “it was consensual” I dismissed that.
But then later I contrasted her affect on that clip and the flashback to when she threatened him a with saying he’d raped her too in the first series. In one clip she was angry, engaged with her emotions. In the other she was both wily and compliant, acting in a way she knew he would find sympathetic and where she was likely to get what she wanted.
I also thought about what she said about when they slept together something like “You’d gotten upset about something, my eating into your time on a segment and I wanted to make that up to you”. That could be a way of putting a nice face on “I was scared of your anger and what the consequences would be, so I slept with you out of fear”.
And then I thought about at how complex the dynamics were and how long this had been going on. Alex had a relationship on air and off air with Mitch for 15 years. That’s a long time to build up a complex set of behaviours designed to hide painful truths.
When the revelations came out, she saw an opportunity to finally be honest and that honesty not rebound on her negatively. All her decisions then were split second. Yes that could be about survival. But when did she make other split second decisions about survival? Are the power dynamics finally shifting in a way that means he can be honest and real?
When she was on air she seized a chance and took it. But the show was taken off air. And then she was swept away in a entourage of advisors. Lots of words to be dropped into her ear again to make her doing herself. And the bald use of power just to take the show off air will have confirmed a lot of her deepest fears about the situation and caused her to clam up again.
Add to that it, we’re gradually being shown that there was a power struggle going on in the months after the bomsbahell show. Involving the outgoing CEO, the incoming CEO, the board. And to an extent that struggle is still going on. Easy for her to go back into her she’ll, especially with a marriage breakdown etc. Retreat to the country. Go back to saying nothing and denying it even to herself.
So, on the own hand she might be a self-serving careerist who swings with the wind. On the other she might be someone deeply traumatised by having to do what she has to survive, and who now sees what happened in the light of a different time.
I think one of the things the Laura Peterson character shows is how different the atmosphere was back then. How really Alex might have thought her career was very precarious and she had to do anything to keep Mitch happy.
So basically in the villa she told Mitch what he wanted to hear, to get what she needed. And the reason she needed him to say that they didn’t sleep together was because it would stop there being further scrutiny, and if there is further scrutiny she will have to think the unthinkable and feel deep pain. . And she will have to admit she had to do something’s he really didn’t want to, and she wasn’t in control no matter how much she has tried to convince herself. And that control is at the heart of her self image and to lose that will shatter her identity. Not to mention public humiliation, speculation, disbelief.