Apparently Juliet's been running down a list for Serena of all the horrible things she's done to her this season, and we're coming in on the tail end: The coke pictures and the overdose. Serena goes, "And then you just left me for dead in a motel room. Why? Because of Nate? Or Colin?" Juliet then utters maybe the most classic line of the season, or possibly the series, leaning forward with a Serena migraine: "No, you stupid bitch!" It's all in the delivery. Like she is just at the end of her rope. "Because you destroyed my brother's life!" Serena shrugs and she's like, "Who's your brother?" But when she finds out, she's as confused as ever. As far as she knows, he refused to fuck her and then disappeared from her entire radar. Juliet just shakes her head like she's about to yell at Serena again, and then it's another flashback.

The official charges were statutory rape, and transporting a minor across state lines. Ben protested, but the lawyer produced an affidavit, signed by Serena, stating otherwise. Ben can't believe it -- I love how this whole story is predicated on them still feeling warmly toward each other (up to the point where he's been in jail for three years and sends his sister to destroy her) -- but they can't even really go to trial on a he said/she said because Damien saw them at the Millbrook Inn. He is such a furtive subway masturbator of a person, I love it. Just the epic casting coup of getting somebody who looks exactly like that to play somebody exactly like that. It's beautiful.

"You left campus with an underage student and drove across state lines," even if it was just to the sexless Vassar library. The lawyer explains how Lily works, quite succinctly: "The girl's family doesn't want the story to get out either, so they pressured the DA into offering a plea bargain." Upside, Ben's name stays off the sex offender list; downside, he didn't actually even get to sleep with Serena van der Woodsen and still has to do five years at a Staten Island facility with iffy 3G coverage. Juliet's like, "It's so hard to be poor! If only we had a billionaire cousin who could get us a better lawyer." In the present, Serena is hornswoggled and fogfuddled by all of this. "He was nothing but good to me!" she swears, but whence the affidavit? Who could have signed Serena's name to a legal document just to make a problem go away? I can't quite, it's on the tip of my, if you'll just give me a...