After some astonishing courtroom antics, incriminating L.A.P.D. testimony, and the mother of all perms, this week’s episode of The People v. O.J. Simpson ends in devastation after a topless photo of Sarah Paulson’s Marcia Clark is printed in The National Enquirer. Clark, publicly humiliated once more, dissolves into tears in the courtroom. It was a sharply-observed examination of sexism that happened to air on International Women’s Day. So did this all really happen to Clark? It all did and, in fact, it was even worse.

Speaking about the media circus at the time of the trial, Clark told Vogue last January, “There was no privacy. I was famous in a way that was kind of terrifying. I had no protection. When reporters showed up at my house, there wasn’t even a sidewalk. They were literally parked on my front lawn.” And in February she appeared on The View to say that watching American Crime Story was like “reliving a nightmare.” She called it a “painful experience” and said every bit was “awful and hard for me.”

But, surely, the hardest part had to come tonight as Clark was forced to relive the moment when her private photos were splashed across the pages of the National Enquirer. In FX’s fictionalized version of events, Clark says that it must have been her ex-husband, Gabriel Horowitz, who sold her photos. In truth, it was her ex-mother-in-law, Clara Horowitz, who sold her out to The National Enquirer. Woman on woman betrayal is always worse.

The photo was taken in 1979 and showed Clark topless on a St. Tropez beach with then-husband Horowitz. In the print edition, her breasts were censored with a black bar. Though Simpson’s lawyers weren’t directly responsible for the damaging photos, the so-called Dream Team was allegedly the inspiration. Clark wrote in in her 1997 memoir Without A Doubt:

In my mind’s eye, I could see Gaby and me and our Italian train-conductor friend. We were playful and giddy. I’d shed my top. It was so innocent. . . . I later learned that a private eye, hoping to curry favor with the Dream Team, had tracked her down in Israel and put her in touch with the Enquirer.

And, just as it played out in The People v. O.J. Simpson, Judge Lance Ito did dismiss the court that day. As Clark tells it, “I overestimated my own strength. No sooner had I taken my seat at the counsel table . . . I felt the tears welling up in my eyes. . . . Lance must have caught my distress, because, in a singular act of compassion, he quickly managed to recess court for the day.”

And even though the jury allegedly never saw the photos—they were sequestered thanks to some brutal fake photos of a battered Nicole Brown Simpson that had also been printed in The National Enquirer—the damage to Clark’s reputation was done. The FX show reverses the timeline to show Clark having to publicly defend herself as a mother before the Enquirer spread. In fact, the photos ran in early February and Clark’s battle with her estranged husband Gordon didn’t hit headlines until March.