Engineered Public Confessions in Literature.
- The Abandon Trilogy: Pierce tries to get one out of Mr. Mueller about Hannah by agreeing to a tutoring session and arming herself with a security camera. Subverted in that it's too dark to film due to Mr. Mueller turning off most of the lights and John interferes...
- In Animorphs it was an engineered public demonstration. In Book #35, after spending days harassing a particular famous-but-psychologically unstable Controller, Marco (as a poodle) provokes the Controller into attempting to strangle him to death on national TV.
- In Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident Briar Cugeon gloats about his plan to double-cross the B'wa Kell and position himself as a savior, then arrange for Opal Koboi to have "a tragic accident. Perhaps several tragic accidents" as Foaly records the conversation on Artemis' computer. First the B'wa Kell are shown Cugeon's plans of betrayal, but he is unperturbed as he always considered them disposable. Having Opal find out is a much bigger wrench in his plans.
- In the Andrew Vachss Burke book Dead and Gone, Burke manages to get the Big Bad to admit his planned duplicity while a gadget is transmitting his words to the mercenaries supposed to be guarding him.
- At the end of the Alina Adams mystery Death Drop, the heroine engineers a situation for the murderer to make a confession to a certain acquaintance of his with a reality TV show in a storeroom full of cameras; he didn't check to make sure none of them were on. Thanks to a waiver he'd signed earlier, it was not only an on-camera confession but a court-admissible one.
- Clive Cussler has his hero Dirk Pitt Adventures pull this in The Mediterranean Caper. It looks like Pitt and some aides have been caught by villain Bruno von Till thanks to how one of Pitt's police allies is secretly on von Till's payroll. Held captive in an underground cavern used as a sub bay, von Till and Pitt banter where Pitt basically lays out what von Till has been up to and von Till congratulating him on how he figured it all out and adding a few more details on how he's planning to unload tons of heroin into the United States. He tells his agent to shoot Pitt...at which point, in comes Pitt's buddy, Al, and a squad of soldiers and cops. It turns out Pitt was onto The Mole the whole time and sent Al for reinforcements who have been patiently waiting.Pitt: Did you get all that?Inspector: Every word. The acoustics here would do Carnegie Hall proud.
- In the Doctor Who New Adventures novel The Dying Days, the Doctor pulls off one of these on the alien warlord who has taken over Britain and declared himself King. After tricking him into breathing in helium, the Doctor then displays the whole conversation as a giant hologram in the sky with the villain's (squeaky) rant broadcast all over the world.The Doctor: I think you've just made your abdication speech, your Majesty.
- The Dresden Files: In White Night Lara Raith helps move Harry and Ramirez to a place in the Deeps that allows them to overhear Lady Malvora's proclamation that she is the power behind all the murders.
- At the end of Embedded, Lex Falk is able to talk Tedders into admitting everything about the alien artifact on the colony planet Eighty-Six, which is what the Bloc and SOMD armies are fighting over. Tedders admits this because Falk is in control of the body of Nestor Bloom, a SOMD soldier, and she feels that "Bloom" needs the whole story, even while the SOMD is trying to cover up the whole thing. She doesn't realize that Falk is there until he openly admits that everything that Bloom is seeing and hearing is being transmitted live to the various news agencies.
- Family Skeleton Mysteries: In the third book, Georgia bluffs a cyberbully into confessing while she has a tape recorder going. Both of them know the recording will be inadmissible, which makes her opponent cocky. At that point, several witnesses who've been hiding in the room at Georgia's instructions reveal themselves.
- Guardians of the Flame: Karl manipulates one from the Prince of Bieme after he betrayed them to the Holts, causing his own guardsmen to turn on him in disgust (they were listening behind a curtain).
- In The Golden Oecumene, Phaethon does this to himself during his trial, angrily replying to a rival on the private channel, and realizing a moment too late he's actually switched over to the public channel.
- Mistborn: The Lost Metal: Marasi tries to get Entrone to admit his lies in front of an active radio. It almost works, but unfortunately he hears the echo from outside before he says anything incriminating, and turns it off. He doesn't realize that enough people had crowded close enough outside to hear him anyway.
- In The Sea of Monsters, the second book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, Percy tricks Luke into confessing his crime of poisoning Thalia's tree to the entirety of Camp Half-Blood through an Iris-message, also proving Chiron's innocence.
- In Joan Hess's Pride V. Prejudice, Claire Malloy tracks down a murderer to clear the name of the victim's widow, as well as a fugitive whom the real killer had also implicated. The culprit admits she's right when she presents her accusation, not realizing that Claire, whom the FBI have been looking for since she was seen with the fugitive, had switched on her cell phone: a device she knew the feds must be tapping in their efforts to locate her.
- Averted in Seven Days in May — even with insurmountable evidence laid out before him, the antagonist never makes any explicit admission of guilt.
- Sherlock Holmes:
- "The Dying Detective", in which a concealed Watson overhears the gloating of a villain who thinks he's given Holmes a fatal disease.
- "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone", with a minor twist: Holmes didn't need the thieves to confess to stealing the missing diamond, as he had collected all the evidence he needed to convict before the story started. What he needed was to trick the thieves into saying where they had hidden it.
- The Spirit Thief uses a more magic-fuelled variant. As Adela has Josef pinned to the ground, half-dead, he manages to provoke her into gloating about her master plan, as there's no-one within their earshot. What she doesn't know is that Eli has talked a wind spirit into transmitting her words to the crowd that's gathered to watch her pummel the supposed bad guy.
- Stark's War uses a variant in which the intent is not so much to expose the villain as to disassociate the hero from him. The General who Stark's mutiny overthrew suggests a We Can Rule Together arrangement could be reached in which Stark sets up a few of his comrades as scapegoats. Stark doesn't know that his eloquent, vehement refusal was being recoded and spread around, leaving his fellow mutineers convinced of his integrity and therefore willing draft him as leader, which is what Stark's friends wanted.
- In one Star Trek: New Frontier novel, Captain Mackenzie Calhoun defeats an evil alien leader this way. In response to her attempt to extort him with the lives of Federation refugee hostages, he launched torpedoes at her world's capital city. Then he begs her to stand down and asks if she cares one bit about her people. She sneers "no". At the last second Calhoun aborts the attack. Calhoun promptly broadcasted a recording of the last few minutes across the planet — particularly the part with the villainess willing to gamble with the lives of her people. Almost immediately an angry mob tears her and her accomplices apart.
- Star Wars Legends:
- During Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy, Princess Leia gets to do this
to Smug Snake Borsk Fey'lya—the ship they're in goes to arrest Han, Luke, and Rogue Squadron, and when an Imperial Star Destroyer shows up and the Rogues start flying cover, Fey'lya's ship and escorts go to abandon them and flee, nominally to get back and warn the Republic. Leia, at the covert suggestion of smuggler Talon Karrde (who had provided the location of the objective that Han & co. were going for), quietly turns on the ship's intercom and outgoing communications, then goads Fey'lya into admitting that the only use soldiers could have to a politician is political power, and his political enemies are his enemies in truth—the people on his ship and flying as his escort are his most ardent supporters; fleeing and letting his "enemies" die can only benefit him. Fey'lya's supporters promptly turn on him, and turn back to save the others. - In Zahn's Choices of One, Thrawn goads his nemesis Nuso Esva into revealing his true opinion of two other systems that have aligned with him. On an open comm channel. That Thrawn is rebroadcasting to those systems.Nuso Esva: I imagine you would delight in telling them. Not that they would believe you.
Thrawn: There’s no need for them to believe me. They can hear it from your own mouth. In fact, they’re hearing it right now.
- During Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy, Princess Leia gets to do this
- In "Gone Too Far", a Transformers: TransTech text story, our heroes manage to use this to their advantage. It's unwise to admit you framed someone for murder when they're a communications 'bot who records everything they hear.
- And in the Transformers: Shattered Glass story "Blitzwing Bop", Soundwave tricks Blaster into confessing a crime in front of a Cybertronian officer.
