Before we start, a pro-tip: if you prefer audio, you can listen to this newsletter on Substack. Just find the play button on the top right corner!
And thank you ll for coming to Veronica Beard last week. We had a GREAT turn out and it was so much fun raising money for CaringKind. Veronica Beard donated 15% of all proceeds of our event, and we are so grateful. I got myself a gorgeous pink jacket, and loved it so much I ended up getting it in khaki with a matching pant. I’ll wear this suit year round. More fun things to come, thanks again for showing up for a great cause!
Hi there,
Have you seen Oprah’s interview with Kristin Cabot? You know, the woman caught on the Coldplay kiss cam last summer with her boss, in what became the most watched video of 2025. Three hundred billion views (!) of fifteen seconds that she will never forget.
Well, spoil alert: it turns out that Kristin Cabot was already separated from her husband. Living apart, planning a divorce, amicably and quietly, like adults. Her husband was at the same concert that night, with someone else. He supported her then, and he supports her now.
None of that mattered.
What followed was over fifty death threats, a radio station broadcasting her home address, paparazzi stalking her for weeks, strangers trespassing to peer through her windows, and — my personal favorite — a group of grown women surrounding her car at her teenage son’s workplace, screaming at her while the boy watched. Her children were afraid they were going to die. Every inch of her appearance was dissected online for apparently wrecking the home of her innocent boss, who by the way told her he was separated too. She was accused of sleeping her way to the top despite her successful 25-year career before the scandal. Was it right for the head of HR to get with her boss? Of course not. But didn’t the boss also get with the head of HR?
That man, the boss and CEO is Andy Byron. He quietly resigned, has never been harassed (and if he was, for sure not even close to the extent that she was), hasn’t had his body scrutinized or his home invaded or his children terrorized. He simply… disappeared into peace, and into his next chapter.
Through it all, what surprised Kristin Cabot the most was that the majority of the cruel, sometimes violent and aggressive reactions came from women. But why are we surprised? We’ve seen this movie, and sadly we know how it ends.
Janet Jackson didn’t rip her own costume off at the Super Bowl. Justin Timberlake did. She was blacklisted from radio, MTV, and the Grammys, and highly judged by women. He won two Grammys that same week, and was invited back to headline the Super Bowl fourteen years later.
Monica Lewinsky, then a 22-year-old intern, became a punchline for a generation, with the harshest judgement coming from women. How she lived through that and overcame the trauma is a miracle to me. Bill Clinton kept the presidency, the foundation, the speaking fees, and the legacy.
Britney Spears was dumped, then publicly humiliated by her ex-boyfriend on every talk show in America, and highly criticized by women before she wrote a book years later sharing that she had an abortion because he wasn’t ready to be a father — the same Justin Timberlake, by the way, the man really does collect these. He left unscathed, and went on to make movies, and win awards.
In the court of public opinion, women burn other women. And let the men walk.
And here’s what should really bother us: men don’t do this to each other. They don’t dissect each other’s hairlines or weight or outfit choices. They don’t form groups in parking lots to scream at each other. They don’t make it their personal mission to destroy another man’s reputation over a fifteen-second clip.
Men — who compete for power, money, and status every single day of their lives — have figured out something we haven’t: turning on each other publicly is a losing strategy. They protect the group because protecting the group protects the individual. When one of them is under fire, they don’t pile on. They go quiet, they close ranks, and they wait for it to pass. Because it always passes.
We could learn something from that. I’m not suggesting we become complicit and silent like the men in the Epstein files (I wrote this article about that), or condone bad behavior on women just because of their gender. But we should refuse to destroy a woman’s life, especially when we don’t even know their story. Tearing each other apart doesn’t elevate the group — it just makes all women look like high-school girls.
While we are here, ripping each other to shreds over fifteen seconds of kiss cam footage, they are holding their positions. They are keeping their seats at the table. They are watching us fight over crumbs while they eat the meal.
So I wanted to understand why. Why do we do this to each other? What is it in us — smart, empathetic, supposedly evolved women — that makes us reach for the knife the moment one of our own stumbles? I went looking for answers. What I found was infuriating, uncomfortable, and — if we’re honest with ourselves — very familiar.
Here’s what I learned.
The Receipts
Before we get to the uncomfortable question at the center of all of this, let’s establish something: this is not anecdotal. The data is in, and it is damning.
The American Psychological Association published a study showing that organizations led by women face greater public punishment after ethical failures than those led by men — because we expect women to be moral, communal, and nurturing. When they fall short, we punish them for violating an identity we assigned to them without their consent.
A 2025 study in Politics & Gender published by Cambridge University Press tested 1,700 Americans and found that when a male political candidate deviated from his party’s platform, voters shrugged it off. When a woman did the same thing, her approval dropped by 11 points — roughly the same penalty as being caught embezzling.
Let that sink in: a woman having her own opinion costs her the same credibility as a man committing a financial crime.
A European study commissioned by the European Women’s Lobby (EWL) found women are 27 times more likely to face online harassment than men. And 92% of women who experience online violence say it negatively impacts their wellbeing, which is a politely clinical way of saying it breaks them.
And here’s the number that should make every woman reading this sit with herself for a moment: a UK think tank Demos analyzed hundreds of thousands of tweets using the words “slut” and “whore.” Accounts with male names sent those words 116,530 times. Accounts with female names: 94,546.
We are nearly neck and neck with men in the act of tearing each other apart.
The Million-Dollar Question: WHY?
Why do we do this to each other? Why did a group of grown women think it was appropriate — righteous, even — to surround Kristin Cabot’s car and scream at her in front of her child? Why did women across the internet spend more energy mocking her appearance than questioning the silence of the man standing right next to her?
Kristin herself tried to make sense of it on Oprah’s podcast. She said she thinks she became representative of something that touches on a lot of fear in people. She became a symbol — the other woman. The homewrecker, the threat. Except here’s the thing about that narrative: for there to be an “other woman,” the man has to be at fault too. He has to be the one breaking a vow, making a choice, walking into that concert with her. Andy Byron was right there, but the fury landed on her. Because the “other woman” story gives us a villain we feel entitled to destroy, and it is almost never the man.
There is no single answer to the question of why. But there are several theories, and every one of them should make us furious — not at each other, but at the system that taught us this behavior in the first place.
Could it be internalized misogyny?
Internalized misogyny is what happens when women absorb the culture’s contempt for women and start running it like their own operating system. It’s not conscious, it’s the water we swim in. Researchers describe it as the phenomenon where women evaluate other women using the exact stereotypes that were designed to diminish all of us — policing appearance, scrutinizing private lives, labeling and mocking each other to decrease each other’s perceived worth. Psychologists have identified three core expressions: devaluation of women, distrust of women, and gender bias in favor of men. And women score on all three. Every single one of us. Because we were raised in the same culture that told us, from the playground forward, that women are less reliable, less rational, less trustworthy than men. We internalized the message, and now we enforce it — on each other.
Could it be intrasexual competition?
This one gets uncomfortable. Researchers at McMaster University introduced an attractively dressed woman to pairs of female study participants. When she wore a low-cut top and short skirt, the other women reacted aggressively, mocking her, rolling their eyes, making cutting remarks behind her back. When the same woman wore jeans and a T-shirt, there was barely a reaction. The lead researcher concluded that the policing of female sexuality is driven largely by women themselves.
The evolutionary argument goes like this: women who appear “too available” threaten the negotiating power of the group. So we regulate, we punish, and we shame because somewhere deep in the wiring, the system taught us that another woman’s freedom is our loss.
Could it be status policing?
A now-famous ethnographic study embedded researchers in a university dorm for an entire year. They found that women across every social tier used the word “slut” — but it almost never had anything to do with sex. Higher-status women used it to mean low-class or trashy. Lower-status women used it to mean snobby or mean. The label was a weapon of hierarchy, not morality. It functioned as a border patrol system: You do not belong here. Stay in your lane. A separate study at Cornell reinforced the pattern — women rated a fictional peer with 20 sexual partners as less competent, less warm, and less emotionally stable than one with 2 partners. Even women who were themselves sexually active made these judgments. We punish in others what we fear being punished for ourselves.
Could it be the patriarchal bargain?
This is the one that should keep us up at night. Scholars describe internalized misogyny as a tool — designed by patriarchy to keep women subordinate by redirecting their energy from opposing the system to fighting each other. When women enforce the rules of respectability on other women, they are performing the system’s maintenance for free. Every time we pile on another woman — in a comment section, in a parking lot, in a group text — we are doing the work the system needs us to do to keep itself running. We become the enforcers of our own oppression. And we do it thinking we’re on the right side.
What Now
We are not bad people! But internalized misogyny is real, intrasexual competition is biological, status policing is sociological, and the patriarchal bargain is structural. These are deep, ancient forces, and none of us are immune.
But here’s the thing about being an intelligent, compassionate, self-aware person: awareness is the first obligation. Once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. And once you can’t unsee it, staying silent — or worse, participating — is a choice.
We could be Kristin Cabot. Any one of us. Fifteen seconds is all it takes to destroy someone’s life. The next time a woman’s face goes viral for the wrong reasons, or she wears something we feel threaten by, or she makes a big mistake in public, before we click, comment, share the meme, and gossip, let’s ask ourselves these questions:
Would men be judged the same way? Is turning against her and destroying her life the solution for this problem? And if a man is involved, why isn’t he paying the same price?
Sending love,
Patricia