The public sphere, amplified by social media, has become a ruthless courtroom where women are tried and sentenced by strangers. The recent case of Kristin Cabot, whose private moment with her boss at a Coldplay concert in 2025 was broadcast on a jumbotron, is a stark global example. Yet, this phenomenon is deeply rooted in Indian society as well, where a woman's difference or perceived transgression invites relentless scrutiny and punishment.
The Viral Spectacle and Its Aftermath
In December 2025, Kristin Cabot's life was dismantled after a camera captured an intimate moment between her and her boss during a Coldplay performance. Despite being separated from her husband, Cabot faced a tsunami of public vitriol. She received over 60 death threats, was subjected to memes and mockery videos, and saw her humiliation commercialized, including in an ad campaign featuring Gwyneth Paltrow. Her career at Astronomer was impacted. As writer Manjiri Indurkar points out, the fact that she wasn't cheating is beside the point. The central question is: what moral logic allows strangers to punish, harass, and threaten a woman for their collective voyeuristic pleasure?
A Small-Town Echo: The Girl Who Chewed Pens
Indurkar's reflection draws a direct line from Cabot's ordeal to her own childhood in Jabalpur. She recalls a brilliant but quirky classmate from the 1990s, a girl whose fingers were stained with ink from chewing pens. In their all-girls school, her academic sharpness earned respect. However, in college, rumours transformed her. Whispers of a mental health breakdown and institutionalization spread. When she secured a coveted campus placement, the gossip mill provided its own narrative: she must have "thrown a fit" or "used tactics." The assumption was that her success was illegitimate, not earned. Indurkar admits to internalizing these stories, leading her to distance herself when the woman later tried to reconnect in Delhi.
The Unchanging Mechanism of Public Judgment
The parallels between the two stories, separated by decades and continents, reveal a consistent pattern. A woman's life becomes a public text open to interpretation with minimal evidence. Her difference—whether in behavior, like the schoolmate's quirkiness, or in a moment of perceived indiscretion, like Cabot's—becomes a story others feel entitled to complete. Social media has only refined and accelerated this impulse, but the foundation was laid long before. The public sphere has always functioned as a court without rules for women, where judgment is passed in real-time and careers, reputations, and mental peace are the collateral damage.
The consequences are severe and lasting. Cabot faced professional and personal ruin. Indurkar's schoolmate navigated a collapsed marriage and fragile mental health while being dogged by rumours. Both cases underscore how women learn early that visibility is conditional and success is suspect. The public's right to look, comment, and judge is often mistaken for a moral obligation, obscuring the human cost. For the entertainment and moral policing of strangers, women continue to pay a steep price every single day. The trial never truly adjourns.
