A man left a comment on one of my reels last month. Not a question. A command.
"Pick a side."
He did not specify which side. He did not have to.
I am going to pick a side. Here it is.
The Epstein files
In 2008, more than forty women and girls reported being trafficked, raped, and sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein and his associates. A federal prosecutor in Florida had a fifty-three-page indictment ready. It named names. It documented a system.
Instead of prosecution, Epstein received a non-prosecution agreement. The deal was negotiated in secret. The victims were not informed. The men whose names appeared alongside his were shielded.
In 2019, Epstein died in federal custody under circumstances that a former chief medical examiner for New York City publicly disputed. The security cameras malfunctioned. Both guards were asleep. The investigation was closed.
In 2024, partial Epstein files were released under public pressure. Names surfaced. Flight logs surfaced. Deposition transcripts surfaced. No significant prosecutions followed.
In April 2026, we are still waiting.
The women who testified were children when these things happened to them. They spoke. The system heard them and chose the men.
That is a side. I am on the other one.
The UN vote
In March 2026, the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women held its 70th session.
Thirty-seven countries voted yes to the Agreed Conclusions: the most basic international commitments to protecting women from discrimination, violence, and exclusion from justice. A document that had been agreed upon, in some form, for seven decades.
One country voted no. The United States, under the Trump administration. The first time in seventy years.
The same administration that has moved to restrict reproductive healthcare, defund domestic violence services, and remove gender identity protections from federal law. The same administration whose appointees have publicly questioned whether marital rape should remain a criminal offence.
I read the news and I thought about the woman who came to me unable to feel her own body. Forty years of correctly identifying what was wanted and giving it. She could not tell me what she wanted for breakfast because the question itself made her panic. Her entire nervous system had been organised around the requirements of others since she was a child.
She did not pick a side. She erased herself. That is what the demand for compliance does to a body over time.
Women's bodies are political territory whether we consent to it or not. The question is not whether you are political. The question is whether you are paying attention.
The body that refuses to perform
I have been told to pick a side my whole life.
When I was a teenager in Texas, my school held a morning assembly where students were expected to stand, place a hand on the heart, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I stood. I placed my hand on my heart. I said nothing.
A teacher pulled me out of the hall.
The principal asked me to explain myself. I said: it is not my flag. I did not want to voice words I did not mean.
He considered that for a moment.
Then he said: I understand.
My body has never been willing to perform an allegiance it does not feel.
The KKK was burning crosses two streets from our house the week a Black family moved into the neighbourhood. I felt the frisson on the school bus when a Black boy's hand brushed my arm. I kissed him anyway.
My mother wanted a neat package. I kept choosing the wrong container.
I did not become complicated on purpose. I followed what was true and it led me here.
Ver-van-je-bed-show
In Dutch we have an expression: ver-van-je-bed-show. Far from your bed show. It means: it does not touch you. It has nothing to do with you.
Palestine was a ver-van-je-bed-show for me. Lebanon was a ver-van-je-bed-show for me. I did not know what was happening in either place and I had no reason to look.
Then I met a family.
I met the Rabbani twins, Nehal and Khaled, in high school. They became my close friends. Through their family I met Karim, who became my husband. He had received a scholarship through the Lutfia Rabbani Foundation and came to study in Holland. The foundation was created by Mahmoud Rabbani, a Palestinian refugee from Haifa who arrived in the Netherlands with nothing and spent his life building bridges between Europe and the Arab world. Queen Beatrix knighted him for it.
I met Karim at the Rabbani house in Holland. Through Mahmoud I met Edward Said. I met Yasser Arafat. I met Palestinian and Lebanese intellectuals, diplomats, activists. People who had lived the history I had never been taught.
I did not arrive at this through ideology. I arrived through a dinner table. Through falling in love. Through a family that carried the wound of 1948 in their bones and hosted European guests with food and grace and fury.
Mahmoud's son Mouin Rabbani is now one of the most respected Middle East analysts in the world. Co-editor of Jadaliyya. Former UN political affairs officer. This week, Jadaliyya published an interview with Mouin where he drew the line between what Israel is doing right now and what the Nazis did. The Anne Frank parallel. Said with the precision of someone who has studied this his entire life. Palestinian journalist Yousef Alhelou reposted it and it is spreading.
I married into this history. My four children carry Muslim names and European faces. What was once a ver-van-je-bed-show became the central wound of my family.
My daughter lives in Beirut
My daughter lives in Beirut. My ex-husband Karim lives there too.
In the first week of April 2026, Israeli military officials began calling village leaders in southern Lebanon. The instruction was explicit: expel the Shia families who have taken refuge among you. If you do not, your village will be targeted.
The leader of Rmeish, a border town, was ordered to immediately remove Shia displaced families sheltering in his community. The same call went to leaders across the south. The threat was clear. Harbour them and you share their fate.
A military power telling civilians to identify their neighbours by religious sect and hand them over, or face destruction.
I need to say what this is because the world seems to have gone quiet about it.
Mouin named it this week in that interview. The mechanism is the same one that operated in occupied Europe. Nazi authorities did not find every hidden Jewish family themselves. They relied on neighbours. On denunciation. On the knowledge that ordinary people, placed under sufficient threat, will turn on the people sleeping in their spare rooms.
Anne Frank's family hid for two years in an annex above a warehouse in Amsterdam. My country. On August 4, 1944, someone informed on them. To this day, the identity of the informer is disputed. What is not disputed is the mechanism: the system did not require that everyone participate. It required that enough people believed the threat was real.
The religion is different. The geography is different. The mechanism is identical. Mouin sees it. I see it. It is no longer a ver-van-je-bed-show for any of us.
It is happening right now. This week. In villages I have driven through. In communities whose food I have eaten.
More than 1.2 million people have been displaced in Lebanon since March. Almost 22 percent of the country's population.
Israeli Defence Minister Katz ordered the destruction of all houses in border villages, explicitly citing the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza. Some are calling it gazafication. The Israeli military has rigged entire villages with explosives and razed them in mass remote detonations. Taybeh. Naqoura. Deir Seryan. Aita al-Shaab. Hanine. Khiam. Ramyah. Bridges destroyed. A security zone declared up to the Litani River. Displaced families told they will not be allowed to return.
Human Rights Watch has said these mass detonations could amount to wanton destruction: a war crime. Haaretz ran the headline: "Like Gaza: Israel Says It Plans to Demolish All Homes in Lebanese Border Villages."
A man named Fadi Zaydan, 35, had been preparing to return home when the news came through. He said: we cannot take this anymore. Sleeping in a tent, not showering, the uncertainty. But we will be targeted if we go home.
I have four children who carry Muslim names and European faces. I have been kicked out of a black cab for saying one of those names aloud. That is an inconvenience.
What is happening in Lebanon is not an inconvenience. It is the systematic dismantling of safety at the level of the nervous system. It will be carried in these bodies for generations.
I wrote about this in detail in another essay, on the diaspora body and continuous traumatic stress. I will not repeat the research here. But I need you to understand: when I talk about the body, I am not speaking in metaphors. Bodies that live under sustained threat develop different nervous systems. This is measurable. The grandmother who fled in 1948. The granddaughter who still scans every room before she can sit down. The research confirms what the body already knew.
The internet's demand
Three hundred thousand views on Instagram. Three thousand new followers in a month. Almost all men.
The internet decided I was an angry white woman giving relationship advice.
Years of practice. Seven hundred and fifty women. Six hundred couples. A methodology I did not design. I metabolised it on my own body first, then offered it to others.
"Angry white woman giving relationship advice."
I watched the comment. I noted what my body did with it. A tightening in my sternum. A heat that moved up through my throat. Then something that felt almost like clarity.
Because I have met this demand before. I know what it asks of me. I know what I cost myself when I comply.
The internet has a specific relationship with women who claim authority over the body. We are welcome as objects of it. We are tolerated as inspirational speakers about it. We become a threat when we say: I know what your nervous system is doing right now, and here is how I know.
Who does she think she is. What are her actual qualifications. Whose side is she on.
The gag order
When I refused to sign the gag order at One Taste, I was about to lose £250,000.
The organisation was dissolving under investigation. Investors were being offered a deal, small and ugly, in exchange for their silence.
I met with my lawyer and I heard what I stood to lose.
I turned to my own body and felt what it was telling me.
The tightening in my throat that I now recognise as: this is not mine to carry. The steadiness in my sternum that I have learned to trust.
I said no.
Not because I was brave. Because my body already knew the answer, and I had learned, slowly and at great cost, to trust that knowledge over the number.
I got everything I asked for in the end.
The women who testified against Epstein trusted their bodies too. They were not believed. They were not protected. They were children. The system chose silence over their testimony.
The demand to pick a side is never neutral. Someone always benefits from your silence.
Where I stand
So here is where I stand.
I stand with the women whose bodies were used and whose testimony was buried. I stand with the Lebanese families being told to hand over their neighbours or die. I stand with the woman in my session room who could not feel her own body because she spent forty years performing what was required of her.
I stand with every person whose nervous system learned to override its own signals because the cost of listening was too high.
I am not neutral. I have never been neutral. Neutral is a luxury for people who are not affected.
I am Dutch. Blonde. European in every way that is immediately legible. I married a Lebanese Palestinian man. My children carry Muslim names. My daughter is in Beirut. My family holds a European passport and a Palestinian wound and the distance between those two things is the distance of a name spoken aloud in the wrong room.
I carry all of this. It does not simplify.
The same nervous system
Last week a man wrote to me from New Zealand. He had watched seventeen of my reels in one sitting. He wrote: "I have been the man who pulled back every time she was upset. I thought it was her fault. Now I think I was just frightened and I did not know how to stay."
I wrote back: "yes. That is exactly it."
He did not have to pass a political test for that to be true. His body was doing something and he had named it.
But I want to say this to him, and to every man who has shown up in my comments this month: the personal and the political are the same nervous system.
The woman you love who goes quiet when you reach for her may be carrying something that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with a world that has been asking her to perform, comply, erase, and accommodate since before she could speak.
The system that silenced Epstein's victims is the same system that teaches women to override their own bodies. The government that voted no on women's rights at the UN is the same force that creates the woman in my session room who cannot feel what she wants. The military that tells villagers to hand over their neighbours is using the same mechanism that has been used on women's bodies for centuries: comply or face consequences.
It is all the same pattern. It shows up in geopolitics and it shows up in the bedroom. It shows up in legislation and it shows up in the way she flinches when you reach for her too fast.
I am not asking you to become political. I am asking you to notice that you already are. Your body is already carrying this. So is hers.
Wake up. Pay attention. Stay in the room.
That is the side I am on.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette