Begging for Food While the Thieves Walk Free

I am sick with fury.

Not the theatrical kind. Not the internet performance kind. The kind that lives in the body, acidic and exact. The kind that arrives when you realize you are being starved in plain sight while the people who did it face no consequences at all.

I am begging for enough money to eat.

Let me say that again, because it still sounds unreal even to me. I am begging for food while the men who sabotaged me, kidnapped me, tortured me, trafficked me, and stole vast sums of money from me live comfortably, protected by silence, bureaucracy, and a justice system with no appetite for touching them.

And here is the part people struggle to metabolize.

I am far more accomplished than everyone I am begging a sandwich from.

My CV is extraordinary. What I have built, led, and created, the scale and impact of my work, exceeds anything the people I am now pleading with have ever done. Clerks. Administrators. Donors. Gatekeepers. Strangers. Every single one of them is less accomplished than I am.

And I am the one hungry.

Not because I failed.

Not because I mismanaged.

Not because I am incapable.

But because I was kidnapped. Because I was tortured. Because I was stolen from.

That is the throughline people keep trying to erase.

My accomplishments did not vanish on their own. They were interrupted by violence. My access did not dry up naturally. It was severed. My financial collapse was not market driven. It was coerced. The theft was not metaphorical. It was literal.

My story is not subtle. It is not ambiguous. It is not a “both sides” situation. It is extreme, documented, and clear. And still, I am here. Hungry. While they are not.

That alone should end the conversation. But it does not, because what is happening to me is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. And women are finally seeing it.

Across industries, marriages, families, and nations, women are waking up to the same brutal arithmetic. Our labor, our money, our bodies, our intellectual property, our time, our safety have been systematically extracted, redirected, laundered, and claimed by men. When we object, we are punished. When we survive, we are disbelieved. When we demand restitution, we are told to be grateful for crumbs.

We are told to be resilient.

We are told to rebuild.

We are told to ask nicely.

And if we do not, we are often jailed, beaten, or killed.

I am not asking nicely anymore.

There is something profoundly obscene about a world in which a woman who survived kidnapping and torture, a woman with an extraordinary record of achievement, is reduced to begging for food while her perpetrators remain untouched. There is something deeply sick about a society that treats this as unfortunate but acceptable collateral damage. There is something rotten at the core of a system where justice is endlessly deferred while hunger is immediate.

What enrages me is not only what was done to me. It is what happens after.

The indifference.

The delays.

The procedural maze designed to exhaust.

The quiet agreement that it is easier to let a woman starve than to confront the men who profited from her destruction.

This is not about one bad actor or one broken case. This is about a global structure that depends on women absorbing the loss silently.

When our money is stolen, it is reframed as a “marital dispute,” a “business risk,” a “miscommunication.” When we are harmed, the harm is minimized. When we ask for justice, we are told the system is slow. When we ask for help surviving in the meantime, we are treated like a nuisance.

Slow justice, in this context, is not neutral. It is lethal.

The Accomplishment Inversion

There is a name for what is happening to me, and to countless other women.

It is accomplishment inversion.

It is the systematic reversal of merit, where the most accomplished woman in the room is rendered powerless while less capable men are elevated as authorities over her survival. This is not accidental. It is a control mechanism.

In my case, the inversion was enforced through kidnapping, torture, and theft. Violence is not separate from economic control. It is one of its most reliable tools.

I am not begging because I lack ability. I am begging because my ability was neutralized by force. Because what I built was taken after my body was broken. Because success in a woman does not lead to protection. It paints a target.

What follows accomplishment inversion is credential laundering.

Men who sabotage women do not just steal money. They steal legitimacy. They absorb the value of women’s labor and present it as their own competence. They sit on boards. They advise institutions. They are treated as stable, serious, trustworthy.

Meanwhile, the women they extracted from are rendered “complicated.”

Credential laundering allows mediocre men to look inevitable and extraordinary women to look disposable. It explains how the people I am begging are positioned as gatekeepers, and I am positioned as a problem.

Hunger is not theoretical. Poverty is not a thought experiment. Being forced to beg while your abusers thrive is not an unfortunate side effect.

It is the mechanism.

The Personhood Gap

There is another truth most women have already reached, quietly and with grim certainty.

Men do not see us as fully real people.

If they did, none of this behavior would be imaginable. You do not kidnap people you recognize as people. You do not torture people you see as people. You do not steal someone’s life and then expect gratitude if you believe they are human.

Ask the simplest question. If this were done to men, what response would be expected? Rage would be assumed. Retaliation would be predicted. Resistance would be taken as obvious and justified.

But women, especially mothers, are expected to absorb it.

Somehow, after kidnapping, torture, theft, starvation, and erasure, we are expected to say:

“It’s fine.”

“No worries.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll still take care of you.”

That expectation only exists if you have been taught, over generations, that women are not fully people. That we are resources. Buffers. Shock absorbers. Containers for male behavior. That our pain is background noise and our fury is a malfunction.

This is not ignorance. It is willful blindness.

Because the response we are having is the only response any human being would have. Anger is not surprising here. Hatred is not mysterious. Fury is not pathological.

What is pathological is the expectation that we would feel anything else.

Women are not suddenly becoming angrier. We are becoming clearer. The lie that we are not real is no longer holding. And once that lie collapses, everything built on it begins to shake.

And here is the part that terrifies those in power. Women are comparing notes.

We are realizing our money did not just disappear. It was taken. Our work did not just fail. It was siphoned. Our dependency was not accidental. It was engineered. Our desperation is not a personal failing. It is the final stage of extraction.

Every day, my feeds surface another woman I was never taught to know. A scientist. A builder. An inventor. A theorist. Each time, the pattern repeats. The details change. The outcome does not. The men around her took her work, earned the credit, pocketed the money, and wrote her out of history while standing on her shoulders.

This is not rediscovery. It is excavation.

And this is the part they cannot undo.

You cannot brush this back under the rug. You cannot make it disappear. You can delay justice. You can ignore it. You can starve us in the meantime. But you cannot make us unsee what we now see. You cannot return us to ignorance. You cannot convince us this is random, rare, or coincidence.

We hate your guts because this is what you have earned.

I am furious because I am hungry.

I am furious because I am not believed.

I am furious because the evidence exists and is ignored.

I am furious because justice is treated as optional when women are the ones owed it.

And I am furious because this is happening everywhere.

If this makes you uncomfortable, good. It should. Because the obscenity is not my anger. The obscenity is a world that finds my hunger, my begging for scraps from my lessers, the stupes and enslavers living off women’s labor, acceptable.

If I were a man thinking clearly at this point, I would get ahead of the cataclysm already forming and start correcting the ledger alongside the other half of humanity. Repair is still possible. Refusal is a choice. And the bill is coming.

We are done being quiet about this.

All women have not yet gotten the full memo.

But they will.