Why I Filmed This: A Note on Silence, Power, and Who Gets Protected

This video was recorded outside the San Francisco Public Library roughly a year and a half to two years ago.

Inside the library that day, a high-ranking California prosecutor, the state’s District Attorney at the time, was speaking publicly about why TikTok should be shut down. The framing was familiar: national security, public safety, concern for the public.

But anyone paying attention knows the deeper reason TikTok is threatening to those in power. It allows people, especially women, to speak to one another directly, publicly, and at scale. It allows patterns to surface. It allows shared reality. That is what institutions that rely on fragmentation and silence cannot tolerate.

I did not initially realize who the speaker was. I recognized him only as I was leaving the building. He moved quickly into a car and left. His two female aides, however, had to walk to theirs.

I followed them. I did not threaten them. I did not block them. I did not touch them. I asked them questions.

Specifically, I asked why public money is being spent the way it is, and why women are not being protected by the very systems that claim to exist for that purpose.

At the time, I was trapped in HUD housing, unable to leave, unable to reach my family, and effectively held in place by bureaucratic and legal mechanisms I had already reported repeatedly to law enforcement. I said this clearly. I said I was being held prisoner.

They did not respond. They did not acknowledge me. They did not answer a single question.

That silence is the point.

What happens next in the video is just as important. A male security guard from the library steps between me and the two women. This is notable because I was not aggressive. I was not behaving erratically. I was doing what journalists and citizens have always done in functioning democracies: asking public officials’ representatives direct questions about public harm.

Yet his body moved instinctively to block me, not them. To contain the question, not the absence of an answer.

This is not about one guard or one moment. It is about an unconscious operating system. A deeply embedded, patriarchal reflex that identifies women who speak as the threat, and institutions that fail as something to be protected.

What you do not see at the very end of the video is the guard’s visible distress. He asks me why I don’t go to the police.

I tell him the truth: I have. Over and over. Dozens of times.

And they do nothing.

That is why I am filming. That is why I am speaking publicly. That is why platforms like TikTok matter. Because when law enforcement, prosecutors, and institutions are aligned against reality rather than accountable to it, documentation becomes the only remaining form of protection.

This video is not about causing a scene. It is about recording one.

Silence is not neutral. Ignoring women who report harm is not benign. And when the state closes ranks instead of listening, that is not democracy functioning imperfectly. That is power protecting itself.

Watch carefully. Not for drama. For pattern.