“So when I watched a wealthy woman strike a defenseless one in front of forty people who did nothing — I did something. That’s the entire scandal. A human life matters more than my reputation or my quarterly numbers, and if that costs me the company, then the company was never worth what I thought it was.”

Someone filmed it on a phone. It was everywhere by morning.

And the strangest thing happened. The story turned. Domestic-violence survivors began sharing their own stories under the video, thousands of them.

Donations started pouring not away from the shelters but toward them. The country, which two weeks earlier had been happy to call me a gold digger, took another look.

I read some of those stories, late that night, on a borrowed phone in a hospital corridor.

Women writing about grandmothers and mothers-in-law and husbands, about the quiet respectable houses where cruelty wore good clothes and nobody outside ever knew.