An Open Letter to Leanna Perry

Earlier this week, a video went viral of a woman on a Southwest flight violently fat-shaming a fellow passenger—yelling, spitting, grabbing her hair. That woman, we learned, is Leanna Perry, a commercial illustrator for major beauty and fashion brands. This is not just about one woman’s breakdown. It’s about the industry that shaped her. The poem-letter below is my response—as someone who has lived on the receiving end of that venom, all my life.

Dear Leanna,

I saw you on the plane. We all did. On the video. Many videos. But I didn’t just see the monstrous Trump supporter you are. I also saw who you must have once been, the small child underneath the vile tantrum, buried in your uncontrolled jaw.

You rose up in the aisle, not like a flame, but like a hunger’s ghost— sharp-edged, starving, too long ignored. Phone clutched like a shield. Grinning like every idiot bully who has ever idiotically bullied. Dissociated as fuck. Screaming about another woman’s “disgusting fat body” because you hate yourself, but also yelling about your “black boyfriend” once you realized you were screwed. That the world would see you and destroy you. Hoping to redeem yourself from the obvious nightmare you are, by having a boyfriend. You: a raging ball of internalized patriarchal white supremacy, clinging to the raft of your “black boyfriend” as though we might all nod and say, “well, in that case, she’s awesome!”

You are not awesome. You are dangerous. And pathetic.

You reached into another woman’s hair as though you owned it, as though to touch it could silence your own shame, as though punishing her body might bring you back your own.

You spit in her face. You snarled: I didn’t want to sit next to a fucking fat lady.

And your venom cracked the air like a bone.

What you did was cruel. Was violent. Was deeply, unfathomably stupid. Was a trigger pulled for all of us who have walked through this world holding too much voice, carrying too much body, using too much brain, being altogether much too much too much, as women are said to do.

I know her, the woman in the middle seat— the one you tried to humiliate. (You failed, by the way.) Not literally, of course. But I have been her since before I had words. You are so many women I’ve known.

You are my own mother.

You work in beauty. You illustrate for brands that wrap misogyny in gold foil and call it empowerment—Maybelline, Adidas, MAC, SHEIN, Betsey Johnson. You were hired to draw for them, to shape their dreams of femininity, to help sell the lie. The one where liberation comes in a tube of lip gloss, and worth is measured by how little space you take up.

In my baby scrapbook, when I was all of two months old, my mother wrote beneath a photo of my soft, round new body: “Alisa (slim).”

A wish. A warning. A wound before I could even speak.

My mother was a beauty queen. A model. Someone you might have worked with in your career, if you’d been born in the same era. People still stop her on the street at 81 to call her stunning.

But she has never been happy. Not one day.

Just like you.

I was always too much for her. Too loud. Too sensitive. Too big. Too hungry.

She used to ask me, Will you ever shut up? I was four years old, wondering how the world worked. My questions took up too much space, too.

Last week, she suggested Ozempic, like passing the salt.

Like my body, my voice, my existence, were things that ought to be managed. Trimmed. Silenced. She also called me “honey.” Like she loved me. It’s so hard to tell what’s love and what’s hate, with women like you and my mom.

It begins early, doesn’t it?

The body blooms, curves appear like questions, hips widen, breasts rise, and the giggle becomes a summons.

We start to shrink ourselves before we understand why. We fold in our shoulders, drag down our hems, count crackers and calories like they’re sins.

Because suddenly, we are watched. Commented on. Measured. And, if we’re good enough, rewarded.

That’s when it begins: The turning.

Girls on girls. Whispers in locker rooms.

She’s so fat.

She thinks she’s cute.

Did you see what she wore?

We learn to survive by slicing ourselves thin and slicing each other thinner.

We diet together, but alone. We compare thigh gaps and collarbones, fantasize about being someone else while pretending we already are.

We all want to look like that, whatever that is.

And you— you gave your godgift, your art, YOUR ART, LEANNA, to that fetid starving altar. You sketched devotion to the God of Shrinking Women in eyeliner ads, built a career out of smoke and contour. Surrounded yourself with…

“Beauty.”

And still, you are a miserable, ugly bitch.

Still, you seethe at strangers on a plane. Still, you reach for another woman’s body like it belongs to you. Still, you self-medicate to stop the pain.

You mistook bullying for power somewhere along the way. Conflated control and confidence, and you were wrong. When people think adults who mock other adults are powerful, it’s because they watched their parents bully people and believed that was power. It’s usually the child who is bullied.

This is how I know you weren’t always this banshee in the video. Once, you were a child staring up at someone like that, wondering why she hated you.

I get it.

I do.

You are not powerful, Leanna. You’ll learn that now. You are just loud in your despair. You seek to make others disappear so that maybe someone will finally see you. Not the awful you in the video. The you who realized when she was very young that she could draw. The you who loved the scratch of pencil against pad. The you who disappeared when you made art, lost in a trance where you were nothing but spirit.

Her.

There’s a scene in Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty. A girl in a mall. Pink tutu. Ice cream cone. And Savannah— older, sharpened, snarls: So much sugar.

She is not talking to the child. She is speaking through the wire mesh of her childhood.

Her mother starved her.

Leanna, who starved you? I am guessing it was your mother, but maybe I’m projecting.

Who taught you to fear your own softness, to spit in someone’s face when you needed to cry?

Who handed you your own reflection and called it hideous and shameful?

This is not forgiveness. You did not hurt me, and so I am not here to absolve you. I will not braid you into the sisterhood as if you didn’t unweave another woman in public.

But I will not lie: I see something else in you. Something all these people who want to beat the living shit out of you now are missing.

A child still clutching the rulebook she was handed: Be small. Be silent. Be sharper than anyone who might call you soft. And in her other hand? A sketchpad.

You mistook terrorizing the powerless for power. You mistook hunger for discipline. You mistook meanness for strength.

But strength is the woman who sat still as you unraveled beside her.

Strength is her silence, the way she did not strike back, the way she held dignity as you shattered yours. So many others would have beaten you, perhaps to death, in the same situation.

The queen you attacked endured. Because here’s the secret, Leanna. The one they never tell you when you work in fashion. Women who carry extra pounds in this society? We are a special kind of strong. Every day is ninja training for our souls, as we walk the gauntlet of this world.

You are flimsy and grotesque.

But.

You are not beyond repair.

But.

You are not entitled to comfort anymore. You are not entitled to reward.

You want to be seen? Then see what you did.

You want redemption? Then build it, brick by ugly, trembling brick— with apology, with humility, with silence until the sound of your remorse is louder than your defense.

I will not cradle you. But I will witness you, if you choose to become someone else.

Not the girl spewing patriarchy in the aisle. But the woman who finally gives herself permission to sit down next to another woman, and, together, to take up all the space.

With fire, with memory,

Alisa

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