There is a covenant in public life, an unwritten rule held so deeply it feels almost sacred: you do not speak ill of the dead. Upon a person’s passing, a moratorium on criticism descends. Animosities are to be shelved, feuds paused, and a baseline of respect is offered, if not to the life lived, then to the finality of death itself. Last week, Simone Biles, a woman whose body has famously defied gravity, took a sledgehammer to that covenant, and the ground beneath our collective feet is still shaking.
In a raw, unvarnished blog post published just 48 hours after the death of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, Biles did the unthinkable. She spoke. Not in platitudes or carefully worded condolences, but with the searing clarity of a wound that never healed. She detailed, in excruciating detail, the personal hell his public crusade against her had caused. It was a posthumous rebuke so stunning in its timing and so potent in its pain that it has plunged the nation into a fierce debate about decency, justice, and whether a victim’s truth has an expiration date.
To comprehend the magnitude of this moment, one must rewind to the suffocating humidity of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Biles arrived not just as an athlete but as an icon, the undisputed greatest of all time, shouldering the psychic weight of a nation’s expectations. But under the glare of the global spotlight, something broke. Not a bone, but the intricate connection between her mind and body. The “twisties,” a terrifying state of spatial amnesia, had taken hold. She withdrew, choosing self-preservation over medals, and in doing so, became a hero to millions for her advocacy of mental health in sports.
But to a vocal and venomous faction, she was a traitor. And no voice was more resonant, more cutting, than that of Charlie Kirk. From his influential platform, he didn’t just criticize her decision; he performed a character assassination. “She’s a sociopath,” he declared. “A coward. A shame of the nation.” The words were not just an opinion; they were a verdict delivered to millions, instantly reframing Biles’s personal crisis into a political litmus test for patriotism and strength. He lit a match, and the fire of online harassment engulfed her.
For four years, Biles remained publicly silent about Kirk’s role in her torment. She went to therapy. She spoke about athlete wellness. She mounted a triumphant return to the sport, collecting more gold, smiling for the cameras, and projecting an image of serene resilience. The world assumed she had moved on. What her recent post makes devastatingly clear is that she hadn’t moved on; she had merely survived.
The blog post, titled simply “The Weight,” reads less like an attack and more like an autopsy of trauma. She writes not of Kirk the political figure, but of Kirk the architect of her private pain. She describes the deluge of death threats that followed his broadcast, the security details her family had to hire, and the sleepless nights spent scrolling through messages calling her a national disgrace. “He gave people permission to hate me,” she writes. “And they used that permission with glee. He never knew, or never cared, that I was a human being on the other side of his words, shaking in a hotel room a world away, feeling like my country had turned on me.”
The reaction was a cultural earthquake, instantly splitting the public into two warring camps. On one side, millions rushed to her defense, hailing her as a hero for speaking a truth she was forced to suppress. They argued that the dead do not get a free pass on the harm they caused. For many, especially women and people of color who have endured public vilification, her act was a form of radical justice. “Why should his memory be sanitized while her pain remains real?” one viral tweet demanded. “He had his platform for years. Now, she finally gets the final word, uninterrupted.”
But on the other side, a tidal wave of condemnation. Critics decried her timing as ghoulish and cruel, an act of “kicking dirt on a fresh grave.” They argued that, regardless of his past statements, his family was in mourning, and her post was a heartless intrusion on their grief. They accused her of stooping to his level, of choosing vengeance over grace, and of violating a sacred norm that separates civilized discourse from barbarism. This faction saw her not as courageous, but as callous.
This is more than a celebrity feud. Biles has forced a national reckoning with uncomfortable questions for the digital age. Does the permanence of online attacks—Kirk’s 2021 tirade will live forever on YouTube—give victims a permanent right to reply? The old social contract around death was written in an era where words were ephemeral. Today, a digital wound can be re-opened with every click, share, and comment. Perhaps the rule of silence is an outdated luxury in an age where the abuse is immortal.
Furthermore, Biles’s decision highlights the unique psychological calculus of speaking out against a powerful tormentor. For many survivors of abuse, safety—both physical and emotional—is paramount. It is often only when the abuser is gone, when the threat of retaliation is finally, permanently neutralized, that the victim feels free enough to speak their truth fully. What her critics call cruelty, a psychologist might call a necessary condition for catharsis.
In the end, Simone Biles’s post was a radical act of narrative reclamation. She refused to allow the story of her own pain to be a footnote in the sanitized obituaries of the man who inflicted it. She has ensured that his legacy will forever be entwined with the cruelty he showed her, a cruelty she was forced to carry in silence for 1,500 days. Whether this was an act of bravery or a step too far will be debated for years. But she has rewritten the rules, forcing us to confront the uncomfortable reality that sometimes, the only way to heal a wound is to show the world the scar, no matter who is made uncomfortable. And for the first time in four years, the voice defining Simone Biles’s story is her own.
