Some Are Shamed for Their Mistakes. Others Are Applauded Because Those Mistakes Sell.

Why don’t companies have their employees’ backs?
Even if they get caught on a kiss cam, – clearly or maybe – in an affair.

Not to excuse it. Not to ignore the hurt it may have caused – at home, in the workplace, in the culture.
But to acknowledge the deeper truth: that we’re human. And humans don’t always act from wisdom or clarity. Sometimes we act from loneliness. From wounds we haven’t looked at yet. From emotional addiction.

Ideally, a company would say: “We don’t condone what happened.”
Not to make it right, but to stop making it worse.
To say: “We know why you might have done this – and instead of discarding you, we’ll walk with you. We won’t cancel you. We’ll help you find another way.”

What we as a society do now, feels backwards. We fire. We shame.

We play the morality card while simultaneously profiting from the scandal and turning it into content.

Ryan Reynolds – as if he didn’t already have enough money – makes a campaign out of it. Gwyneth Paltrow – as if she didn’t already have enough money – becomes the ironic face of the brand. It’s tongue-in-cheek. It’s smart, it’s brilliant, we say.

But is it? Isn’t it strange – how we normalize profiting from someone else’s lowest point?

How we draw a hard line at personal failure, but not at systemic exploitation?

The truth is, we punish what we were punished for. We laugh at what we were told was shameful. That’s what we’ve internalized since childhood. And now we perpetuate it – in our culture, our workplaces, our relationships.

What if we stopped punishing altogether – even when someone has done the most unthinkable thing?

Not to separate the harmed from the harmer – but to understand how one becomes the other.

Not to erase responsibility – but to create healing. For everyone.

Because punishment doesn’t restore. It keeps pain cycling.