Bondi Isn’t Shameless

How Shame, Not Its Absence, Drives Bondi, Our Culture, and The System Persisting Abuse

After Pam Bondi’s performance at the House Judiciary Committee last week, everyone called her defensive, brazen, aggressive, combative. She deployed rehearsed attacks, pointed deflections, and classic DARVO—Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim-Offender—to avoid answering questions that could implicate her or her colleagues in the Epstein cover-up. She refused to look at the victims, refused to face the consequences of her actions. She looked away.

And yet the story therapists and pundits ran with was simple: Bondi has no shame. They argued her “healthy shame” response was fully deactivated. This so-called “healthy shame” fires when behaviour falls out of alignment with a person’s values. Because Bondi’s sense of self was built on external validation, power, and status, commentators claimed it had nothing to attach to.

Watching it, I see the opposite. What Bondi demonstrated was not the absence of shame, but the exact mechanics of shame in real time. Her behaviour, her premeditated talking points, her attacks and deflections—textbook shame response.

Bondi did not act from freedom or moral clarity. She acted from shame: defensiveness, fear, and the compulsion to protect her status and identity. Shame is not subtle; it contracts us, kills empathy, drives cruelty and self-justification. Bondi’s inability to face victims, her flustered responses, her rehearsed deflections—these were shame’s defence mechanisms in action.

When someone calls her “shameless,” they participate in a cultural narrative that distances us from our own shame. It reassures us: I am moral, I have shame, I am good; she doesn’t, therefore she is bad. But Bondi’s performance was shame personified. This is the danger of the “healthy shame” myth: it frames shame as a moral compass, when in reality, it drives the very behaviours we call toxic.

By claiming Bondi is incapable of experiencing “healthy shame,” therapists do two things:

• Exonerate themselves from seeing their own shame: “I am morally superior because she is defective.”

• Misframe the cultural system, which depends on shame to enforce hierarchy, conformity, and judgment.

It’s a false narrative. Comforting, yes—but dangerous. It tells you: “You are better than those operating from shame,” when the truth is we’re all swimming in it. Social media, politics, work, family—we all lash out, judge, defend ourselves. That’s the nature of shame. It’s everywhere, and it drives the very behaviours we despise, yet we continue to participate in it.

Her flustered responses, her attacks, her staged indignation—they weren’t freedom from shame. They were shame defending itself, mobilised to protect her status, her image, her identity. Calling her “shameless” is a cultural gaslight: it comforts us, distancing us from our complicity. Bondi’s performance exposes the lie of “healthy shame”—it is not a moral compass, it drives exactly the behaviours we abhor.

The narrative of her almost as a psychopath, someone incapable of shame or empathy, is false. She reacted emotionally on several occasions. She is not operating free of shame; rather, shame operates through her, armoured with lies, deflections, denials, and ad hominems. That armour shapes her moves, her voice, her body language. It makes her look brazen, heartless, unrepentant—but it is still shame in action. Observers are unsettled because the survival mechanics we recognise in her mirror shame in all of us.

Bondi’s behaviour is reprehensible, and she should be held criminally accountable. But she is the tip of the iceberg. Both Bondi and Maxwell are culpable for the crimes they committed. Yet they are expendable players, tried in the court of public opinion, burned at the stake, while the true architects of abuse remain shielded from scrutiny. Burning these women may feel righteous—but it does not burn away our complicity. Judgment feels like justice, but it is not. Responsibility asks: who looked away? Who stayed silent? Who built the culture that let predators thrive? The uncomfortable truth is: we all have. We actively participate in burning these women to feel clean, while the armour of shame that allowed these systems to flourish persists.

Every time someone names an uncomfortable truth, we look away. We change the subject. We police each other. This is our society. This is what shame has trained us to do. We participate unconsciously and consciously every day. Shame numbs us. It lets abuse happen. It keeps us from seeing, acting, and confronting the architecture of harm beyond the sacrificial lambs. And yet we call the women at the tip of the iceberg “shameless.” We keep the fire on them while the architecture of abuse remains untouched.

Bondi couldn’t face the victims. She couldn’t take responsibility. Her shame prevented her from doing what was necessary.

Will you do the same?

Will you finally look?

Will you dare to see?

Or, like Bondi will you turn away?