A woman took to social media with an open letter addressed to a man who allegedly fat-shamed her on a flight from Orlando, to Detroit, last week.
In a Facebook post, which has since been deleted, passenger Katie Kiacz said she was on the Delta Air Lines flight last Tuesday when she saw an unidentified man write a text message to someone, complaining about her body.
“Dear Man on flight DL1723,” the message begins, Yahoo Lifestyle reported.
Katie Kiacz, we all get it. And we are all over it.#CallHimOut #OutThem #BeKind https://t.co/qasaDXniro
— Serendipity Indigo (@Serendipity1974) January 24, 2019
“You referred to me as a ‘2-ton woman.’ You told your friend soon as I boarded and you saw me that it was ‘not good.’ When I confronted you saying ‘I am not two tons but I did just have a baby,’ you sighed and got up to use the bathroom then quietly asked the flight attendant for a different seat.”
“I’m glad there were not any,” she wrote.
The new mom continued her letter claiming the man did not apologize, or speak to her, for the remainder of the flight.
“I do not need your validation. So why am I posting? To call you out. Because I do not exist to please you. Because I will take up as much space as I want. Because even when confronted you did not think you were in the wrong, that you did not need to apologize,” the letter read, Yahoo reported.
“I’m glad you had to sit next to me the entire two-hour flight, I’m only sorry I couldn’t take up more space,” she wrote.
Kiacz said she penned the letter because she was “sick of this s—-” referring to women getting fat-shamed when in public spaces.
At the end of her letter, Kiacz hashtagged it with the phrase “call him out,” asking women to call out men who have body-shamed them.
After writing the public post, it was shared 102,000 times and received over 85,000 comments – many of which supported Kiacz and shared their own stories – before it was taken down.
“The outpouring love and support has been unreal,” Kiacz wrote on Facebook Wednesday, Yahoo reported. “In that moment, I was shaking with anger, I was overcome by sadness, and for a moment I was ashamed and self-conscious,” she said, before saying she had to remind herself of “who I was, what I do, and how much I have accomplished and still have to accomplish.”
Kiacz is hoping her story will make people think before they speak.
“I think we have all said something unkind at one time or another, and this is just a reminder that we do not know the battles people are fighting and that we just need to be a little kinder to each other,” she wrote on Facebook.
